News Items

  • Mubarak, Army, U.S., Israel vs Egyptian People

    [As government forces have attacked peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square, Emad Mekay from Cairo reports] Mubarak is clearly backed by the Americans. He took some moves after speaking with Obama and a visit by a former U.S. Ambassador to Egypt Frank Wisner. Mubarak, the army, the Americans and the Israelis are clearly on one side. That’s one camp. The people of Egypt (most of them now) are the other. The Americans want Mubarak to stay on for longer while they look for a suitable successor that would be best for U.S. interests. Mubarak’s tactic is to make Egyptians choose between…

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  • Unrest Spreads to Sinai

    A Bedouin youth casually spreads out a piece of cloth before a police headquarters in Sheikh Zwayyed town in Sinai, the vast desert area to the east of Cairo across the Suez. “I will leave when Mubarak leaves,” he says. [Full piece from Inter Press Service]

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  • Chomsky: Strategic and Economic Objectives, Not Anti-Islamization, Drives U.S. Policy

    [While many are claiming that a central goal of U.S. policy is to minimize influence of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, Noam Chomsky contributed this to our blog] It is well-established, including the major scholarly literature, that the U.S. supports democracy if and only if that accords with strategic and economic objectives.  Following that principle, in the Arab/Muslim region it has generally supported radical Islamists in fear of secular nationalism (as has the UK).  Familiar examples include Saudi Arabia, the ideological center of radical Islam (and of Islamic terror), Zia ul-Haq, the most vicious of Pakistan’s dictators, Reagan’s…

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  • An Open Letter to President Barack Obama

    ————————————————————————————————————————— [To sign; for recent news releases on Egypt from the Institute for Public Accuracy] Dear President Obama: As political scientists, historians, and researchers in related fields who have studied the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy, we the undersigned believe you have a chance to move beyond rhetoric to support the democratic movement sweeping over Egypt. As citizens, we expect our president to uphold those values. For thirty years, our government has spent billions of dollars to help build and sustain the system the Egyptian people are now trying to dismantle.

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  • Report from Cairo

    From Alex Ortiz in Cairo: “The army is beginning to come into Cairo … tens of thousands converged in midan al-gala’ coming from three different protest marches. Total communication blackout. Reports of senior police officers ordering their men to stand down and not beat or fire tear gas at protesters in Midan al-gala an hour ago.”

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  • Report on Latest from Cairo

    CAIRO, Egypt [11 p.m. local time] — 1-Some government media figures appear to be joining ranks with the protesters. Mahmoud Saad, a talk show host in the Egyptian state-run TV, has announced that he will no longer appear on TV starting tonight after he came under pressure from top government officials to report “untruths” about the protests. Mahmoud Saad, a popular TV host, has told other journalists that his disappearance from his daily show, Masr El-Naharda (Egypt Today), comes in protests against pressure to defame protesters as rioters “destroying the country”. The state is clearly starting to launch a media…

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  • Police in Cairo Beating up Jounalists

    [From 9:28 a.m. ET]: Police started beating up journalists protesting outside the Press Syndicate in downtown Cairo. They beat up women journalists too who were screaming and crying for help. “Do not club women. Do not club women,” some of the men rushed to the police asking them not to target women. “You’ll make things worse if you use violence” many journalists were telling police officers outside the building. In the industrial city of Mahala, police virtually cordoned off the city. My sources in the city tell me the police ordered early dismissal of textile factory workers to preempt any…

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  • From Alex Ortiz in Cairo

    [The Egyptian government has apparently block Twitter, Facebook (as of Wed. morn U.S. ET) and other internet tools, though apparently some people are able to get around such restrictions. Email from 8:45 a.m. ET:] Downtown Cairo today remains in a state of high alert. There are many security forces and plainsclothed policemen visible on every street in the center of the city. There have been minor clashes with protesters in various parts of Cairo, as well as in Assiyut – a city to the south. At the moment, security forces are cordoning off Tahrir Square. Private security guards in the…

