Journalist Robert Fisk faces libel action for pointing out BahrainSaudi alliance

ahrain, ruled by King Hamad bin Isa Al Khalifa, accused the newspaper of deliberately orchestrating a defamatory and premeditated media campaign and failing to abide by professional impartiality and credibility in its one-sided news-coverage and reports. Fisk accused Bahrains ruling family of starting an utterly fraudulent trial of the surgeons, doctors, paramedics and nurses treating those injured four months ago when security forces opened fire on protesters. He said that the Saudis were running the country, writing, They never received an invitation to send their own soldiers to support the Bahraini security forces from the Bahraini Crown Prince, who is a decent man. They simply invaded and received a post-dated invitation. The subsequent destruction of ancient Shia mosques in Bahrain was a Saudi project, entirely in line with the kingdoms Taliban-style hatred of all things Shia. Could the Bahraini prime minister be elected, I asked a member of the royal court last February? The Saudis would not permit this, he replied. Of course not. Because they now control Bahrain. Hence the Saudi-style doctors trial. Fisk concluded, Bahrain is no longer the kingdom of the Khalifas. It has become a Saudi palatinate, a confederated province of Saudi Arabia, a pocket-size weasel state from which all journalists should in future use the dateline: Manama, Occupied Bahrain. The threatened libel suit is a major attack on press freedom. But despite this, there has been an almost complete blackout of the announcement by the rest of the media. The nominally liberal Guardian merely reported the announcement without comment. The legal action takes advantage of Britains notorious libel laws, which provide a powerful weapon for those with unlimited cash to silence their critics. It will, at the very least, tie up the Independents resources for months. At worst, it could bankrupt it, forcing its closure, as similar law suits closed ITVs flagship current affairs programme World in Action more than a decade ago. Whether or not the action goes ahead, its purpose is to intimidate the media and stifle any discussion of the Bahrain-Saudi link and Saudi Arabias broader role in the Middle East, as well as any criticism of the imperialist powers support for the oil-rich Gulf monarchies. The US and Western governments, acutely conscious of the danger that political upheaval in Bahrain represents to their geopolitical interests, have given the green light to repression. Just a few days ago, the British government admitted that it had trained the Saudi forces used in Bahrain. It confirmed that Britain has been providing training for the Saudi national guard to improve their internal security and counter-terrorism capabilities since 1964. Last year, Britain exported arms and weaponry worth more 110 million to Saudi Arabia. Last September, the United States negotiated a $60 billion arms deal, the largest in US history, with the Saudis, who said that they will increase the size of their armed forces and National Guard. Bahrain is home to the US Navys Fifth Fleet, providing a principal platform for the projection of Washingtons military power in the Persian Gulf, through which one-fifth of the worlds oil supplies pass. Saudi Arabia has long been a strategic ally of US imperialism and, as the worlds largest oil exporter, is the one country capable of boosting production to make up for crises elsewhere and preventing an uncontrolled spiralling of fuel prices.

On June 14, Bahrain, the tiny island kingdom in the Persian Gulf off the eastern coast of Saudi Arabia, announced that it is to sue the Independent newspaper for libel over an article written by its veteran Middle East correspondent, Robert Fisk.

or decades, Riyadh has used its enormous oil wealth to cultivate Sunni Islamic clerics and Salafist groups and finance large-scale campaigns of religious education and television programmes broadcast throughout the Middle East and Central Asia as a counterweight to secular opposition, Shia movements and Iran. It is a key investor and trading partner in most countries. It has not hesitated to play the sectarian card, whipping up hostility to the Shia minorities within the region to divide any domestic dissent, prevent the growth of pro-Iranian Shiite political parties and to counter Irans influence. It has routinely blamed Iranian interference in Bahrain and the Yemen for the unrest there without producing any evidence, as the US has acknowledged. The Saudi regime, furious that Washington withdrew its support for Egypts Hosni Mubarak and Tunisias former president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, whom it is now sheltering, moved in swiftly to prevent a similar fate befalling Bahrains al-Khalifa dynasty. The Sunni al-Khalifas rule over an impoverished Shia majority. Mass protests broke out in February, demanding an end to sectarian discrimination, unity across the religious divide, as well as democratic elections and equitable distribution of the countrys oil wealth. The monarchy declared a state of emergency that was only recently lifted. Unable to suppress the protests with its own forces, the al-Khalifas relied on military reinforcements from the Saudi monarchy, with which they have close family ties, just as they had in 1994 during the last period of mass demonstrations against their autocratic rule. More than 1,200 military and police personnel moved in, ostensibly under the command of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the Saudi Arabia-led association of Persian Gulf monarchies, to secure key oil facilities and financial institutions in Bahrain and help suppress the opposition with mass arrests, detentions, military trials of civilians, including medical personnel, and executions. Riyadh will countenance no compromise with the Shia-based opposition or parliamentary elections that might lead to them gaining power, as happened in Iraq. Its key aim is to prevent the spread of the unrest to Saudi Arabia and the rest of the Gulf States, all of which face dissent from their own restive Shia populations who form the majority in the eastern oil producing regions. The Saudi ruling dynasty faces the additional problem that the 86-year-old King Abdullah is a sick man and his potential successors are no less elderly and infirm. Thus far at least, it has been able to suppress the barely reported demonstrations and buy off unrest within the Kingdom with a $100 billion package of subsidies, wage increases and welfare concessions.

