Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[MacCruiskeen]

Pay attention to the man before the curtain

The pig of empire is sometimes enlipsticked, a few decorous phrases thrown in: freedom; concern; restraint; &c. These codes are so well-worn, so universally understood, as to make their decipherment a simple, if bleakly amusing, task.

Often, however - increasingly - no make-up is applied. Thus, breathtakingly, this.

* ‘Where it’s best to end up is in free elections at a certain point in time, but in the mean time to get a managed process of change …’

* ‘I totally understand that [that Egyptians want Mubarak gone now], but you asked me what’s the best thing for Egypt and for this region …’

* ‘I don’t think that Western governments should be the slightest bit embarrassed about saying we’ve worked very closely with president Mubarak …’

* ‘You have to say, he has been a staunch and often courageous advocate for peace …’

* ‘The important thing now is that we allow this process to happen in an orderly and not chaotic way …’



There is no embarrassment at opposing democracy in favour of imperial control. No blushes at, even now, encomia to the dictator. Nothing inadvertent nor shameful about the verbs ‘manage’ & ‘allow’ to describe ‘the West”s mission, faced with liberation. Indeed, shame is explicitly abjured.

Here is no great & terrible Oz to deflect attention. No smoke, no mirrors. No bread, no circuses. No dissembling, no lullabies, no kiss on the cheek, no taxi fare home. There is no wriggling. The man in the suit tells the heroines & heroes & martyrs of Egypt quite clearly that their lives, their revolution, their emancipation belong to him & his colleagues, to dole out as, & when, & if, they see fit.

http://chinamieville.net/post/303197894 ... he-curtain

[Searcher08]

His Right Eye
is full of distant pity
for the flock he feels
born to guide
His Left Eye
is full of doing
what is required
to turn the lambs
the silly naïve lambs
into coin
Golden coin
in his pocket

[tazmic]

His Right Eye
is full of distant pity
for the flock he feels
born to guide
His Left Eye
is full of doing
what is required
to turn the lambs
the silly naïve lambs
into coin
Golden coin
in his pocket

I was about to make a similar post, but had decided not to. Nice to see someone else doing this... Try it on the first few seconds of the video just posted:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12324996

No less disturbing.

[barracuda]

Google translation from here.

Ministry of the Interior:

Minister's Office - Circular No. 60 / B / M - secret and very important

Topic: Plan to address the mass demonstrations

Strategies
1 - Allow to pass demonstrations in the streets of cities and villages of the state as of the date. And non-objection to their careers and to exercise extreme caution in live fire, rubber bullets and tear gas Alabamr Ivlk of competent jurisdiction according to the table you have a blogger.

2 - employ a number of thugs and pay them amounts rewarding and meet with them in their role in the sites gatherings and in private by the elements authorized to do so without an official status, it and surrounding the deployment plan according to the attached table of the site entitled to 1 and tell them the time of the move and plan to create chaos scalability mentioned in the statement ,

3 - Control members of organizations and parties, and coordination with the printing presses and publishing houses and communication devices and the imposition of a complete record of messages and incoming and outgoing Almkalamat and clarify the content of the report of the direct case Tgaykm information.

4 - will be cut off means of communication (Mobile - Internet) As of six o'clock am on Friday, 28/1/12011 with services to keep the ground so it must to all holders of the officers and members of the use of wireless communications devices, manual and make sure it is in the development of encryption.

5 - the planned deployment of police and detectives and the security forces in civilian clothes, according to the annex, entitled B-2.

6 - Inventory march demonstrations on Friday, 28/01/2011 in public squares and major parts in the event of demonstrations and access to the areas of warning, according to the attached map entitled by 3.

7 - make sure to arm members of the civilian elements in civilian clothes with a wooden stick and sticks, iron small-scale (manual) for use in the arrest of the main elements present in the demonstration, without showing any violence.

8 - firing rubber bullets and tear gas without the use of live bullets and warning that only in extreme necessity.

9 - show partial disability as of four o'clock Friday afternoon the police mentioned to show superiority demonstrations and allow the infiltration of elements of item 2 to cause chaos during the demonstration and limited according to the plan agreed with them to do so.

