Colin Cavell: Britain’s support for Manama against ethical principles

Colin Cavell, a former lecturer of the University of Bahrain from West Virginia, has been interviewed by Press TV about the refusal of British police to shed light on their ties with the Bahraini regime.

The following is a rough transcription of the interview.

Press TV: Do you think it's smart for Britain to try to keep this under wraps?

Cavell: When a government agency seeks to profit by selling its expertise either to private businesses or foreign governments, questions of ethics normally arise; and when civil servants sell their expertise on the market, that is expertise that they have garnered at public expense, the public has paid for them to get that expertise, and now they're selling it on the market, then ethical violations are definitely evident, because working for one society either through the civil service or other government work is protected from the usual regulations which apply to private firms because work for one society is deemed to be work for the betterment of one society, that is, for the general welfare of the community and not primarily for the sole benefit of individuals.

So the UK College of Policing in Bahrain Ministry of Interior signing this agreement in June of last year spills out a completely commercial nature of the relationship, that is, Bahrain pays money to the UK College of Policing and the UK College of Policing in return renders instruction on surveillance and intelligence gathering, infiltration, arrest and interrogation procedures and it's similar to the corrupt role of American psychologists during President George W Bush's war on terror, which implicated a number of psychologists who supported the Department of Defense and the CIA and water-boarding and sleep deprivation and in other forms of torture, practices which were condemned by the American Psychological Association last August, when it issued a unanimous ban barring psychologists from participating in national security interrogation.

Press TV: How important has such training and such support from the West been for the Bahraini monarchy to keep going?

Cavell: It's definitely crucial but more importantly is the ethical violation. When you work for one society, when you do government work, you're getting trained, you're getting expertise that should be for the betterment of one's community not for private profit. And when people profit from government work, then the whole society, the whole community, they deem that as in violation of the ethics of one society. Of course because of the corruption of American society and politicians continuously profiting from it, we become dull to realizing that this is an ethical violation, but much of the world that is not caught up in the complicity of American politics, which everything is for sale, recognizes the ethical violation at work here.

Press TV’s website can also be accessed at the following alternate addresses:

www.presstv.co.uk