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This is a quality blog article by a BBC journalist, centring around the role of a shadowy British colonial advisor in building the repressive Bahrain that we know today.
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"Things came to a head when in 1956 the British foreign secretary, Selwyn Lloyd, flew to Bahrain for a visit. There was a large, violent demonstration with hundreds of Bahrainis trying to tell Lloyd to remove Belgrave - because he was standing in the way of making Bahrain a modern democracy.
The riots and the demonstration made the news in Britain - and Panorama came out to investigate. The report - by Woodrow Wyatt (later to become one of Rupert Murdoch's closest advisers) - is really good.
Wyatt interviews Belgrave who has a great quote about the demonstration - "it's anti-British, anti-Sheikh, and anti-me." But Wyatt also goes and talks to people on the street, almost all of who want Belgrave to go. One of them standing on the back of a truck sums it up neatly: "Belgrave is not just an adviser - he is the judge, and when he goes to the court he is also the police commandant. He is everything in Bahrain, he is not an adviser."
IF YOU TAKE MY ADVICE - I'D REPRESS THEM, May 11, 2012
I can't extricate the related video clip (9 minutes). Therefore, kindly open the above posting and scroll down to this picture and run the video (P.S.: Note the English proficiency and political maturity of the Bahraini versus the arrogance of Belgrave):
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Further on: "Across the Arab world people had been inspired by the new ideas of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the President of Egypt, and they wanted freedom from the corrupt old Shaikhs and Kings who were propped up by the west. And in 1966 the BBC went out to Bahrain again and made a Panorama programme that tore into the hypocrisy of what Britain was doing in that country.
It didn't pull its punches - the reporter, called John Morgan, says to the camera at the end:
"If one of the tests of a society's health is a citizen's willingness to speak his mind freely in public then Bahrain belongs in the class of a Communist or a Fascist country - and we are deeply implicated in order to preserve our oil and foreign policy." (See the next video clip in the above posting (12 minutes). Again, note the English proficiency and political maturity of the Bahraini).

There are several other very informative historical video clips after that.

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"The Shabiha started off as racketeers and smugglers. But now, as ultra-loyal enforcers of Syria's brutal regime, they have taken on a far more bloodthirsty role.
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"They were like monsters," said Dr Azzawi, who worked in Latakia. "They had huge muscles, big bellies, big beards. They were all very tall and frightening, and took steroids to pump up their bodies.
"I had to talk to them like children, because the Shabiha likes people with low intelligence. But that is what makes them so terrifying – the combination of brute strength and blind allegiance to the regime."
The Shabiha: Inside Assad's death squads, June 2, 2012
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