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 Last Modified: 24 Feb 2011 20:01 GMT

Export led economic growth, based on cheap labour, has created vast inequalities .

In early March, China’s National People’s Congress will approve its 12th Five-Year Plan. This plan is likely to go down in history as one of China’s boldest strategic initiatives.

In essence, it will change the character of China’s economic model – moving from the export- and investment-led structure of the past 30 years toward a pattern of growth that is driven increasingly by Chinese consumers. This shift will have profound implications for China, the rest of Asia, and the broader global economy.

Like the Fifth Five-Year Plan, which set the stage for the “reforms and opening up” of the late 1970s, and the Ninth Five-Year Plan, which triggered the marketisation of state-owned enterprises in the mid-1990’s, the upcoming Plan will force China to rethink the core value propositions of its economy.

Premier Wen Jiabao laid the groundwork four years ago, when he first articulated the paradox of the “Four ‘Uns” – an economy whose strength on the surface masked a structure that was increasingly “unstable, unbalanced, uncoordinated, and ultimately unsustainable”.

Re-balancing

The Great Recession of 2008-2009 suggests that China can no longer afford to treat the Four Uns as theoretical conjecture. The post-crisis era is likely to be characterized by lasting aftershocks in the developed world – undermining the external demand upon which China has long relied. That leaves China’s government with little choice other than to turn to internal demand and tackle the Four Uns head on.

The 12th Five-Year Plan will do precisely that, focusing on three major pro-consumption initiatives. First, China will begin to wean itself from the manufacturing model that has underpinned export- and investment-led growth. While the manufacturing approach served China well for 30 years, its dependence on capital-intensive, labor-saving productivity enhancement makes it incapable of absorbing the country’s massive labor surplus.

Instead, under the new Plan, China will adopt a more labor-intensive services model. It will, one hopes, provide a detailed blueprint for the development of large-scale transactions-intensive industries such as wholesale and retail trade, domestic transport and supply-chain logistics, health care, and leisure and hospitality.

Such a transition would provide China with much greater job-creating potential. With the employment content of a unit of Chinese output more than 35 per cent higher in services than in manufacturing and construction, China could actually hit its employment target with slower GDP growth. Moreover, services are far less resource-intensive than manufacturing – offering China the added benefits of a lighter, cleaner, and greener growth model.

The new Plan’s second pro-consumption initiative will seek to boost wages. The main focus will be the lagging wages of rural workers, whose per capita incomes are currently only 30 per cent of those in urban areas – precisely the opposite of China’s aspirations for a more “harmonious society”.

Among the reforms will be tax policies aimed at boosting rural purchasing power, measures to broaden rural land ownership, and technology-led programs to raise agricultural productivity.

Urban-rural divide

But the greatest leverage will undoubtedly come from policies that foster ongoing and rapid migration from the countryside to the cities. Since 2000, annual rural-to-urban migration has been running consistently at 15-20 million people.

For migration to continue at this pace, China will have to relax the long-entrenched strictures of its hukou, or household registration system, which limits labor-market flexibility by tethering workers and their benefits to their birthplace.

Boosting employment via services, and lifting wages through enhanced support for rural workers, will go a long way toward raising Chinese personal income, now running at just 42 per cent of GDP – half that of the United States. But more than higher growth in income from labor will be needed to boost Chinese private consumption. Major efforts to shift from saving toward spending are also required.

That issue frames the third major component of the new Plan’s pro-consumption agenda – the need to build a social safety net in order to reduce fear-driven precautionary saving. Specifically, that means social security, private pensions, and medical and unemployment insurance – plans that exist on paper but are woefully underfunded.

For example, in 2009, China’s retirement-system assets – national social security, local government retirement benefit plans, and private sector pensions – totaled just RMB2.4 trillion ($364bn). That boils down to only about $470 of lifetime retirement benefits for the average Chinese worker. Little wonder that families save out of fear of the future. China’s new Plan must rectify this shortfall immediately.

New industries

There will be far more to the 12th Five-Year Plan than these three pillars of pro-consumption policy. The Plan’s focus on accelerated development of several strategic emerging industries – from biotech and alternative energy to new materials and next-generation information technology – is also noteworthy.

But the emphasis on the Chinese consumer is likely to be the new Plan’s defining feature – sufficient, in my opinion, to boost private consumption as a share of Chinese GDP from its current rock-bottom reading of around 36 per cent to somewhere in the 42-45 per cent range by 2015. While still low by international standards, such an increase would nonetheless represent a critical step for China on the road to rebalancing.

It would also be a huge boost for China’s major trading partners – not just those in East Asia, but also growth-constrained European and US economies. Indeed, the 12th Five-Year Plan is likely to spark the greatest consumption story in modern history. Today’s post-crisis world could hardly ask for more.

But there is a catch: in shifting to a more consumption-led dynamic, China will reduce its surplus saving and have less left over to fund the ongoing saving deficits of countries like the US. The possibility of such an asymmetrical global rebalancing – with China taking the lead and the developed world dragging its feet – could be the key unintended consequence of China’s 12th Five-Year Plan.

Stephen S. Roach, a member of the faculty of Yale University, is Non-Executive Chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia and author of The Next Asia.

This article was first published by Project Syndicate.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial policy.

 Middle East Correspondent

Monday, 7 March 2011

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin – also funded and armed the Taliban.

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

The Saudis have been told that opponents of Gaddafi need anti-tank rockets and mortars as a first priority to hold off attacks by Gaddafi’s armour, and ground-to-air missiles to shoot down his fighter-bombers.

Supplies could reach Benghazi within 48 hours but they would need to be delivered to air bases in Libya or to Benghazi airport. If the guerrillas can then go on to the offensive and assault Gaddafi’s strongholds in western Libya, the political pressure on America and Nato – not least from Republican members of Congress – to establish a no-fly zone would be reduced.

US military planners have already made it clear that a zone of this kind would necessitate US air attacks on Libya’s functioning, if seriously depleted, anti-aircraft missile bases, thus bringing Washington directly into the war on the side of Gaddafi’s opponents.

For several days now, US Awacs surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya, making constant contact with Malta air traffic control and requesting details of Libyan flight patterns, including journeys made in the past 48 hours by Gaddafi’s private jet which flew to Jordan and back to Libya just before the weekend.

Officially, Nato will only describe the presence of American Awacs planes as part of its post-9/11 Operation Active Endeavour, which has broad reach to undertake aerial counter-terrorism measures in the Middle East region.

The data from the Awacs is streamed to all Nato countries under the mission’s existing mandate. Now that Gaddafi has been reinstated as a super-terrorist in the West’s lexicon, however, the Nato mission can easily be used to search for targets of opportunity in Libya if active military operations are undertaken.

Al Jazeera English television channel last night broadcast recordings made by American aircraft to Maltese air traffic control, requesting information about Libyan flights, especially that of Gaddafi’s jet.

An American Awacs aircraft, tail number LX-N90442 could be heard contacting the Malta control tower on Saturday for information about a Libyan Dassault-Falcon 900 jet 5A-DCN on its way from Amman to Mitiga, Gaddafi’s own VIP airport.

Nato Awacs 07 is heard to say: “Do you have information on an aircraft with the Squawk 2017 position about 85 miles east of our [sic]?”

Malta air traffic control replies: “Seven, that sounds to be Falcon 900- at flight level 340, with a destination Mitiga, according to flight plan.”

But Saudi Arabia is already facing dangers from a co-ordinated day of protest by its own Shia Muslim citizens who, emboldened by the Shia uprising in the neighbouring island of Bahrain, have called for street protests against the ruling family of al-Saud on Friday.

After pouring troops and security police into the province of Qatif last week, the Saudis announced a nationwide ban on all public demonstrations.

Shia organisers claim that up to 20,000 protesters plan to demonstrate with women in the front rows to prevent the Saudi army from opening fire.

If the Saudi government accedes to America’s request to send guns and missiles to Libyan rebels, however, it would be almost impossible for President Barack Obama to condemn the kingdom for any violence against the Shias of the north-east provinces.

Thus has the Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US military priorities in the region.

In contrast with what is happening in Egypt and Tunisia, Libya occupies the first spot on the Human Development Index for Africa and it has the highest life expectancy on the continent.  Education and health receive special attention from the State.  The cultural level of its population is without a doubt the highest.  Its problems are of a different sort.  The population wasn’t lacking food and essential social services.  The country needed an abundant foreign labour force to carry out ambitious plans for production and social development.

For that reason, it provided jobs for hundreds of thousands of workers from Egypt, Tunisia, China and other countries.  It had enormous incomes and reserves in convertible currencies deposited in the banks of the wealthy countries from which they acquired consumer goods and even sophisticated weapons that were supplied exactly by the same countries that today want to invade it in the name of human rights.

The colossal campaign of lies, unleashed by the mass media, resulted in great confusion in world public opinion.  Some time will go by before we can reconstruct what has really happened in Libya, and we can separate the true facts from the false ones that have been spread.

Serious and prestigious broadcasting companies such as Telesur, saw themselves with the obligation to send reporters and cameramen to the activities of one group and those on the opposing side, so that they could inform about what was really happening.

Communications were blocked, honest diplomatic officials were risking their lives going through neighbourhoods and observing activities, day and night, in order to inform about what was going on.  The empire and its main allies used the most sophisticated media to divulge information about the events, among which one had to deduce the shreds of the truth.

