Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[American Dream]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2014/06/l ... egypt.html

Friday, June 27, 2014

Long live darkness in Egypt



The headline reads: The President (of Egypt) decides to ration electricity.

[American Dream]

Al Jazeera journalists

http://thatonesuheirhammad.tumblr.com/image/89793731121

[AlicetheKurious]

The headline reads: The President (of Egypt) decides to ration electricity.

You realize that the "headline" is made up, right? It's a cartoon. Nobody's rationing anything, we still get to waste electricity as much as we want, if we're so inclined.

But it's a question of decency and personal responsibility. For at least the past three years, there has been almost no maintenance work on the nation's power stations, and the government is struggling to do it now. Also, our national debt has ballooned -- in Morsy's one year in power, he increased it by almost as much as Mubarak had in 30 years. Most of our fuel is imported, using hard currency reserves that are precariously low (in the past 3 years alone, they've decreased from $43 billion to less than $10 billion). We're all trying to do our part to pull Egypt through.

So I voluntarily stopped using my clothes dryer and hang my laundry in the sun instead. I replaced our electric kettle with a stove-top gas kettle. I replaced the bulbs we normally use the most with energy-saving bulbs. Instead of thoughtlessly turning on all the landscape lights in my yard when one of us is out, I just leave the (energy-saving) porch light on. I turn off my dishwasher before it heat-dries the dishes, and leave the door open so the dishes air-dry. At night we've raised the thermostat on the air-conditioner from 20 degrees Celsius to 24. We've also lowered the thermostat on our solar-powered water heater so that the electricity doesn't kick in and we take warm instead of hot showers, especially in this summer heat. We don't turn on the air-conditioner in the family room any more, because it's wide open; we use the ceiling fan instead. Stuff like that. And as I said, we're glad to do it for our country. Nobody has forced us.

How pathetic is that, when even this is used by assholes to attack us and to demonize our extremely popular president.

[Sounder]

How pathetic is that, when even this is used by assholes to attack us and to demonize our extremely popular president.

It's typically pathetic, but AD is pretty sure that what he lacks in quality can be made up for with quantity. Which is odd because when every cut-and-paste of his to the RI message board(TM), reeks of a weird sense of discrimination, it would seem to compromise his ability to successfully push his 'message'.

Boy, I'm glad this thread is still called Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt's growing revolution.

Thanks Alice for keeping it real, and here is to wishes of good fortune to all the Egyptian people.

[AlicetheKurious]

Boy, I'm glad this thread is still called Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt's growing revolution.

Believe it or not, so am I. It's ironic but so appropriate. So many people were saying/warning: "The revolution will not be televised." The fact that the one in January 2011 was, (and how!) should have been a clue. Now that a real revolution is in progress, it's happening behind a wall of obfuscation and lies.

Thanks Alice for keeping it real, and here is to wishes of good fortune to all the Egyptian people.

Thank you, and thank everybody who genuinely wishes good things for the Egyptian people, and for all people. Or at least respects them.

[American Dream]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/j ... ary-prison

Egypt’s secret prison: ‘disappeared’ face torture in Azouli military jail

Guardian interviews with former detainees reveal up to 400 Egyptians being held without judicial oversight amid wider crackdown on human rights
Patrick Kingsley in Ismailia
The Guardian, Sunday 22 June 2014


Map showing the Galaa military camp in Ismalila and the location of the Azouli military prison within it. The S1 block, which detainees describe as an interrogation block, is a few minutes drive from the jail

Hundreds of “disappeared” Egyptians are being tortured and held outside of judicial oversight in a secret military prison, according to Guardian interviews with former inmates, lawyers, rights activists and families of missing persons.

Since at least the end of July 2013, detainees have been taken there blindfolded and forcibly disappeared. Up to 400 are still being tortured and held outside of judicial oversight in the clearest example of a wide-scale crackdown that Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have jointly called “repression on a scale unprecedented in Egypt’s modern history”.

Prisoners at Azouli are routinely electrocuted, beaten and hanged naked by their tied wrists for hours until they either give up specific information, memorise confessions or until – in the case of a small group of released former inmates – are deemed of no further use to their interrogators.

They are among at least 16,000 political prisoners arrested since last summer’s regime change. But what sets Azouli’s prisoners apart is the way they are held outside of Egypt’s legal system, in circumstances that allow their jailers to act without fear of even hypothetical consequences.

“Officially, you aren’t there,” said Ayman, a middle-aged man who was brought to Azouli towards the end of 2013, and one of only a few to later be released.

“It isn’t like normal prisons. There is no documentation that says you are there. If you die at Azouli, no one would know.”

Azouli prison cannot be seen by civilians. It lies inside a vast military camp – the sprawling headquarters of Egypt’s second field army at Ismailia, a city 62 miles north-east of Cairo – but hundreds are nevertheless all too aware of its third and highest floor, where the detainees are held in cramped cells.


Azouli jail in the Galaa military base in Egypt.

According to three former inmates, each interviewed separately, the majority of Azouli detainees are Salafis – ultraconservative Muslims – suspected of involvement or knowledge of a wave of militant attacks that began after the violent dispersal of a pro-Mohamed Morsi protest camp in August 2013. Many are from the northern Sinai peninsular, the centre of a jihadist insurgency, but there are prisoners from all over Egypt.

A few are suspected members of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, others were involved in student protests and a significant minority are people with no connection to religious movements who interviewees felt had been arrested at random. All three said at least one prisoner was a child and two said another was a journalist.

The interviewees characterised their detentions as metaphorical fishing expeditions in which they were arrested on little evidence and then tortured to force them to give up any information that would justify their incarceration.

“The issue is that many of those at Azouli are arrested randomly or with very little evidence, and then the intelligence services use torture to find out whether they are actually involved in violence,” said Mohamed Elmessiry, Egypt researcher for Amnesty International, who has led an extensive investigation into Azouli.

For Khaled, a young activist, the torture began before he arrived. Arrested as he went about his daily business several months ago, he alleges that he was beaten and electrocuted by soldiers and military policemen in an enclosed outdoor space for several hours before being driven to Azouli.

