Bahrain’s court of appeal should overturn a lower court conviction for illegal assembly against the human rights activist Nabeel Rajab and cancel his three-year prison term, according to a recent Human Rights Watch press release. Because the authorities have presented no evidence that he advocated or participated in violence, his conviction is a violation of his right to freedom of peaceful assembly, Human Rights Watch said. The court was scheduled to hear Rajab’s appeal on October 16, 2012, but the appellate court postponed the hearing and denied a petition filed by Rajab’s lawyer challenging the legality of the laws prohibiting demonstrations. A new hearing has been scheduled for December 11, 2012.
A criminal court sentenced Rajab on August 16 to three years in prison for organizing and participating in three demonstrations between January and March 2012. Rajab is president of the Bahrain Center for Human Rights and a member of the advisory committee of the Human Rights Watch Middle East and North Africa Division.“The criminal court verdict cites no evidence – not even an allegation– that Nabeel Rajab participated in or advocated violent protests,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “He has the basic right to peaceful assembly and shouldn’t be sent to prison for that.”
The Public Prosecution Office charged Rajab under article 178 of the Penal Code, which prohibits unauthorized gatherings of five or more people in a public place with the “purpose of committing crimes” or “undermining public security, even if intended to achieve legitimate purpose.”
A public prosecution official told Bahraini media that that Rajab had incited violence. The government also posted videos of some protests on YouTube, claiming, “You will find…defendant Nabeel Rajab violating the law.” Those videos appear to confirm that the protests were peaceful and do not capture any incitement to violence by Rajab or otherwise support the allegation made by the public prosecutor.
No such evidence is cited in the court’s verdicts in the three cases. In the case numbered 07291204947, police testified that after they dispersed an “illegal demonstration” on January 12, some people threw stones and Molotov cocktails at “special forces” and blocked the road with metal containers. One officer testified that he saw Rajab leading a march of 10 to 15 people “chanting for the release of political detainees.” But the verdict cites no evidence suggesting that Rajab was involved in the violence that police alleged occurred or that he incited such acts.
In the case numbered 07201203460, according to the verdict, about 15 people including Rajab had organized in a march on an unspecified date in February and that the protesters, except Rajab and three others, dispersed when police ordered them to. Police then arrested Rajab and allegedly found messages on his mobile phone calling “for participation in unlicensed marches, including the march at which he was arrested.” The verdict contains no conclusion that any crime or public security disturbance had occurred and does not cite any evidence for reaching such a conclusion.
The verdict in the case numbered 07201205263 stated that Rajab had called for and participated in an unauthorized gathering of about 50 people on March 31. The court said the protesters did not respond to orders to disperse, but the verdict does not mention any public disturbance, violent activity, or incitement to violence by Rajab or anyone else.
Authorities have previously prosecuted Rajab on politically motivated charges. He was detained from May 5 to May 28 for Twitter remarks criticizing the Interior Ministry for failing to investigate attacks by what Rajab said were pro-government armed gangs against Shia residents. On June 28 a criminal court fined him 300 Bahraini Dinars (US$790) in that case. A court of appeal will review the verdict on November 27.
Authorities again detained Rajab on June 6 for another Twitter remark calling for the prime minister to step down. On July 9 a criminal court convicted and sentenced him to three months in prison. A court of appeal overturned that verdict on August 23, but Rajab remained in prison following the August 16 convictions.
Bahraini authorities have given permits for some opposition rallies over the past year, but a great number of applications for permits have been denied, Human Rights Watch said.
“It is hard to avoid concluding that Nabeel Rajab’s convictions and three-year sentence for illegal assembly represent politically motivated punishment for his insistence on exercising rights that are protected both by international treaties to which Bahrain is a party and Bahrain’s constitution,” Stork said. “The appeals court should vacate the convictions and free him immediately.”
My journey into the dark underworld of the US military begins on a rainy Tuesday morning in March 2008, with a visit to Tampa, Florida. I am here to meet Forrest Fogarty, an American patriot who served in the US army for two years in Iraq. Fogarty is also a white supremacist of the serious Hitler-worshipping type.
We meet in his favorite hangout, the Winghouse Bar & Grill. In our brief phone call, I’d asked how I would recognize him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said. And sure enough, sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish-looking man, plastered in tattoos, with cropped hair and bulging biceps. “You’re British, right,” he says, as we order. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”
Fogarty tells me he was bullied at his LA high school by Mexican and African-American children, and was just 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. He has no qualms about flaunting his prejudice. When black people come into the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval. “I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me.”
As a young man, Fogarty was obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the legendary singer in the British band Skrewdriver, who is hero-worshipped in the neo-Nazi music scene. At 16, he had an image from one of Skrewdriver’s album covers – a Viking carrying an axe, an icon among white nationalists – tattooed on his left forearm. Soon after, he had a Celtic cross, an Irish symbol appropriated by neo-Nazis, emblazoned on his stomach. A few years later, he started his own band, Attack, now one of the biggest Nazi bands in the US. But it was never his day job. “I was a landscaper when I left school,” he says. “I kind of fell into it. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, I was just drinking and fighting.”
