Why Was the CIA Blind in Egypt? TIME
But there will also be the question why the CIA failed to predict events there. The first, obvious explanation is that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have been a giant black hole sucking in CIA operatives and resources from around the world. ...
I'm just hearing on Al Jazeerra [if you haven't gotten 'hip' to this station yet...do so....no better, in general, general news source in the World, as long as you know their slight bias, due to their ownership/funder. Whatever, makes the American and European media look quite pale and vapid....not to mention commercial and beholden to their sponsors.
Pssssst~ Don't tell anyone, but he was under both house-arrest and a legal order not to leave the country...I smell the CIA / MI6, and their ilk here.....
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Mubarak has left Egypt for the UAE. From here it is 'out of the depths or the MSM', and I fear even the 'progressive community'. Only the MOST immune to the indoctrination dejour, [radicals!] will be immune....
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Been, 'a 'thinkin'......It was always likely that Mubarak would get a 'get-out-of-jail-free card...for his 'hard' work for the CIA, MIA. MI6 and Mossad...and a few others; but it is still interesting he disappears at this moment...I think an analysis of what is happening in Yemen, Syria and Libya at them moment. would give background to what is gong/ will be going on.............
"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws. - Mayer Rothschild
"Civil disobedience is not our problem. Our problem is civil obedience! People are obedient in the face of poverty, starvation, stupidity, war, and cruelty. Our problem is that grand thieves are running the country. That's our problem!" - Howard Zinn
"If there is no struggle there is no progress. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and never will" - Frederick Douglass
Al Jazeera did very well covering the Egyptian events but their coverage of Libya leaves a bit to be desired and it just so happens that Al Jazeera's boss is one of the countries attacking Libya.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
https://rt.com/news/mubarak-died-559/
Rumors in Egypt say that the ousted Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who was being tried for alleged ordering to kill civilians and corruption in Cairo, may have died in custody, RT's Paula Slier reports.
If true, Mubarak becomes the second head of state to become a victim of the so-called Arab Spring and not be properly tried for the crimes the opposition charged him with. Earlier, Libya's Muammar Gaddafi died under suspicious circumstances after being captured by rebel forces.
Egyptian media say Mubarak, whose health had deteriorated to the point where he had to be lying in bed during his trial, was informed about Gaddafi's death, which worsened his condition. The former Egyptian leader suffered a heart attack after seeing his long-rime friend's body bloodied and still.
Whether the attack was fatal or not is unclear. However the Egyptian army decided to rap up security in the hospital where Mubarak is being kept under arrest. Extra guards have surrounded the building as well as entered the floor on which the ailing ex-president is being treated, says Slier.
Mubarak has been charged with various crimes, including ordering to shoot at protesters who took to the streets of Egypt in February and eventually overthrew the government. The uprising ended the four-decade rule of the regime. So far, a number of his former subordinates have testified before the court, but none confirmed the accusations.
Another famous similar case in resent history is that of Slobodan Milosevic. The president of Serbia and Yugoslavia was in custody of the Hague Tribunal for alleged crimes committed during the 1990s Balkan wars. The trial was never finished as the defendant died in custody in 2006 of a heart attack.
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
The woman is young, and slim, and fair. She lies on her back surrounded by four soldiers, two of whom are dragging her by the arms raised above her head. She's unresisting maybe she's fainted; we can't tell because we can't see her face. She's wearing blue jeans and trainers. But her top half is bare: we can see her torso, her tummy, her blue bra, her bare delicate arms. Surrounding this top half, forming a kind of black halo around it, is the abaya, the robe she was wearing that has been ripped off and that tells us that she was wearing a hijab.
Six years ago, when popular protests started to hit the streets of Egypt as Hosni Mubarak's gang worked at rigging the 2005 parliamentary elections, the regime hit back not just with the traditional Central Security conscripts but with an innovation: militias of strong, trained, thugs. They beat up men, but they grabbed women, tore their clothes off and beat them, groping them at the same time. The idea was to insinuate that females who took part in street protests wanted to be groped.
Women developed deterrent techniques: layers of light clothing, no buttons, drawstring pants double-knotted and carried right on protesting. Many of the smaller civil initiatives that grew into the protest movement: "We See You", "Against Corruption", "The Streets are Ours" were women-led.
But, a symbiotic relationship springs up between behaviors. Mubarak and Omar Suleiman turn Egypt into the US's favorite location for the torture of "terror suspects" and torture becomes endemic in police stations. The regime's thugs molest women as a form of political bullying and harassment of women in the streets rises to epidemic levels.