Without any doubt, the faces of the young people who were protesting in Benghazi, men, and women wearing the veil or without the veil, were expressing genuine indignation.

One is able to see the influence that the tribal component still exercises on that Arab country, despite the Muslim faith that 95% of its population sincerely shares.

Imperialism and NATO – seriously concerned by the revolutionary wave unleashed in the Arab world, where a large part of the oil is generated that sustains the consumer economy of the developed and rich countries – could not help but take advantage of the internal conflict arising in Libya so that they could promote military intervention.  The statements made by the United States administration right from the first instant were categorical in that sense.

The circumstances could not be more propitious.  In the November elections, the Republican right-wing struck a resounding blow on President Obama, an expert in rhetoric.

The fascist “mission accomplished” group, now backed ideologically by the extremists of the Tea Party, reduced the possibilities of the current president to a merely decorative role in which even his health program and the dubious economic recovery were in danger as a result of the budget deficit and the uncontrollable growth of the public debt which were breaking all historical records.

In spite of the flood of lies and the confusion that was created, the US could not drag China and the Russian Federation to the approval by the Security Council for a military intervention in Libya, even though it managed to obtain  however, in the Human Rights Council, approval of the objectives it was seeking at that moment.  In regards to a military intervention, the Secretary of State stated in words that admit not the slightest doubt: “no option is being ruled out”.

The real fact is that Libya is now wrapped up in a civil war, as we had foreseen, and the United Nations could do nothing to avoid it, other than its own Secretary General sprinkling the fire with a goodly dose of fuel.

The problem that perhaps the actors were not imagining is that the very leaders of the rebellion were bursting into the complicated matter declaring that they were rejecting all foreign military intervention.

Various news agencies informed that Abdelhafiz Ghoga, spokesperson for the Committee of the Revolution stated on Monday the 28th that “‘The rest of Libya shall be liberated by the Libyan people’”.

“We are counting on the army to liberate Tripoli’ assured Ghoga during the announcement of the formation of a ‘National Council’ to represent the cities of the country in the hands of the insurrection.”

“‘What we want is intelligence information, but in no case that our sovereignty is affected in the air, on land or on the seas’, he added during an encounter with journalists in this city located 1000 kilometres to the east of Tripoli.”

“The intransigence of the people responsible for the opposition on national sovereignty was reflecting the opinion being spontaneously manifested by many Libyan citizens to the international press in Benghazi”, informed a dispatch of the AFP agency this past Monday.

That same day, a political sciences professor at the University of Benghazi, Abeir Imneina, stated:

“There is very strong national feeling in Libya.”

“‘Furthermore, the example of Iraq strikes fear in the Arab world as a whole’, she underlined, in reference to the American invasion of 2003 that was supposed to bring democracy to that country and then, by contagion, to the region as a whole, a hypothesis totally belied by the facts.”

The professor goes on:

“‘We know what happened in Iraq, it’s that it is fully unstable and we really don’t want to follow the same path.  We don’t want the Americans to come to have to go crying to Gaddafi’, this expert continued.”

“But according to Abeir Imneina, ‘there also exists the feeling that this is our revolution, and that it is we who have to make it’.”

A few hours after this dispatch was printed, two of the main press bodies of the United States, The New York Times and The Washington Post, hastened to offer new versions on the subject; the DPA agency informs on this on the following day, March the first: “The Libyan opposition could request that the West bomb from the air strategic positions of the forces loyal to President Muamar al Gaddafi, the US press informed today.”

“The subject is being discussed inside the Libyan Revolutionary Council, ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post’ specified in their online versions.”

“‘The New York Times’ notes that these discussions reveal the growing frustration of the rebel leaders in the face of the possibility that Gaddafi should retake power”.

“In the event that air actions are carried out within the United Nations framework, these would not imply international intervention, explained the council’s spokesperson, quoted by The New York Times”.

“The council is made up of lawyers, academics, judges and prominent members of Libyan society.”

The dispatch states:

“‘The Washington Post’ quoted rebels acknowledging that, without Western backing, combat with the forces loyal to Gaddafi could last a long time and cost many human lives.”

It is noteworthy that in that regard, not one single worker, peasant or builder is mentioned, not anyone related to material production or any young student or combatant among those who take part in the demonstrations.  Why the effort to present the rebels as prominent members of society demanding bombing by the US and NATO in order to kill Libyans?

Some day we shall know the truth, through persons such as the political sciences professor from the University of Benghazi who, with such eloquence, tells of the terrible experience that killed, destroyed homes, left millions of persons in Iraq without jobs or forced them to emigrate.

Today on Wednesday, the second of March, the EFE Agency presents the well-known rebel spokesperson making statements that, in my opinion, affirm and at the same time contradict those made on Monday: “Benghazi (Libya), March 2.  The rebel Libyan leadership today asked the UN Security Council to launch an air attack ‘against the mercenaries’ of the Muamar el Gaddafi regime.”

“‘Our Army cannot launch attacks against the mercenaries, due to their defensive role’, stated the spokesperson for the rebels, Abdelhafiz Ghoga, at a press conference in Benghazi.”

“‘A strategic air attack is different from a foreign intervention which we reject’, emphasized the spokesperson for the opposition forces which at all times have shown themselves to be against a foreign military intervention in the Libyan conflict”.

Which one of the many imperialist wars would this look like?

The one in Spain in 1936? Mussolini’s against Ethiopia in 1935? George W. Bush’s against Iraq in the year 2003 or any other of the dozens of wars promoted by the United States against the peoples of the Americas, from the invasion of Mexico in 1846 to the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982?

Without excluding, of course, the mercenary invasion of the Bay of Pigs, the dirty war and the blockade of our Homeland throughout 50 years, that will have another anniversary next April 16th.

In all those wars, like that of Vietnam which cost millions of lives, the most cynical justifications and measures prevailed.

For anyone harbouring any doubts, about the inevitable military intervention that shall occur in Libya, the AP news agency, which I consider to be well-informed, headlined a cable printed today which stated: “The NATO countries are drawing up a contingency plan taking as its model the flight exclusion zones established over the Balkans in the 1990s, in the event that the international community decides to impose an air embargo over Libya, diplomats said”.

Further on it concludes: “Officials, who were not able to give their names due to the delicate nature of the matter, indicated that the opinions being observed start with the flight exclusion zone that the western military alliance imposed over Bosnia in 1993 that had the mandate of the Security Council, and with the NATO bombing in Kosovo in 1999, THAT DID NOT HAVE IT”.

To be continued tomorrow.

Fidel Castro Ruz

March 2, 2011

8:19 p.m.

07 March, 2011

Climatestorytellers.org

In 1970 Howard Zinn began his now–famous speech “The Problem is Civil Obedience” with these words: “I start from the supposition that the world is topsy–turvy, that things are all wrong, that the wrong people are in jail and the wrong people are out of jail, that the wrong people are in power and the wrong people are out of power, that the wealth is distributed in this country and the world in such a way as not simply to require small reform but to require a drastic reallocation of wealth.”

In 2005 I read Zinn’s speech as part of a Voices of a People’s History of the United States performance in Seattle that was organized by Anthony Arnove—Zinn’s co–editor of the anthology. Those words are as close to the truth as we will get to what’s happening today.

In India, internationally recognized physician–humanitarian Dr. Binayak Sen is in jail with a lifetime sentence, and in the US, young climate change activist Tim DeChristopher was convicted last Thursday and may end up in jail for ten years.

Late last year, I visited my family in India. On December 24 we watched with horror on TV channels and read newspaper articles with dismay that Dr. Binayak Sen has been convicted with sedition charges. My dad was outraged; my mom was outraged; my sister and brother–in–law were outraged; my brother was outraged; and I was outraged.

Some of you may know about him but others might be curious: who is Binayak Sen?

The Physician and His Humanism

As we struggle to fight for “public health for all” in the US, including for the 45 million underprivileged members of our communities, you might perhaps appreciate a brief trajectory of Binayak and his wife Dr. Ilina Sen’s life.

In 1972 Binayak Sen received, first a MBBS, and then in 1976 a MD in pediatrics, both from the prestigious Christian Medical College in Vellore, India. He then joined as a faculty member in the Centre for Social Medicine and Community Health at the Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi, one of India’s most well known universities.

After two years of academic career, Dr. Sen began his life–long work to serve the poorest of the poor with both his medical service as well as various innovative initiatives. He moved from New Delhi to Hisangabad in the state of Madhya Pradesh to work at the Friends Rural Centre, a community based health center. There, he worked for two years on the diagnosis and treatment of Tuberculosis, as well as to understand the socio–economic causes of the disease. He also joined the recently formed Medico Friend Circle, a national group of socially conscious individuals who recognized that the, “existing system of health care is not geared towards the needs of the majority of the people: the poor.”

In 1981 he moved to Dalli Rajahara in the state of Chhattisgarh. There, in 1983 he worked with mine workers and fellow physicians to set up the Shaheed Hospital that continues to provide low–cost medical care to mine workers and Adivasis (tribal people) of the nearby region.

In 1987 Sen left Dalli Rajahara and settled in the village of Bagrumnala. He was appointed a member of the advisory group on Health Care Sector reforms in the state government of Chhattisgarh. He helped develop the Mitanin programme that became the role model for the National Rural Health Mission. It’s a great irony that the same state government has now put him behind bars, for life.

