Thousands March in Egyptian Capital Calling for President’s Ouster

[Peter Lemkin]

If Egypt had its own Teabaggers, would they be pro- or anti-Mubarak demonstrators?

Pro-Mubarrak..too easy...more difficult quiz, please....:joystick:

[Charles Drago]

Is there a more important distinction for patriots to grasp than that between one's country and its government?

[Peter Lemkin]

Is there a more important distinction for patriots to grasp than that between one's country and its government?

Charles, I was bred [by my very ''odd' parents (by usual standards)] to not ever consider myself as an ''American'', but rather as a citizen of the Planet Earth]....that said, we Planet Earth Patriots don't give a flying shit about country or government. Yes, there ARE governments and there ARE countries, but these are very artificial constructs from the past and now from the Oligarchy of the Planet in order to control and contain. It is IMO we either all survive and advance; or we all perish and fail. I personally do NOT believe in big government or big countries [in physical size or political power]. Small is beautiful and the sooner we get back to something approaching a unified Planetary tribalism, the better.

[Charles Drago]

It's best that you learn this from me.

We're in the same tribe.

And our parents may have been related.

[Peter Lemkin]

It's best that you learn this from me.

We're in the same tribe.

And our parents may have been related.

Hey, Brother!...or at least First cousin!

[Charles Drago]

Hey Blood! What it is?

Half Jewish, half Italian.

We hijack our own trucks.

[Peter Lemkin]

Hey Blood! What it is?

Half Jewish, half Italian.

We hijack our own trucks.

R-E-V-O-L-U-T-I-O-N.....I think would be the only course of action........

[Peter Lemkin]

A plainclothes policeman (l) moves to attack a foreign journalist as others beat a protester during demonstrations in Cairo. Photograph: Goran Tomasevic/Reuters

The soldier appeared helpful at first, offering to walk us through to Cairo's Tahrir Square as we attempted to cover the latest protests on what had been dubbed Mubarak's "day of departure". But it was not the square that we were being led to but the ministry of the interior.

The next soldier, outside the ministry's main door was not so friendly. He ordered us to kneel facing a wall with our hands behind our heads, an order that was quickly countermanded by another soldier.

The soldiers were disciplined but firm, demanding to know who we were, querying a passport stamp for the Rafah border crossing into Gaza; others for Tunisia and Afghanistan. Soon there were more of us sitting with our backs against a wall: a freelance journalist from New Zealand, another Briton, a Dane and an Italian, and three students.

Next came two officers in plain clothes, less friendly than the enlisted troops.

"Israeli?" asked one of the plain clothes men. No, British, we replied. Our phones were taken despite our best efforts to hide them. The Dane's bag was searched, as well as those belonging to the three students, who were French.

The man who ordered us to kneel was sat by an armoured personnel carrier. With a flourish he took out five or six sets of handcuffs and racked them on a bar behind a metal shield.

My colleague Jack Shenker's packet of Strepsils attracted sudden suspicion. A soldier took them from my hand, demanding to know what they are.

State television has been reporting that foreigners were directing the protests in Tahrir Square; that they have been handing out drugs to those occupying it and that the foreign press was telling lies. That is the background to our detention in a city fast descending into anarchy and mutual suspicion. It was also clear that the army had been given orders to harass us.

What happened to this reporter and his colleague is far from unique.

In the last few days, in what appears to be a co-ordinated campaign, journalists have been arrested, beaten, threatened, even stabbed. Cameras have been taken and broken, crews set upon, rooms and offices raided.

Outside the interior ministry, the mood relaxed somewhat. Some of the young soldiers spoke English. We talked about football and the Hollywood star Russell Crowe. They gave us crisps and cigarettes, allowing us to stand one at a time to stretch.

One of the soldiers warned us about the senior man in plain clothes, telling us that he's "mad" and that we were unlucky to walk into the wrong checkpoint.

"I'll make a deal with you," Ahmad, the "mad" officer said, after an hour and a half: "I'll let you go but I'm afraid for you." He repeated this several times. "You come near the square again things won't be so good next time. Do you understand? Go far away from here."