Until 25 January. The Revolution happened and with it came the Age of Chivalry. One of the most noted aspects of behavior in the streets and squares of the 18 days of the Egyptian Revolution was the total absence of harassment. Women were suddenly free; free to walk alone, to talk to strangers, to cover or uncover, to smoke to laugh to cry to sleep. And the job of every single male present was to facilitate, to protect, to help. The Ethics of the Square, we called it.
Now our revolution is in an endgame struggle with the old regime and the military.
The young woman is part of this.
Since Friday the military has openly engaged with civilian protesters in the heart of the capital. The protesters have been peacefully conducting a sit-in in Ministries' Street to signal their rejection of the military's appointment of Kamal Ganzouri as prime minister.
Ganzouri announced that no violence would be used to break up the Cabinet Office sit-in. Moments later the military took on the protesters. For a week Military Police and paratroopers had kidnapped activists from the streets, driven them off in unmarked vehicles, interrogated them and beaten them. On Friday they kidnapped Aboudi one of the "Ultras" of the Ahli Football Club. They gave him back with his face so beaten and burned that you couldn't see features and started the street war that's been raging round Ministries' Street for the last three days.
The protesters have thrown rocks at the military. The military has shot protesters, and thrown rocks, Molotov cocktails, china embossed with official parliament insignia, chairs, cupboards, filing-cabinets, glass panes and fireworks. They've dragged people into parliament and into the Cabinet Office and beaten and electrocuted them my two nieces were beaten like this.
They beat up a newly elected young member of parliament, jeering: "Let parliament protect you, you son of … ". They took a distinguished older lady who's become known for giving food to the protesters and slapped her repeatedly about the face till she had to beg and apologize. They killed 10 people, injured more than 200, and they dragged the unconscious young woman in the blue jeans with her upper half stripped through the streets.
The message is: everything you rose up against is here, is worse. Don't put your hopes in the revolution or parliament. We are the regime and we're back.
What they are not taking into account is that everybody's grown up the weapon of shame can no longer be used against women. When they subjected young women to virginity tests one of them got up and sued them. Every young woman they've brutalized recently has given video testimony and is totally committed to continuing the struggle against them.
The young woman in the blue jeans has chosen so far to retain her privacy. But her image has already become icon. As the tortured face of Khaled Said broke any credibility the ministry of the interior might have had, so the young woman in the blue jeans has destroyed the military's reputation.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
Egyptian army soldiers beat a female protester during clashes at Tahrir Square, pulling up her head scarf and dragging her through the street. Photograph: Reuters
The woman photographed being beaten in Cairo is an activist who does not want her name revealed because of her shame at the way she was treated, according to those who were with her at the time.
Hassan Mahmoud, a journalist with the newspaper Al Badeel who was there, said the woman stumbled as she tried to flee from the military police, who managed to grab her and beat her. "It was clear to me that they wanted to take her away from us but then a few brave protesters came in and started hurling stones and that was the one thing that saved her from their hands."
He said she was treated for hand and leg wounds, then taken to a centre for rehabilitation of violence victims called El Nadeem Centre, before being taken home where she was said to be feeling wretched about her treatment.
Though her case was drawing comparison with the instant fame accorded posthumously to Neda Agha Soltan, the Iranian woman killed during the 2009 uprising, the woman appealed for her identity to be kept secret.
Mahmoud said she told him: "It doesn't matter if I talk [to the media] or not, their stripping me is enough to reveal them [the army] and tell enough to those who still believe them."
Clashes continued on Sunday for a third straight day, with the toll rising to 10 dead and 505 injured, according to the Egyptian health ministry. Army sources said 164 people had been detained.
As many as 1,000 protesters were still hurling stones and being confronted by both military police and Interior Ministry police the latter having only joined the fighting that day in Sheikh Rihan road nearby Tahrir Square and overlooking the rear of the cabinet building. The street leading from Tahrir towards the front of the cabinet is blocked by cement barricades set up by military police earlier on Sunday.
Most confrontations involved hurling stones, along with occasional hit and run raids by security officers chasing protesters towards Tahrir Square using sticks. There were also a considerable number of plainclothes officers hurling stones at protesters from the rear roof of the cabinet building.
The continuing violence has overshadowed phased elections intended to form a new elected government next year.
"You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.â€
Buckminster Fuller
[/URL] Fireworks burst over opponents of Egypt's Islamist President Mohamed Morsi, in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt, July 2, 2013.
Reuters July 02, 2013
CAIRO, EGYPT Army concern about the way President Mohamed Morsi was governing Egypt reached a tipping point when the head of state attended a rally packed with hardline fellow Islamists calling for holy war in Syria, military sources said.
