Peace and Justice Post

By Patrick O’Connor, wsws.org, 3 February 2011

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak yesterday mobilised thousands of pro-regime thugs, provocateurs and plain clothes police against demonstrators demanding an end to his dictatorship. At least five people were killed, though the final death toll will likely be significantly higher, and hundreds more were injured, many seriously.

The calculated provocation was facilitated by the military, which allowed the violent attacks to proceed throughout the day. Pro-Mubarak forces were effectively escorted by the army into central Cairo’s Tahrir Square, the focal point for anti-regime protests, just hours after military leaders issued a statement demanding that demonstrators desist and “restore normal life.” The violence is aimed at intimidating and dividing the revolutionary forces in Egypt and creating the conditions for the military to more directly intervene.

Senior commanders have signalled their support for Mubarak’s plan to stay in power until September. This would allow ample time for military and intelligence personnel, working hand in glove with their American counterparts, to prepare a rigged ballot to anoint Vice President Omar Suleiman or another “safe pair of hands” as Mubarak’s successor.

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Slavoj Žižek, The Guardian, Feb 1, 2011

An Egyptian demonstrator uses his shoe to hit a picture of President Hosni Mubarak during a protest in Cairo. Photograph: Mohammed Abed/AFP/Getty Images

What cannot but strike the eye in the revolts in Tunisia and Egypt is the conspicuous absence of Muslim fundamentalism. In the best secular democratic tradition, people simply revolted against an oppressive regime, its corruption and poverty, and demanded freedom and economic hope. The cynical wisdom of western liberals, according to which, in Arab countries, genuine democratic sense is limited to narrow liberal elites while the vast majority can only be mobilised through religious fundamentalism or nationalism, has been proven wrong. The big question is what will happen next? Who will emerge as the political winner?

When a new provisional government was nominated in Tunis, it excluded Islamists and the more radical left. The reaction of smug liberals was: good, they are the basically same; two totalitarian extremes – but are things as simple as that? Is the true long-term antagonism not precisely between Islamists and the left? Even if they are momentarily united against the regime, once they approach victory, their unity splits, they engage in a deadly fight, often more cruel than against the shared enemy.

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by Marjorie Cohn, CommonDreams.org, Feb 2, 2011

Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has supported Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the tune of $1.3 billion annually, mostly in military aid. In return, Egypt minds U.S. interests in the Middle East, notably providing a buffer between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Egypt collaborates with Israel to isolate Gaza with a punishing blockade, to the consternation of Arabs throughout the Middle East. The United States could not have fought its wars in Iraq without Egypt’s logistical support.

Now with a revolution against Mubarak by two million Egyptians, all bets are off about who will replace him and whether the successor government will be friendly to the United States.

Mubarak’s “whole system is corrupt,” said Hesham Korayem, an Egyptian who taught at City University of New York and provides frequent commentary on Egyptian and Saudi television. He told me there is virtually no middle class in Egypt, only the extremely rich (about 20 to 25 percent of the population) and the extremely poor (75 percent). The parliament has no input into what Mubarak does with the money the United States gives him, $300 million of which comes to the dictator in cash each year.

Torture is commonplace in Egypt, according to Korayem. Indeed, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief whom Mubarak just named Vice-President, was the lynchpin for Egyptian torture when the CIA sent prisoners to Egypt in its extraordinary rendition program. Stephen Grey noted in Ghost Plane, “[I]n secret, men like Omar Suleiman, the country’s most powerful spy and secret politician, did our work, the sort of work that Western countries have no appetite to do ourselves.”

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Photographed by Lindsey Parietti 

After a week marked by unity, kicking, shoving and verbal fights erupted in and around Tahrir Square Wednesday as pro- and anti-Mubarak protesters faced off.

With conflicting messages, some of President Hosni Mubarak’s supporters pledged to “liberate Tahrir Square with blood,” while others said they did not want violence.

Hundreds gathered in Talaat Harb Square outside the television building on the Corniche and around Mostafa Mahmoud Mosque in Mohandessin demanding an end to chaos and the week-long protests, according to witnesses.

The renewed violence that broke out after days of peaceful protests had already resulted in several injuries early Wednesday afternoon, as the wounded were rushed to a makeshift hospital in a mosque near Tahrir Square.

Tens of Mubarak supporters hoisted printed signs that read “Yes Mubarak” as opposing sides hurled invectives at each other along the Qasr al-Nil entrance to the square, where anti-regime forces reached more than one million people Tuesday night.

Chanting as vehemently as their counterparts inside the square, they called on protesters to accept Mubarak’s decision to finish his term and oversee a transition of power in the upcoming fall elections.

“Our president, he served this country more than 30 years, he has mistakes, no problem. Everybody has mistakes,” said Hassan, a general manager of a construction company who would only give his first name.

Insisting that every potential candidate will have nine months to present their platforms to Egyptians before elections, Hassan worried the country would deteriorate into chaos if Mubarak fled immediately.

Earlier in the morning some said the pro-Mubarak group would not try to enter Tahrir Square, but by afternoon eyewitnesses reported that people already inside were pulling down the anti-government banners that papered the square.

“President, we love you!” the men yelled in unison.

Anonymous sources at a state hospital and at the Ministry of Petroleum said employees were told to join the regime supporters in demonstrations Wednesday.

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Protesters demonstrate near a torn picture of Gamal Mubarak, son of Hosni Mubarak, in Alexandria on January 25. Photograph: Reuters

We are hypocrites. We cheer on the brave Tunisians and Egyptians as they assert the revolutionary power of the street. Hands off, we cry. Let them do it their way. It has taken a long time, but let the people get the credit and be strengthened thereby.