In Bagrumnala, Binayak and his wife Ilina began to develop models of primary health care. They founded Rupantar, a non–governmental organization whose mission is to train and deploy community health workers across 20 villages. Here are few words from an article published in the Deccan Chronicle (May 27, 2009): “Ghasia Ram Netam, a health worker with Rupantar, the NGO founded by the Sens, introduced himself as the first tribal youth in his village to be trained as a laboratory technician. Every week, before he was arrested [in 2007], Dr. Sen used to visit the village clinic. … This timely diagnosis [at the makeshift laboratory in the clinic] and immediate referral to district hospital saved many tribals from certain death. The nearest government–run primary health centre is seven km away and the doctor is frequently absent—an old, familiar story.”

In the late 90s Binayak Sen was as an advisor to the Jan Swasthya Sahyog—a community health clinic providing low–cost health care to the rural poor in the Bilaspur district of Chhattisgarh. If you have nine minutes, you will see in a wonderfully produced video about this health clinic, that the work of Binayak and Ilina Sen have inspired next generation of doctors.

In her recently published book, “A Doctor to Defend—the Binayak Sen Story,” author Minnie Vaid points out that Binayak Sen’s generous heart reached out beyond the underprivileged Adivasis of Chattisgarh and Madhya Pradesh, to also the minority Muslims of India. Here is such a story from the book as recounted by journalist–activist Mahtab Alam, “Binayak Sen was travelling in a second class compartment in a train to Purulia in 1993 along with his friend Dr. Yogesh Jain, when someone came and asked him, ‘Maualana ji, kya time hua hai?’ [Mr. Maulana, what time is it?] It might sound funny but his growing a beard like a Maulana’s was a well thought out act. Dr. Yogesh tells the author [Minnie Vaid] that when he asked Binayak why he had grown a beard, Binayak replied, “(I) wanted to see what it means to be insecure, to know how it feels to be a minority in one’s own country.” He was inspired by the book Black Like Me. Adivasis, Hindus and Muslims lovingly know him as the “doctor with a beard.”

The Human Rights Activist and the Charges Against Him

On May 14, 2007, Binayak Sen was arrested in Bilaspur under the provisions of the Chhattisgarh Special Public Security Act and the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act—two draconian laws. The allegation claimed that while Dr. Sen was treating and visiting imprisoned Maoist leader Narayan Sanyal, he had taken letters from Sanyal and delivered them to businessman Piyush Guha, who supposedly would pass them onto the Maoist underground. The state has not been able to provide any evidence that validates their claim. The Hindustan Times reported (December 24, 2010) the charges against him were: “Treason; criminal conspiracy; sedition, anti–national activities and making war against the nation; knowingly using the proceeds of terrorism; links with the Maoists.”

Only a paranoiac and ultra–nationalist state ready to serve the wishes of wealthy industrialists can imprison Dr. Binayak Sen with those preposterous charges.

In addition to being a physician and humanitarian, Binayak Sen is also a dedicated human rights activist. Since 1981 he has been a member of Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL), an organization devoted to the preservation of constitutional civil liberties and human rights. He is currently the President of the Chhattisgarh state unit, and Vice President of its National body.

Here are Binayak Sen’s own words about Narayan Sanyal: “I have been concerned with the rights of prisoners in my capacity as a Human Rights worker and was approached by the family of Mr. Narayan Sanyal to look after his health and well being after he was brought to Raipur jail in 2006. My first visit to him in jail was in the company of his family and lawyer. Subsequently, I obtained permission from the police authorities for visiting him in jail, and visited him several times, each time applying to do so in my capacity as a PUCL office bearer. … I played a role in facilitating his surgery and kept his family informed about the process. During this period there was considerable correspondence between the prisoner’s family, jail administration and medical authorities, of which copies were marked to me.”

Now, let me share a few words about Binayak Sen’s work that has great implications for ecology, climate change, natural resource, indigenous human rights and neo–liberalism that gets little attention in the mainstream media, but perhaps the main reason why he is in jail today. You see, all the focus is on such words as “Maoists” and “sedition.” In the US we have a similar situation: to tarnish one’s reputation, the right wing only has to brand him/her as a “Communist”—the rest will be taken care of by the FoxNews.

The OtherIndia.org reports, “While they [Adivasis] are extremely poor, their land is extremely rich, both in terms of minerals and forests. … Development, and the lust for mineral wealth, is destroying the environment and shattering the lives of indigenous tribals. … These [mining] operations use enormous quantities of water, which is a scarce commodity in Chattisgarh, and also destroys the environment. … In a situation where the state claims rights to the land and the people who live on that land are treated as peripheral to the national economy, a mass base of the Maoists challenging this status quo forms a threat to the state’s plans for heavy industry and profits in this region.”

So how much mineral is there in Chhattisgarh to create all these commotion? Here are the estimates presented by the Chhattisgarh Environment Conservation Board: 35 billion tonnes of coal; 2.34 billion tonnes of iron ore; 3.58 billion tonnes lime stone; 606 million tonnes of dolomite; 96 million tonnes of bauxite; and 29 million tonnes of cassiterite. Almost all of India’s coal deposit is in Chhattisgarh and two other states. If that’s not enough to lure the profiteers, there is more, Chhattisgarh has diamond, too.

In 2005 the state of Chhattisgarh set up a vigilante army called Salwa Judum to counter the Maoists and forcibly take away lands from the Adivasis. Binayak Sen has to say this about Salwa Judum: “In Chhattisgarh, the PUCL has been in the forefront of exposing the atrocities of the police. … The PUCL has acted as a whistleblower in the matter of exposing the true nature of the Salwa Judum. … an investigation led by the PUCL and involving several other Human Rights organizations revealed that it was in reality a state sponsored and state funded as well as completely unaccountable vigilante force, to which arms were provided by the government. The activities of the Salwa Judum have led to the emptying of more than 600 villages, and the forced displacement of over 60,000 people. Concerns regarding the activities of the Salwa Judum have been expressed by several independent organizations including the National Human Rights Commission.”

This sentiment is shared by Frazer Mascarenhas, principal of St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai in an article published in The Times of India (February 19, 2011): “Dr. Sen exposed how the objective of the State–sponsored Salwa Judum was to uproot the tribal population, so that their villages could be handed over to industrialists for the vulgar profit of a few that we sometimes call ‘development’. That made him the enemy of the local Government.”

On November 29, 2010 as the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP16 opened in Cancún, Mexico, I published a widely circulated essay titled, “Cancún Opens for GREEN Business But REDD Will Destroy Indigenous Forest Cultures.” I wrote about how the Global North—governments, the UN, and powerful fossil fuel and mineral corporations with support from influential environmental NGOs are converging on a plan to take away the last remaining forests from the indigenous communities in the Global South and sell it back to the polluters—all in the name of solving the climate change crisis, that the developed countries created in the first place.

Can we think of Binayak Sen’s work also as a resistance to the global ecological looting taking place right now in front of our collective eyes?

Dr. Sen ended his recent court testimony with these words: “I am being made an example of by the state government of Chhattisgarh as a warning to others not to expose the patent trampling of human rights taking place in the state. Documents have been fabricated by the police and false witnesses introduced in order to falsely implicate me.”

Binayak Sen’s work hasn’t gone unnoticed either by his country or the world. In 2004 he received the Paul Harrison Award for a lifetime of service to the rural poor from his alma mater, the Christian Medical College. In 2007 he received the R.R. Keithan Gold Medal Award by The Indian Academy of Social Sciences (ISSA) for “his outstanding contribution to the advancement of science of Nature–Man–Society and his honest and sincere application for the improvement of quality of life of the poor, the downtrodden and the oppressed people of Chhattisgarh.” In 2008, the Global Health Council in Washington, DC honored him with the Jonathan Mann Award for Global Health and Human Rights, while he was still incarcerated. On a letter dated May 9 2008, twenty–two Nobel laureates from around the world urged that, “Dr. Sen be freed from incarceration on humanitarian grounds to receive his award and to continue his important medical work.” No such permission was granted to him. Dr. Sen is the first south Asian to receive this prestigious award—he sat in his jail cell with the news.

What can we learn from Binayak Sen’s activism? For protests to have any teeth we must also be willing to sacrifice, something. In most cases we’re too polite, either with our words or with our civil disobedience actions—you see, we’re civilized. We join a rally and come back home to a warm meal and a warm bath—nothing is lost but not much is gained either. Those who sacrifice, however, are often punished, but sometimes get rewarded, too.

The Global Protests and Our Demand

Since Binayak Sen was put in jail in 2007 there have been hundreds of rallies across the world demanding his release. The Indian Supreme Court eventually intervened and Dr. Sen was granted bail on May 25 2009, after being in prison for two years. In an op–ed published in Deccan Chronicle journalist Antara Dev Sen wrote (May 28, 2009), “It took two years of sustained shaming to get Dr. Binayak Sen out on bail. The state had been stoutly ignoring the worldwide chorus of appeals and angry protests since the doctor and civil rights activist’s arrest on flimsy charges back in May 2007.”