At the June 15 rally, Sunni Muslim clerics used the word "infidels" to denounce both the Shi'ites fighting to protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the non-Islamists that oppose Morsi at home.
Morsi himself called for foreign intervention in Syria against Assad, leading to a veiled rebuke from the army, which issued an apparently bland but sharp-edged statement the next day stressing that its only role was guarding Egypt's borders.
"The armed forces were very alarmed by the Syrian conference at a time the state was going through a major political crisis," said one officer, whose comments reflected remarks made privately by other army staff. He was speaking on condition of anonymity because he was not permitted to talk to the media.
The controversy surrounding the Syria conference pointed to a crippling flaw in the Morsi presidency: Though the constitution names Morsi as supreme commander of the armed forces, the military remains master of its own destiny and a rival source of authority to the country's first freely elected head of state.
The army's dramatic ultimatum demanding Morsi and other politicians settle their differences by Wednesday afternoon caught the presidency completely off guard. Triggered by mass protests against Morsi's rule, it amounted to a soft coup by a military that has been a major recipient of U.S. aid since the 1970s, when Egypt made peace with neighboring Israel.
The army has cited the need to avoid bloodshed as its main motivation. It also is worried by other major problems facing Egypt, including an economic crisis that has wiped out more than one-tenth of the value of the currency this year, making it harder for the state to import fuel and food.
Speaking on the eve of the protests, the president had dismissed the idea that the army would take control again.
If Morsi was aware of irritation in the army, he chose to ignore it, believing his mandate as Egypt's democratically elected leader gave him license to make policy the way elected leaders do elsewhere in the world.
For the army, the Syria rally had crossed "a national security red line" by encouraging Egyptians to fight abroad, risking creating a new generation of jihadists, said Yasser El-Shimy, analyst with the International Crisis Group.
At the heart of the military's concern is the history of militant Islam in Egypt, homeland of al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahri. The military source condemned recent remarks made by "retired terrorists" allied to Morsi, who has deepened his ties with the once-armed group al-Gamaa al-Islamiya.
Speaking privately, officers in the secular-leaning military have said Egyptians did not want a religious state. Though the Brotherhood never said it wanted to set up a theocracy, such concerns reflect the army's long-standing suspicion toward a movement banned by army rulers in 1954.
Presidency blind to threat
In public, Morsi and the army have kept up appearances.
The presidency repeatedly has moved to quash rumors of tensions with the generals.
The constitution signed into law by Morsi late last year protects the interests of the military, which oversees a sprawling economic empire that produces everything from bottled water to tablet computers.
"The presidency didn't perceive the military as a threat," added Shimy of the International Crisis Group.
The current head of the armed forces, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, was appointed by Morsi in his second month in office after he sent into retirement Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, Mubarak's defense minister for two decades.
Twenty years Tantawi's junior, Sisi was promoted from the position of military intelligence director. Analysts have described it as an arrangement that suited both Morsi and a younger generation of army commanders seeking promotion. He was trained in the United States and Britain, like many officers in an army that receives $1.3 billion in military aid a year from Washington.
While saying the army was out of politics, Sisi repeatedly has called on Egypt's feuding politicians to settle their differences. In December, he chaired unity talks to ease tensions ignited by a decree that expanded Mursi's powers.
Earlier this year, Sisi warned that unrest could bring down the state. He also responded to calls for the army to unseat Mursi, saying: "No one is going to remove anybody".
The army has not said what Morsi's fate will be in the plan, which it will implement if the politicians fail to agree.
Sisi is something of an Islamist himself, said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian military based at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He cited materials written by Sisi during his training in the United States. "As I see it, they are trying to assert as much pressure as possible to bring about a compromise settlement," said Springborg.
The military's actions this week should be viewed as those of an institution, not individuals, added Nathan Brown, an expert on Egypt at George Washington University.
"The personal inclinations of individual members of the armed forces are not the issue and are not on display here.
"There is one thing we do know about the ideology of the military. That it sees itself as having a mission to the state rather than the constitution," said Brown. http://www.voanews.com/content/egypt-arm...93911.html
"The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it." Karl Marx
"He would, wouldn't he?" Mandy Rice-Davies. When asked in court whether she knew that Lord Astor had denied having sex with her.
“I think it would be a good idea” Ghandi, when asked about Western Civilisation.
![[Image: Egyptian-army-soldiers-ar-005.jpg]](http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2011/12/18/1324209662950/Egyptian-army-soldiers-ar-005.jpg)
Egyptian army soldiers beat a female protester during clashes at Tahrir Square, pulling up her head scarf and dragging her through the street. Photograph: Reuters