"Bahraini Oil, American Water"

"... There is a place for such analysis, though it tends to draw attention away from what’s happening in Bahrain now. Last week I received an email from the father of Abdallah Madan, a 17-year-old Bahraini-American citizen, who was arrested for protesting in early March. He has been beaten, his nose has been broken, and there is no sign of his being released any time soon. US embassy officials were made to wait three weeks before being allowed to see him, and have so far not made his case a priority. Meanwhile, Abdallah has asked his father to take up the cause of more than 450 other children languishing in Manama’s prisons for standing up to autocracy.

Reflecting on how all this came tabout, Madan wrote that they often told Abdallah that his support for democracy was because ‘he drank a lot of American water’ when he was a small child in Virginia. The US authorities would do well to drink some more of that water, too."