Saudi riot police fire live rounds on Shiite protesters in Qatif – reports (PHOTOS)

Published: RT
Edited: 28 July, 2012, 07:17

Several demonstrators have been wounded in Saudi Arabia’s eastern district of Qatif after security forces opened fire on protesters. Officers fired live rounds at demonstrators who carried posters of those injured and arrested earlier this month.

Spokesmen for the Saudi Interior Ministry said several people were burning tires during the protests, and several arrests were made.

Among those arrested today was Mohammed al-Shakhuri, who is on a list of the country’s 23 most-wanted people, Al-Manar News reported. Witnesses said Shakhuri was taken to a military hospital with bullet wounds in his back and neck.

“There were no casualties,” the Interior Ministry said in a statement.

Clashes between police and protesters have increased in recent days, following the deaths of two protesters earlier this month.

Protests began in Saudi Arabia last March, when a Shia uprising in neighbouring Bahrain was crushed by Gulf troops, led by Saudi Arabia.

Demonstrations escalated earlier this month, after a prominent Shia cleric was arrested for being what the interior ministry deemed an “instigator of sedition.”His detainment has been the source of widespread demonstrations demanding an end to sectarian discrimination in the region.

Shia Muslims have long complained of marginalization at the hands of Saudi Arabia’s Sunni ruling family. They were demanding greater rights and an end to what they believe is discrimination by the rulers.

Political analyst Dr. Mohsen Saleh explains that the protests are taking place in the country’s major oil-producing region, where, at the same time, the poorest people live.

“The eastern part in Saudi Arabia has been agonizing for a long time, for centuries…They have been deprived of their basic rights,” he told RT. “When the peaceful [protests] started in Bahrain, the Saudis thought [the same may happen in their country] – and they were right in thinking so, because they are discriminating against an essential part of their people in the east.

“And it’s an irony that all kinds of [carbohydrates – oil] and gas are produced there. [And still], these people are the poorest in their country. That’s why the [Saudi rulers] fear that the agony of these people might be a mark of a great revolution in Saudi Arabia. And that’s what the United States and the Saudis are really afraid of,” he concluded.

The latest events in Saudi Arabia follow the eight latest arrests that were made Thursday in the United Arab Emirates, where the government announced an investigation into groups plotting crimes against the state.

Similar crackdowns have earlier taken place in Bahrain.

Still from YouTube video

Still from YouTube video

Still from YouTube video

Saudi Arabia is concerned about a revolution in the country because it is experiencing a unique power vacuum, an analyst tells Press TV.

Posted by EU Times

 

“The Saudis, obviously, the ruling family is extremely worried about any revolution, if it’s in Egypt, Yemen or Bahrain because they know that the people of Saudi Arabia will go after them sooner or later,” said the founder and director of IGA, Ali al-Ahmad, from Washington.

He explained that the Saudi family members are in their eighties or late seventies and they are still incapacitated in terms of their ability to deliver policy and to conduct policy inside and outside the country.

“This is really creating a unique vacuum of power in Saudi Arabia,” Ahmad said.

The analyst also noted that Saudi people can learn from other revolutions in the region, like Egypt, Bahrain and Yemen.

“If they learn, if they see the Egyptians, the Bahrainis and Yemenis and other Arabs revolting and changing their regimes, they will topple the regime of the Saudi monarchy,” he said.

The IGA director concluded that the revolution in Saudi Arabia will “take time but it will happen eventually because the situation and the ingredients in Saudi Arabia are bountiful and available for regime change.”

Saudi Arabia’s Nayef bin Abdul Aziz was named crown prince in October last year following the death of Prince Sultan, one of his brothers.

Prince Nayef would take over the rule of the kingdom in the event of the death of King Abdullah, who is nearly 90.

The poor health among the aging royal family in the Persian Gulf state deepens the power vacuum amid a wave of protests over the persisting brutal crackdown on the Saudi people.

Saudi Arabia’s east has been the scene of anti-government protests since February 2011.

Source

We’re Now Selling The Most Advanced Missile System To This Islamic State

Walter Hickey

U.S. Missile Defense Agency

The U.S. is selling one of the most advanced missile systems on the planet to a country with an abysmal human rights records.

Lockheed Martin’s Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) system is the most effective weapon when it comes to shooting incoming missiles right out of the sky.

As of yesterday, a total of 138 of these launchers are headed to the United Arab Emirates.

Lockheed Martin will be getting $2 Billion for the contract.

