Bahrain: Buying news in the U.S.

 In November the Washington Times posted an article favorable to the Bahraini regime. The article was written by a former U.S. 5th fleet commander who later became a Lockheed Martin executive.
  It turns out that the article was placed in the Times at the request of the Sanitas lobbying which works on behalf of the Bahrain government. The article urged the U.S. government to support the Bahraini government in cracking down on pro-democracy protesters in Bahrain. While deploring the violence the U.S. in effect did support the crackdown and said nothing against the sending of GCC troops into Bahrain to help quash the protests.
   The Washington Times did note that the commander Admiral Charles Moore worked for Lockheed Martin and that the company  sells  hundreds of millions in arms to the kingdom but they failed to mention that the article was placed at the request of  the lobbying firm Sanitas. Sanitas is paid 15,000 per month to lobby on behalf of the firm. Surely, the public should have been informed about that as well. This was not an opinion piece so much as an infomercial. For more see this article.