Peace and Justice Post

CAIRO – The Egyptian revolution is being dissolved right in front of the world’s eyes by an optical illusion.

The protesters who have been on the streets for two weeks still want President Hosni Mubarak out. Now. Yet United States President Barack Obama is firmly in not-so-fast mode, glad that “Egypt is making progress”. Obama has not mentioned even once the capital words “free elections”.

Washington’s “orderly transition” road map – fully supported by Tel Aviv and European capitals – is a facelift. Mubarak stepping down has become an afterthought; the already anointed successor is Vice President Omar Suleiman, the former head of the Mukhabarat, whom the protesters call “Sheik al-Torture”.

Sheik al-Torture already behaves as a president – while the actual president is still inhabiting his palace, but as a ghost. The regime, a brutal military dictatorship, remains an immovable subject – even while being denounced by the protesters as illegitimate from A to Z, from the executive to the legislative. The key point is that acting president Suleiman is the regime. If French philosopher Jean Baudrillard was alive, he would say this revolution never took place – except on the world’s television screens.

Some among the fragmented opposition want the head of the constitutional court to be appointed as interim president, and then preside over the election of a constituent assembly. Others – including the youth movement – want a national committee to supervise the Washington-sanctioned “orderly transition”.

Gilbert Achcar, professor of international relations at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, goes straight to the point, “In order to impose such a thorough change, the mass movement would need to break or destabilize the regime’s backbone, that is, the Egyptian army.”

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2008 diplomatic cable published by the Daily Telegraph quotes Israeli official as saying that Israel was ‘most comfortable’ with prospect of Omar Suleiman becoming Egypt’s next leader.

Haaretz, Feb 11, 2011

By The Associated Press

Egypt’s Vice President Omar Suleiman was long seen by Israel as the preferred candidate to succeed President Hosni Mubarak, secret U.S. diplomatic cables published Monday suggested.

	President Shimon Peres shaking hands with Egyptian intelligence chief Omar Suleiman during their meeting in Tel Aviv on November 4, 2010.

According to an August 2008 cable released by WikiLeaks and published by the Daily Telegraph newspaper on its website, a senior adviser from the Israeli Ministry of Defense told U.S. diplomats in Tel Aviv that the Israelis believe Suleiman would likely serve as “at least an interim president if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.”

A U.S. diplomat who classified the cable, Luis Moreno, wrote that although he deferred to the Embassy in Cairo for Egyptian succession scenario analysis, “there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of” Suleiman.

The cable quoted the adviser to Israel’s defense ministry, David Hacham, as saying an Israeli delegation led by Defense Minister Ehud Barak was “shocked by Mubarak’s aged appearance and slurred speech,” when it met him in Egypt. “Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however,” it said. Suleiman was spelled Soliman in some of the leaked cables.

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Jean-Bertrand Aristide, The Guardian, Feb 4, 2011

Graduating electricians and plumbers in Port-au-Prince, July 2010. The quake left a gaping hole in the vocational training vital to reconstruction Photograph: Ramon Espinosa/AP

Haiti’s devastating earthquake in January last year destroyed up to 5,000 schools and 80% of the country’s already weak university infrastructure. The primary school in Port-au-Prince that I attended as a small boy collapsed with more than 200 students inside. The weight of the state nursing school killed 150 future nurses. The state medical school was levelled. The exact number of students, teachers, professors, librarians, researchers, academics and administrators lost during those 65 seconds that irrevocably changed Haiti will never be known. But what we do know is that it cannot end there.

The exceptional resilience demonstrated by the Haitian people during and after the deadly earthquake reflects the intelligence and determination of parents, especially mothers, to keep their children alive and to give them a better future, and the eagerness of youth to learn – all this despite economic challenges, social barriers, political crisis, and psychological trauma. Even though their basic needs have increased exponentially, their readiness to learn is manifest. This natural thirst for education is the foundation for a successful learning process: what is freely learned is best learned.

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Chris Hedges, TruthDig.com, Feb 6, 2011

AP

By Chris Hedges

Empires communicate in two languages. One language is expressed in imperatives. It is the language of command and force. This militarized language disdains human life and celebrates hypermasculinity. It demands. It makes no attempt to justify the flagrant theft of natural resources and wealth or the use of indiscriminate violence. When families are gunned down at a checkpoint in Iraq they are referred to as having been “lit up.” So it goes. The other language of empire is softer. It employs the vocabulary of ideals and lofty goals and insists that the power of empire is noble and benevolent. The language of beneficence is used to speak to those outside the centers of death and pillage, those who have not yet been totally broken, those who still must be seduced to hand over power to predators. The road traveled to total disempowerment, however, ends at the same place. It is the language used to get there that is different.

