Financial Times confuses Bahraini minister with 9/11 suspect

This video is called CNN – Bahrain security forces torture doctors, medics and patients.

By Sydney Smith:

Financial Times Mistakes Bahrain Foreign Minister in Photo as Accused 9/11 ‘Plotter’

December 26, 2013 05:00 AM EST

Whoops! The Financial Times wrongly used a photo of Bahrain‘s foreign minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa, with a report on accused 9/11 terrorist Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the Huffington Post reported.

The Financial Times‘ Dec. 21/22 story was titled “Guantanamo inmates face two divergent paths after 12 years” and included a photo of the foreign minister captioned as “among five detainees on trial.”  The caption of the photo called him the accused terrorist.

The Financial Times has published a correction and apology to the foreign minister, “Apology to His Excellency Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa.”

This reminds me of the FBI in the USA confusing photos of Osama bin Laden with Spanish Leftist politician Gaspar Llamazares. There are differences between these two cases, though.

The Financial Times is an unarmed newspaper business. So, the Financial Times‘ misidentification was not a danger for Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa in a big way. While the FBI is an armed organization; some of its members have a “licence to kill”. The FBI did put Gaspar Llamazares’ life in danger.

Though the FBI misidentified Gaspar Llamazares in January 2010, today, almost four years later, they have still not apologized for that as far is I know. Maybe they did not like Gaspar Llamazares’ criticism of George W Bush’s Iraq war? While, on the other hand, the Financial Times apologized immediately and profusely to Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa.

There is still a third difference. Gaspar Llamazares was and is completely innocent of any terrorism. While hundreds of thousands of Bahrainis will consider Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed al Khalifa, as a member of the royal dynasty and of the Bahraini government, engaged in bloody repression of the Bahraini pro-democracy movement, to be a “state terrorist”, roughly in the same league as al-Qaeda.

South Korean consumer products aren’t hard to find in Bahrain, one of the fastest-growing markets in the Persian Gulf for conglomerate Samsung Electronics. But more than two years into anti-government protests in the Gulf state, it is South Korean tear gas – rather than smartphones or flat-screen TVs – that is attracting international scrutiny for its role in an unfinished chapter of the Arab Spring: here.

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