We gave no such licence to the Iraqis or Afghans. We presumed it was our job to dictate how they should be governed. We accused their leaders of crimes and decided to punish them all, massacring thousands. We declared a “freedom agenda”, and bombed them to bits.

Hosni Mubarak of Egypt is another Saddam Hussein, a secular dictator ruling a Muslim country with a rod of iron through a kleptocracy of cronies. Less wealthy than Saddam, he had to rely on American support, but he was only a little more subtle in his ruthlessness.

We are told that there were sound strategic reasons for supporting Mubarak – as there once were for supporting the Ba’athists, Assad of Syria and Saddam himself. There were similar reasons for backing the Ben Ali dynasty in Tunisia and “Britain’s good friend”, the outrageous Colonel Gaddafi of Libya. All offered a supposed bulwark against Muslim extremism, a monster of which Americans and Britons are told to show a pathological, all-consuming and costly terror. Now, apparently, that no longer applies to Egypt.

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by Badri Raina

For decades your endless waters

flowed quiescent,

all your fertile powers spent,

vassal to far-off matters,

as a despot had you in thrall.

How you have now turned

from  slumber, O Nile,

and already spurned

with the memory of ancient might

a regime of cruel guile.

Your children of all ages, both sexes,

and all religions

fill Egypt shoulder to shoulder

and end to end—

their vision not of violence

but something far bolder:

as their conglomerate voice waxes,

they are determined

that in the Egypt to come

not just some, but all

shall feast of peace, prosperity

and democracy.

Children of true Islam,

the revolution you make

bids fair to shame

a world of perfidy that has given

to the faith such a bad name.

Your chant of human liberation

already rings in nation after nation.

Never will either the Arab world

or the rest of us be quite the same.

O Nile, your waters pour a needed balm

on a desecrated world;

do receive our salaam.

By Richard Smallteacher, Wikileaks staff, Counter Currents,

Feb 1, 2011

WikiLeaks

New cables released by Wikileaks reveal that the U.S. government has been quietly anticipating as well as cultivating Omar Suleiman, the Egyptian spy chief, as the top candidate to take over the country should anything happen to President Hosni Mubarak. On Saturday, this expectation was proved correct when Mubarak named Suleiman to the post of vice-president making him the first in line to assume power.

An intelligence official who trained at the U.S. Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, Suleiman became head of the spy agency in 1993 which brought him into close contact with the Central Intelligence Agency. Recently he took up a more public role as chief Egyptian interlocuter with Israel to discuss the peace process with Hamas and Fatah, the rival Palestinian factions.

In recent years most political analysts have assumed that the heir apparent was Gamal Mubarak, the president’s younger son, but the U.S. embassy in Cairo came to a different conclusion more than five years ago. On 15 June 2005, a memo (05CAIRO4534) written for Timothy Pounds, the director for Syria, Lebanon, Egypt, and North Africa at U.S. National Security Council, noted: “(A)ll agreed that the most likely candidate to be appointed to the post (of vice-president) was General Omar Soliman, Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS).” (State department officials use a different spelling of Suleiman’s name)

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Dissidents demanding the end of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s regime had better hope they don’t end up under arrest. The first members of Mubarak’s new cabinet — a face-lift so he can stay in power — are heavily involved in the apparatus of state repression, including a spymaster who worked with the U.S. to torture terrorist suspects.

New prime minister Ahmed Shafik is a long-time deputy of Mubarak with a reputation for toughness. (Title of a 2005 profile: “With an Iron Fist.”) The new interior minister was the top jailer. And the new vice president is the Middle East’s most powerful intelligence chief. That looks less like the kind of government demanded by the protesters and more like a government designed to crack down on them.

Let’s start with the new internal-security chief, Gen. Mahmoud Wagdy, the former head of prisons. What happens in an Egyptian prison? The U.S. State Department’s annual human rights report explains: “[P]rison cells were overcrowded, with a lack of medical care, proper hygiene, food, clean water and proper ventilation. Tuberculosis was widespread; abuse was common, especially of juveniles in adult facilities; and guards brutalized prisoners.”

As interior minister, Wagdy will run the police forces responsible for keeping the regime in power. After a brief disappearance over the weekend, when several cities saw riots break out amidst the protests, the police returned to the streets Sunday. That prompted many Egyptians to wonder if Mubarak pulled the police back to tell the country that the alternative to his regime is chaos. Wegdy’s ascension would place someone familiar with crackdowns at the helm of those forces.

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by Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, Feb 1, 2011

If it weren’t for Al Jazeera, much of the unfolding Egyptian revolution would never have been televised. Its Arabic and English language channels have provided the most comprehensive coverage of any network in any language hands-down. Despite the Mubarak regime’s attempts to shut it down, Al Jazeera’s brave reporters and camera crews have persevered. Six Al Jazeera journalists were detained briefly on Monday, their equipment seized. The US responded swiftly to their detention with the State Department calling for their release. “We are concerned by the shutdown of Al Jazeera in Egypt and arrest of its correspondents,” State Department spokesperson PJ Crowley tweeted. “Egypt must be open and the reporters released.”

The Obama White House has been intently monitoring al Jazeera’s coverage of the Egyptian revolt. The network, already famous worldwide, is now a household name in the US. Thousands of Americans—many of whom likely had never watched the network before—are livestreaming Al Jazeera on the internet and over their phones. With a handful of exceptions, most US cities and states have no channel that broadcasts Al Jazeera. That’s because cowardly US cable providers refuse to grant the channel a distribution platform, largely for fear of being perceived as supporting or enabling a network that for years has been portrayed negatively by US officials.

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