Obama Administration to Sell $1 Million Dollars Worth of Arms to Human Rights Abuser Bahrain

In a bold move of outright hypocrisy the Obama administration has decided to move forward on an arms deal with the country of Bahrain, despite their track record of human rights abuse while simultaneously publicly berating Syria for committing abuses against it’s citizens.

“Bahrain has made many promises to cease abuses and hold officials accountable, but it hasn’t delivered,” said Maria McFarland, deputy Washington director at Human Rights Watch. “Protesters remain jailed on criminal charges for peacefully speaking out and there has been little accountability for torture and killings – crimes in which the Bahrain Defense Force is implicated.”

In a January 27, 2012 statement, the State Department announced plans to move forward with the sale of approximately $1 million dollars worth of equipment to Bahrain while maintaining “a pause on most security assistance for Bahrain pending further progress on reform.” The Department has not made the contents of the sale public but insists that none of the equipment contained items that could be used against protesters. A guarantee that will most certainty help  those who have been tortured and killed sleep better at night.

In September 2011, the Obama administration delayed a $53 million arms sale to Bahrain after human rights groups and members of Congress criticized the sale because of the ongoing abuses against protesters as well as anyone labeled as government opponents in Bahrain. The Bahrain Defense Force, the intended recipient of the arms sale, was in charge of the crackdown on largely peaceful protests during 2011.

In December, Mark Toner, a State Department representative, stated that the U.S. would weigh human rights concerns as it decided whether or not to go on with the arms sales. A November 23rd report by the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI), found systematic abuses in Bahrain’s crackdown on protesters, including torture and widespread detention of activists and peaceful protesters.

Since the release of the BICI report Bahrain has done little to address accountability for the documented abuses. Low-level Pakistani prison guards are on trial for beating prisoners to death, and several policemen are facing trial in the shooting deaths of three protesters. Only one Bahraini security official faces prosecution, for a horrific killing that Human Rights Watch documented at the time.

So far there has been no investigations into the roles the Interior Ministry, the National Security Agency, or the Bahrain Defense Force played in the deaths of dozens of people, widespread torture, and the detention of hundreds with no due process.

At least a half dozen people have died since the BICI report was released in protest-related confrontations with authorities. Protesters allege that the number of fatalities is 16 while the government claims that the deaths were from natural causes.

Bahrain continues to hold hundreds of people convicted for charges such as “illegal gatherings” and “inciting hatred against the regime.” Bahraini authorities are refusing to allow international human rights organizations to visit the country.

“Bahrain’s failure to take immediate steps to reform – for example, by releasing political prisoners and investigating ranking security officials – raises real doubts about its commitment to addressing the serious abuses documented in the BICI report,” McFarland said. “Washington should hold off on arms sales until Bahrain shows it is serious about addressing the country’s human rights crisis.”

Feds to Monitor Internet for Uprisings with Predictive Software

Apparently some U.S. Navy-backed researchers has come up with a bizarre explanation for the grass roots uprisings that took place in Egypt last year. According to their thesis the reason for the revolt was not a cry for freedom and equality but that the idea of overthrowing their dictator spread like an infection throughout the Egyptian population. What’s even more disconcerting is the antidote they have come up with.

A team at Aptima Inc., with funding from the Office of Naval Research, is developing software that would scour the internet, including news stories, social networks and blogs, to extract topics and phrases that are gaining traction online. The software would then track how the conversations proliferate, both geographically and over time.

The software would use epidemiological modeling to chart the discussions and their trajectory. It’s the same method used in public health initiatives to figure out where a particular illness started, and how it spread. Epidemiologists collect data and use the information to make educated guesses on how causality, health and environmental factors contributed to outbreaks in any given community.

Applied to the online world, epidemiological models would treat an uprising like some sort of viral outbreak. They’d break down and track  web conversations by the author of the post, what site it was published on and the comments that followed and try to figure out which parts contributed most to the spread of a revolutionary message.

Called “Epidemiological Modeling of the Evolution of Messages”  or E-Meme for short, the program would also use language recognition technology to determine what people in certain regions, of certain age groups, genders, or any number of other demographics, are discussing. From “next week’s election” to “link up and cause havoc.”

“We witnessed the profound power of ideas to replicate in what began as anti-government sentiment in Tunisia, then moved like a virus, reaching and influencing new groups in Egypt, Syria, and Libya,”  Dr. Robert McCormack, the project’s lead investigator, said. “If we can better understand the flow of ideas through electronic channels to sway the perceptions of groups, we may be better prepared to develop appropriate strategies, such as supporting democratic movements or perhaps dissuading suicide bombers.”

E-Meme is currently one year into a two-year development plan and will even be designed to go beyond those abilities. After tracking the proliferation of topics, E-Meme will analyze what kinds of attitudes those discussing them appear to have and then how those attitudes influence the conversation’s spread across the web.

“A lot of tools exist to do things like look at trending topics, or how many people online are talking about X,” McCormack added. “We want to take that several steps further. We’re interested in the dynamics of those conversations.”

McCormack and co. certainly have high hopes for the software’s abilities. Eventually, they’d like to analyze “sentiments” and “the perceptions of groups” to predict “what the online discussion will actually turn into.” Egypt’s relative peace compared to Libya’s rampant violence. Of course, McCormack notes, that kind of analysis remains “incredibly difficult to do.”

The evolution of software like E-Meme will no doubt remain a major Pentagon priority. In the past two years alone, we’ve seen the CIA invest in a company that scours the Internet to “predict the future,”  Iarpa consider the merits of person-finding via web pic and spotting rebel citizens via YouTube.

Of course, governments worldwide already do plenty of online monitoring. But for those living under power hungry dictatorial regimes in which citizens can be indefinitely detained or even assassinated by their government with no due process? The prospect of monitoring that’s smart enough to understand the online spread of ideas, and their subsequent real-world outcomes, could be downright devastating. Good thing for us we in live in the U.S. where..wait a minute, damn.