Advertising is a poison that demeans even love and were hooked on it

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We are subjected to ever more pervasive messages to consume, encouraging dissatisfaction. Yet this column depends on it

e think we know who the enemies are: banks, big business, lobbyists, the politicians who exist to appease them. But somehow the sector which stitches this system of hypercapitalism together gets overlooked. That seems strange when you consider how pervasive it is. In fact you can probably see it right now. It is everywhere, yet we see without seeing, without understanding the role that it plays in our lives. I am talking about the industry whose output frames this column and pays for it: advertising. For obvious reasons, it is seldom confronted by either the newspapers or the broadcasters. The problem was laid out by Rory Sutherland when president of the Institute of Practitioners in Advertising. Marketing, he argued, is either ineffectual or it raises enormous ethical questions every day. With admirable if disturbing candour he concluded that I would rather be thought of as evil than useless. A new report by the Public Interest Research Centre and WWF opens up the discussion he appears to invite. Think of Me as Evil? asks the ethical questions that most of the media ignore. Advertising claims to enhance our choice, but it offers us little choice about whether we see and hear it, and ever less choice about whether we respond to it. Since Edward Bernays began to apply the findings of his uncle Sigmund Freud, advertisers have been developing sophisticated means of overcoming our defences. In public they insist that if we become informed consumers and school our children in media literacy we have nothing to fear from their attempts at persuasion. In private they employ neurobiologists to find ingenious methods of bypassing the conscious mind. Pervasiveness and repetition act like a battering ram against our minds. The first time we see an advertisement, we are likely to be aware of what its telling us and what it is encouraging us to buy. From then on, we process it passively, absorbing its imagery and messages without contesting them, as we are no longer fully switched on. Brands and memes then become linked in ways our conscious minds fail to detect. As a report by the progressive thinktank Compass explains, the messages used by advertisers are designed to trigger emotional rather than rational responses. The low-attention processing model developed by Robert Heath at the University of Bath shows how, in a crowded advertising market, passive and implicit learning become the key drivers of emotional attachment. They are particularly powerful among children, as the prefrontal cortex which helps us to interpret and analyse what we see is not yet fully developed. Advertising agencies build on this knowledge to minimise opportunities for the rational mind to intervene in choice. The research company TwoMinds, which has worked for Betfair, the drinks company Diageo, Mars, Nationwide and Waitrose, works to uncover a layer of behavioural drivers that have previously remained elusive. New developments in neurobiology have allowed it to home in on intuitive judgments that are made instantaneously and with little or no apparent conscious effort on the part of consumers at point of purchase. The power and pervasiveness of advertising helps to explain, I believe, the remarkable figure I stumbled across last week while reading the latest government

Academic research suggests a link between advertising and both consumer debt and the number of hours we work. People who watch a lot of advertisements appear to save less, spend more and use more of their time working to meet their rising material aspirations. All three outcomes can have terrible impacts on family life. They also change the character of the nation. Burdened by debt, without savings, we are less free, less resilient, less able to stand up to those who bully us. Invention is the mother of necessity. To keep their markets growing, companies must keep persuading us that we have unmet needs. In other words, they must encourage us to become dissatisfied with what we have. To be sexy, beautiful, happy, relaxed, we must buy their products. They shove us on to the hedonic treadmill, on which we must run ever faster to escape a growing sense of inadequacy. The problem this causes was identified almost 300 years ago. In Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, the hero remarks: It put me to reflecting, how little repining there would be among mankind, at any condition of life, if people would rather compare their condition with those that are worse, in order to be thankful, than be always comparing them with those which are better, to assist their murmurings and complainings. Advertising encourages us to compare ourselves with those we perceive to be better off. It persuades us to trash our happiness and trash the biosphere to answer a craving it exists to perpetuate. But perhaps the most important impact explored by Think of Me As Evil? is the one we discuss the least: the effect it has on our values. Our social identity is shaped by values which psychologists label as either extrinsic or intrinsic. People with a strong set of intrinsic values place most weight on their relationships with family, friends and community. They have a sense of self-acceptance and a concern for other people and the environment. People with largely extrinsic values are driven by a desire for status, wealth and power over others. They tend to be image-conscious, to have a strong desire to conform to social norms and to possess less concern for other people or the planet. They are also more likely to suffer from anxiety and depression and to report low levels of satisfaction with their lives. We are not born with our values: they are embedded and normalised by the messages we receive from our social environment. Most advertising appeals to and reinforces extrinsic values. It doesnt matter what the product is: by celebrating image, beauty, wealth, power and status, it helps create an environment that shifts our value system. Some adverts appear to promote intrinsic values, associating their products with family life and strong communities. But they also create the impression that these values can be purchased, which demeans and undermines them. Even love is commingled with material aspiration, and those worthy of this love mostly conform to a narrow conception of beauty, lending greater weight to the importance of image. I detest this poison, but I also recognise that I am becoming more dependent on it. As sales of print editions decline, newspapers lean even more heavily on advertising. Nor is the problem confined to the commercial media. Even those who write only for their own websites rely on search engines, platforms and programs ultimately funded by advertising. Were hooked on a drug that is destroying society. As with all addictions, the first step is to admit to it.