For the next eight years he drifted through jobs in construction and landscaping, and began hanging out with the National Alliance, at the time one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the US. He soon became a member. He had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior, so he resolved to do what two generations of Fogartys had done before him: join the military.
Fogarty was not the first extremist to enter the armed forces. The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the US military. Since its inception, the leaders of the white supremacist movement have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the US government, and then to bring what they learn home to undertake a domestic race war. Not all far-right groups subscribe to this vision – some, such as the Ku Klux Klan, claim to prefer a democratic approach – but a large portion see themselves as insurrectionary forces. To that end, professional training in warfare is a must.
The US military has long been aware of these groups’ attempts at infiltration, but it wasn’t until 1996 that supremacist and neo-Nazi groups were specifically banned from the military, after the murder in 1995 of two African-Americans by a neo-Nazi paratrooper stationed at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Fogarty was recruited the year after.
He knew that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem when it came to enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the clearest indicators of extremism for a recruiter, and in an effort to police the matter, the US military requires recruits to explain any tattoos. “They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says.
Soon after Fogarty was approved, his ex-girlfriend and mother of his eldest child contacted the military. According to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock with Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures. I just denied it.” The committee, he says, “knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier”.
Fogarty remained in the reserves, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. Before he left for the Middle East, he joined the Hammerskin Nation – described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organised neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States”.
Fogarty maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” He was confident enough of his carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in 2004, he flew not to see his family in the US but to Dresden, Germany, to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget.
When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Fogarty even says a sergeant came up to him and said, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers, aren’t you?” I ask how the sergeant knew about his racism. “The tattoo, I suppose. I can’t hide everything – people knew, even the chain of command.”
Another white supremacist soldier, James Douglas Ross, a military intelligence officer stationed at Fort Bragg, was given a bad conduct discharge from the army when he was caught trying to mail a sub-machine gun from Iraq to his father’s home in Spokane, Washington. Military police found a cache of white supremacist paraphernalia and several weapons hidden behind ceiling tiles in Ross’s military quarters. After his discharge, a Spokane County deputy sheriff saw Ross passing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance. And in early 2012, a photo emerged of a 10-strong US marine scout sniper unit posing for a photo with a Nazi SS bolts flag in Sangin, Afghanistan.
According to the military, the symbolism was unknown to the soldiers. “Certainly, the use of the ‘SS runes’ is not acceptable and scout snipers have been addressed concerning this issue,” marine corps spokesman Captain Gregory Wolf said.
The magnitude of the problem within the military is hard to quantify. The military does not track extremists as a discrete category, coupling them with gang members, and those in the neo-Nazi movement claim different numbers. The National Socialist Movement claimed 190 of its members are inside. White Revolution claimed 12. In white supremacist incidents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI identified 203 veterans. Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its numbers don’t include the many extremist soldiers who have managed to stay off the radar. But its report does pinpoint why the white supremacist movements seek to recruit veterans – they “may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intelligence or apply specialized training in weapons, tactics, and organizational skills to benefit the extremist movement”.
The report found that two army privates in the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen property from the military – including ballistic vests, a combat helmet, and pain medications such as morphine – to an undercover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white supremacist movement (they were convicted and sentenced to six years in prison). It also found multiple examples of white supremacist recruitment among active military personnel, including a period in 2003 when six active-duty soldiers at Fort Riley were found to be members of the neo-Nazi group Aryan Nations, working to recruit their army colleagues and even serving as the Aryan Nations’ point of contact for the State of Kansas.
The degree of impunity encountered by Fogarty and countless other extremists has caused tensions within the military. The blind eye turned by the recruiters angered many investigators whose integrity was being compromised. Hunter Glass was a paratrooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fairville, North Carolina, next to Fort Bragg. “In the 1990s, the military was hard on them, they could pick and choose,” he recalls. The change came after 9/11. “The key rule nowadays is ignore it until it becomes a problem,” Glass tells me. “We need manpower. So as long as the man isn’t acting out, let’s blow it off.” He recounts one episode in early 2005 when he was requested by military police investigators at Fort Bragg to interview a soldier with blatant skinhead insignia – SS lightning bolts and hammers. Glass worked with the base’s military police investigators, who filed a report. “They recommended that he be kicked out,” he recalls, “but the commanding officers didn’t do anything.” He says there was an open culture of impunity. “We’re seeing guys with tattoos all the time … As far as hunting them down, I don’t see it. I’m seeing the opposite, where if a white supremacist has committed a crime, the military stance will be, ‘He didn’t commit a race-related crime.’ “
By 2005, the US had 150,000 troops deployed in Iraq and 19,500 in Afghanistan. But the military wasn’t prepared in any way for this kind of extended deployment – and just two years into the war in Iraq, people were talking openly about the fact that it had reached breaking point. The slim forces needed fattening up and what followed constituted a complete re-evaluation of who was qualified to serve – a full-works facelift of the service unheard of in modern American history. In the relatively halcyon days of the first Gulf war in 1990, the US military blocked the enlistment of felons. It spurned men and women with low IQs or those without a high school diploma. It would either block the enlistment of or kick out neo-Nazis and gang members. It would treat or discharge alcoholics, drug abusers and the mentally ill. No more. While the Bush administration adopted conservative policies pretty much universally, it saved its ration of liberalism for the US military, where it scrapped many of the regulations governing recruitment.