The UAE is a federation of absolute monarchies. It’s comprised of seven principalities, each with its own absolute monarch. It’s got the sixth largest oil reserves in the world.

The original sale was announced late last year, and it looks like the UAE wanted to add on to the order.

While $2 billion may sound like a lot, the UAE has been known for extravagant expenditures. It’s notorious because of the explosive expansion of its largest city, Dubai, and the international human rights issues that came with that construction.

The GDP of that city alone was $82 billion in 2008.

Dubai is also home to the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest building — and also its tallest man made structure.

Those achievements are likely what the UAE is trying to defend with THAAD.

The THAAD system is designed to intercept medium to intermediate sized missiles, and even has some capability against Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs).

Using advanced radar, the THAAD system launches a missile that intercepts the incoming threat. The THAAD missile has no warhead, and is only designed to strike and detonate the incoming missile’s warhead while it remains at a safe distance.

The U.S. sells all kinds of tech to all kinds of countries.

But this is first country other than Israel to get THAAD.

Lockheed is forbidden from selling tech to certain nations, and the Department of Defense (DoD) serves as a middleman in the transaction. A buyer approaches the DoD, the Department approves the buyer, the DoD buys the tech using its budget, then sells the tech to the bidding nation.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/lockheed-martin-sells-thaad-missile-system-to-uae-2012-6#ixzz1x609LPRg

WAR ON IRAN: US Launches New Computer Virus “Weapon of Mass Destruction”

Posted by truther on May 31, 2012

by Finian Cunningham

The US-led economic war on Iran has been dangerously ratcheted up with the launching of a powerful new computer virus targeting the Islamic Republic’s nuclear research facilities and other vital commercial sectors, including the oil and banking industries.

Previously, the Iranian economy and scientific research centres have been hacked with the computer malware or virus known as Stuxnet. That sabotage of Iranian facilities is widely believed to have been the work of American and Israeli military agencies.

Now an even more destructive virus appears to have been unleashed. The so-called Flame malware is said by internet security experts to be 20 times more disruptive to computer systems than Stuxnet. Compared with Stuxnet, which inflicted serious Iranian technical damage nearly two years ago, the latest malware can be seen as virtual weapon of mass destruction.

Again, American and closely collaborative Israeli military agencies are believed to have launched the latest salvo of cyber missiles.

Iranian and Syrian computer systems are reported to be among the main targets of Flame. Although other countries have this week also reported malfunctions from the Flame virus, including Austria, Hong Kong Hungary and United Arab Emirates, precedent would point to its origin as US intelligence, with the motive of adding yet more economic pain on Iran.

Independent internet security firms say that there is no obvious commercial motive for the malware, for example reports of blackmail attempts, and that the most likely instigator of the virus are “state agencies”.

Over the past year, the US has been stepping up bilateral economic sanctions on Iran, aimed at crippling the country’s central banking and oil sectors that are the backbone of the national economy.

Next month, the US and the European Union are set to tighten the economic embargo on Iran even further with new sanctions lined up to hit the country’s international oil trade – some 80 per cent of Iran’s national revenues derive from oil and gas sectors.

Moreover, the US, Britain and France, together with Germany and Israel, have been twisting the pressure on Iran at the resumed P5 + 1 talks this month over itsnuclear programme, demanding that the country rescind its legal right to enrich uranium.

Tehran has steadfastly refused to suspend its uranium enrichment facilities, which it says it is legally entitled to as a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and which are solely for civilian applications, such as energy production and medical radioisotopes.

The evidence certainly points to “regime change” being the thinly veiled objective of the Western powers and that the nuclear issue is a manufactured controversy with which to browbeat Iran. But the war of words goes way beyond browbeating. The US-led international campaign against Iran is tantamount to an all-out covert war, a war that is criminal in its conduct on several counts.

Military threats, invasion of Iranian territory with unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, financial and economic sanctions, and now intensified computer virus attacks on Iran’s telecommunications. This is all but a war of aggression without troops on the ground.

With mainstream news media becoming ever more servile to Western government foreign policy agenda, it is important to remind ourselves of realistic legal and moral perspective here.

Can you imagine how the US, Britain, France or Israel would react if Iran were to shut down their computer systems because it objected to their unlawfully persistent arsenals of actual weapons of mass destruction? Such an Iranian cyber attack would be met with ferocious retaliation or at best would be considered reprehensible, but such a move by Iran would certainly have a lot more legal and moral right than the Western campaign of belligerence towards Tehran.

