Archive for the ‘Egypt’ Category
Is this what Obama wanted for our U.S. ally? Mubarek defends himself in a cage at his death penalty trial
So this is what happens to you if you are a loyal ally of the United States when Barack Obama is President. The U.S. turns on you. You then end up in a kangaroo court show trial. You are then hanged by the neck until dead.
The 83-year-old Hosni Mubarak is now lying in a bed in a cage as his trial is being broadcast on national Egyptian TV. Either way, Mubarek looks like he’s on death’s doorstep.
Mubarek was far from being an ideal leader. But except for Israel, Mubarek was America’s best ally in the Middle East. Now he’s on trial for murdering the 800 anti-Mubarek protesters.
But that’s a big part of what governments do, including our own — kill people. Our government has certainly killed a lot of people (including innocent civilians) during the past decade in Iraq and Afghanistan. So should our Presidents be put on trial?
Mubarek’s trial in a cage and coming execution will certainly make it very tough to convince dictators and strongmen to exit power in the future — if this is what happens to them. Not that Mubarek was even a dictator by Middle East standards.
No wonder Muammar Gaddafi is fighting to the death to avoid this fate.
Obama’s foreign policy is so misguided, so incompetent that it borders on criminal. Who in their right mind would would to be an ally of the United States after this?
GREAT NEWS! Egypt’s ‘secular’ leader is also a 9-11 Truther and Holocaust Denier . . . But he’s not as powerful as the even more radical Muslim Brotherhood
WASHINGTON TIMES: A leader of Egypt’s top secular party says the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were “made in the USA,” the Holocaust is “a lie” and Anne Frank’s memoir is “a fake” — comments sure to roil the post-revolution political debate in the Arab world’s most populous country.
Ahmed Ezz El-Arab, a vice chairman of Egypt’s Wafd Party, made the remarks in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times last week while in the Hungarian capital attending the Conference on Democracy and Human Rights.
He denied that the Nazis killed 6 million Jews during World War II.
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Christopher Hitchens not optimistic about the fate of Egypt
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS-VANITY FAIR: When anatomizing revolutions, it always pays to consult the whiskered old veterans. Those trying to master a new language, wrote Karl Marx about the turmoil in France in the 19th century, invariably begin haltingly, by translating it back into the familiar tongue they already know. And with his colleague Friedrich Engels he defined a revolution as the midwife by whom the new society is born from the body of the old.
Surveying the seismic-looking events in Tunis and Cairo in January and February of this year, various observers immediately began by comparing them to discrepant precedents. Was this the fall of the Arab world’s Berlin Wall? Or was it, perhaps, more like the “people power” movements in Asia in the mid-1980s? The example of Latin America, with its overdue but rapid escape from military rule in the past decades, was also mentioned. Those with longer memories had fond recollections of the bloodless “red carnation” revolution in Portugal, in 1974: a beautiful fiesta of democracy which also helped to inaugurate Spain’s emancipation from four decades in the shadow of General Franco.
Harvard Professor Niall Ferguson has about the same assessment of Egypt as Hitchens
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CBS News reporter Lara Logan sexually assaulted by mob in Cairo
HOWARD KURTZ-DAILY BEAST: The hard-charging CBS News correspondent was attacked in Tahrir Square, sexually assaulted, and hospitalized.
Lara Logan had already been arrested in Egypt when she decided to go back for what turned out to be the closest call of a danger-filled career.
CBS News disclosed that Logan was surrounded in Tahrir Square and “suffered a brutal and sustained sexual assault and beating before being saved by a group of women and an estimated 20 Egyptian soldiers.” She was hospitalized upon her return to the United States.
CBS NEWS: On Friday, Feb. 11, the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS chief
foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team and their security were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration. It was a mob of more than 200 people whipped into frenzy.
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DEMOCRACY AT WORK: Egypt’s military junta dissolves parliament, suspends Constitution
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS: Egypt’s Army officially took over the country Sunday, dissolving
Parliament and suspending the constitution to make way for a new democratic government.
Filling the vacuum left after extraordinary street protests toppled strongman Hosni Mubarak, the Supreme Council of Armed Forces said it would run Egypt for six months, or until elections are held – whichever comes first.
It also announced the formation of a committee to draw up constitutional reforms to be voted on by the people in a referendum.
Egypt’s protesters, who rocked the world last week by peacefully forcing out Mubarak after 30 years of iron rule, hailed the developments.
“They have definitely started to offer us what we wanted,” said activist Sally Touma.
Ahmed Shafiq, Egypt’s prime minister, who is nominally running the country, promised his caretaker government would return peace to the streets and start rooting out corruption.
Obama Intelligence Director James Clapper (AKA Stupidest Man in America) says Muslim Brotherhood now “secular” and has “eschewed violence”
JAMES CLAPPER: “The term Muslim Brotherhood is an umbrella term for a variety of movements. In the case of Egypt, a very heterogeneous group, largely secular, which has eschewed violence and has decried al-Qaeda as a perversion of Islam.”
FLASHBACK:
Here’s Diane Sawyer’s famous interview where James Clapper, Director of National Intelligence, had no knowledge of the terrorist attack in London that happened that day.
So when will Clapper resign or be fired?
Obama learned of Mubarak resignation from TV
ASSOCIATED PRESS: President Barack Obama declared Friday the peaceful departure of Hosni Mubarak as Egypt’s president marked “a beginning” holding the promise of greater democracy for the world’s most populous Arab nation. But he added soberly, “There will be difficult days ahead.”
Indeed, while Obama and other U.S. officials voiced optimism, they were also concerned over who will end up in control of the Egypt and whether the United States will emerge with the kind of stable partner it badly needs in the volatile Middle East.
Also at issue: whether the unrest that brought down Mubarak will spread to other nations in the Middle East, including oil-rich autocratic neighbors, and whether the Egyptian military will make good on its pledge of promoting free and fair elections.
At the White House, Obama’s words were alternately celebratory and cautious after Mubarak ended three decades of iron rule and turned over his authority to the military.
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