“They used up two electric-shock machines,” said Khaled. “They brought a towel and put water on it and put it on my face to stop me breathing. The military policemen kept beating me.

“After four hours my clothes were ripped apart. My face was swollen. My eyes were closed. I got a wound in my jaw deep enough for a soldier to put his finger inside it.”


The daily routine

Inmates are woken between 3am and 6am. All 23 of one cell’s inmates are collectively given five minutes to use the bathroom, which contains four toilets and four basins. It leaves no more than a minute for each prisoner to wash and use the toilet – and if someone takes too long, they are beaten. As a result, some people avoid eating to save time in the toilet every morning.

Breakfast is at about 7am: bread or biscuits served with jam and sometimes cockroaches. Lunch comes at 2pm. “The lunch is rice,” said Khaled. “In most cases, it’s not enough, so they’d bring raw rice and mix it with the cooked rice. Then there was what they called vegetables. Mostly boiled cauliflower – either with a lot of salt, or no salt at all. Three days a week, there was a chicken that wasn’t fit for human consumption, but we had to eat it to keep up our strength.” Dinner is usually beans or lentils.

Inside the cells, Ayman said, there was a bucket for urine and a few blankets for the 20-plus inmates to share. But they did not need to keep warm, even in the winter months. “There was very little ventilation,” said Ayman. “So though this was during the winter, people still wore [just] their underwear and it was very hot.”


In the military vehicle on the way to Azouli, Khaled says he was trapped underneath a car seat with his arms locked behind him – a position of prolonged and excruciating pain he says was worse than any he would experience in the coming months.

At Azouli, he says he was immediately placed in a cell on the third floor, where the vast majority of the disappeared prisoners are held.

Two other survivors said they were beaten on arrival by a “welcoming committee” of soldiers, an experience that prisoners in civilian prisons also frequently report.

“When we arrived at the prison, they covered our eyes,” said Ayman, the middle-aged former prisoner. “They took everyone’s valuables and their belts and anything that resembled a rope. Medicines, too. And after that they started the beating. They lined us up against the wall and hit us with sticks, water pipes and fists. This lasted for 10 minutes.

“Then they lined us up and as we walked to the third floor, they beat us as we walked. In the corridor on the third floor, they uncovered our eyes again and started beating us. The warden on the third floor – he was called Gad – kept threatening us: ‘If anyone looks out of the window, if anyone makes any noise, we will beat you.’ And then they beat us for a while, with their fists to our faces. After the beating, they put us in the cell.”

The bottom two floors of the prison have long been used to detain soldiers subject to courts martial. But since July 2013, political detainees have been kept on the third floor, the majority of them in about a dozen cells that each contain between 23 and 28 prisoners.



At any one time, the third floor can hold well above 300 prisoners, with the total number of inmates likely to be higher, since some detainees have left and others have taken their places.

Amnesty believes that up to 20 have been released from any kind of custody. Lawyers also say that a number of others have “reappeared” in civilian jails, accused of terrorism charges based on confessions extracted after torture and interrogation.

The interrogation and systematic torture of Azouli’s prisoners takes place in a separate building – known as S-1 – a few minutes’ drive from the prison. About 10 prisoners are taken there at the middle of each day. Once their names are called, they are let out of their cells to blindfold themselves and form a line. Each survivor said that at this point they would be beaten then led downstairs to a minibus, where they would be beaten again. Prisoners are then driven the short journey to S-1, where they are usually led up a set of wooden stairs to a first-floor office. There the detainees wait – still blindfolded – until they are called one by one to a next-door room.

The ‘security solution’

Azouli is one of the clearest examples of a resurgent security state that was never reformed under the successors to Hosni Mubarak (including the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, under whose presidency security officials were frequently accused of excessive force and torture) and in the past 12 months has exerted itself in almost unprecedented fashion.

Throughout last summer and early autumn, police and soldiers engaged in six mass killings of alleged Morsi supporters unmatched by any other in Egypt’s modern history. They began with the deaths of 51 Morsi supporters on 8 July 2013 and peaked with the clearance of a protest camp – Rabaa al-Adawiya– at which at least 637 died.


Clashes at Rabaa al-Adaiya, August 2013.

Post-Morsi governments have said the “security solution” is necessary to counter terrorism, a narrative made possible by a wave of jihadist-led bombings and ambushes in the Sinai peninsula – most notoriously, the assassination of 25 police conscripts in August. Islamist-led attacks on churches and police stations in the days after Rabaa also helped to justify it.

According to the interior ministry, at least 16,000 Egyptians have been arrested for political reasons since July 2013, though one independent estimate suggests the figure may be as high as 41,000.

As the interior minister, Mohamed Ibrahim, has admitted, many were arrested arbitrarily. “Every Friday, no less than 500 to 600 get arrested,” he said in January. “At the beginning, we used to wait for the demonstration to turn violent, but now we confront them once they congregate. When we confront them, there are some that run. But whoever we can grab, we detain.”

Most of the detainees are Morsi supporters. But the crackdown has widened to include anyone whose beliefs, actions or lifestyle threatens the state. Liberal academics have been banned from overseas travel, while those detained include allegedly gay men, at least 16 journalists and hundreds of secular activists, including figureheads of the 2011 uprising.


When Khaled was first called, on his first full day at Azouli, he remembers the unnerving sound of an officer silently flicking his lighter on and off for several minutes before asking a series of questions about the organisation of protests.

“And then the torture started,” Khaled recalled. “It started with electric shocks in every place in my body. [The officer] called the military policemen and told them: ‘Take off his clothes.’ They took me out of the room. I took everything off apart from my boxers. They said: ‘Make yourself totally naked.’ I said no. The officer said: ‘Bring him in.’

“I started to give him some names. He felt I had lied, so he ordered the soldiers to make me totally naked. The electric shocks were in every place in my body, especially the most sensitive areas – my lips, the places with nerves. Behind the ear and lips. Under the shoulders.”