10 - a full withdrawal of police and security forces of the Central and wanted to organize the traffic and the guard and all categories of officers and individuals to protect government sites, businesses and institutions with the wearing of civilian attire and presence beside roads, around trees and engagement between the lines of the organizers of the demonstrations and the parking without interfering in any negative phenomena, and without revealing the identities their non-interference in the street until you tell you so.

11 - empty police stations of weapons, ammunition and prisoners and transferred to the central prison and placed under heavy guard and the introduction of private security personnel and security elements to jail instead of them and the elements of the living and the members of the follow-up and criminal investigators, and collaborators from informants.

12 - broadcast the rumors through all the media, the existence of acts of looting and by contacting the elements of women at all different media with hearing the cases of strong panic and cry and plan according to broadcast rumors attached to you.

13 - broadcast messages directly from individuals or indirect messages distributed leaflets to the media only external private located near the events, the existence of acts of looting and breaking of the banks and shops and police stations to coincide with the deployment plan thugs item 2, in order to broadcast a state of panic and terror in the street and the existence of a claim civil and popularity of the presence of the military, public security and public presence in these locations.

14 - Tips to issue directly and indirectly through the media of internal and external committees formed to protect the popular neighborhoods in order to guide members of the demonstration to go to their sites without the imposition of force by the army.

15 - send false rumors and false information through all means of media stations outside only be corrected by the local media stations in order to gain the confidence of the public to divert attention from these stations and discredit all incoming connections to the local media stations.

16 - strong rumors broadcast across all media, local and external existence of chaos and escape of prisoners and determining the number and big fake registrants, as well as the danger and they were seen within the residential areas.

17 - claims all the people across all media and the formation of popular committees watches day and night to protect the living and the composition of the claims by the voices of women members of the security as agreed in the meeting with you earlier.

18 - Follow-up situation on the ground by the security forces of civil and uploaded to us the approximate numbers of demonstrators and knowledge of their group to send item 2 to their neighborhoods until you absorb them and empty spaces of the demonstrators.

19 - extensive contacts and personal calls and the presence of all the media shows a marked improvement after a presence of the People's Committees for the protection of neighborhoods and residential and commercial complexes.

20 - start to show solidarity with the leadership gradually after that show logos on time and according to what is to inform you of it.

[nathan28]

Good--documentation showing that the police were, as some rumors had stated, releasing and deputizing prisoners for both crowd control and to cause chaos.

Mubarek's toast. He's done. Here's to hoping that someone besides the military officer class--the chief beneficiaries of Mubarek's market reforms--or right-wing Muslims seize the reigns of power.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Yeah Mubarak is gone, (I called that Sun morning our time in Oz. Do I win a prize?)

Too many dead people on one hand, but there are another 22 million in Cairo alone supposedly. And judging by what some people on the ground say - no one gives a fuck anymore. They certainly aren't scared to die.

Some time soon, maybe Tuesday morning, there is a planned march, hopefully over a million people, on the presidential palace. If that march starts then I'd say thats the end of it for the regime I reckon. Well, its already the end, but that'll be the crux. I don't think the west will have control of this for a while yet.

I checked all the stuff I linked to on that blog post (Atef Said, Hossam, Al Quassemi and others) this morning and honestly it does feel like something has broken, like a certain tension has lifted and that things have turned another corner.

I certainly wouldn't trust the military command, but conscripted soldiers who have been on the street with protesters for nearly a week are not the same as privileged top brass.

[JackRiddler]

.

Today's Democracy Now was excellent. I can never figure out the link for the current show, so I'll post it again tomorrow, but obviously it's still on the front page.

http://www.democracynow.org/

I'm not kidding. Cried at two points. Cried on the subway when I tried to relate one of the stories. From shared joy. About a writer, an uncle of the DN reporter in Cairo, who was circumventing the Internet block. For the last 20 years his uncle has literally gone out each morning with a megaphone and the items he needs in case he gets arrested. Sometimes when they arrest dissidents they just drive them out into the desert and abandon them there, let them walk back (obviously more than a prank, a kind of Russian roulette). Every day he goes to the steps of the Press Club, raises hell, often gets arrested. And now he's not the only one on the steps of the Press Club -- he can't get on the steps, the whole city is out. And he's in joy. Then they had this feminist leader, also a censored writer, she sounded like she was 80, the joy in her voice... can't go on I'm crying already!