After a dragged out prosecution, a trial court in Raipur, Chhattisgarh convicted Binayak Sen on December 24, 2010 with a lifetime sentence and charged him with conspiring to commit sedition. Since this devastating news, in the last two months protests took place in: Amherst, Austin, Bangalore, Bhopal, Boston, Chandigarh, Chennai, Dallas, Delhi, Houston, Hyderabad, Indore, Ithaca, Jaipur, Kolkata, London, Los Angeles, Lucknow, Minneapolis, Mumbai, New York, Patna, Pune, Salem, San Francisco, Seattle, Sitapur, Sonebhadra, Vadodara, Vancouver, Varanasi, Washington, and other cities, towns and villages. I’ve put together a small album of photos from these protests that you can see here. The first photo includes Binayak Sen’s mother Anusuya Sen in the center of the frame during a recent rally in Kolkata, the city of my youth.

On January 8, 2011 Nobel laureate economist–philosopher Amartya Sen of Harvard University said in New Delhi, “Even if he did pass [on] the letters, it does not seem to be material of which [allegations of] sedition can be made. In his own writings, Binayak Sen has said that violence is not prudential. He was against sedition and I am amazed by the nature of this decision.”

Binayak Sen however, is not the first person to be charged with this maximum punishment. Mahatma Gandhi was also charged with conspiring to commit sedition. Gandhi admitted his charges and said, “… to preach disaffection towards the existing system of government has become almost a passion with me. … The only course open to you … is … either to resign your post or inflict on me the severest penalty.” In 1922 Gandhi was sentenced to six years in prison.

In an interview published on February 14, 2011, Binayak Sen’s wife Dr. Ilina Sen—well–known social activist and feminist scholar, who currently heads the Department of Women’s Studies at the Mahatma Gandhi University in Wardha said, “I have only seen him once, on the 27th. As a convicted prisoner, he has fewer rights, and can have visitors only once in 15 days. I was told that he is in a maximum–security cell. This is a small courtyard with five cells (cages with iron grills like in the older zoos), in which Binayak, Piyush, Sanyal and three others are kept. … I do not know the legality of this but know that this kind of treatment for a prolonged period can drive one to insanity. The jail superintendent refused to discuss prison conditions with us, and said they would be having a meeting to discuss how the enemies of the state were to be kept.”

In January Amartya Sen organized another letter campaign, this time with 39 other Nobel laureates from around the world to demand immediate release of Binayak Sen. I’m sharing with you verbatim parts of their letter published in The Hindu (February 9, 2011):

“Several months after voicing our concern about Dr. Sen’s detention, one of us travelled to Chhattisgarh; met government officials; consulted Dr. Sen’s family, lawyers, and colleagues; visited his remote clinic to learn more about his selfless work with the Adivasis; and, after a few days and many hours spent waiting in the Raipur prison yard, finally met with Dr. Sen himself in the presence of the prison warden.

We have seen that Dr. Sen is an exceptional, courageous, and selfless colleague, dedicated to helping those in India who are least able to help themselves. Yet his recompense has been two years in prison under difficult conditions, a blatantly unfair trial lasting two years in the so–called ‘Fast Track’ Sessions Court, an unjust conviction of sedition and conspiracy, and condemnation to life imprisonment.

We earnestly hope that our renewed appeal is heard. We know that there are leaders in India who have the power, humanity, patriotism, and decency to speak out against this injustice. We entreat those leaders to act now, to urge Dr. Sen’s immediate release on bail, and insist that this time his appeal is heard without delay under the highest standards of Indian law.”

They ended their letter with these words: “Surely, those who would see the largest democracy in the world survive and thrive can do no less at this crucial time for both Dr. Sen and for the future of justice in India.”

Other prominent activists in India are urging for a major movement to free Binayak Sen. Mahasweta Devi, one of India’s most beloved novelist–activists said during a February 9, 2011 press conference in Kolkata, “the Constitution gives many rights to people, but the state does not uphold them. The result is that people like Binayak Sen, who has been working for the cause of humanity, has to languish in prison on false charges.” She also drew media’s attention to the forest rights of tribals and said, “It is people like Sen who have dedicated their lives towards making people aware of the rights of the tribals.” For those of you who might not know, Mahasweta gave up her most successful career as a novelist to dedicate her life to work on behalf of the Adivasis. She is in her eighties. A few years ago, I visited her with my dad—my parents grew up with Mahasweta and her siblings in Berhampore.

Amartya Sen is hopeful, “He [Binayak Sen] served a great cause and does serve and will serve. I hope this [his sentencing] is just an intermission, like an interval in a film and then the second part will begin.”

Ilina Sen is hopeful, “I try to hope that I will live again with Binayak in my lifetime.”

On Friday March 11, the Supreme Court of India will hear the plea for admission of the petition. If it is admitted, actual bail hearing could begin in mid April.

India must unconditionally release Binayak Sen immediately and put an end to the great suffering that he and his wife have already endured since May 2007. Binayak Sen deserves a Nobel Peace Prize, not lifetime imprisonment as an enemy of India.

Further Resources: FreeBinayakSen.org | BinayakSen.net | Peoples’ Union for Civil Liberties | OtherIndia.org

Subhankar Banerjee is founder of ClimateStoryTellers.org. He is an Indian born American photographer, writer and activist. Over the past decade he has been a leading international voice on issues of arctic conservation, indigenous human rights, and global warming, and over the past five years he has also been focusing on forest deaths from global warming. He received many awards, including Lannan Foundation Cultural Freedom Fellowship. Subhankar is currently editing an anthology titled, “Arctic Voices“ (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012) and has been appointed Director’s Visitor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton for fall term 2011.

The story of Raymond Allen Davis is one familiar to me and I wish our government would quit doing these things – they cost us credibility.  Davis is the American being held as a spy working under diplomatic cover out of our embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan. You can understand why foreign countries no longer trust us and people are rising up across the Middle East against the Great Satan. In the Vietnam War the country of Laos held a geo-strategic position, as does Pakistan does to Afghanistan today.  As in Pakistan, in Laos our country conducted covert military operations against a sovereign people, using the CIA.

I was a demolitions technician with the Air Force who was reassigned to work with the CIA’s Air America operation in Laos. We turned in our military IDs cards and uniforms and were issued a State Department ID card and dressed in blue jeans.  We were told if captured we were to ask for diplomatic immunity, if alive.  We carried out military missions on a daily basis all across the countries of Laos, Cambodia, Thailand and Vietnam. We also knew that if killed or captured that we would probably not be searched for and our families back home in the U.S. would be told we had been killed in an auto accident of some kind back in Thailand and our bodies not recovered.

Our team knew when the UN inspectors and international media were scheduled to arrive – we controlled the airfields. We would disappear to our safe houses so we could not be asked questions.  It was all a very well planned operation, 60 years ago, involving the military and diplomats out of the US Embassy.   It had been going on a long time when I was there during the 1968 Tet Offensive. This continued for a long time, until we were routed and had to abandon the whole war as a failure.

In Laos the program I was attached to carried out a systematic assassination of people who were identified as not loyal to U.S. goals.  It was called the Phoenix program and eliminated an estimated 60,000 people across Indochina.  We did an amazing amount of damage to the civilian infrastructure of the country, and still lost the war.  I saw one team of mercenaries I was training show us a bag of ears of dead civilians they had killed.   This was how they verified their kills for us.  The Green Berets that day were telling them to just take photos of the dead, leave the ears.

Mel Gibson made a movie about all this, called Air America.  It included in the background the illegal drug operation the CIA ran to pay for their operations. Congress had not authorized funds for what we were doing.  I saw the drug operation first hand too.  This was all detailed in The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred McCoy.  I did not connect all this until the Iran-Contra hearings when Oliver North was testifying about it.  Oliver North was a leader of the Laos operation I was assigned to work with. Our country has a long history of these type programs going back to World War Two.   We copied this from of warfare from the Nazis in WWII it seems. We justified it as necessary for the Cold War.  One of the first operations was T.P. Ajax run by Kermit Roosevelt to overthrow the democratically elected government of Iran in 1953to take over their oil fields.

In that coup the CIA and the State Department under the Dulles Brothers first perfected these covert, illegal and immoral actions. Historians have suggested that Operation T.P. Ajax  was the single event that set in motion the political force of Islamic fundamentalism we are still dealing with today.

Chalmers Johnson also a former CIA employee wrote a series of books too on these blowbacks that happen when the truth is held from the American public. If we had taken a different approach to our problems in those days an approach that did not rely on lying to our own and the people of other countries and killing them indiscriminately our country would not be in the disaster it is abroad today. I was young and foolish in those days of the Vietnam War, coveting my Top Secret security clearance, a big thing for an uneducated hillbilly from Appalachia.  We saw ourselves much like James Bond characters, but now I am much wiser. These kinds of actions have immense and long reaching consequences and should be shutdown. But I see from the Ray Davis fiasco in Pakistan that our government is still up to its old way of denying to the people of the world what everyone knows is true.   When will this official hypocrisy end, when will our political class speak out about this and quit going along with the lies and tricks?  How many more of our people and others will die in these foolish programs?  Davis is in a bad situation now because most of the people of the world, as we see across the Middle East, are now aware of the lies and not going to turn their head anymore.

I say “most” everyone knows, because our own public, the ones suppose to be in control of the military and CIA,  is constantly lied to.  It is so sad to see President Obama repeating the big lie.