After the electrocutions, Khaled’s hands were tied behind him. He then claims he was hanged naked by the ensuing knot from a window frame – a torture technique known as the Balango method, which left his shoulders and wrists in excruciating pain. Two-and-a-half hours later he was taken down and returned to the cells.

Two other former inmates report similar experiences, though one says he was tied in a different position, and the other – Salah, a man in his 20s – said he was allowed to keep wearing his clothes while being electrocuted.

“The officer asked me if I knew certain people from a list,” said Salah. “If I said no, he would electrocute me … My answers were, of course, no: I don’t stay very much in [my hometown]. So he would electrocute me.

“The electrocution was over my clothes, but on the testicles. I was sitting on the floor, handcuffed. He was sitting on the small table, and would stretch his hands to electrocute me in my testicles.”

The victims cannot know for certain who tortured them. But all three believe that the interrogations were led by officers from military intelligence – the army wing headed until 2012 by Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, Egypt’s new president – with involvement from the secret police, known informally in Egypt as amn ad-dawla, or state security.

One interviewee said he had been brought to Azouli by state security, who handed him over to the army.

According to Ahmed Helmy, a lawyer who represents former Azouli prisoners, many detainees are tortured by military intelligence until they memorise specific confessions to acts of terrorism. Then they are transferred to state security offices where they are asked to repeat these confessions to a police prosecutor. Other detainees from civilian jails confirm meeting Azouli prisoners at this stage in their incarceration.

If they repeat their memorised confessions correctly, Azouli prisoners are then “reappeared” in a civilian jail, where torture is less systematic, and where they are allowed visits from lawyers and relatives. But, says Helmy: “If they don’t confess exactly how the security services want, they’re sent back to Azouli for more torture.”

Helmy represents some of the detainees who he says have been transferred from Azouli to civilian jails. He says some of them may have committed parts of the crimes to which they have confessed, but because of the way their confessions were extracted it was impossible to be sure.

“You can’t know if these people have committed these crimes or not,” Helmy said. “Under the pressure of torture you can admit to anything. It’s clear that some people are admitting to things because of the torture.”

Justice in the civilian system

When 683 people were given death sentences this year for their alleged role in the police attacks, many saw it is an appropriate deterrent to further violence, but others saw evidence of an unaccountable security state and rotten judicial system.

The death sentences were the latest in a series of draconian court decisions, including students being given 17-year jail-terms for demonstrating on campus and protesters handed life sentences for blocking roads while policemen walk free for murder.

Three leftist activists – Mahienour el-Masry, Ahmed Maher and Alaa Abd El Fatah – who helped organise the protests that led to the fall of Mubarak – were jailed three years later under a new law that allows the government to stop its opponents mobilising in public.



Activist Alaa Abd El Fatah.

But many detainees remain uncharged after months in jail, with judges renewing their detentions en masse every 45 days – a situation that rights campaigners say amounts to arbitrary detention.

“Every detainee should be able to access a judge who can assess the validity of their detention,” said Mohamed Lotfy, the director of the Egyptian Commission for Rights and Freedoms, which has also investigated Azouli. “But that’s not happening. They don’t have an effective means of challenging the legality of their detention and to me that’s a denial of fundamental rights.”

Even once a trial does begin, due process is by no means guaranteed. The absurdities of the trial of three al-Jazeera English journalists – in which prosecutors have presented footage of trotting horses and a BBC documentary from Somalia as evidence – shows how flawed Egypt’s court system can be.


The mother of one former Azouli detainee – now transferred to a civilian jail – said it had taken her son Omar four days of torture and three trips to a civil prosecutor before he would agree to recite his forced confession. Omar’s mother said she feared he had died because during his time at Azouli no state institution would reveal his whereabouts.

She only found Omar again when he re-emerged at an official jail weeks later. “The skin on his nose was raw to the bone,” she remembered of their reunion at a family visit inside the second prison.

“There was a cut with the depth of a fingertip on his neck, which came from being beaten with a metal stick. There were two big wounds on his wrists from the hanging.

“They electrocuted him on his testicles. He said he was threatened with rape and that they used to hang them naked. He said he was prevented from going to the bathroom for six days and they kept him blindfolded for ten days.

“He asked me if we had had any visits, because they threatened that they would arrest his [female relatives], rape them, film it, and then show them the videos.”

The three former prisoners interviewed directly by the Guardian said that they were not tortured at S-1 as many times as detainees such as Omar. Over time, officials appeared to lose interest in them, which may partly explain their eventual release.

Summarising the difference between Azouli and notorious civilian jails such as Cairo’s Scorpion prison, Helmy said: “Scorpion is an official prison under the supervision of the prosecution and it’s visible. But Azouli is in a military area. It’s forbidden for any civilians to go inside.

“When we ask the civil prosecution to investigate people inside Azouli, they say they don’t have any jurisdiction to go there. So it’s a place where military intelligence can take their time and torture people without any oversight.”

At Azouli, prisoners subjected to systematic torture lack even a hypothetical legal redress.

“It gives you an idea of how confident the security forces are today,” said Amnesty’s Mohamed Elmessiry.

“They don’t care about the rule of law. They are holding people for over 90 days and subjecting them to ongoing torture without any judicial oversight. These practices are a devastating blow to detainees’ rights, as enshrined under both Egyptian and international law.”

As Khaled, one of the three survivors, summarised: “Your whole life there is a living tomb. No one knows anything about where you are.”

A senior military officer acknowledged the existence of Azouli prison, but did not respond within a fortnight to specific written allegations, and turned down a request to visit the jail.


• Additional reporting by Manu Abdo. All detainees’ names have been changed.

[AlicetheKurious]

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/22/disappeared-egyptians-torture-secret-military-prison

Egypt’s secret prison: ‘disappeared’ face torture in Azouli military jail

Guardian interviews with former detainees reveal up to 400 Egyptians being held without judicial oversight amid wider crackdown on human rights
Patrick Kingsley in Ismailia
The Guardian, Sunday 22 June 2014


Map showing the Galaa military camp in Ismalila and the location of the Azouli military prison within it. The S1 block, which detainees describe as an interrogation block, is a few minutes drive from the jail

Hundreds of “disappeared” Egyptians are being tortured and held outside of judicial oversight in a secret military prison, according to Guardian interviews with former inmates, lawyers, rights activists and families of missing persons.