Quite the contrast to last night on the GE-NBC Pentagon News. GE may have just sold to Comcast (Kabletown!), but they created this network, and it remains the most Pentagonny of the the three, if we bother to make this minor distinction. Once a week or so I like to tune in to the Dinosaur Nightly News programs to get a taste. They are not one inch off Pravda. Pravda with celebrity porn, of course, this being land of the free. Worse than ever.

Anyway, so I'm thinking, how big are the protests? Who is in the protests? What are the police and the army doing? Any word from the dictator? (Trivia: known to Egyptians as La Vache Qui Rit because he's thought to look like the cow on those cheese triangles.) Or his freshly-appointed CIA-avatar torture-renditioning Vice? Baradei? Other opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood? You know, that news stuff. I mean, if they're going to bother to cover it at all.

About 20 seconds in, I started scribbling notes - sorry I missed the first part - because I thought NBC's ultra-Ugly American reporter was going to set some kind of record for density of shock words. For the full effect, read the following transcript (which is faithful, minus the filler quacking) out loud with hysterical emphasis:

chaos
dead
White House
bursts of gunfire
state of chaos
show of force
spinning out of control
drastic vacuum of power
prison breakouts
murderers
rapists
Islamic militants
fear, crime and terrorism
killed so far
murdered
missing
mob justice
vigilantes
thieves
looters
armed
killed
beaten
looters
vigilantes
terrified foreigners

To which I add: motherfucker. As in NBC reporter.

That was four minutes or so, then they managed a minute in which they sort of touched upon my questions, that Egyptian revolution thing.

Then it was on to three minutes on TOURISTS! How are they holding up?!

Then Clinton, oh my god the spin spin spin.

Then Andrea Mitchell (wife of Greenspan or is it Kissinger barf) being both snarky about Clinton and acting as her twin at the same time. I don't need to hear their in-studio bozos, that's usually where I switch to the other channel. CBS was doing some golf tournament live, which is forgivable, they run the news when it's done. ABC news (tabloid schmuck Jim Sciutto!) was... already doing a story about the all-important unfinished golf tournament.

Back on NBC, cue commercial.

.

[Joe Hillshoist]

BTW Who is Frank Wisner jr?

http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Frank_Wisner



Oh and Jeff, nice one, can't wait to read the rest.

[hanshan]

They may be our Most Terrible Lizards, but they wouldn't be called the best and the brightest by even the hindmost fart-catcher in Abaddon's human centipede. They can turn blood into gold, playing Last Days' alchemists in the booming catastrophe and collapse sectors, but don't confuse an habituated massacre with a meritocracy. They're the eschaton of open jaws at the close of the food chain, but only because brutal design rewards a cold heart with the cruelest bite. We're the 99 and they're the One Percenters, and like the outlaw bikers who share the patch, they run the drugs and guns and kill for their club, all oxymoronic howlings of billionaire philanthropists notwithstanding. Just don't call them elites. No. Apparently and with great perversity, that's me and my tribe, over-educated beyond utility at the end of things.

You closing comment suggests that a reframing of the meaning of elite may be in order.

With the title of article being, "We Have Met the Elite, and He is Us".

well spoke & reads gooder...



...

[Searcher08]

His Right Eye
is full of distant pity
for the flock he feels
born to guide
His Left Eye
is full of doing
what is required
to turn the lambs
the silly naïve lambs
into coin
Golden coin
in his pocket

I was about to make a similar post, but had decided not to. Nice to see someone else doing this... Try it on the first few seconds of the video just posted:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12324996

No less disturbing.

Indeed - a mix of the following ingredients, in image proportion.

[Joe Hillshoist]

.

Today's Democracy Now was excellent. I can never figure out the link for the current show, so I'll post it again tomorrow, but obviously it's still on the front page.

http://www.democracynow.org/

I'm not kidding. Cried at two points. Cried on the subway when I tried to relate one of the stories. From shared joy. About a writer, an uncle of the DN reporter in Cairo, who was circumventing the Internet block.

Thats Sharif Kouddous' uncle you are talking about (I'd never heard of him last week).

I've been following S_K's stuff on twitter. Its quite moving, you see the pride when he writes about his dad and especially his uncle, it is very moving.