The panoply of aggression towards Iran is emanating from Western powers that have murderous blood on their hands from the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, Somalia, among other places, and this campaign is based on a repetition of outlandish allegations over “weapons of mass destruction”. The latest sabotage of Iranian society through computer malware should be seen, and roundly denounced, as yet another war crime by US allies that is pushing the world ever closer to escalation of war.

Finian Cunningham is Global Research’s Middle East and East Africa Correspondent

Obama nixes French-Saudi plan to finish Assad by bombing his palace

DEBKAfile Exclusive Report May 30, 2012

Bashar Assad’s fortified palace atop Mt. Qassioun

US President Obama recently vetoed a detailed Franco-Saudi plan for ending President Bashar Assad’s rule by means of a massive air strike against his palace that would at one fell swoop wipe him, his family and top leadership circle out, DEBKAfile’s military and intelligence sources report.

Their plan was for the presidential palace situated atop Mount Qassioun northeast of Damascus to be devastated by French warplanes taking off from the Charles de Gaulle aircraft carrier off Syria’s Mediterranean coast and Saudi and United Arab Emirates bombers flying in through Jordan.
They would bomb the palace for 12 hours in several sorties while at the same time American fighter jets launched from a US aircraft carrier cruising in the Mediterranean or Red Sea would shut down Syria’s air defenses, which are considered among the most sophisticated and densely-arrayed in the region.
US warplanes would also keep the Syrian Air Force grounded and prevented from repulsing the incoming bombers.

This plan was presented to President Obama separately by Nicolas Sarkozy before he was voted out of office and Saudi Defense Minister Prince Salman, who arrived at the White House on April 12 for a personal presentation. The prince maintained that there is no end in sight for the Syrian conflict; it would only spread and ignite the rest of the Middle East. The peril could only be rooted out at source by a single, sharp military strike that would remove Assad and his close clan for good. This would be the only acceptable kind of Western-Arab armed intervention in Syria and it had the added advantage of being effective without bringing foreign boots to Syrian soil.

In early May, Sarkozy was still trying to talk Obama around to the plan. He spent his last days in the Elysée Palace in long telephone conversations with the White House in which he drove home three points:

1.  Because Assad has concentrated his family, top military command and intelligence chiefs at a single nerve center behind the fortified walls of the Qassioun Palace, the snake’s head can feasibly be cut off at one stroke.
The case of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi was different because, unlike Assad, he never stayed long in one place and was constantly on the move.

2. Once that nerve center is destroyed, Syrian army and intelligence would be bereft of their sources of command. Their troops may remain in their bases and wait for news, while their officers may use the sudden political vacuum in Damascus to try and seize power. In either case, the Syrian military would be free of its orders to crush the anti-Assad revolt.
3.  The French, Saudi and UAE air forces lack a central command center capable of coordinating a major combined air operation and therefore depend on the United States to provide this essential component. American military input is also vital for paralyzing Syria’s air defenses by applying its cyber warfare capabilities to disrupt the radar systems of Syria’s anti-air missile batteries.
Our Washington sources report that Obama consistently resisted repeated French and Saudi efforts to jump aboard their initiative.
The Saudi defense minister at one point in their conversation told the US president harshly that it was time for the Americans to stop talking and start acting. But Obama remained unmoved.
These events, revealed here by DEBKAfile, provide the background for Presidents Barak Obama and Francois Hollande’s divergent responses Tuesday, May 29, to the al-Houla atrocity and its 108 brutally murdered victims.
The White House repeated its objection to military intervention in Syria “at this time,” because it would only “increase the carnage.” A military option was left on the table.

That was standard Obama-speak for the crisis in Syria, behind which he remains determined to stay out of armed action for unseating President Assad and instead seek a deal with the Russians on the Syrian ruler’s fate as part and parcel of a comprehensive accord on Syria and Iran’s nuclear program.
President Hollande was at first quoted as saying he does not rule out armed intervention in Syria. Elysée sources later watered down this statement with the qualifier: …”only with UN Security Council approval.”
On top of the American hurdle, Moscow and Beijing rushed Wednesday, May 30, to reiterate that they would oppose (veto) any Security Council resolution authorizing military intervention in Syria, so effectively nipping the French intention in the bud.
Bashar Assad accordingly had no qualms about sending UN-Arab League envoy Kofi Annan off empty-handed from a final bid to salvage his peace mission: The world powers have left him sitting pretty in his palace, unconcerned about his future and free to pursue one of the most vicious anti-opposition campaigns of modern times.