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Saudi Forces and US kill youth, remove organs

Since the US-approved invasion of Bahrain by Saudi forces, the bodies of protesters killed in the clashes are being returned to their families, albeit with various organs missing.

In an interview with Press TV, Ralph Schoenman discusses the events taking place in Bahrain, which are similar to those in Israel, in which the Israeli regime has been accused of murdering Palestinians for their organs. He also touches on the planned Yemen resolution. The following is a transcript of the interview.

Press TV: Let’s begin with a quote I once heard from an analyst saying that al-Qaeda is the extension of US foreign policy and Yemen is a demonstrable example of that — this is according to Dr. Tarpley, and he added that Anwar al-Awlaki (US alleged al-Qaeda commander) in Yemen is a CIA agent. Can you comment on this?

Ralph Schoenman: Many of the figures that were supposedly connected to al-Qaeda of course were funded by the CIA and that includes Osama Bin Laden in the original attempts to destabilize Afghanistan and to implement what Brzezinski called ‘the bear trap,’ which he outlined in his book, The Grand Chessboard, which was to entrap the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan.

The fundamental issue here is whatever the rationale, the basic politics of American rulers in the region is to subjugate the population, exploit their resources and to do that they require country-selling regimes – because the basic anti-colonial struggle for national independence and sovereignty for self-determination, which is 150 years old, cannot be realized either in the Arab East, or the region at large — nor for that matter in any part of the world — without the people having ownership and control over their own resources and own economic life. Otherwise it is form without substance.

The only meaning of having independence when the control of the economy, the resources, the markets, the labor of people is in the hands of a handful of corporate oligarchs, capitalist rulers — in the case of the US, something like 5,000 people who have command over the banking and corporate structure of the US economy — is to have the forms of independence without the substance. Inevitably, the population is resistant to that and that then requires brutal repression.

Dictatorships are not an accident; they are prerequisite for control by an imperial force. As we’ve witnessed today in Yemen where the police have injured more than 400 people using gas as they have prior to this time in Yemen and in the case of Bahrain, poison gas and nerve gas. In addition to that, 17 people have been shot dead as Reuters describes it in Houdada and repression is intensifying.

What does the US do? It encourages the besieged dictator to make plans to leave, but what is the form in which that is to take place? We are informed that the Gulf States at American request have requested Yemeni sides to come to Riyadh for talks – extending a request for a meeting of GCC foreign ministers in the Saudi capital of Riyadh to resolve the impasse on specific issue pertaining to Yemen.

Riyadh is to be the arbiter, the arena and Riyadh is, in fact, occupying Bahrain as we speak, subjecting the population to a reign of utter terror in which doctors and surgeons are being killed, hospitals seized, and the entire population subject not merely to nerve gas, but a rather sinister barbaric development in which the bodies of youths, who are being taken out of hospitals and killed, are being returned to their families with their organs missing – That’s a replica of what the Israeli armed forces were doing in Gaza and other place with Palestinian prisoners – marketing their organs.

It’s a measure of the nature of the regime in Bahrain, and it’s a measure of the politics of Saudi dictatorship. And that is to be the arena in which the crisis of Yemen is to be resolved. Nothing better reflects the real character of US policy than that proposal — because they want to buy a little time for the removal of Abdullah Saleh in order to replace him — as they did in Egypt with the replacement of Mubarak — with a structure that carries out the identical politics and policies.

If the result of that is outright rebellion, they will try to buy time with an interim formula, which maintains the same type of rule in a different guise.

Press TV: Referring to the issue of PGCC countries offering to mediate in Yemen – does that include the possibility of Saudi forces invading Yemen and other countries?

Ralph Schoenman: Saudi shock troops were put in place in Bahrain six weeks ago. There was a general strike in Bahrain and that was extended to Oman and Muscat. The sheikhdoms of the UAE are deeply unpopular, unstable and repressive, so you can be certain that if a similar uprising occurs in those States you will see Saudi troops in there.

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