The problem with lying about verifiable things is that others can produce evidence that contradicts it. So it's best to stick with anonymous sources talking about secret places about which you can make up whatever you want.

They are among at least 16,000 political prisoners arrested since last summer’s regime change. But what sets Azouli’s prisoners apart is the way they are held outside of Egypt’s legal system, in circumstances that allow their jailers to act without fear of even hypothetical consequences.

“Officially, you aren’t there,” said Ayman, a middle-aged man who was brought to Azouli towards the end of 2013, and one of only a few to later be released.

“It isn’t like normal prisons. There is no documentation that says you are there. If you die at Azouli, no one would know.”

Azouli prison cannot be seen by civilians. It lies inside a vast military camp – the sprawling headquarters of Egypt’s second field army at Ismailia, a city 62 miles north-east of Cairo – but hundreds are nevertheless all too aware of its third and highest floor, where the detainees are held in cramped cells.

According to the interior ministry, at least 16,000 Egyptians have been arrested for political reasons since July 2013, though one independent estimate suggests the figure may be as high as 41,000.

Where did the figure of 16,000 come from? The same place that Abdel-Moneim Aboul-Fotouh's 21,000 came from, and the same place that Gigi Ibrahim, of the Revolutionary Socialists, got 41,000. I wonder where the Guardian's "independent estimate" came from. Nobody ever tells us. What the hell, who's counting? Why not say 1 million? Say whatever you want. When one guy is arrested, his family puts on a big show, screaming and wailing for the cameras. His mother tells us earnestly what a good boy he was, and Al-Jazeera makes him a star. But 16,000, or 21,000 or 41,000 (depending on who you ask) "disappear", and... no families. No names. No faces. Just anonymous "sources" and "lawyers" and "activists" in the Guardian, except for one:

According to Ahmed Helmy, a lawyer who represents former Azouli prisoners, many detainees are tortured by military intelligence until they memorise specific confessions to acts of terrorism. Then they are transferred to state security offices where they are asked to repeat these confessions to a police prosecutor. Other detainees from civilian jails confirm meeting Azouli prisoners at this stage in their incarceration.

Ah, finally a name: Ahmed Helmy, of the Muslim Brotherhood, a frequent guest on Al-Jazeera, where he says whatever suits his Qatari paymasters. So, you've got this tall edifice resting on the word of anonymous individuals and one Muslim Brotherhood lawyer. And this edifice is the claim that there are at least 16,000 "political prisoners".

There are no political prisoners in Egypt. None. These are how the Muslim Brotherhood and its fans define "political prisoners" and "peaceful demonstrators":

“The issue is that many of those at Azouli are arrested randomly or with very little evidence, and then the intelligence services use torture to find out whether they are actually involved in violence,” said Mohamed Elmessiry, Egypt researcher for Amnesty International, who has led an extensive investigation into Azouli.

Do tell: how and when did Mr. Elmessiry conduct this "extensive investigation"? Where are the results of this "extensive investigation"? Or is this "extensive investigation" a fiction solely for the purpose of giving this gentleman credibility that he has not otherwise earned?

I looked up Mohamed Elmessiry, and found only this reference:

Last weekend, Badr Abdelatty, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson, told reporters that the former president would “have full rights to a free and fair trial” and that he would “be charged on criminal charges before his normal judge according to the Egyptian penal code.” However, rights groups say that because Morsi was initially denied a lawyer while being interrogated and investigated during his detention, this promise has not been fulfilled.

Morsi’s legal team also told Amnesty International that they were not given access to the full 7,000 page case file until the end of October. Mohamed El Messiry, an Egyptian spokesperson for Amnesty, said Morsi’s detention and the charges leveled against him are politically motivated. “The fact that he didn’t have access to lawyers and therefore the means to defend himself during the preparation of the case,” El Messiry said, “means there is no fairness to the trial. A person should be entitled to lawyers and informed of his rights.” Link

Not surprisingly, Mohamed Elmessiry is a liar. Morsy was arrested under a warrant from the Prosecutor-General's office, based on the evidence (his first trial was for the murder of peaceful demonstrators, who were brought into the presidential palace by Brotherhood thugs under the personal supervision of Morsy's officials, and were tortured and killed inside the presidential palace while Morsy was present. This happened after Morsy had first ordered the Interior Minister to "get rid of them", and been refused, then ordered the Chief of the Presidential Guard, and also been refused. Both asked Morsi to give them orders in writing, which he would not do. The Interior Minister was fired for refusing the order).

Morsy was advised to appoint a lawyer, which he did not, declaring that he did not recognize the authority of the state to arrest and try him. The Muslim Brotherhood sent him a series of lawyers, whom he refused to accept. The state tried to assign him a lawyer, but he refused to meet him. When Morsy's trial for murder began on November 4, he refused to acknowledge the court, and to wear the white training suit which defendants must wear according to the law. He showed up at his trial wearing a navy blue blazer and pants. The courthouse was a chaotic mob scene. The judges deemed this unacceptable and ordered the trial delayed for two months, during which: Morsy will have to appoint a lawyer, and the lawyer will be given enough time to review the evidence against his client; Morsy will put on the mandatory white suit for defendants; the court house will be renovated in such a way to prevent shouting on both sides of the defendants' cage during the trial.



The trial actually began on January 8. This time, Morsy wore the white suit, and had a lawyer present, the Islamist lawyer Selim El-Awa, who had ample time to review the evidence.

But this is my favorite part:

When Khaled was first called, on his first full day at Azouli, he remembers the unnerving sound of an officer silently flicking his lighter on and off for several minutes before asking a series of questions about the organisation of protests.