A soldier walked us to the edge of their cordon and waved us out. It was then that our problems really began.

Hailing a taxi, we were stopped immediately by an armed group. Two men jumped into the car. One took our passports while the other cradled a large machete. Behind us two men jumped up onto the bumper. Within minutes we were taken to another group of soldiers who released us after once again checking our documents.

We tried again to head back to the hotel, but in the midst of a contested revolution this was no mean feat. The city reeked of paranoia and violence.

Every hundred yards or so someone from the groups along the road - men with knives and scaffold poles - put their body in front of the car to stop us and demanded to see our passports.

Another soldier prevented us reaching the hotel and sent us in another direction. We could see the building where we were staying close to Tahrir Square but suddenly we found ourselves among a crowd of Mubarak supporters.

There was a tank 100m distant, but we were where the heaviest clashes of the day before took place, beneath a series of overlapping underpasses leading to the 6 October bridge. It remains perhaps the most dangerous spot in the city for foreign journalists.

We reversed quickly, in the knowledge that these were the same groups who had been beating up reporters, and found ourselves immediately surrounded by a new crowd.

The same barked questions were fired our way. By now we had decided to try an escape the city centre and head to another hotel in Zamalek, on the river's other side.

More men got into our car. They said they were leading us to the hotel but in Arabic we understood them to be saying they would take us to the army once again, this time to the defence ministry.

We were questioned once more, this time by soldiers at the state-run TV station, getting more scared and frustrated in the knowledge that we were within a couple of hundred metres of our destination and relative safety. We were not there yet. Between us and the hotel, on the main roads lay pro-Mubarak crowds.

An Egyptian journalist, being held along with his luggage, asked for an escort to the hotel. He was visibly as alarmed as we both felt. We asked the senior officer on the scene three times but he shrugged his shoulders and refused us. Instead a group of the neighbouring vigilantes walked us back down tiny, dirty back alleys guarded by young men with swords and knives and clubs, who upon seeing us accompanied by their neighbours smiled and welcomed us.

We finally felt secure for the first time in several hours.

[Peter Lemkin]

Egypt: 1) Deputy Omar Suleiman Known for His Brutality and CIA Links, 2) Suleiman Biography
3rd February 2011 [Mr. Nice-Guy, English-Speaker, American 'Friend'', Handpicked by US to succeed Mubarak]

AFP | February 2, 2011

THE man named by President Hosni Mubarak as his first ever deputy, spy chief Omar Suleiman, reportedly orchestrated the brutal interrogation of terror suspects abducted by the CIA in its secret "extraordinary rendition" program.

Mr Suleiman has carried out sensitive truce negotiations with Israel and the Palestinians as well as talks among rival Palestinian factions, winning the praise of American diplomats. For US intelligence officials, he has been a trusted partner willing to pursue Islamist militants without hesitation, targeting homegrown radical groups Gamaa Islamiya and Jihad after they carried out a string of attacks on foreigners.

He was also "the CIA's point man in Egypt for rendition 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", according to Jane Mayer in a profile for The New Yorker. "Technically, US law required the CIA to seek assurances' from Egypt that rendered suspects wouldn't face torture," Mayer writes. "But under Suleiman's reign at the intelligence service, such assurances were considered close to worthless."

Mayer is the author of The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

A product of the US-Egyptian relationship, Mr Suleiman underwent training in the 1980s at the John F. Kennedy Special Warfare School and Centre at Fort Bragg in North Carolina.

After taking over as spy director, Mr Suleiman oversaw an agreement with the US 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 Mr 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-Qa'ida.

The suspect was bound and blindfolded and flown to Cairo, where he was locked in a cage for hours and beaten, according to The One Percent Doctrine by Ron Suskind, until he told his interrogators that the Iraqi regime was moving to provide terrorist group al-Qa'ida with biological and chemical weapons.

When then US secretary of state Colin Powell made the case for war before the UN, he referred to details of Libi's confession.