Robert Anderson lives in Albuquerque, N.M. He can be reached at citizen@comcast.net

7 March, 2011

TruthDig.com

I have walked through the barren remains of Babylon in Iraq and the ancient Roman city of Antioch, the capital of Roman Syria, which now lies buried in silt deposits. I have visited the marble ruins of Leptis Magna, once one of the most important agricultural centers in the Roman Empire, now isolated in the desolate drifts of sand southeast of Tripoli. I have climbed at dawn up the ancient temples in Tikal, while flocks of brightly colored toucans leapt through the jungle foliage below. I have stood amid the remains of the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor along the Nile, looking at the statue of the great Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II lying broken on the ground, with Percy Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias” running through my head:

“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Civilizations rise, decay and die. Time, as the ancient Greeks argued, for individuals and for states is cyclical. As societies become more complex they become inevitably more precarious. They become increasingly vulnerable. And as they begin to break down there is a strange retreat by a terrified and confused population from reality, an inability to acknowledge the self-evident fragility and impending collapse. The elites at the end speak in phrases and jargon that do not correlate to reality. They retreat into isolated compounds, whether at the court at Versailles, the Forbidden City or modern palatial estates. The elites indulge in unchecked hedonism, the accumulation of vaster wealth and extravagant consumption. They are deaf to the suffering of the masses who are repressed with greater and greater ferocity. Resources are more ruthlessly depleted until they are exhausted. And then the hollowed-out edifice collapses. The Roman and Sumerian empires fell this way. The Mayan elites, after clearing their forests and polluting their streams with silt and acids, retreated backward into primitivism.

As food and water shortages expand across the globe, as mounting poverty and misery trigger street protests in the Middle East, Africa and Europe, the elites do what all elites do. They launch more wars, build grander monuments to themselves, plunge their nations deeper into debt, and as it all unravels they take it out on the backs of workers and the poor. The collapse of the global economy, which wiped out a staggering $40 trillion in wealth, was caused when our elites, after destroying our manufacturing base, sold massive quantities of fraudulent mortgage-backed securities to pension funds, small investors, banks, universities, state and foreign governments and shareholders. The elites, to cover the losses, then looted the public treasury to begin the speculation over again. They also, in the name of austerity, began dismantling basic social services, set out to break the last vestiges of unions, slashed jobs, froze wages, threw millions of people out of their homes, and stood by idly as we created a permanent underclass of unemployed and underemployed.

The Mayan elite became, at the end, as the anthropologist Ronald Wright notes in “A Short History of Progress,” “… extremists, or ultra-conservatives, squeezing the last drops of profit from nature and humanity.” This is how all civilizations, including our own, ossify and die. The signs of imminent death may be undeniable. Common sense may cry out for a radical new response. But the race toward self-immolation only accelerates because of intellectual and moral paralysis. As Sigmund Freud grasped in “Beyond the Pleasure Principle” and “Civilization and Its Discontents,” human societies are as intoxicated and blinded by their own headlong rush toward death and destruction as they are by the search for erotic fulfillment.

The unrest in the Middle East, the implosion of national economies such as those of Ireland and Greece, the increasing anger of a beleaguered working class at home and abroad, the growing desperate human migrations and the refusal to halt our relentless destruction of the ecosystem on which life depends are the harbingers of our own collapse and the consequences of the idiocy of our elite and the folly of globalization. Protests that are not built around a complete reconfiguration of American society, including a rapid dismantling of empire and the corporate state, can only forestall the inevitable. We will be saved only with the birth of a new and militant radicalism which seeks to dethrone our corrupt elite from power, not negotiate for better terms.

The global economy is built on the erroneous belief that the marketplace—read human greed—should dictate human behavior and that economies can expand eternally. Globalism works under the assumption that the ecosystem can continue to be battered by massive carbon emissions without major consequences. And the engine of global economic expansion is based on the assurance that there will always be plentiful and cheap oil. The inability to confront simple truths about human nature and the natural world leaves the elites unable to articulate new social, economic and political paradigms. They look only for ways to perpetuate a dying system. Thomas Friedman and the array of other propagandists for globalization make as much sense as Charlie Sheen.

Globalization is the modern articulation of the ancient ideology used by past elites to turn citizens into serfs and the natural world into a wasteland for profit. Nothing to these elites is sacred. Human beings and the natural world are exploited until exhaustion or collapse. The elites make no pretense of defending the common good. It is, in short, the defeat of rational thought and the death of humanism. The march toward self-annihilation has already obliterated 90 percent of the large fish in the oceans and wiped out half of the mature tropical forests, the lungs of the planet. At this rate by 2030 only 10 percent of the Earth’s tropical forests will remain. Contaminated water kills 25,000 people every day around the globe, and each year some 20 million children are impaired by malnourishment. Greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now are at 329 parts per million and climbing, with most climate scientists warning that the level must remain below 350 ppm to sustain life as we know it. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that the measurement could reach 541 to 970 ppm by 2100. At that point huge parts of the planet, beset with overpopulation, droughts, soil erosion, freak storms, massive crop failures and rising sea levels, will be unfit for human existence.

Jared Diamond in his essay “The Last Americans” notes that by the time Hernan Cortés reached the Yucatán, millions of Mayan subjects had vanished.

“Why,” Diamond writes, “did the kings and nobles not recognize and solve these problems? A major reason was that their attention was evidently focused on the short-term concerns of enriching themselves, waging wars, erecting monuments, competing with one another, and extracting enough food from the peasants to support all these activities.”

“Pumping that oil, cutting down those trees, and catching those fish may benefit the elite by bringing them money or prestige and yet be bad for society as a whole (including the children of the elite) in the long run,” Diamond went on. “Maya kings were consumed by immediate concerns for their prestige (requiring more and bigger temples) and their success in the next war (requiring more followers), rather than for the happiness of commoners or of the next generation. Those people with the greatest power to make decisions in our own society today regularly make money from activities that may be bad for society as a whole and for their own children; those decision-makers include Enron executives, many land developers, and advocates of tax cuts for the rich.”

It was no different on Easter Island. The inhabitants, when they first settled the 64-square-mile island during the fifth century, found abundant fresh water and woods filled with the Chilean wine palm, a tree that can reach the size of an oak. Seafood, including fish, seals, porpoises and turtles, and nesting seabirds were plentiful. Easter Island’s society, which split into an elaborate caste system of nobles, priests and commoners, had within five or six centuries swelled to some 10,000 people. The natural resources were devoured and began to disappear.

“Forest clearance for the growing of crops would have led to population increase, but also to soil erosion and decline of soil fertility,” Paul Bahn and John Flenley write in “Easter Island, Earth Island.” “Progressively more land would have had to be cleared. Trees and shrubs would also be cut down for canoe building, firewood, house construction, and for the timbers and ropes needed in the movement and erection of statues. Palm fruits would be eaten, thus reducing regeneration of the palm. Rats, introduced for food, could have fed on the palm fruits, multiplied rapidly and completely prevented palm regeneration. The over exploitation of prolific sea bird resources would have eliminated these for all but the offshore islets. Rats could have helped in this process by eating eggs. The abundant food provided by fishing, sea birds and rats would have encouraged rapid initial human population growth. Unrestrained human population increase would later put pressure on availability of land, leading to disputes and eventually warfare. Non-availability of timber and rope would make it pointless to carve further statues. A disillusionment with the efficacy of the statue religion in providing the wants of the people could lead to the abandonment of this cult. Inadequate canoes would restrict fishing to the inshore waters, leading to further decline in protein supplies. The result could have been general famine, warfare and the collapse of the whole economy, leading to a marked population decline.”

Clans, in the later period of the Easter Island civilization, competed to honor their ancestors by constructing larger and larger hewn stone images, which demanded the last remnants of the timber, rope and manpower on the island. By the year 1400 the woods were gone. The soil had eroded and washed into the sea. The islanders began to fight over old timbers and were reduced to eating their dogs and soon all the nesting birds.

The desperate islanders developed a belief system that posited that the erected stone gods, the moai, would come to life and save them from disaster. This last retreat into magic characterizes all societies that fall into terminal decline. It is a frantic response to loss of control as well as despair and powerlessness. This desperate retreat into magic led to the Cherokee ghost dance, the doomed Taki Onqoy revolt against the Spanish invaders in Peru, and the Aztec prophecies of the 1530s. Civilizations in the last moments embrace a total severance from reality, a reality that becomes too bleak to be absorbed.

The modern belief by evangelical Christians in the rapture, which does not exist in biblical literature, is no less fantastic, one that at once allows for the denial of global warming and of evolution and the absurd idea that the righteous will all be saved—floating naked into heaven at the end of time. The faith that science and technology, which are morally neutral and serve human ambitions, will make the world whole again is no less delusional. We offer up our magical thinking in secular as well as religious form.

We think we have somehow escaped from the foibles of the past. We are certain that we are wiser and greater than those who went before us. We trust naively in the inevitability of our own salvation. And those who cater to this false hope, especially as things deteriorate, receive our adulation and praise. We in the United States, only 5 percent of the world’s population, are outraged if anyone tries to tell us we don’t have a divine right to levels of consumption that squander 25 percent of the world’s energy. President Jimmy Carter, when he suggested that such consumption was probably not beneficial, became a figure of national ridicule. The worse it gets the more we demand illusionary Ronald Reagan happy talk. Those willing to cater to fantasy and self-delusion are, because they make us politically passive, lavishly funded and promoted by corporate and oligarchic forces. And by the very end we are joyfully led over the cliff by simpletons and lunatics, many of whom appear to be lining up for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Are the events of three hundred years ago on a small remote island of any significance to the world at large?” Bahn and Flenley ask. “We believe they are. We consider that Easter Island was a microcosm which provides a model for the whole planet. Like the Earth, Easter Island was an isolated system. The people there believed that they were the only survivors on Earth, all other land having sunk beneath the sea. They carried out for us the experiment of permitting unrestricted population growth, profligate use of resources, destruction of the environment and boundless confidence in their religion to take care of the future. The result was an ecological disaster leading to a population crash. A crash on a similar scale (60 percent of the population) for the planet Earth would lead to the deaths of about 1.8 billion people, roughly 100 times the death toll of the Second World War. Do we have to repeat the experiment on this grand scale? Do we have to be as cynical as Henry Ford and say ‘History is bunk’? Would it not be more sensible to learn the lesson of Easter Island history, and apply it to the Earth Island on which we live?”

