Accidental Blogger

Correction; it was an Oil Dance.  With oil prices hovering between $90 – $100 a barrel, George W. Bush recently visited his family friends in Saudi Arabia to sweetly jawbone them into lowering prices. It hasn’t worked yet. Eager to please the Saudis, Bush even participated in a sword dance with his princely hosts. The dance is not exactly a spirited show of athleticism. The participants appear to mostly sway from side to side in a leisurely manner while schmoozing. To his credit, GWB looked just a bit embarrassed. While watching the video, an uncomfortable thought crossed my mind. With Saudi Arabia’s less than stellar record on human rights, as reported by our own State Department, is Dancing With Swords a good headline for the leader of a democratic nation? 

c. Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment

During the year the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, known as the religious police (Mutawwa’in) harassed, abused, and detained citizens and foreigners of both sexes. These incidents were most common in the central region, including the capital of Riyadh, and relatively less frequent in the eastern and western regions of the country. However, there was an increase in reported religious police abuse in the Eastern Province and Jeddah.

The government sentenced criminals to punishment according to its interpretation of Shari’a. Corporal punishments provided by law included public execution by beheading, amputation, lashing, and other measures deemed appropriate by the judicial authorities. According to HRW, judges routinely issued sentences of thousands of lashes as punishment, often carried out in public. HRW reported that the beatings lead to severe mental trauma and physical pain, and the victims do not receive medical treatment.

During the year the press reported approximately 38 executions. The government executes individuals who have been convicted of murder, apostasy, narcotics-related offenses, rape, and armed robbery. Twenty of these executions were for crimes related to illegal drugs. There were no executions for apostasy during the year. The authorities punished repeated thievery and other repeated offenses by amputation of the right hand and left foot. The government also punished people for various offenses with lashings, including for alcohol-related offenses or for being alone in the company of an unrelated person of the opposite sex. According to press reports, lashings were generally administered with a thin reed by a man who must hold a book under his arm to prevent him from lifting the arm too high. The strokes, delivered through a thin shirt, are not supposed to leave permanent damage but are designed to leave painful welts that bleed and bruise. According to the NGO National Society for Human Rights (NSHR), there were unauthorized and excessive lashings in the women’s prisons.

On September 9, a Nigerian man had his right hand amputated after he was convicted of stealing in the Great Mosque in Mecca. He was found guilty of "committing the crime of pickpocketing."

On the other hand, doing a silly dance in an effort to keep the nation’s economy well lubricated is a far better foreign policy move than attacking an oil rich country under false pretense.