Live: Al Jazeera coverage of Egypt’s growing revolution

[lupercal]

1) I was the first

2) I was the first

3) And, of course, I was the first

Ha. I wanted to modestly balance those examples with instances where I've been wrong but frankly, I couldn't find any, so there ya go.

It's a gift I guess.

[jingofever]

Lotus revolution versus Egyptian revolution. I only heard a few people call it the Lotus Revolution and that was probably only during the first few days. Since then, nothing.

[JackRiddler]

.

I know very little about Syria and couldn't say for now what to believe of this story, beyond the very interesting opening part about Biasi.

http://counterpunch.org/lee05272011.html

May 27 - 29, 2011
Hello History, Get Me Rewrite
Distorting the Syrian Uprising With the Help of the (UK) Independent

By PETER LEE


The Syrian government has banned foreign and, I would imagine, anything but state-media reportage on the ongoing unrest.

So I guess that foreign journos have little to chew on except reports relayed by dissidents and their own, understandable resentment at Bashar al-Assad’s attempt to dominate the news cycle.

Even so, I think The (U.K.) Independent’s Alastair Beach or his editors reached a new low in submissive fluffing of the Syrian uprising.

The issue concerns a rather cool young Syrian gentleman, Ahmad Biasi, who made a guerilla video debunking desperate government spin concerning cellphone footage of heavy-handed government stomping of detainees in the town of Al Bayda. Not our town, said the government. Some old footage...maybe from Iraq?

Baisa did a video tour of his town, showing that the square where the stomping occurred was indisputably Al Bayda. At the end of the video, Biasi stood in front of the camera and held up his national ID card to certify the authenticity of his film.

The video went viral and the Syrian government detained Biasi.

Now let’s put the spinmobile in the deft hands of Alastair Beach. He writes:

“But his bravery came at a terrible cost. Earlier this month, Ahmad was arrested by one of Syria's most feared intelligence units. Human-rights activists – who received reports last week that he had died under torture – told The Independent that had been held in a secret-service headquarters in Damascus.

“Before the weekend started, many people in Syria thought that Ahmad Biasi was dead. Human-rights organisations were receiving reports that he had suffered a terrifying final few hours at the hands of Syria's secret police.

“By Saturday night, it transpired he was very much alive and had given an interview to state television offering proof to that effect. ‘We know he was detained and taken by security,’ said Wissam Tarif, executive director of the Syrian human-rights organisation Insan. ‘He was humiliated in front of other prisoners. They urinated on him and he lost consciousness after being electrocuted. He was very badly tortured. They made him an example to the others and made other prisoners watch as he was being tortured.’

“According to Mr Tarif, the types of abuse used by the Air Force Intelligence Directorate – the notorious branch of the secret police believed to have taken Ahmad – include electrocution, nail extraction and genital mutilation. ‘The level of brutality they are using is just absurd,’ Mr Tarif added. ‘It is so inhuman.’”

Other human-rights organisations also received reports of Ahmad's death. According to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, residents in Al-Bayda had feared that "Ahmad may have died after being subjected to severe torture".

At the end of the article, we get the denouement:

“Syrian state television dropped a happy bombshell. It ran an interview showing Ahmad Biasi sitting on a leather chair in a blank room expressing his "surprise" at hearing about his own death.

“Looking gaunt but otherwise healthy, he said: "I was home when I heard that I had died under torture in a prison. I was very surprised and I felt strange when I saw it on the news. I wondered how they broadcast such fake news. It is humiliating."

The Independent’s takeaway: Score 1 for the Uprising!

“Yet in spite of the dramatic turn of events, news of Ahmad's fate may turn out to harm the Syrian regime more than it had anticipated when it released the footage. Activists have already accused the secret police of extracting a forced confession, while others are saying that the interview has inadvertently done what Ahmad intended to do in the first place: prove that he was Syrian and that the original video of government abuse did not take place in Iraq.”

And the title of the piece: Protester who exposed lies at the heart of Syria's regime

Actually, he also appears to have exposed the exaggerations and misrepresentations that seem to permeate the media campaign of the Syrian dissidents...and the foreign media’s insatiable appetite for sensationalism.

In defense of Mr. Beach, it is possible that his efforts to report the fact of Biasi’s detention and the allegations of the opposition straight up got mangled by the editor.

Possibly, the original report was electrocuted, suffered genital mutilation, got pissed on, and/or suffered fingernail removal during its preparation. All these things can and do occur in the environs of a British newsroom.

It would be irresponsible not to speculate, or recycle the unfounded assertions of interested parties.

But I just know it came at a terrible cost.

I do not doubt that the Syrian security forces do terrible things to detainees.

But the real story here was that they apparently chose not do them to Biasi—though I would think it likely that they leaned on him in unpleasant physical and psychological ways. The Syrian government hoped to score a propaganda coup by revealing Biasi—a self-identified, genuine, and celebrated dissident!— emerging alive and reasonably well from the maw of Syrian government detention, thereby giving the lie to the scaremongering of the dissidents.

However, that was a propaganda victory that The Independent appears dead-set to deny the Syrian government, even at the cost of some markedly tortured prose.

The Syrian uprising is a little more complicated than non-violent protesters rising up against Syrian authoritarianism.

The struggle is still very much in the hearts-and-minds phase for both sides.