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  • Video from Cairo

    Phone lines are intermittent and Twitter has reportedly been blocked in Egypt. Here is a live video feed: ustream.tv/channel/cairodowntown [update: ustream has been blocked, streaming now intermittently at livestream.com/cairowitness — further update, now at: www.justin.tv/cairowitness] Here is a YouTube video from earlier today:

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  • Ukraine’s Assault on a Free Press

    In Ukraine, where media diversity is often defined by which powerful oligarch controls which TV station, one network, TVi — known for its independent investigative style — is under intense legal pressure, with its owner not part of Ukraine’s power circles. TVi faces a court hearing on Tuesday over a legal claim that the station’s frequencies were not legally authorized. But critics, including many from abroad, have accused the Kiev government of using the case as a way to bludgeon a troublesome media voice into silence. … [See full piece on consortiumnews.com]

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  • Debbie Wasserman Schultz out as Head of DNC?

    Wasserman Schultz has supported ‘”New Dem’ policy positions that run counter to Democratic values, from support for Pay Day lenders and private prisons, to unfair trade policies, continued criminalization of marijuana (including medical marijuana), the Cuba embargo, etc.”

  • Hiroshima Trip Myths: A-bomb Ended War; Obama’s Against Nuclear Weapons

    “”The other great myth we’re seeing play out is that of Obama as some kind of peaceful guy who’s trying to get rid of nuclear weapons. He’s the biggest nuclear warrior there is. He’s committed us to a ruinous course of spending a trillion dollars on more nuclear weapons. ”

  • Will Obama Renounce His $1 Trillion Nuclear Buildup?

    “Now that he is set to visit Hiroshima, he should look with his own eyes at the inhuman consequences of the use of the A-bomb by visiting the Peace Memorial Museum, listen to the voices of the Hibakusha, and meet their wishes without delay.”

  • New Brazil Minister Out After Revelations of Coup Plotting

    “Just 10 days after taking office, the planning minister, Romero Jucá, announced that he would ‘go on leave’ following the release of a secretly taped telephone conversation in which he said Rousseff needed to be removed to quash a vast corruption investigation that implicated him and other members of the country’s political elite.”

  • State Dept. Emails: How Clinton Pushed Fracking

    “…emails obtained by The Intercept from the Department of State reveal new details of behind-the-scenes efforts by Clinton and her close aides to export American-style hydraulic fracturing — the horizontal drilling technique best known as fracking — to countries all over the world.”

  • “Putting the Lie” to Clinton and Obama’s Deceit on Snowden

    “Hertsgaard’s piece lays out the case of several NSA whistleblowers, including “Thomas Drake, who blew the whistle on the very same NSA activities 10 years before Snowden did. Drake was a much higher-ranking NSA official than Snowden, and he obeyed U.S. whistleblower laws, raising his concerns through official channels. And he got crushed.”

  • Realities of “Terrorism”

    “For decades they have constructed a politically correct discourse where U.S. leaders in particular determine who the terrorists and freedom fighters are and enforce that distinction in public debate and public policy. Despite GOP complaints of ‘political correctness run amuck,’ the most politically incorrect thing one can do is assert the U.S. is or has…

  • Obama, Clinton, Malcolm X, and the Novocaine Effect

    “”This has been the role played by Obama. Many people — but especially black people — have silently suffered his policies because he has had the effect of novocaine. This is partly because, certainly, some rightwing attacks on Obama have been racial. But most of his core policies have been corporate and neoliberal. From a…

  • How the NSA Pushed Iraq Invasion

    “The U.S. government, through the NSA, was spying — in violation of international law — on other UN Security Council members in order to better coerce them to back the invasion of Iraq. We know this because Katharine Gun leaked a short 300-word NSA memo on this shortly before the invasion. She worked at the…

  • Sykes-Picot and What Would Have King-Crane Brought?

    “The redrawing borders continued after Sykes-Picot when the British seized Mosul Province from the French in 1918 by continuing fighting north and westward after the Armistice had been announced. Today in Washington there continues to be discussions of ethnically-based redrawing of borders in Iraq and Syria and the Kurds are part of this discourse, while…

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