Human beings seem cursed to repeat these cycles of exploitation and collapse. And the greater the extent of the deterioration the less they are able to comprehend what is happening around them. The Earth is littered with the physical remains of human folly and human hubris. We seem condemned as a species to drive ourselves and our societies toward extinction, although this moment appears be the denouement to the whole sad show of settled, civilized life that began some 5,000 years ago. There is nothing left on the planet to seize. We are now spending down the last remnants of our natural capital, including our forests, fossil fuel, air and water.

This time when we go down it will be global. There are no new lands to pillage, no new peoples to exploit. Technology, which has obliterated the constraints of time and space, has turned our global village into a global death trap. The fate of Easter Island will be writ large across the broad expanse of planet Earth.

Chris Hedges writes a regular column for Truthdig.com. Hedges graduated from Harvard Divinity School and was for nearly two decades a foreign correspondent for The New York Times. He is the author of many books, including: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, What Every Person Should Know About War, and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America. His most recent book is Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle.

© 2011 TruthDig.com

5 March, 2011

WSWS.org

Under the cynical cover of addressing a humanitarian crisis in Libya, the US and its European allies are intensifying military operations and economic measures directed against the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.

Amid preparations for a possible armed intervention, US marines have arrived in Greece for deployment to US warships off the Libyan coast, and US military cargo planes have commenced flights to the Tunisian-Libyan border.

What began as a popular revolt against the repressive Gaddafi regime is increasingly being channelled, with the help of an interim administration in Benghazi, Libya’s second city, into the pretext for an imperialist intervention. Such an operation would seek to establish a de facto client state in Libya. It would help imperialist forces assert control over the country’s large oil and gas fields and serve as a bastion of reaction against the working-class uprisings sweeping the entire region, from Morocco to Iraq.

British and European leaders welcomed President Barack Obama’s statement on Thursday, in which he demanded Gaddafi’s removal and pointedly refused to rule out the imposition of a militarily-enforced “no-fly” zone over Libya. His remarks were an indication of US readiness to support an operation to oust the regime and install a compliant government of the type being shaped in Benghazi.

The London-based Guardian reported yesterday that British Prime Minister David Cameron, who had earlier called for Britain and its allies to draw up plans for a no-fly zone, “was offered important support by Barack Obama on Thursday night. American military planners had been instructed to draw up a full range of options, including a no-fly zone, Obama said at the White House during a press conference with his Mexican counterpart, Felipe Calderón.”

The British newspaper stated that Cameron and Obama now agreed on “the need for military planning if there is a greater humanitarian catastrophe or if Gaddafi becomes even more aggressive; and the absolute need for Gaddafi to stand down.”

According to the Guardian, Cameron and other European leaders had been left in no doubt by Washington that the European Union should be seen to be taking the lead in responding to the Libyan crisis. For that purpose, Cameron had “shown leadership” by openly advocating a no-fly zone, and was now working with French President Nicolas Sarkozy in drawing up plans for an emergency European Union summit in Brussels next Friday.

The Russian government, which holds a veto at the UN, has publicly opposed a no-fly zone. But British Foreign Minister William Hague said that while “ideally” such a zone would need to be sanctioned by the UN, that was not essential. No-fly zones operated over Iraq by the US and Britain, as initial steps toward ousting the Saddam Hussein regime, did not receive such Security Council approval.

Washington is anxious for its European allies to take the front position, at least publicly, precisely because of the hated record of US imperialism in the Middle East. This includes not only its ongoing wars of occupation in Afghanistan and Iraq, but its role in the post-World War II oppression of Libya itself.

In Libya itself, after World War II, the US and Britain took advantage of the defeat of Italy to continue the brutal oppression of the Libyan people, up to half of whom had died under Italian colonial rule from 1911 to 1943. Although a puppet king, Idris I, was installed after formal independence in 1951, Libya’s neo-colonial status continued—symbolised by the establishment of the giant US Wheelus air base near Tripoli, which functioned as a hub for US military operations across North Africa.

The discovery of oil in 1959 only tightened the American, British and Italian domination of Libya, the hostility toward which created the conditions for Colonel Gaddafi’s military coup in 1969. One of Gaddafi’s first actions was to demand the closure of the Wheelus base, which—like his nationalisation of Libya’s oil industry—initially gave the colonel anti-imperialist credentials and a base of popular support.

Yesterday, Britain said it was sending several planes to airlift thousands of Egyptians stuck in refugee camps on the Tunisian-Libyan border, while France said it was dispatching a helicopter carrier to waters off Libya to help evacuate civilians. The British government also reported that one of its border agency vessels had intercepted a ship bound for Libya and seized “a significant quantity of Libyan currency.”

Washington is also positioning itself to militarily intervene, in the name of evacuating some of the estimated 180,000 foreign workers who have fled Libya. Two US amphibious warships, the USS Kearsarge and the USS Ponce, joined the USS Barry in the Mediterranean, and 400 marines were flown to a naval base at Souda Bay on the Greek island of Crete, ready to be transferred to the Kearsarge. Base spokesman Paul Farley said they had been deployed “as part of contingency planning to provide the president flexibility on full range of option regarding Libya.”

Pentagon spokesman Colonel David Lapan said the military had not been given orders beyond two cargo flights to the Libyan-Tunisian border on Friday and a planned transport of refugees from the Tunisian side of the border today. But he announced that the overall military effort, including movements of ships had been code-named Operation Odyssey Dawn.

Unilateral economic sanctions imposed by the Western powers are being used to try to cripple the Gaddafi regime, and seize Libyan assets. US Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday that the US had frozen about $32 billion in assets held by the Libyan Investment Authority, Libya’s sovereign wealth fund. Obama described the measures as the “most rapid and forceful set of sanctions that have ever been applied internationally.” On the same day, the British government froze similar assets, including holdings at the HSBC bank, worth about $3.2 billion, on top of about $1.6 billion in assets linked to Gaddafi and his children.

In a related move, Interpol, the international police agency, issued an international “Orange Notice” alert for Gaddafi and 15 members of his inner circle, declaring that they had been “identified as being involved in or complicit in planning attacks, including aerial bombardments, on civilian populations”. While there is little doubt that the Libyan regime has mounted murderous attacks on anti-government protesters, the Western authorities have offered no specific evidence to substantiate such charges, which could provide a justification for sending in forces to capture Gaddafi.

Within the US political establishment, pressure is mounting for an intervention. Former Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain and former Democrat vice presidential candidate Senator Joe Lieberman issued a joint statement urging the White House to move faster, “for both moral and strategic reasons.”

Speaking at the Brookings Institution in Washington, McCain revealed something of the reactionary calculations motivating US policymakers. He warned that the revolutionary movement seen in Libya, Egypt and elsewhere would continue to spread, “beyond the boundaries of the Arab world” and “throughout the globe.”

Inside Libya, Gaddafi’s former justice minister, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, who now heads the opposition National Libyan Council in Benghazi, called for foreign air strikes and a no-fly zone. Citing sources within the council, the New York Times reported that this stance was adopted at a heated council meeting where “others strongly disagreed”. There has been deep opposition to such a call within popular protests against Gaddafi, because of fears of a return to neo-colonial rule—fears that Gaddafi is exploiting to posture as a defender of Libyan sovereignty.

The readiness of the bourgeois opposition leaders in Benghazi, however, to facilitate an intervention by the same powers that have plundered Libya historically is rooted in their own class interests in preventing the development of a wider mass movement from below against the regime.

Jalil’s call demonstrates that the opposition council, which includes other recent defectors from Gaddafi’s leadership, would be perfectly willing to enter into intimate relations with the Western powers and oil companies—no less than Gaddafi and his cronies, who cemented lucrative ties in Washington, London, Rome and other capitals during the past decade.

London’s Daily Telegraph has reported that British officials have held talks with former allies of Gaddafi, to identify “potential future leaders”. Among them was General Obaidi, a former interior minister and head of Libyan special forces. A Downing Street source told the newspaper that Obaidi was someone Britain “could do business with.”

The Gaddafi regime is continuing to attack protesters with brutal force. Yesterday, about 1,000 demonstrators shouting slogans and waving pre-1969 flags in the poor suburb of Tajoura on the outskirts of Tripoli were dispersed after Friday prayers by police firing tear gas and plastic bullets. Other parts of the capital were patrolled by fleets of vehicles packed with soldiers, police and men in plain-clothes armed with AK-47s.

In Zawiyah, 60 kilometres west of Tripoli, residents told Reuters at least 30 people had been killed, including the town’s opposition commander, when pro-government forces attempted to retake the town. According to residents, pro-Gaddafi militias opened fire on a peaceful protest in front of the town’s hospital, killing seven people and injuring many others.