The detainee eventually recanted his account.

AFP

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/wor...5998362607

Biography

Omar Suleiman (Wikipedia) Arabic: عمر سليمان‎; born July 2, 1936 - is an Egyptian politician and military figure who was appointed Vice President of Egypt on January 29, 2011. Previously, he was Minister without Portfolio and Director of the Egyptian General Intelligence Directorate (EGID), the national intelligence agency, from 1993 to 2011. In his role as Director of EGID, the British Daily Telegraph dubbed him as "one of the world's most powerful spy chiefs". Foreign Policy magazine ranked him the Middle East's most powerful intelligence chief, ahead of Mossad chief Meir Dagan.[3][4]
Contents

1 Early life and education
2 Egyptian intelligence career
2.1 CIA rendition program
3 Political role and accession to the vice presidency
4 References
5 Further reading
6 External links

Early life and education

Suleiman was born in Qena in Southern Egypt. He left Qena for Cairo in 1954, at the age of nineteen, to enroll in Egypt's prestigious Military Academy. He received additional military training in the former Soviet Union at Moscow's Frunze Military Academy. He is known to have participated both the Six-Day and Yom Kippur Wars.[2] In the mid-1980′s he later earned additional degrees: a bachelors and a master degree in Political Science from Ain Shams and Cairo Universities. Suleiman was transferred to military intelligence and, fluent in English,[5] he began what was to be a long relationship between Egypt and the United States.
Egyptian intelligence career

Suleiman became the director of military intelligence in 1991. In 1993, he became the chief of the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS). In 1995, it is said that he insisted that President Mubarak ride in an armored car during a visit to Ethiopia. A would-be assassin fired on the vehicle, but Mubarak escaped without injury due to the added precautions.[6] His name has become known only in recent years, breaking the tradition of keeping the name of the Egyptian head of Intelligence a secret known only to top government officials. It was released in the media around 2000.

Suleiman has acquired a more public profile while trying to broker a deal between the different armed Palestinian groups vying for power in Gaza as the top presidential envoy from President Hosni Mubarak as well as brokering deals or truces between the Palestinians and Israel. His perceived role in negotiations between Palestinian groups gave him the image of an effective behind-the-scenes figure in the Egyptian government as well as identifying him as potentially useful to foreign governments such those of the Arab countries, Israel, the Palestinians and the United States.
CIA rendition program

Suleiman has been implicated as directly involved in the controversial CIA "rendition" program.[5][7] Journalist Stephen Grey in his work, "Ghost Plane", states that after taking over as intelligence director, Suleiman oversaw an agreement with the US in 1995 that allowed for suspected militants to be secretly transferred to Egypt for questioning.[8] Although Suleiman's Egyptian Intelligence was required to provide "assurances" that prisoners handed over through this program would not be subjected to torture, at least one CIA officer has testified that such assurances from them were unofficially regarded as worthless as "a bucket of warm spit".[5]

He has been accused of complicity in torture of Al-Qaeda suspects in Egypt.[9] Particularly, the case of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi who was captured and handed over to Suleiman. The information al-Libi gave under torture was cited by US officials in the run-up to the 2003 invasion of Iraq as evidence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda. Al-Libi later recanted his confession.[8]
Political role and accession to the vice presidency