[Joe Hillshoist]

.

Today's Democracy Now was excellent. I can never figure out the link for the current show, so I'll post it again tomorrow, but obviously it's still on the front page.

http://www.democracynow.org/

I'm not kidding. Cried at two points. Cried on the subway when I tried to relate one of the stories. From shared joy. About a writer, an uncle of the DN reporter in Cairo, who was circumventing the Internet block.

Thats Sharif Kouddous' uncle you are talking about (I'd never heard of him last week).

I've been following S_K's stuff on twitter. Its quite moving, you see the pride when he writes about his dad and especially his uncle, it is very moving.

He's sposed to be on Al Jazeera English v soon.

[vanlose kid]

Track Mappable Tweets From Egypt In Real Time

Submitted by Tyler Durden on 01/31/2011 18:10 -0500


For those who are getting tired of Al Jazeera's third party Egypt coverage, yet find the real time #Egypt stream on twitter overwhelming, below we present an interface which allows mapping (and this gives a far better sense of orientation) of what is going on where, on in a real time basis. We feel that ahead of tomorrow's million man (+) march which will likely end up with at least one presidential palace being sacked this will be quite a useful function to track the ongoing revolution.



[click on image.]

*

[vanlose kid]

Egypt at night.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/28634332@N ... /lightbox/

*

[vanlose kid]

lo-tek cool.

*

Egypt unplugs the Internet, and creative minds adapt...

Egypt unplugged the Internet on Friday January 28th (SANS Internet Storm Center) and it didn't take long for people to find a way around. The Egyptian government shut down DNS service and promptly followed by ordering all ISPs to block routing of networks in and out of the country. Though this may stop the vast majority of traffic, it has arguably hurt the regime more than it has helped. Clever individuals have began circumventing the block. Good list here: http://wikileaks.blogsport.de/2011/01/2 ... net-block/

Individuals outside of Egypt have set up ham radio relay sites outside the country. Anyone with ham gear and some EE know-how can get a radio link out:

• Egypt hams are on 7.050-7.200 MHz LSB

• #hamradio frequencies for #egypt http://slink.us?ls PLEASE SPREAD IRC: http://slink.us?lt

• Ham Radio Software software for PC, Mac and Linux http://www.hamsphere.com Communicate w/ #egypt

• 0m band, 7.050-7.20 0 MHz LSB, 318.5 degrees (northwest /north from cairo) Ham Radio Operators

There are always telephone modems, remember those?:

• Nour DSL is still working in Egypt, Dial up with 0777 7776 or 07777 666

• There is an Old DSL Dialup 24564600

• We are now providing dialup modem service at +46850009990. user/pass: telecomix/telecomix (only for #egypt, respect that PLEASE!).

• People of Egypt ONLY! Use this dial-up provided by friends in France to go online: +33172890150 (login ‚toto‘ password ‚toto‘)

Apparently, there are people bringing in Sat phones to provide Internet connectivity as well:

Activists have also begun smuggling satellite phones into the country and have gone so far as to establish an independent “mesh” of connections, forming what Deibert called an “essentially an autonomous internet, not routed through the Egyptian network.”


Read more: cbc.ca: Busting Egypt's web blackout

And there's SMS proxy (manually) and Internet proxy service (if you can get connectivity):

• Send SMS reports to +1 949 209 7559 and they will retweet for you. Please spread to those in #Egypt on battlefield

• Help the Egypt Revolutionaries by overcoming the Firewall https://www.accessnow.org/proxy-cloud\

• https://www.accessnow.org/

• https://www.mousematrix.com/

This tactic of blocking the Internet is getting old and stale. Iran did it last year, and it happened in a couple other small circumstances prior to that. People and business are finding ways around a government arbitrarily cutting the Internet. Each time it happens there are lessons learned and resiliency built in to the system to mitigate this kind of service loss.

This certainly has a much more sour sound to it now doesn't it?:
Obama 'Internet kill switch' plan approved by US Senate panel: President could get power to turn off Internet

This from Zerohedge.com:
Egypt tweets mapped in real time:

http://www.mibazaar.com/egypt.html

Very cool.

http://freedomofoceania.blogspot.com/20 ... ative.html

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