“And then the torture started,” Khaled recalled. “It started with electric shocks in every place in my body. [The officer] called the military policemen and told them: ‘Take off his clothes.’ They took me out of the room. I took everything off apart from my boxers. They said: ‘Make yourself totally naked.’ I said no. The officer said: ‘Bring him in.’

“I started to give him some names. He felt I had lied, so he ordered the soldiers to make me totally naked. The electric shocks were in every place in my body, especially the most sensitive areas – my lips, the places with nerves. Behind the ear and lips. Under the shoulders.”

This is hilarious: it's taken from a famous scene from a movie, The Yacoubian Building. A young man whose dream is to become a police officer has his application rejected by the police academy. He joins a terrorist group and is arrested. In jail, he's blindfolded and tortured by an anonymous police officer whom he can only identify by the distinctive sound of his lighter, which he keeps "flicking...on and off for several minutes before asking a series of questions..." After his release, one day he hears that unique sound, and is able to identify his torturer. At the end of the film, he murders the officer, and gets killed in the process.

The death sentences were the latest in a series of draconian court decisions, including students being given 17-year jail-terms for demonstrating on campus and protesters handed life sentences for blocking roads while policemen walk free for murder.

No student was given 17-year jail-terms for demonstrating on campus. No protesters were handed life sentences for blocking roads. Pure lies, but what the hell.

Three leftist activists – Mahienour el-Masry, Ahmed Maher and Alaa Abd El Fatah – who helped organise the protests that led to the fall of Mubarak – were jailed three years later under a new law that allows the government to stop its opponents mobilising in public.

As I've mentioned before, the law is less restrictive than those of the US, Germany, the UK, etc., but these "activists" don't want ANY law regulating ANY demonstrations, even if these violate the rights of other citizens, or involve vandalism, destruction of property, or incitement to violence. Some of them, including Alaa' Abdel-Fatah, have even explicitly said that their aim is to collapse the state. Abdel-Fatah is actually currently free, which I for one find very surprising.** Ahmed Maher is charged with receiving illegal funds from a foreign state in exchange for espionage and acts of sabotage. The evidence against him includes film footage of him breaking into government buildings, committing acts of vandalism and theft, and audio recordings of him boasting of his crimes to his co-conspirators, among other things.

But many detainees remain uncharged after months in jail, with judges renewing their detentions en masse every 45 days – a situation that rights campaigners say amounts to arbitrary detention.

There is not a single "detainee" that is "uncharged". All arrests are based on evidence presented to the General-Prosecutor's Office, which issues a warrant for the suspect's arrest, at which time they are charged. Those making the accusations about "detainees" held without charge have been repeatedly asked to substantiate their claims, which they have consistently failed to do. But who's listening?

** On Edit: I actually forgot that Alaa' Abdel-Fattah was finally arrested, on the very day of his court trial, for which he didn't bother to show. Sorry.

[American Dream]

http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/06/30/ ... epression/

JUNE 30, 2014

Profiles in Courage and Repression

by ALFREDO LOPEZ

As bad as things get for our movement in this country, we are not yet feeling the full throttle of repression and, if one needs a reminder of that and perhaps a profile of what’s in store for us if we don’t organize now, the situation facing Internet activists in the Middle East provides it.

Two weeks ago, June 11, Egyptian blogger and on-line activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was sentenced to 15 years in jail by an Egyptian court. His crime? He was part of a Nov. 26, 2013 peaceful demonstration in front of the Egyptian Shura council protesting a proposed constitutional provision allowing military trials for civilians. His trial was held at a police station and he and 23 other defendants in his case weren’t allowed to be present. They were all sentenced in absentia as they stood outside the courtroom.

Fattah is one of the world’s best-known Internet activists; he’s given interviews to so many countries he’s like a United Nations of sound-bites. That makes even more brazen the farcical trial and nightmarish sentence handed down. It also makes clear how far governments will go in implementing the blueprint for Internet repression that is being followed, in one way or the other, world-wide.

About a week later, Pakistan’s chapter of Bytes for All (among the most acclaimed Internet rights organizations in the world) released a remarkable study about hate speech in Pakistan. The study is among the most informative ever on this topic and that’s an enormous contribution. But its most important finding is that hate speech isn’t some random rant by a fool or a crazy person; it is political, organized and a motor of repression.

Perhaps the greatest lesson is that the study was publized at all. Bytes for All (Pakistan) operates under relentless attack and repression. Its coordinator, Shazhad Ahmad, has been sentenced to death (the sentence deferred) and can’t live with his family for security reasons. Its staff is constantly harassed and some staff members have been arrested and one was beaten fiercely outside the organization’s office.

This is about how much worse repression can get and how it is being facilitated. But it’s also about how, despite the conditions, brave people keep fighting and should be supported.

The Bytes for All report is couched in the careful and fact-laden language of NGO activism to present a treasure trove of facts, cases and quotes while making the case that all this is politically driven. Page after page of the report describes cases in which on-line and other public communications systems have been used to repress movements, deepen the oppression of women and target (sometimes successfully) opposition leaders for beatings or death.

But it also reveals an important fact about the government response to political and social crises: regimes are now using mass expression to oil their repression and to build extremist right-wing movements to protect them. The hysterical leaflets and screaming speeches that were once the mobilizing cry of fascism have been replaced by hateful statements floating on the pixels dancing across computer screens. There’s something incremental about these “one at a time” rants. With each Facebook entry or tweet on Twitter, the hysterics of hate deepen and become more violent: shooting vituperative volleys like spraying bullets, the calibre increasing with each post.

The 63-page report was written by Pakistani journalist Jahanzaib Haque, who writes for the popular Pakistani publication Dawn.com (among others), and was based on an online survey on hate speech to which 559 Pakistani Internet users responded. This was complemented with monitoring and information-gathering from “high impact, high reach” Facebook pages and Twitter accounts.

According to the report, 92 percent of all respondents have come across hate speech online and over half (51 percent) have been the target. Of those targeted people, 42 percent said they were targeted for their religious beliefs, 23 percent for their nationality, 22 percent based on race/ethnicity and 16 percent for sex/gender/sexual orientation.