Suleiman is seen as a very close and trusted ally of President Mubarak, sharing many of his views on key issues such as Iran, Egyptian relations with Israel and the United States, and treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood.[6] Although he was a military man who by law is not a member of Mubarak's National Democratic Party, he preferred suits to military uniforms and is seen as a major link between Egyptian political and military elites.[6] Due to his role in the regional political scene and the lack of an alternative candidate acceptable to Hosni Mubarak, some have speculated that Suleiman will succeed Mubarak as President. In particular, he is seen as the choice of the Egyptian military establishment.[6] On January 29, 2011, he was named Vice President of Egypt during the civil unrest,[10] ending a vacancy in the position that lasted almost 30 years.
References
^ Black, Ian (January 30, 2011). "Egypt protests as they happened". guardian.co.uk. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan...g#block-51.
^ a b c "Profile: Omar Suleiman" aljazeera.com April 30, 2008. Retrieved January 30, 2011.
^ "The List: The Middle East's Most Powerful Spooks". Foreign Policy. 2009-07-20. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/20...rful_spies. Retrieved 2011-01-29.
^ Blair, David (2009-02-24). "The fixer in the shadows who may emerge as Egypt's leader". Telegraph. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/perso...eader.html. Retrieved 2011-01-29.
^ a b c Mayer, Jane. "Who is Omar Suleiman?" http://www.newyorker.com Retrieved January 30, 2011.
^ a b c d Slackman, Michael. "Choice Likely to Please the Military, Not the Crowds" New York Times January 30, 2011. A10.
^ Stein, Jeff (January 30, 2011). "The CIA's complicated relationship with Egypt". The Washington Post. http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-tal...tions.html. Retrieved January 31, 2011.
^ a b France-Presse, Agence (January 31st, 2011). "Mubarak's new deputy linked to CIA rendition program". The Raw Story. http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/01/mubar...ion/?hl=en. Retrieved January 31st, 2011.
^ Soldz, Stephen. "The Torture Career of Egypt's New Vice President: Omar Suleiman and the Rendition to Torture Program". Dissident Voice. http://dissidentvoice.org/2011/01/the-to...e-program/. Retrieved January 31st, 2011.
^ "Egypt's Mubarak picks vice-president for first time". Reuters. 29 January 2011. http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/01/2...F120110129. Retrieved 29 January 2011.
Further reading
Shpiro, Shlomo (2004). "Intelligence Services and Political Transformation in the Middle East". International Journal of Intelligence and CounterIntelligence 17 (4): 575600. doi:10.1080/08850600490496407.
Sirrs, Owen L. (2010). A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service: A History of the Mukhabarat, 1910-2009. New York: Routledge. ISBN 9780415569200.
External links
We Want Omar Soliman unofficial supporter blog
Pharaohs-in-Waiting, Mary Anne Weaver, The Atlantic, October 2003
The ongoing Omar vs. Gamal Debate, Josh Stacher, The Arabist, February 10, 2005
Israel pinning hopes for Hamas deal in Gaza on Egypt intel chief, Yossi Melman, Ha'aretz, 20 January 2009
Egyptian intelligence chief's Washington agenda, Laura Rozen, Foreign Policy, March 21, 2009
The list: The Middle East's Most Powerful Spooks, Patrick Devenny, Foreign Policy, July 20, 2009
Egypt's Next Strongman, Issandr Amrani, August 17, 2009
Egypt's Succession Crisis: Omar Suleiman and El Baredei Hold Keys to the Presidency, Ikhwanweb.com, April 2, 2010
New Yorker: "Who is Omar Suleiman?" January 29, 2011
Omar Suleiman: Egypt's vice-presidential spook Channel 4 News, 2 February 2011

[Ed Jewett]

The CIA, an American Pinay Circle & the Muslim Brotherhood

4th February 2011

" … The CIA funded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1977, and trained Mujahadin to support Hekmatyar of the Brotherhood in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brothers have served the CIA operationally for some 40 years, an arrangement rubber-stamped by Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and Kermit Roosevelt. Airline hijacker Mohammed Atta was ID'd as a Muslim Brother in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times shortly after the jet attacks on the World Trade Center. So were Khalid Shaik Mohammed [accused killer of Daniel Pearl], and Ramzi Yousef, reportedly guided to a sacrificial pyre in the sky by Aman Zawahiri, Al Qeada's second-in-command also a co-conspirator, while operating under the aegis of the CIA, in the murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and the 1993 WTC bomb plot. … "

The CIA, an American Pinay Circle & the Muslim Brotherhood

By Alex Constantine

[B] (Excerpt from Psychic Dictatorship in the USA II)[/B]

