The death of a 22-year-old Bahraini man early on Saturday raises new questions about the regime's declared commitment to avoiding brutality when dealing with demonstrators.
Ahmed Ismael Hassan (above) – described as a citizen journalist who regularly...
Blog archive: Bahrain
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1st April 2012
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29th February 2012February has been a busy month for Qorvis, the American public relations firm hired at $480,000 a year to spruce up Bahrain's tarnished image. For starters, there was the usual round of "good news" press releases to be churned out highlighting the kingdom's tolerance, its culture, its...
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14th January 2012Alarmed by negative media coverage of its bloody repression, the government of Bahrain embarked on an Israeli-style hasbaracampaign earlier this year, hiring – at great expense – an assortment of western public relations firms, "reputation management" consultants, etc, to whitewash...
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22nd December 2011I have written before about Matt Lauer of Qorvis, the American PR firm with a $40,000-a-month contract to spruce up the Bahraini government's tarnished image. Mr Lauer was on Twitter yesterday, complaining about excessive use of exclamation marks by bloggers. What a pity he...
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10th December 2011I have written here before about the American public relations firm, Qorvis, and its shameful $40,000-a-month contract with the government of Bahrain to spruce up the kingdom's tarnished image. Now, though, a document filed by Qorvis under the Foreign Agents Registration Act (as...
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21st November 2011The Ennahda (al-Nahda) party, which won the largest number of seats in the recent Tunisian election, has declared its support for the counter-revolutionary forces in Bahrain, according to the official Bahrain News Agency. A report from the agency says the party's political bureau "...
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20th November 2011Foreign Policy Blogs boasts that it is "the largest network of global affairs blogs online", staffed "by scores of professional contributors from the worlds of journalism, academia, business, non-profits and think tanks". Plus the occasional public relations man working for a repressive...
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5th November 2011It's not every day that the President's Office of the Bahrain Information Affairs Authority of goes to the trouble of sending me an email informing me that one of the kingdom's more elderly citizens has died of a heart attack – but it happened yesterday. Ali Hassan Al-Daihi, aged 78, "had...
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30th October 2011The Bahrain-based Gulf Daily News has finally got around toreporting the arrest of a businessman in Britain, in connection with a $6m bribery case involving Bahrain's government-controlled aluminium company, Alba. The Gulf Daily News says the alleged recipient of the bribes "cannot be named...
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23rd October 2011What on earth is going on at Huffington Post? Hot on the heels ofTom Squitieri's articles presenting a sympathetic view of Bahrain's repressive regime (September 21, October 2 and October 5), we now have Rob Sobhani scaremongering about Iranian designs on Bahrain...
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17th October 2011The government of Bahrain is desperately seeking international support for its repressive policies – so desperately, in fact, that if the support doesn't exist it's happy to invent it. In April, it claimed that Ban Ki-moon, the UN Secretary-General, had expressed support for...
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9th October 2011In an article for Huffington Post on September 21, Tom Squitieri began: "The rubber stamp storyline out of Bahrain is that it is the latest chapter of the people rising against the evil rulers in the 2011 drama of the Arab Spring. Spend a few days and nights away from the hotels and...