“…the 30 Facebook pages analyzed (3,000 shares and related comments) contained 10,329 counts of hate speech, which translates to more than three counts of hate speech on every single share,” the report’s findings synopsis says.

It’s disturbing but not surprising. This is after all the country where Malala Yousafzai, the 12-year-old student who advocated for education for women, was shot point-blank in the face by a Taliban thug as she was riding home on a school bus. Her case provoked international reaction as she slowly recovered from her wounds outside her country and a promise by the Taliban, which admitted planning her murder, to finish the job if she ever returned. The shooting was the culmination of a remarkably virulent attack campaign on Facebook.

Pakistan is the place where on-line hate speech has fanned sectarian flames morphing into murderous mobs like those in Rawalpini in 2013 (where Musliam and Sihks engaged in a community-based war leaving scores dead). It’s a country where a charge of blasphemy, supported by hundreds of twitter or Facebook messages, can end in a death sentence or imprisonment. It’s the place where media personalities, journalists and even actors can see their lives endangered and careers ruined by an on-line hate campaign.

It’s also, not unconnected, a country that has been bombed, attacked, invaded, violated, bullied and villified by the United States government: treatment that appears to have fed the right-wing ferocity documented in this report.

The Pakistani government’s reaction to all this is dramatized by the fact that it goes on uninterrupted while the regime continues through threat, intimidation, beatings, arrests and even a recent tax case to shut Bytes for All down. The target isn’t the crime; it’s the crime’s opponent.

In places where there are still some democratic rights, like the United States, the issue of hate speech on-line is framed as a debate over whether some fool has the right to say something sexist or racist and whether Facebook or Twitter have the right to block that post. It’s all about individuals and hurtful words and, in a sense, the veneer of respect. This is, without question, important to notice and organize around. Because if left unchallenged, it will morph into the situations in many other countries, like Pakistan, where hate speech is an organized force with the government compliant or actually involved.

Ironically, the key here may be to resist the obvious solution: repression of these forms of communication. That would be the government’s choice, of course, because free expression is the greatest threat to it.

“We at Bytes for All hold Freedom of Expression very dear as an inviolable fundamental human right,” Bytes for All’s Ahmad said, “but often see it being fettered in false paradigms of morality, security, national interest or even hate speech.”

“The need to counter the spread of hate speech in Pakistan’s online space,” the report’s summary states, “is a pressing concern that needs to be addressed through a multi-pronged approach that educates, creates awareness and discourages hate and intolerance, prohibits and criminalizes the most extreme and dangerous forms of hate speech by law, yet guarantees that fundamental human rights to free speech and information are safeguarded.”

Why we need to safeguard those rights was made painfully obvious earlier this month when the Egyptian court sentenced Alaa Abdel Fattah to 15 years in jail for being part of the 2013 demonstration. While Egypt — known for the bizarre decisions of some of its judges — has never been a beacon for judicial fairness, this imprisonment has a logic. That logic has become even clearer with the remarkably nasty sentencing last week of three journalists for the Al Jazeera network.

Fattah is one of Eqypt’s most visible democracy activists and his blog, read world-wide, is one of the democracy movement’s most respected news sources. Eloquent, charismatic, funny and principled without question, he’s the kind of guy repressive governments view as a rash.

But the popular blogger has been much more than a source of information and interviews. He’s a revolutionary activist and, possibly most dreaded, a “techie”. He has spent the last period of time alternating between his blog and the training of Egyptian young people in the important tasks of coding, running servers and developing websites.

They knew what they were doing when they jailed Alaa Abdel Fattah. This was an attack, not only on free communications but on people’s ability to develop the tools of communication.

The Al Jazeera case has provoked a deserved condemnation internationally but the attention to Fattah’s case has been largely limited, at least in the United States, to technology organizations and rights groups. That has to change. The Internet is ours. It was started by people (not governments or companies) and the movements for change in this world now use it as our principle communications and mobilizing tool. Governments are not happy about that and their efforts to control it (and repress it when they can’t control it) are attacks on our movements, our future and us. We can’t ignore that.


Alfredo Lopez writes about technology issues for This Can’t Be Happening!

[American Dream]

Egypt Media Roundup (June 30)

Jun 30 2014
by Jadaliyya Egypt Editors

[This is a roundup of news articles and other materials circulating on Egypt and reflects a wide variety of opinions. It does not reflect the views of the Egypt Page Editors or of Jadaliyya. You may send your own recommendations for inclusion in each week's roundup to egypt@jadaliyya.com by Sunday night of every week.] Egypt’s Secret Prison: ‘Disappeared’ Face Torture in Azouli Military Jail Partick Kingsley “interviews former detainees reveal up to four hundred Egyptians being held without judicial oversight amid wider crackdown on human rights.” Blog: The "Court" Lina Attalah writes on the court session of twenty-three detainees who are charged with ...


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[AlicetheKurious]

Two weeks ago, June 11, Egyptian blogger and on-line activist Alaa Abdel Fattah was sentenced to 15 years in jail by an Egyptian court. His crime? He was part of a Nov. 26, 2013 peaceful demonstration in front of the Egyptian Shura council protesting a proposed constitutional provision allowing military trials for civilians. His trial was held at a police station and he and 23 other defendants in his case weren’t allowed to be present. They were all sentenced in absentia as they stood outside the courtroom.

Fattah is one of the world’s best-known Internet activists; he’s given interviews to so many countries he’s like a United Nations of sound-bites. That makes even more brazen the farcical trial and nightmarish sentence handed down. It also makes clear how far governments will go in implementing the blueprint for Internet repression that is being followed, in one way or the other, world-wide.

..But the popular blogger has been much more than a source of information and interviews. He’s a revolutionary activist and, possibly most dreaded, a “techie”. He has spent the last period of time alternating between his blog and the training of Egyptian young people in the important tasks of coding, running servers and developing websites..