This language of blind obedience and retribution is used by authority in our inner cities, from Detroit to Oakland, as well as our prison systems. It is a language Iraqis and Afghans know intimately. But to the members of our dwindling middle class—as well as those in the working class who have yet to confront our new political and economic configuration—the powerful use phrases like the consent of the governed and democracy that help lull us into complacency. The longer we believe in the fiction that we are included in the corporate power structure, the more easily corporations pillage the country without the threat of rebellion. Those who know the truth are crushed. Those who do not are lied to. Those who consume and perpetuate the lies—including the liberal institutions of the press, the church, education, culture, labor and the Democratic Party—abet our disempowerment. No system of total control, including corporate control, exhibits its extreme forms at the beginning. These forms expand as they fail to encounter resistance.

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By Shamus Cooke, Countercurrents.org, Feb 6, 2011

The revolution in Egypt erupted like all revolutions do, from the bottom up. It was unemployment and high food prices that propelled working and poor people into action. Now, the media reports that the “opposition” in Egypt is a group of well-to-do folks who have very little in common with the poor of Egypt.

This top down takeover of the revolution is being engineered with the support of the U.S. and European nations, the same allies of the dictatorship that lasted three decades. If this elite group of Egyptians manages to gain power, they’ll soon find themselves confronted with the real opposition of Egypt, the overwhelming majority of working and poor people.

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Julian Borger in Munich and Chris McGreal in Cairo

The Guardian, Feb 6, 2011

Hillary Clinton at the Munich Security Conference, where she backed Egypt vice-president Omar Suleiman’s call for orderly reform. Photograph: Jens Meyer/AP

America yesterday swung its support behind Egypt‘s vice-president, Omar Suleiman, and the political transition he is leading, calling for a process of orderly reform. The policy, made clear by Hillary Clinton at the Munich Security Conference, was the latest sign of steps by the US and senior members of the Egyptian military to nudge President Hosni Mubarak aside and contain the potential for street violence.

The move came as senior members of the leadership of the ruling National Democratic party resigned from the party in response to the protests. They included Mubarak’s powerful son, Gamal, long expected to succeed his father. A relative liberal, Hossam Badrawi, was appointed the party’s new secretary general.

The mass resignation, announced yesterday afternoon, is likely to be seen as a further sign of Mubarak’s weakness and will only strengthen the demands of protesters determined to topple him. It appeared to be part of a strategy agreed with the US to manage the transition, with or without Mubarak, as power shifts to Egypt’s vice-president, who is backed by the Americans to head the political transition.

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As it now stands, the United States appears content to contemplate exchanging Hosni Mubarak for Egypt’s new Vice President, Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian spy master–that is, one dictator for another– to maintain the status quo. Of course, Israel must sign off on this deal, assuring the U.S. that Egypt can remain as its main base in the region, straddling as it does North Africa and the Middle East. Without it, the U.S. would most definitely have to rethink its entire neo-colonial policies  in the region.

As for Suleiman, he looks to be a  nasty piece of work.  Agence France Press has pulled together the basics:

For US intelligence officials, he has been a trusted partner willing to go after Islamist militants without hesitation, targeting homegrown radical groups Gamaa Islamiya and Jihad after they carried out a string of attacks on foreigners.A product of the US-Egyptian relationship, Suleiman underwent training in the 1980s at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Center at Fort Bragg in North Carolina….

After taking over as spy director, Suleiman oversaw an agreement with the United States in 1995 that allowed for suspected militants to be secretly transferred to Egypt for questioning, according to the book “Ghost Plane” by journalist Stephen Grey…

In the run-up to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, the CIA relied on Suleiman to accept the transfer of a detainee known as Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, who US officials hoped could prove a link between Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Al-Qaeda.The suspect was bound and blindfolded and flown to Cairo, where the CIA believed their longtime ally Suleiman would ensure a successful interrogation, according to “The One Percent Doctrine” by author Ron Suskind. A US Senate report in 2006 describes how the detainee was locked in a cage for hours and beaten, with Egyptian authorities pushing him to confirm alleged connections between Al-Qaeda and Saddam.Libi eventually told his interrogators that the then Iraqi regime was moving to provide Al-Qaeda with biological and chemical weapons.When the then US secretary of state Colin Powell made the case for war before the United Nations, he referred to details of Libi’s confession.The detainee eventually recanted his account.

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By Volkhard Windfuhr and Daniel Steinvorth in Cairo,

Spiegel Online International, Feb 2, 2011

 

Photo Gallery: 15 Photos

REUTERS

In exchange for the equivalent of a few euros, poor seasonal workers have taken part in street fighting in Cairo on the side of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. The thugs, who fight with iron bars, knives and clubs, have been recruited by privileged members of the regime, including party officials, security forces and rich business people with lucrative state contracts.

The bloody clashes in Cairo show that not all of Egypt’s 80 million people want to see President Hosni Mubarak overthrown or a new start heralded by fresh elections. Many are fiercely loyal to the ruling system and are ready to fight for it — with brutality. On Thursday afternoon, there were even reports on the Al Jazeera news channel that Mubarak supporters were storming the hotels of Cairo and hunting down journalists.

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