A new tactic of thuggish Arab dictators and their even more thuggish secret police is to hire plain-clothed thugs to go out and beat up dissidents and then the regime claims ignorance and innocence that that it was all some unfortunate mundane and non-political crime where a dissident happens to be attacked.

I believe it was the Tunisian regime that pioneered this tactic and is now making fans in Egypt and Jordan. Tunisian hired thugs would go to the house of some dissident and beat the crap out of them and the government feigns outrage. Once a Tunisian woman - editor of the online magainze Kalima (word) which had its archives deleted by the Tunisian regime - was visited by such men and brutally beaten with her eyes swollen.

The Jordan regimes learns fast and is duplicating the Tunisian model:

Meet Layth Shubaylat, the most prominent Jordanian dissident. This senior lies in a hospital after being beaten by hired plain-clothed goons. The Jordanian secret police - founded and trained by the C.I.A. - of course claims innocence and is pretending that Shubaylat just happened to get into a fight with thugs he could have fathered. Of course, the much-beloved-by-Westerns Jordanian monarch claims innocence and it was all a non-political events.

Arab regimes think very little of their people since their propaganda is of such low quality. But then Arabs are too quite in the face of such injustice that no wonder the regimes do not bother with sophisticated propaganda since it doesn’t matter either way.

And will the equally beloved phony Queen Rayna talk about Shubaylat to Western audiences when she spews her London-PR-agency-crafted talking points about how liberal and “modern” Jordan’s monarchy is? Will she meet him or is she too busy shopping?