An American Pinay Circle

"… The sky burns,
A copper roof over the shriveled corn.
Children and camels gasp in the noonday heat.
Enemies sweat in their steel, cry out at night,
And wake up trembling, wet with fright.
We squat and stare
Across the nervous barbs,
tied by our common dreads…"
Aubrey Hodes, "Hating"

Adnan Khashoggi's mercenary army of global corporate criminals lives in Mafia mansions, basks in the political limelight, enjoys privileges of royalty in tyrannical desert dystopias, sips vodka in the shadow of gleaming Moscow spires. They are kings, Pentagon officials, priests, S&L thieves, assassins, prostitutes, nazis, Big Oil executives, metals merchants, New Age cultists, drug barons, boiler-room con artists, mobsters, dictators by the horde. And terrorists, of course.
Khashoggi is a Turkoman, the son of a doctor who tended to Abdul al-Aziz Ibn Saud. The Khashoggi brothers were classmates of the future King Hussein and several sons of the bin Ladens.1 His career as an international "connector" began in the 1950s, while still an undergraduate at Chico State College. His purchase of fifty Kenworth trucks for resale to Saudi Arabia's bin Laden Group demonstrated his business savvy, and provided him the capital to launch his career as world-class death merchant.
Edwin Pauley
In the early 1960s, he could be found languishing in the sun or plotting world domination at Edwin Pauley's Coconut Island estate in Hawaii. Pauley, then Democratic Party chairman, operated an oil company called Zapata with the son of Prescott Bush, the Nazi collaborator.2
Houston attorney Linda Minor sidelines as an investigator into banking and political malfeasance. She discovered that Pauley was a slimy operator years before his alliance with Bush.
"He was a spy within the White House," Minor says, "acting as a funnel for campaign funds to FDR, while at the same time gathering and transmitting information about oil policy and captured Nazi and Japanese assets back to his California business associates."
Pauley's political significance stems from his participation in Gulf of Mexico oil explorations in the 1950′s when, with an oil concession from Mexico, he threw in with Howard Hughes and George H.W. Bush.
"Pauley taught Bush how to launder money through corporate subsidiaries to be used for payoffs and the financing of political campaigns," Minor notes. "Both Pauley and Bush used this system to finance Richard Nixon's presidential campaigns."
The laundering scheme unraveled after the 1972 election, when a check drawn at a Mexican bank the subsidiary of a Houston corporation controlled by associates of Bush the elder surfaced in the Miami bank account of a Watergate plumber.3
Saudi shiekhs and domestic oil barons struck up alliances. Shiekh Kamal Adham and a circle of cohorts founded Arabian Shield Development Co. in Texas. (since re-named the Arabian American Development Company).
Sheikh Mohammad Salem Bin Mahfouz at National Commercial Bank was an Arabian Shield investor.4 "During the 1980′s," reports Martin J. Rivers of the Center for Research on Globalization, "Sheikh Mahfouz's syndicate performed major CIA-inspired banking operations for such former CIA assets as Osama bin Laden … Saddam Hussein, Manuel Noriega and other drug dealing generals. George W. Bush, for his part, had important business relationships … with a total of nine prominent individuals central to Mahfouz's financial empire."5
The early 1970s also brought Saudis recruited by the CIA to train at American military bases, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan.6
After September 11, 2001, Bandar drew the attention of the press when it was discovered that two of the terrorists involved were found to have received financing from the Prince's wife. Bandar trained at Ellington AFB near Houston.7
In the early 1970s, the prince fell in with James A. Baker's social circle, struck up an alliance with Joanne Herring, who was instrumental in luring Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson to support Gul Hekmatyar of the Muslim Brotherhood chaptger in Afghanstan by the late '70s.
The Big Oil-CIA-Saudi alliance was consummated with the establishment of the Safari Club of elite cut-throats, founded with covert Agency support on Sept. 1, 1976. George Herbert Walker Bush was then director of the Agency,. Nelson Rockefeller was vice president under Ford.
The Safari Club was a CIA cut-out: This clutch of intelligence agents, politicians and businessmen from three countries (Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Iran) was founded with the express purpose of engaging in covert operations in Africa and the Middle East without leaving a CIA footprint.
Chicago Tribune book reviewer Padam Ahlawa neatly summarized the tensions that gave rise to the Safari Club: "The origins of world terrorism go back to the cold war era. Moscow's monumental blunder in invading Afghanistan in 1979 set off a sequence of intrigue-laden events in Afghanistan…. High-profile military operations were out. Carter wanted a covert CIA operation like the one it had carried out in Laos, with no US personnel directly involved. The Agency, it was decided, would co-opt specialized American military personnel with the support of the Pakistan military to train an army of Muslim zealots."
Anwar Sadat entered into an agreement to assist in the training and equipping of recruits for the coming Anti-Communist jihad. "Russian weapons were flown to Afghanistan. Encouraging fundamentalism to grow in Egypt had its fallout when these Mujahadins turned hostile to Sadat for signing the peace treaty with Israel. It led to Sadat's assassination and terrorist acts of killing 58 tourists. Zia ul Haq of Pakistan made the best of this opportunity, created the ISI to train Pakistanis and Afghans. By doing this, Pakistan's economic and social instability increased and terrorist acts in Sindh grew."8
The Safari Club's cover was blown when the Ayatollah Khomeini allowed an Egyptian reporter to peek into the archives of the exiled Shah of Iran a Club member.9 The CIA/Safari Club left footprints in the destabilization campaign at Mengistu in Ethiopia, the unrest in Costa Rica, and there were treadmarks all over Iran-Contra, not to mention the funding of UNITA in Angola and the Afghan "freedom fighters,' including bin-Laden.10
The CIA funded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1977, and trained Mujahadin to support Gulbuddin Hekmatyar of the Brotherhood in Afghanistan. The Muslim Brothers have served the CIA operationally for some 40 years, an arrangement rubber-stamped by Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and Kermit Roosevelt.
Airline hijacker Mohammed Atta was ID'd as a Muslim Brother in the Wall Street Journal and New York Times shortly after the jet attacks on the World Trade Center. So were Khalid Shaik Mohammed and Ramzi Yousef, reportedly guided to a sacrificial pyre in the sky by Aman Zawahiri, Al Qeada's second-in-command also a co-conspirator, while operating under the aegis of the CIA, in the murder of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, and the 1993 WTC bomb plot.

