Posts Tagged ‘Egypt’
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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Mubarak faces death penalty trial for alleged murder of protesters
Another U.S. ally finds out what happens to you if you are a U.S. ally
BEN SAYS: This sure will make it tough to get dictators to step aside in the future. Mubarak (a U.S. ally who stepped aside after a few days of protests) will now be tried for capital murder, punishable by death. Look for Qaddafi now to fight to the finish. Where were all these charges against Mubarak before now? Before all this (though clearly no Jeffersonian Democrat), he was said to be a pretty decent U.S. ally and, if not a friend, at least not interested in erasing Israel.
Looks like a Kafkaesque Kangaroo court show trial coming up. Under this reasoning, should Obama be tried for killing innocent Afghan and Pakistani tribesmen in error via killer drone and other military assaults.
Come to think of it, aren’t all governments killing innocent people all the time, sometimes in error? It’s called collateral damage . . . or breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. Some U.N. Committee on torture wants to prosecute Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush for the same thing. idiotic.
REUTERS: Hosni Mubarak was ordered on Tuesday to stand trial for the killing of protesters and could face the death penalty, scotching speculation the former leader would be spared public humiliation by Egypt’s military rulers.
Mubarak, ousted on February 11 after mass demonstrations demanding he end his 30 years in power, has been questioned for his role in a crackdown that led to the killing of more than 800 demonstrators and has been probed over corruption.
The public prosecutor said Mubarak, who is detained in a hospital in the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, would be tried on charges including “pre-meditated killing,” which could be punished by the death penalty.
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 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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Military Coup in Egypt Rocks Middle East. White House in Disarray
How is a military takeover historic or democratic?
STRAFOR GLOBAL INTELLIGENCE: Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman delivered the following statement Feb. 11: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country. May God help everybody.”
Suleiman’s statement is the clearest indication thus far that the military has carried out a coup led by Defense Minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. It is not clear whether Suleiman will remain as the civilian head of the army-led government. Egypt is returning to the 1952 model of ruling the state via a council of army officers. The question now is to what extent the military elite will share power with its civilian counterparts.
At a certain point, the opposition’s euphoria will subside and demands for elections will be voiced. The United States, while supportive of the military containing the unrest, also has a strategic need to see Egypt move toward a more pluralistic system.
ASSOCIATED PRESS: Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak resigned as president and handed control to the military on Friday after 29 years in power, bowing to a historic 18-day wave of pro-democracy demonstrations by hundreds of thousands. “The people ousted the president,” chanted a crowd of tens of thousands outside his presidential palace in Cairo.
Several hundred thousand protesters massed in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square exploded into joy, cheering and waving Egyptian flags. Fireworks, car horns and celebratory shots in the air were heard around the city of 18 million in joy after Vice President Omar Suleiman made the announcement on national TV just after nightfall.
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