Alaa Abdel-Fatah was not standing outside the courtroom. He was arrested in a cafe where he was hanging around with his friends after failing to show up for his trial. He seems to believe that he is above the law, maybe because of his extreme popularity in the US media and with US administration officials. On his recent visit to Cairo, one of John Kerry's main demands was for President Sisi to grant Abdel-Fattah "a presidential pardon". That's a stupid request, because presidential pardons can't be granted until after there's been a trial and conviction and all appeals have been exhausted. Also, why would President Sisi pardon Alaa Abdel-Fattah? As a special favor to the Obama administration? Really?

The question is, as with so many of these "activists" -- who's footing the bill? Running a blog, and "training Egyptian young people in the important tasks of coding, running servers and developing websites" doesn't pay the rent, nor does it cover the considerable living expenses of someone who spends most of his time sleeping in until noon, then hanging out in coffee shops downtown all night, yet lives rather well.

Abdel-Fattah faces a number of serious charges, including arson. We look forward to his trial, presumably where he will deign to appear in person, when we expect to see the evidence, including videos of him in action.

As I explained before, when someone is tried in absentia, if found guilty they are automatically given the maximum sentence. Once they are arrested, they get a new trial and the previous sentence becomes nullified.

[AlicetheKurious]

For anyone who cares, the Brotherhood planted bombs in Cairo's underground metro last week. The day before yesterday, they planted a bomb in a telecommunications building in Cairo West, killing a mother and her small daughter.

Today, they planted bombs near the presidential palace in Cairo East, very close to where my mother happens to live, in front of the club where she and her friends meet on an almost daily basis.

Two police officers were killed, and a third lost his arm. Several people, including a street-cleaner, were injured.







The police are especially vulnerable, because their work necessarily entails that they be in the street. During the past year alone, we've lost hundreds of truly brave and selfless police officers who have been killed in the line of duty by the Muslim Brotherhood and their allies. Hundreds of civilians have also been killed, and an incredible amount of public and private property destroyed. At the same time, we have the likes of Alaa' Abdel-Fattah, who deliberately provokes people like with one of his recent tweets, "I wish someone would form a militia and kill the police for us."

That's American Dream's "principled" hero. He's an agent provocateur, someone who is treated as a heroic activist, but only abroad. Here, nobody's buying. And that's what it's all about: his customers are almost all abroad. Now isn't that strange, for someone who's supposedly a Champion of the People???

[bluenoseclaret]

AlicetheKurious....

I would like to say Thank You for the years of postings by you.

It would almost be nigh impossible to appreciate/understand the events in Egypt without your posts.

Good luck.

[American Dream]

http://angryarab.blogspot.com/2014/06/l ... egypt.html

Friday, June 27, 2014

Long live darkness in Egypt



The headline reads: The President (of Egypt) decides to ration electricity.

This excerpt from an account by Dilip Haro provides some important context for the image immediately above:

An Army as Immovable as the Pyramids

Ever since 1952, when a group of nationalist military officers ended the pro-British monarchy, Egypt’s army has been in the driver’s seat. From Gamal Abdul Nasser to Hosni Mubarak, its rulers were military commanders. And if, in February 2011, a majority of the members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) abandoned Mubarak, it was only to stop him from passing the presidency on to his son Gamal on his 83rd birthday. The neoliberal policies pursued by the Mubarak government at the behest of that businessman son from 2004 onward made SCAF fear that the military’s stake in the public sector of the economy and its extensive public-private partnerships would be doomed.

Fattened on the patronage of successive military presidents, Egypt’s military-industrial complex had grown enormously. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), though a state secret, could be as high as 40%, unparalleled in the region. The chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals.

Working with the interior ministry, which controls the national police force, paramilitary units, and the civilian intelligence agencies, SCAF (headed by General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, doubling as the defense minister) would later orchestrate the protest movement against popularly elected President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood. That campaign reached its crescendo on June 30, 2013. Three days later, SCAF toppled Morsi and has held him in prison ever since.

The generals carried out their coup at a moment when, according to the Washington-based Pew Research Center, 63% of Egyptians had a favorable view of the Muslim Brotherhood, 52% approved of the Brotherhood-affiliated Freedom and Justice Party, and 53% backed Morsi, who had won the presidency a year earlier with 52% of the vote.

Washington Misses the Plot

Remarkably, Obama administration officials failed to grasp that the generals, in conjunction with Interior Minister Muhammad Ibrahim, were the prime movers behind the Tamarod (Arabic for “rebellion”) campaign launched on April 22, 2013. Egyptians were urged to sign a petition addressed to Morsi that was both simplistic and populist. “Because security has not returned, because the poor have no place, because I have no dignity in my own country…” read the text in part, “we don’t want you anymore,” and it called for an early presidential election. In little over two months, the organizers claimed that they had amassed 22.1 million signatures, amounting to 85% of those who had participated in the presidential election of 2012. Where those millions of individually signed petitions were being stored was never made public, nor did any independent organization verify their existence or numbers.

As the Tamarod campaign gained momentum, the interior ministry’s secret police infiltrated it, as did former Mubarak supporters, while elements of the police state of the Mubarak era were revived. Reports that cronies of the toppled president were providing the funding for the campaign began to circulate. The nationwide offices of the Free Egyptians – a party founded by Naguib Sawiria, a businessman close to Mubarak and worth $2.5 billion – were opened to Tamarod organizers. Sawiria also paid for a promotional music video that was played repeatedly on OnTV, a television channel he had founded. In addition, he let his newspaper, Al Masry al Youm, be used as a vehicle for the campaign.

In the run-up to the mass demonstration in Cairo’s iconic Tahrir Square on June 30th, the first anniversary of Morsi’s rule, power cuts became more frequent and fuel shortages acute. As policemen mysteriously disappeared from the streets, the crime rate soared. All of this stoked anti-Morsi feelings and was apparently orchestrated with military precision by those who plotted the coup.

http://fpif.org/clueless-cairo/

[AlicetheKurious]

Fattened on the patronage of successive military presidents, Egypt’s military-industrial complex had grown enormously. Its contribution to the gross domestic product (GDP), though a state secret, could be as high as 40%, unparalleled in the region. The chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals.