Despite intensive efforts to prevent media coverage, evidence also emerged of large-scale detentions by the security forces. An Amnesty International spokesman confirmed that it was receiving, and trying to verify, reports of disappearances and rapes in Tripoli.

Sporadic fighting occurred elsewhere, especially in areas surrounding key oil facilities. In the east of the country, opposition forces said they had pushed further west and seized control of Ras Lanuf, an oil terminal which has been under the regime’s control and lies along a strategic coastal road between the east and Sirte, Gaddafi’s birthplace.

5 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

I wrote an article that ran on a few different websites entitled “Another Corporate-Inspired War?”. I received some information about Libya and some facts about Col. Gadhafi from a few of my readers. I have no way of completely fact-checking all of this information and so initially I wasn’t going to write about all of the information I received. After I watched a number of news shows about Libya and saw that very few of them were trying to show an objective outlook on Gadhafi or on Libya, I decided that another perspective really needed to be presented to the American people. I have decided to write on the information presented to me and let the readers of this article make their own judgment on the information presented.

First of all, very few good things have been presented on Col. Gadhafi. I would like to mention some of the things that have taken place in Libya since he overthrew the monarchy in 1969 in a popular revolution against the US supported King.

Some aspects of Libyan progress since the downfall of the monarchy in 1969:

1. Literacy rates have risen from 10% of the nation to around 90% of the population. ( http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_is_the_literacy_rate_in_Libya )

2. Women have the right to go to school and hold down a job.

3. The life expectancy of Libyans has risen by twenty years and the infant mortality rate has dropped dramatically.

4. Libya had the highest Human Development Index ranking in Africa. This is a U.N. measurement of life expectancy, educational attainment and adjusted real income. ( http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ )

5. Most basic necessities: food, housing, fuel, healthcare and education were either heavily subsidized or became entirely free. Subsidies were considered the most effective way to redistribute the national wealth.

6. Libya had a lower incarceration rate than the Czech Republic (or the United States). Libya ranked 61 st in the world while the US has been number one for years. ( http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/law/research/icps/

worldbrief/wpb_stats.php?area=all&category=wb_poprate )

7. Libya has the third highest GDP on the African continent, South Africa has the highest, Algeria is second.( http://hdr.undp.org/en/statistics/ )

Who is behind the insurgency in Libya?

This is the question that most people following the situation there would like to know. The details are far from clear. There are more questions than answers. One question in particular seems to be elusive, and that is why does the United States take such an active interest in a nation that has less than 6.5 million people? Egypt by comparison (with a population of almost 79 million) was a resolute ally that had a peace agreement with our other ally Israel and controlled the Suez Canal, the oil gateway into the Middle East. Why does Libya provoke such a response like the one Secretary of State Hillary Clinton articulated from the Middle-East yesterday when she said “all of our options regarding actions towards Libya are on the table” (This is euphemism for military options). Yesterday President Obama made the statement that Gadhafi’s time was up and that he should resign. This is a much harder stance than the one the United States took towards Mubarak in Egypt.

The primary opposition group most widely quoted is the National Front for the Salvation of Libya. According to Wikipedia:

“NFSL was based in Sudan until 1985 when the regime of Colonel Nimeiry fell. It opposed military and dictatorial rule in Libya, and called for a democratic government with constitutional guarantees, free elections, a free press, and separation of powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. NFSL launched a wide campaign to topple Gaddafi in Libya, establishing a short-wave radio station, a commando military training camp and also published a bi-monthly newsletter, Al Inqadh (Salvation). According to various sources, Saudi Arabia and the United States Central Intelligence Agency had supported the NFSL.”

The facts are that the United States has considered Gadhafi an enemy of the U.S. for well over 35 years. The NFSL now operates out of Virginia. According to Sara Flounders, writing for Global Research:

“The U.S. carried out numerous assassination and coup attempts against the Gadhafi regime and financed armed opposition groups, such as the NFSL. Some U.S. attacks were blatant and open. For example, without warning 66 U.S. jets bombed the Libyan capital of Tripoli and its second-largest city, Benghazi, on April 15, 1986. Gadhafi’s home was bombed and his infant daughter killed in the attack, along with hundreds of others.”

Looking at the situation in Libya now, according to past history, the United States is not behaving in any way that could be described as anything new. She also states that:

“Even if Gadhafi were as quiet and austere as a monk and as careful as a diplomat, as president of an oil-rich, previously underdeveloped African country he still would have been hated, ridiculed and demonized by U.S. imperialism if he resisted U.S. corporate domination. That was his real crime and for that he has never been forgiven.” ( http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23472 )

As Americans, what can we do to stop American involvement in the affairs of Libya, A country we have been engaged against for almost 40 years?

It is clear from the outset that it is our political establishment and not our military that are calling for interference in another nation’s internal affairs. The Secretary of defense, Robert Gates has warned that a No-Fly Zone begins with a military attack on Libya’s air defense facilities.

““Let’s just call a spade a spade. A no-fly zone begins with an attack on Libya. That’s the way you do a no-fly zone. And then you can fly planes around the country and not worry about our guys being shot down.”

That is calling a spade a spade indeed. We need people like Gates to stop another war being waged against another nation that has not attacked us. Once the military option is used in any situation, it is hard to control. We have enough debt to deal with and even without intervention in Libya we spend 53% of our total Federal spending on defense (defense, really?) Politicians like John Kerry are calling for a no fly zone in order to stop Gadhafi from bombing his people. According to the Associated Press, “Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that despite media reports of Libyan aircraft attacking rebel areas, the Pentagon had not confirmed any air attacks.”

How often are we going to allow the American military to act as the world’s policemen? In the long run, we stand to gain nothing from interfering in the politics of Libya. This will only turn out to be another in a long list of military attacks on sovereign nations. The truth of the matter is that we would not be thinking of acting militarily against Libya if they did not sit on oil reserves estimated at over 40 billion barrels of high-quality crude. If Russia or China launched military operations against Libya we would be screaming at the top of our lungs.

The American people need to see this as what it is, and that is just another attempt by the United States to secure resources by force. We are already fighting a war in Afghanistan in order to stabilize the country so that we can build the Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Indian pipeline (T.A.P.I.). Our attempt to control the oilfields of Iraq has yielded no significant gains for the U.S. Sending America’s military to Libya will be a grave mistake. Obama’s entire presidency will be gauged by what we do in Libya and other potential trouble spots in the resurgent Middle-East. I don’t want to be writing about what I wrote today years from now.

Resources:

http://www.medialens.org/articles/the_articles/articles_2002/rk_secret_war.html

http://www.acorn.net/jfkplace/03/Test-CIA/LIBYA

http://empirestrikesblack.com/2011/02/libya-the-rest-of-the-story/

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23472

http://english.pravda.ru/opinion/columnists/24-02-2011/117000-libya_surface-0/#

http://davidrothscum.blogspot.com/2011/02/world-cheers-as-cia-plunges-libya-into.html

timgatto@hotmail.com

02 March, 2011

Countercurrents.org

America’s media, Britain’s state-controlled BBC, other Western sources, and Al Jazeera are spreading unverified or false reports on Libya’s uprising.

On February 25, writer Mahdi Darius Nazemroaya, a Middle East/Central Asian specialist, based on reliable in-country contacts, headlined an important article, “Libya: Is Washington Pushing for Civil War to Justify a US-NATO Military Intervention?”

Access it through the following link:

http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=23375

For greater readership, this article covers key information in it. Its entirety explains much about what’s ongoing – what major media accounts misreport or suppress, especially television reaching large audiences, presenting distorted managed news. It shouldn’t surprise. Representing powerful interests, carefully filtered sanitized reporting substitutes for the real kind.

Gaddafi indisputably is despotic, governing by “fear and cronyism,” treating Libya as his “private estate,” and spawning “an entire hierarchy of corrupt officials,” disdainful of popular interests.

Nonetheless, something is “(r)otten in the so-called ‘Jamahiriya’ (state of the masses) of Libya.” Popular anger is justified and real. At issue is whether it’s spontaneous or externally generated, and, if so, by whom and for what reasons.

Western powers, especially America, gladly support despots. They only fall into disfavor by forgetting who’s boss. Mubarak forgot. So did Gaddafi, long targeted for removal despite rapprochement with America and Western nations. As a result, in-country reports lack credibility without verifiable proof. Much of it is lacking.

At issue is removing an outlier while keeping his regime intact, one friendly to Washington and Western interests. Acquiescence assures support for the world’s most ruthless tyrants. Straying gets them in trouble. Gaddafi strayed, leaving him vulnerable for removal.

Comparing Yugoslavia to Libya

In the 1990s, “pack (or) advocacy journalism” substituted for the real kind, including by promoting the 1999 US-led NATO war of aggression to complete Yugoslavia’s long-planned balkanization, characterized as “humanitarian intervention,” the same theme repeated now.

From March 24 – June 10, 1999, daily attacks were relentless. Around 600 aircraft flew about 3,000 sorties, dropping thousands of tons of ordinance as well as hundreds of ground-launched cruise missiles. Its ferocity to that time was unprecedented. Large numbers were killed, injured or displaced. Vast destruction was inflicted. Two million people lost their livelihoods, many their homes and communities, and for most their futures under military occupation.

Diana Johnstone’s “Fools’ Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO and Western Delusions” remains the definitive Balkan wars history, explaining what Western media reports suppressed. For America and European powers, it was about deterring Slobodan Milosevic’s “Greater Serbia” ambitions, a gross mischaracterization about 1990s events, culminating in naked aggression.