NOTES

1) Roland Jacquard, In the Name of Osama Bin Laden, Duke University Press, 2002, http://print.google.com/print/doc?isbn=0822329913

2) Bruce Campbell Adamson, letter to Congressman Sam Farr, September 15, 2001, http://www.mail-archive.com/ctrl@listser...g96515.htm
33) Linda Minor, "Follow the Yellow Brick Road: From Harvard to Enron," http://www.newsmakingnews.com/lm4,30,02,...ronpt4.htm
4) LB, e-mail exchange with author, October 2, 2004.
5) Martin J. Rivers, "A Wolf in Sheikh's Clothing: Bush Business Deals with Nine Partners of bin Laden's Banker," geocities.com, March 15, 2004, www.globalresearch.ca/articles/MAR403A.html.
6) Anonymous, "Bandar bin Sultan, a CIA Agent," House of Saud web site, http://www.geocities.com/saudhouse_p/irancont.htm.
7) LB.
Padam Ahlawat, "Journalists' account of terrorism," Chicago Tribune, May 5, 2002 review of Unholy Wars. Afghanistan, America and International Terrorism, by John K. Cooley, Penguin.
9) Imad-ad-Dean Ahmad, review of Unholy Wars, Journal of Islam and Muslim-Christian Relations, Minaret of Freedom Institute, http://www.minaret.org/cooley.htm.
10) Dr Samir Rihan, "Arms or democracy, but not both," http://www.globalcomplexity.org/Arms%20o...ocracy.htm
11) Debbie Schlussel, "Bush's Favorite Terrorist Buddy," WorldNetDaily, October 1, 2001.