Yet another lie. The actual figure is 1.8% One side-effect of the US' domination of Egypt since the mid- to late 1970s was the unprecedented gutting of Egypt's arms manufacturing industries, and the privatization of military-owned firms. A good example is the strategically important cement industry, which in the 1950s and 60s was mostly a public sector industry. The factories were "privatized" under Mubarak, and sold for a fraction of their value to Egyptian businessmen who just happened to have very close ties to the US. The Egyptian businessmen, in turn, sold them to foreign-owned multinationals for a massive profit. This was the pattern for the most important public sector firms, including those that were important to the military industries and to national security. The purpose was to render Egypt militarily and economically crippled and dependent on the US, which in turn is committed to a policy of ensuring that all Arab states combined do not achieve strategic/military parity with Israel. This long-standing policy was written into law in 2007, and named the US policy of ensuring Israel's "Qualitative Military Edge." In practice, this has meant that US' near-total hegemony over the region has for decades allowed Israel to do pretty much whatever it wants to us.

Number six on the list of weapon exporters is Israel. Israel may be the sixth weapon exporter in the world, but it is the largest arms exporter in per capita terms. Indeed, while the U.S. has the largest military-industrial complex in the world, Israel has the largest proportion of its economy dedicated to the military-industrial complex.

A good way to estimate the size of the military-industrial complex is to compare the proportions of public expenditure on defense. According to SIPRI, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Israel spends 8.4 percent of its GDP on defense, putting it in the third place worldwide, and almost twice as much as the U.S., which is seventh place in the world.

But SIPRI's data doesn't take into account the massive investment of natural resources, especially land and labor, which are used by the Israeli army, police, and prison systems without payment. Approximately half of the territory of Israel is controlled directly or indirectly by the army, and about half of the Israeli citizens serve in the army without salary for one to three years. If those facts are taken into account, it becomes clear that Israel is the world's most militarized state.

It should be emphasized that the arms industry is built upon reciprocal purchases. Arms deals are often two-sided, meaning that when one country sells military equipment to a second country, the second country is expected to buy something from the first. This tradition intensifies the arms proliferation and creates an unnecessary stockpiling of arms by countries who are at peace.

The problem is that where the army's outfitted with new shiny toys, generals and politicians sometimes develop the urge to try them out and go on the offensive. The arms trade is therefore a hazard to peace and to security for all residents of all countries.

Because of the massive investment of resources on security and the army, Israel suffers from high levels of poverty and crumbling social services. The current Israeli government debated the urgent need to cut military expenditures and eventually approved some minor cuts to the defense budget. But the Israeli system allows the Ministry of Defense to keep the revenue from arms sales and use them to further boost its own budget. Therefore, despite the government's efforts, the actual budget of the Israeli Ministry of Defense is expected to grow, although the Israeli Ministry repeatedly exceeds its budget. In 2012, it spent about one and a half billion dollars more than the budget approved by the Israeli parliament, the Knesset.

The U.S. continues to give Israel military aid to the tune of $3 billion every year, with plans to expand aid to $4 billion annually. The aid ensures high profits for the U.S. arms companies. The U.S. also buys military equipment from Israel in reciprocal deals, contributing to the Israeli military-industrial complex.

More importantly, when the U.S. shows its support for Israel, it also legitimizes Israel's use of force. Israel intensifies the violence in the Middle East and contributes to sales of the arms industry worldwide.

BARACK OBAMA, U.S. PRESIDENT: Four years ago, I stood before you and said that "Israel's security is sacrosanct. It is non-negotiable." That belief has guided my actions as president. The fact is, my administration's commitment to Israel's security has been unprecedented. Our military and intelligence cooperation has never been closer. Our joint exercises and training have never been more robust. Despite a tough budget environment, our security assistance has increased every single year. We are investing in new capabilities. We're providing Israel with more advanced technology--the types of products and systems that only go to our closest friends and allies. And make no mistake: we will do what it takes to preserve Israel's qualitative military edge--because Israel must always have the ability to defend itself, by itself, against any threat.

The massive investments in the military-industrial complex causes immeasurable suffering, injury, and death to the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, it puts Israel in a state of deep socioeconomic crisis, and it costs U.S. taxpayers billions of dollars that could have been used to provide much-needed services in the U.S. But on the other hand, it creates profit for the arms companies. Lockheed Martin had a profit in 2012 of over $4.4 billion. Boeing had a profit of $3.9 billion that year. Link

As for the claim that the "chief executives of 55 of Egypt’s largest companies, contributing a third of that GDP, are former generals," that may or may not be true. What is true is that former generals are in great demand throughout the private sector, because of their reputation for discipline, excellent technical training and skills, honesty and capacity for leadership. Retired generals can be found heading not only Egyptian corporations, but also foreign corporations operating in Egypt and the Middle East, and Africa.

In any case, I am delighted to announce that Egypt's military-industrial industries are being revitalized and are expected to make a much bigger contribution to Egypt's economy, and to Egypt and to the Arabs' national security, in the coming years. The process has already begun. With the US' unbelievably destructive role having been thoroughly exposed, and the US' subsequent marginalization in the region, Israel is losing its license to invade, bomb, destroy and infiltrate our countries with impunity. We WILL be able to defend ourselves, and will no longer be at your mercy. Violation of our national sovereignty and of our people's rights will come with a very, very heavy price. Too bad for you, AMERICAN DREAM.

[AlicetheKurious]

AlicetheKurious....

I would like to say Thank You for the years of postings by you.

It would almost be nigh impossible to appreciate/understand the events in Egypt without your posts.

Good luck.

I can't tell you how much I appreciate the head's up from you and Sounder. I was beginning to feel like a sucker, wasting my time and energy on a futile and asinine "dialogue" with Mr. Cut-and-Paste. It's like being stuck in an elevator with a malicious robot. It's good to know that there are actual humans here, and that they're interested.