Libyan turmoil appears headed for a similar resolution, driven by unverified misreporting of events on the ground. In Yugoslavia, it was about removing Milosevic for a more accommodative replacement. In Libya, Gaddafi appears headed for the same fate, again by raw force, Washington’s alternate “diplomacy,” the same kind used to “liberate” Iraq and Afghanistan, destroying both countries, causing millions of deaths as well as vast devastation and despair.

Libyan Analysis in Bullet Points

— Unlike Tunisia, Egypt, and other regional allies, “upsetting (Libya’s) established order is a US and EU objective,” by replacing one despot with another.

— the West “seek(‘s) to capitalize on the revolt” for new leadership it controls.

— Heavy weapons are coming in.

— Destabilizing Libya affects its vast energy reserves and neighboring states, perhaps the entire region.

— Tensions among Libyan factions complicate matters further, including between Gaddafi’s son, Saif Al-Islam, “and his father’s circle of older ministers. Libyan ministers are generally divided amongst those (close to Said) and” member’s of the “old guard.”

— Other tensions exist between Gaddafi and his sons, perhaps one generation against another, each with its own ideas incompatible with the other.

— Gaddafi spent years purging opposition. Even so, “little loyalty is felt for (him) and his family.” Fear alone gives them power. Now it’s gone, denunciation of his regime openly stated. “Aref Sharif, the head of Libyan Air Force,” renounced him. Ministers and ambassadors resigned, some going abroad. “Defections are snowballing amongst the military and government.” Yet what’s ongoing may differ significantly from unverified or willful major media misreporting, including by Al Jazeera.

— Authentic opposition is real, but not organized. It’s “been encouraged and prompted from outside Libya through social media networks, international news stations, and events in the rest of the Arab World.” As a result, major media reports are suspect. Accept nothing from them at face value.

— Internal opposition leadership comes “from within the regime itself.” However, corrupt officials aren’t populists. They oppose Gaddafi but not tyranny, corruption, and other trappings of power and privilege. Some of them, in fact, wish “to save themselves, while others” want to “strengthen their positions.” It’s also possible or likely that they’ve allied with Western powers for their own self-interest.

— Major media reports, including by Al Jazeera, “about Libyan jets firing on protesters in Tripoli and the major cities are unverified and questionable….No visual evidence of the jet attacks has been shown.” Gaddafi, in fact, controls cities reported to be occupied by opponents. Moreover, some accounts of violence are spurious. Stories are invented to “justify no-fly zones,” perhaps heading for war led by America and NATO.

— Corporate and Western interests in Libya, not despotism, explain what’s ongoing. They’re fueling civil war to replace one despot with another, one they control. “Chaos in the Arab World has been viewed as beneficial (to) Washington, Tel Aviv,” and other Western powers. Balkanization may be planned, similar to Yugoslavia, culminating as explained above – “liberation” for control, not democracy America won’t tolerate, including at home. If it happens, regional destabilization may follow, leaders everywhere wondering who’s next.

— Henry Kissinger once said: “to be an enemy of America can be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.” If balkanization is planned, friends and foes alike may be targeted if thought unreliable. Libya’s chaos also affects Europe and global energy issues, including price, for oil heading over $100 a barrel and maybe much higher, threatening fragile economies with deeper crisis.

— Washington wanted Gaddafi replaced for years. Former NATO commander General Wesley Clark once included Libya among future targeted countries besides Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. Divide, conquer and control, a game way pre-dating modern America.

— Libya conducted secret negotiations with Washington in 2001. Formal rapprochement followed, but doing business with imperial powers is dangerous, and in Gaddafi’s case perhaps fatal with no safe haven if civil war or NATO ousts him. Either “provides the best cover” for controlling Libya’s “energy sector and to appropriate (its) vast wealth.”

— Libyans should be wary. America and Western powers play hardball against popular interests throughout the region.

— “Actions of opposition to Gaddafi are strong, but there is no strong organized ‘opposition movement.’ The two are different.” Moreover, no opposition force wants democracy.

— Serious discussion suggests a Yugoslav-type “humanitarian intervention.” A “no-fly” zone is mentioned, an act of war if imposed, giving Western powers the right to intervene militarily the way Iraq was bombed in the 1990s. Invasion and occupation, in fact, could follow to replace the already weakened regime. Libya’s assets would be plundered, its people left with one despot replacing another.

A Final Comment

For decades, Gaddafi denied Libyans democratic freedoms. Imperial occupation, however, is worse, creating nightmarish conditions for Iraqis, Afghans, and others experiencing US-style rule, exceeding the worst of regional despots’ harshness, making some look benign by comparison.

Under more populist leaders than Gaddafi and internal opposition forces, mobilized resistance may prevent it, but not easily or quickly. Libyans must now liberate themselves, independent of Western powers wanting to exploit them for their own self-interest.

Stephen Lendman lives in Chicago and can be reached at lendmanstephen@sbcglobal.net. Also visit his blog site at sjlendman.blogspot.com and listen to cutting-edge discussions with distinguished guests on the Progressive Radio News Hour on the Progressive Radio Network Thursdays at 10AM US Central time and Saturdays and Sundays at noon. All programs are archived for easy listening.

http://www.progressiveradionetwork.com/the-progressive-news-hour/.

07 March, 2011

The Independent

Obama asks Saudis to airlift weapons into Benghazi

Desperate to avoid US military involvement in Libya in the event of a prolonged struggle between the Gaddafi regime and its opponents, the Americans have asked Saudi Arabia if it can supply weapons to the rebels in Benghazi. The Saudi Kingdom, already facing a “day of rage” from its 10 per cent Shia Muslim community on Friday, with a ban on all demonstrations, has so far failed to respond to Washington’s highly classified request, although King Abdullah personally loathes the Libyan leader, who tried to assassinate him just over a year ago.

Washington’s request is in line with other US military co-operation with the Saudis. The royal family in Jeddah, which was deeply involved in the Contra scandal during the Reagan administration, gave immediate support to American efforts to arm guerrillas fighting the Soviet army in Afghanistan in 1980 and later – to America’s chagrin – also funded and armed the Taliban.

But the Saudis remain the only US Arab ally strategically placed and capable of furnishing weapons to the guerrillas of Libya. Their assistance would allow Washington to disclaim any military involvement in the supply chain – even though the arms would be American and paid for by the Saudis.

The Saudis have been told that opponents of Gaddafi need anti-tank rockets and mortars as a first priority to hold off attacks by Gaddafi’s armor, and ground-to-air missiles to shoot down his fighter-bombers.

Supplies could reach Benghazi within 48 hours but they would need to be delivered to air bases in Libya or to Benghazi airport. If the guerrillas can then go on to the offensive and assault Gaddafi’s strongholds in western Libya, the political pressure on America and NATO – not least from Republican members of Congress – to establish a no-fly zone would be reduced.

US military planners have already made it clear that a zone of this kind would necessitate US air attacks on Libya’s functioning, if seriously depleted, anti-aircraft missile bases, thus bringing Washington directly into the war on the side of Gaddafi’s opponents.

For several days now, US AWACS surveillance aircraft have been flying around Libya, making constant contact with Malta air traffic control and requesting details of Libyan flight patterns, including journeys made in the past 48 hours by Gaddafi’s private jet which flew to Jordan and back to Libya just before the weekend.

Officially, NATO will only describe the presence of American AWACS planes as part of its post-9/11 Operation Active Endeavor, which has broad reach to undertake aerial counter-terrorism measures in the Middle East region.

The data from the AWACS is streamed to all NATO countries under the mission’s existing mandate. Now that Gaddafi has been reinstated as a super-terrorist in the West’s lexicon, however, the NATO mission can easily be used to search for targets of opportunity in Libya if active military operations are undertaken

Al Jazeera English television channel last night broadcast recordings made by American aircraft to Maltese air traffic control, requesting information about Libyan flights, especially that of Gaddafi’s jet.

An American AWACS aircraft, tail number LX-N90442 could be heard contacting the Malta control tower on Saturday for information about a Libyan Dassault-Falcon 900 jet 5A-DCN on its way from Amman to Mitiga, Gaddafi’s own VIP airport.

NATO AWACS 07 is heard to say: “Do you have information on an aircraft with the Squawk 2017 position about 85 miles east of our [sic]?”

Malta air traffic control replies: “Seven, that sounds to be Falcon 900- at flight level 340, with a destination Mitiga, according to flight plan.”

But Saudi Arabia is already facing dangers from a co-ordinated day of protest by its own Shia Muslim citizens who, emboldened by the Shia uprising in the neighboring island of Bahrain, have called for street protests against the ruling family of al-Saud on Friday.

After pouring troops and security police into the province of Qatif last week, the Saudis announced a nationwide ban on all public demonstrations.

Shia organizers claim that up to 20,000 protesters plan to demonstrate with women in the front rows to prevent the Saudi army from opening fire.

If the Saudi government accedes to America’s request to send guns and missiles to Libyan rebels, however, it would be almost impossible for President Barack Obama to condemn the kingdom for any violence against the Shias of the north-east provinces.

Thus has the Arab awakening, the demand for democracy in North Africa, the Shia revolt and the rising against Gaddafi become entangled in the space of just a few hours with US military priorities in the region.

©independent.co.uk