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Egypt: Lessons and Future
Porter just wrote the piece “The Triumph of Leaderless Revolutions,” which states: “‘Leaderless revolutions,’ as seen currently in North Africa, pose important challenges to outside media and to foreigners, generally, seeking authoritative voices to clarify the picture of fast-moving events. But genuine revolutions are made from below, with the myriad energies and objectives of hundreds of thousands or millions coalescing at least around certain fundamental demands. Time-constrained and impatient foreign journalists and audiences, dependent on fast analyses by the usual hierarchical menu of ‘experts’ and political leaders, naturally resist an arduous process of grassroots inquiry.”
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Egypt: The Next Move
The analysts listed below are in the U.S. and Egypt, which is 7 hours ahead of U.S. ET. For online resources see: accuracy.org/online-resources-on-egypt Dr. AIDA SEIF AL-DAWLA, Dr. MOSTAFA HUSSEIN Hussein is a doctor at Nadeem Center for Victims of Torture in Cairo; Al-Dawla is a psychiatrist with the group. She was profiled by Time magazine as a global hero in 2004.
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Egyptian Torture Victim: Suleiman “Should be Arrested”
Antony Loewenstein is an independent journalist and author in Sydney, Australia. He just interviewed Mamdouh Habib, an Egyptian-born Australian who wrote the book “My Story: The Tale of a Terrorist Who Wasn’t.” Loewenstein’s web page features audio of a new interview with Habib in which he says of Suleiman: “He should be arrested, he should be in jail, he’s a criminal. … If America supports Suleiman, people in Egypt will say Obama is a criminal.”
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Omar Suleiman, “Egypt’s Torturer-in-Chief,” Tied to False Iraq WMD Tortured “Intel”
A human rights lawyer, Katherine Hawkins has been a researcher for Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side and the new piece “Who is Omar Suleiman?” in The New Yorker Mayer writes: “Suleiman has headed the feared Egyptian general intelligence service. In that capacity, he was the CIA’s point man in Egypt for renditions — the covert program in which the CIA snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.”
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Egypt: Frank Wisner and the Nexus of U.S. Interests
Vijay Prashad recently wrote the piece “Frank Wisner in Cairo: The Empire’s Bagman.” “Both the U.S. State Department and the CIA have long used the term ‘stability’ as their preferred goal for the world order. To those who live under oppressive regimes, instability is the general course of their lives: the vagaries of poverty and police behavior coupled with corruption and incompetence. Protests such as we see in Egypt now are not instability, as far as the people are concerned, but toward the construction of a real stability. The U.S. State Department’s meaning of stability is far removed from the…
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Egyptian Activists Demand Resignation of Mubarak
A member of the April 6 Youth Movement, Asmaa Mahfouz posted several YouTube videos, including one on January 18 that has been credited by many with having helped spark the protests in Egypt that began on January 25; for example, “Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades” by Mona El-Naggar in the New York Times. See video with English subtitles: The April 6 Youth Movement was set up largely to support workers in El-Mahalla, an industrial town, who held a series of strikes over the last several years (including [planed strike] on April 6, 2008). See from The Real News “Roots…
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Egypt: Threat of the Army, Resilience of the Protests
Philip Rizk is an independent blogger and filmmaker based in Cairo. He said today: “Although the Egyptian anti-government demonstrators welcomed the arrival of the military on Friday night the 29th, I have considered their presence a threat to the people’s demands from the start. I believe the military dispersed on the streets of Egypt in order to calm down a very fragile situation and then to gain the demonstrators’ trust in order eventually to act as the element of surprise when they partner with government security forces and turn on the demonstrators. So far the military has been biding its…
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Egypt: U.S. Government’s “Dynamic Hypocrisy”
Edward Peck served in Tunisia and Egypt, was chief of mission in Iraq and Mauritania, and deputy director of the Cabinet Task Force on Terrorism in the Reagan White House. He said today: “Asked why they don’t have Mubarak step down, the administration says that is not its role, it’s up to the Egyptian people, while tacitly admitting involvement in efforts to pull together acceptable elements to form a government. This will be seen by many as another example of U.S. Dynamic Hypocrisy. “All states act hypocritically, but the U.S. is the only hyper power, so does it globally. Another…
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Mubarak’s Base
Fawaz Gerges is director of the Middle East Center at the London School of Economics. He writes in a piece in today’s Independent: “The regime’s base is extremely shallow in comparison to the opposition, which represents an overwhelming majority of the population. The regime has alienated most of the rising social and political classes: centrists and democrats, leftists, nationalists, independent Islamists, and the Muslim Brotherhood. They’re left with about 10 percent of the country, the uppermost echelon of the population.”
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“Mubarak Will Hunt Us Down One by One”
Based in Cairo, Mekay reports for Inter Press Service and other outlets. He just wrote the Institute for Public Accuracy: “Just outside Tahrir Square right now. Pro-Mubarak ‘hired muscle’ is attacking journalists and stopping them from going into the square. These are the government types, possibly even police staff in plainclothes. They are confiscating all cameras. They set up road blocks around most entryways to the square. I sense they may be preparing for something tomorrow, Friday. Friday has been called by the anti-Mubarak movement ‘The Departure Friday’ i.e. a day in which Mubarak will decide to step down. Government…
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“With a tiny staff, it has managed to place on the air and in newspapers, points of view otherwise excluded from the national debate.”
Howard Zinn