Many of the wars’ worst atrocities are linked directly to the loosening of enlistment regulations on criminals, racist extremists, and gang members, among others. Then there are the effects on the troops themselves. Lowering standards on intelligence and body weight, for example, compromised the military’s operational readiness and undoubtedly endangered the lives of US and allied troops. Hundreds of soldiers may have paid with their lives for this folly.
California is set for a major debate on the death penalty following qualification Monday of a November ballot measure that would replace capital punishment with a life term without possibility of parole.
If passed, the measure would make California the 18th state in the nation without a death penalty. During the last five years, four states have replaced the death penalty and Connecticut is soon to follow.
Growing numbers of conservatives in California have joined the effort to repeal the state’s capital punishment law, expressing frustration with its price tag and the rarity of executions. California has executed 13 inmates in 23 years, and prisoners are far more likely to die of old age on death row than by the executioner’s needle.
November’s ballot measure would commute the sentences of more than 700 people on death row to life without possibility of parole, a term that would then become the state’s most severe form of criminal punishment.
Most death row inmates would be returned to the general prison population and be expected to work. Their earnings would go to crime victims.
Worth noting: A ban on the death penalty is expected to save the state billions of dollars in the future. A recent study estimates that California has spent over $4 billion dollars on capital punishment since the death penalty was reinstated in 1978.
The news from India’s 2011 census is almost all heartening. Literacy is up; life expectancy is up; family size is stabilizing. But there is one grim exception. In 2011 India counted only 914 girls aged six and under for every 1,000 boys.
Without intervention, just a few more boys would be born than girls. If you compare the number of girls actually born to the number that would have been born had a normal sex ratio prevailed, then 600,000 Indian girls go missing every year. This is less distorted than the sex ratio in China, but whereas China’s ratio has stabilized, India’s is widening, and has been for decades. Sex selection is now invading parts of the country that used not to practice it.
India’s sex ratio shows that gendercide is a feature not just of dictatorship and poverty. Unlike China, India is a democracy: there is no one-child policy to blame. Although parts of the country are poor, poverty alone does not explain India’s preference for sons. The states with the worst sex ratios—Punjab, Haryana, Gujarat—are among the richest (see article), which suggests distorted sex selection will not be corrected just by wealth or government policy. But it can be corrected.
Parents choose to abort female fetuses not because they do not want or love their daughters, but because they feel they must have sons (usually for social reasons); they also want smaller families—and something has to give. Ultrasound technology ensures that this something is a generation of unborn daughters, because it lets them know the sex of a fetus. Sex selection therefore tends to increase with education and income: wealthier, better educated people are more likely to want fewer children and can more easily afford the scans.
But whereas sex selection may be understandable for a family, it is disastrous for a nation. It is an extreme expression of an attitude that says daughters are worth less than sons—a belief that is damaging both to women and to the next generation, since healthier, better educated mothers have healthier, better-educated children.
If sex ratios stay the same, 600,000 missing girls this year will become, in 18 years’ time, over 10m missing future brides. Robbery, rape and bride-trafficking tend to increase in any society with large groups of young single men. And because in China and India men higher up the social ladder find wives more easily than those lower down, the social problems of bachelorhood tend to accumulate like silt among the poorest people and (in India) the lowest castes. This is unjust as well as damaging.
Israeli soldiers have been found using tear gas and smoke grenades against female protesters in an attempt to disperse them. One Swedish activist, from the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), was hurt when a gas canister scraped her arm and singed her hair. She was treated by Palestinian paramedics at the scene. Dozens of Palestinian women along with international activists demonstrated in northern Jerusalem, calling for an end to the Israeli occupation of the West bank. The Palestinian activists are inspired by the calls for democracy that toppled autocratic leaders in Egypt and Tunisia.
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With this victory, France officially becomes the 14th country in the world to allow gay and lesbian couples to legally marry. The first same-sex weddings could take place 10 days from today's signing.
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Bahrain’s court of appeal should overturn a lower court conviction for illegal assembly against the human rights activist Nabeel Rajab and cancel his three-year prison term, according to a recent Human Rights Watch press release. Because the authorities have presented no evidence that he advocated or participated in violence, his conviction is a violation of his right to freedom of peaceful assembly, Human Rights Watch said. The court was scheduled to hear Rajab’s appeal on October 16, 2012, but the appellate court postponed the hearing and denied a petition filed by Rajab’s lawyer challenging the legality of the laws prohibiting demonstrations. A new hearing has been scheduled for December 11, 2012. 
