Roberto Abraham Scaruffi

April 28, 2011 Tomgram: Nick Turse, How to Arm a Dictator [Note for TomDispatch Readers: Every few months I regularly launch little week-long drives for TD readers to get new subscribers for the site.  At this point, I would normally issue a heartfelt thank you for all your help and end the drive, but the truth is this one's going so splendidly, at record levels in fact, that I’m simply going to redouble my urgings.  Please ask your friends, colleagues, relatives, and others to go to the "subscribe" window at the upper right of TD's main screen, put in their email addresses, hit “submit,” answer the “opt-in” email that instantly arrives in your inbox (or, unfortunately, spam folder), and receive notices whenever a new TD post goes up.  Just keep ‘em coming.  It’s great.  In fact, while you’re at it, be sure to tell any new readers that if they buy books (or anything else) at Amazon.com and arrive there via a TomDispatch book link like this one, we get a small cut of whatever they purchase, which is a great way to support this site at no extra cost to you! Tom] Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates attended a groundbreaking ceremony at Mount Vernon for a National Library for the Study of George Washington.  (“I’d like to thank the Mount Vernon Ladies Association for extending this invitation to me...”)  He used the occasion for a full-throated defense of the American right to support democracy and freedom with extreme and remarkably self-interested selectivity in the Middle East.  “The most successful leaders, starting with Washington,” he told the ladies, “have steadfastly encouraged the spread of liberty, democracy, and human rights... We have at times made human rights the centerpiece of our national strategy even as we did business with some of the worst violators of human rights. We have worked with authoritarian governments to advance our own security interests even while urging them to reform...” And here, after a fashion, was the good news he had to offer, if you didn't happen to be a Bahraini, a Yemeni, or from other states where we still like “doing business” with those “violators of human rights” and “authoritarian governments”: “When we discuss openly our desire for democratic values to take hold across the globe,” he said, taking a conveniently long view of history, “we are describing a world that may be many years or decades off." Years or decades off.  In fact, in the Persian Gulf, from Kuwait to Yemen, Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, the Pentagon has been working quite diligently to insure the accuracy of that schedule.  TomDispatch regular and Associate Editor Nick Turse has been working no less diligently to ensure that we have a record of just what the Pentagon has been doing when it comes to arming and training the security forces of those authoritarian governments to insure that democracy doesn’t arrive a second ahead of the SecDef’s schedule.  In mid-March, Turse focused on Bahrain where, with the help of the Saudis and Pentagon weaponry, that country’s security forces brutally repressed a democracy movement.   Now, as part of an ongoing series, he turns to Yemen where some of the same impulses are evident.  You might think of this not as a “hearts and minds” winning, but a hearts-and-minds-stopping policy.  Tom Hueys Over Yemen Is U.S. Aid Suppressing Another Mideast Freedom Struggle? By Nick Turse In recent weeks, Yemeni protesters calling for an immediate end to the 32-year reign of U.S.-backed President Ali Abdullah Saleh have been met with increasing violence at the hands of state security forces.  A recent pledge by Saleh to step down, one of many that haven’t met demonstrators’ demands, has yet to halt the protests or violence by the troops backing his regime.  During a demonstration earlier this month in the city of Taiz, protesters marching down a central street were confronted by security forces and Saleh supporters, while government helicopters flew overhead.  “The thugs and the security forces fired on us with live gunfire,” Mahmud al-Shaobi, one of the protesters told the New York Times. “Many people were shot.” In the days since, more demonstrators have been attacked by government forces -- with the death toll now estimated to exceed 130.  Witnesses have also been reporting the increased use of military helicopters in the crackdown.  Some of those aircraft may be recent additions to Saleh’s arsenal, provided courtesy of the Obama administration as part of an $83-million military aviation aid package. Since the beginning of 2011, under a program run by the U.S. Department of Defense, the United States has overseen the delivery of several new Bell UH-1Hs, or “Huey II” helicopters, current models of the iconic Huey that served as America’s primary gunship and troop transport during the Vietnam War.  Although these helicopters are only the latest additions to a sizeable arsenal that the Pentagon has provided to Yemen in recent years, they call attention to how U.S. weapons and assistance support regimes actively suppressing democratic uprisings across the Middle East. Click here to read more of this dispatch.