There are large numbers of Syrians not particularly sympathetic to the dissidents, whom the opposition is trying to wean away from the government by fomenting an ever deeper and ever more polarizing crisis and support the narrative of a government discredited by its own dysfunction.

It’s a different dynamic from Bahrain (total war against the Shi’a majority) and Yemen (popular uprising hijacked by Saudi meddling).

The government has tried to split the opposition by inflicting repression on those who continue to protest after the pledge of constitutional revision, inviting dialogue with those willing to discuss reforms through a state-mediated process, and raising the entirely plausible specter of a sectarian meltdown similar to Lebanon’s and Iraq’s to sway the general public in favor of the regime's continued survival.

Nobody has emerged from the ranks of the dissidents to negotiate; it’s pretty much Bashar-must-go.

How well this is working—basically, who will give up through exhaustion first, the demonstrators, the security forces, or the fence-sitters—remains to be seen.

However, from the smaller turnout, albeit at a larger number of demonstrations, there are some signs that the government’s grinding strategy of attrition may be prevailing.

And the opposition isn’t just a question of people’s power by non-violent demonstrators. It concludes some shadowy, militant forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood (which runs one of the top dissident social media sites) and reactionary, Saudi-backed strongmen like Rifaat Assad and Abdul Halim Khaddam.

Dozens of members of Syrian security forces have died in encounters with armed gangs. Dissident efforts to cover up and excuse the violence are a story in themselves. The soldiers “were shot by other soldiers who didn’t want to fire on dissidents”; they were “shot by their officers in a provocation”; in one instance, there was a concession that the security forces might have died at the hands of regime opponents, with the excuse that they reflected blood-for-blood tribal enmities generated by the crackdown. The sophists also had their go, declaring that, if the authoritarian government couldn’t protect its own troops, that was nothing more than a demonstration of the fact that it had forfeited its right to exist.

There is now a concerted campaign to keep the demonstrations going, while spurning the government’s attempts to engage in negotiations.

This might be because the dissidents fear that, once the tide revolutionary passion recedes, they will have a hard time forcing the Syrian government to live up to any bargain.

It also might be because there are important elements among the Syrian dissidents who are still loath to take leadership of negotiations and reveal themselves, because the focus might shift to them...and the Syrian public might not like what they see.

Reportedly, the Muslim Brotherhood—which has a long and bloody history of opposition to the Assad regime, including the insurrection that terminated in the Hama massacre—is considering stepping forward to give direction to the hitherto fractured movement.

The MB is midwifing a gathering in Ankara, Turkey, May 31 through June 2, that aims to give domestic demonstrators and foreign governments something concrete to get behind, thereby ratcheting up pressure on the regime. The Syrian government, while mindful of the importance of continued Turkish forbearance on the issue of the future of Assad’s regime, is obviously anxious and unhappy that the Turkish government has decided to give the opposition a platform.

Until then, the current strategy seems to bum rush the rising and keep the ball rolling through enthusiasm, outrage, propaganda, disinformation, some of it delivered courtesy of The Independent.

P.S. For you forensic etymologists out there, “the bums rush” originally referred to the forcible and unceremonious eviction of an indigent person by the bouncer from a bar or other place of business that did not welcome his presence. In the modern era, “bumrushing” took on a reverse meaning: a non-paying clientele forcing its way past security to gain admission to a club or concert. By extension, it means taking advantage of chaos, distraction, or carelessness by the powers-that-be to seize an otherwise unattainable and perhaps undeserved advantage.

Peter Lee is a business man who has spent thirty years observing, analyzing, and writing on Asian affairs. Lee can be reached at peterrlee-2000@yahoo.

[Nordic]

Ha. I wanted to modestly balance those examples with instances where I've been wrong but frankly, I couldn't find any, so there ya go.

It's a gift I guess.

The fact that you are convinced you're right about everything is exactly your problem.

And what makes you exactly like HMW to the point where I have wondered if you're the same person.

An open mind you're not.

[lupercal]

^ Bit of a joke there Nordic. Nevertheless it appears to be the case that I was the first here to identify the Egyptian operation as a full-on regime change on Jan. 17 though I expressed suspicions earlier in the church bombing thread.

Now whether said operation was indigenously inspired is I suppose debatable but if you put aside the strong feelings and look at the evidence it's pretty clear that it wasn't. Not that many Egyptians weren't sincerely swept up in it, but that's how soft power works. Here's a longish vid that rehearses some of the evidence if you're still wondering what it is:

"Exposing Democracy Promotion in the Middle East"

Uploaded by argonium79 on Apr 28, 2011
Direct link: http://youtu.be/4d7VqNyTHLw

[eyeno]

Lotus...Interesting. Have you guys read the "Secret Of The Golden Flower"? There are two translations as far as I know. I read both of them. best I remember "seeing without turning is not seeing, turning without seeing is not turning". Interesting book.

[AlicetheKurious]

Ok, lupercal, I just wasted 26 minutes and 11 seconds of my precious time watching this video that you claim shows "some of the evidence" basically that the Mossad or right-wing zionists were and are driving the Egyptian revolution. I must have blinked because if even one shred of evidence is in this video, I missed it. It breaks my heart to waste even a few minutes rebutting it, but I will, as concisely as possible:

The video tells us about the Georgian and Ukrainian "color revolutions" that we know were organized and financed by the likes of George Soros, various zionists and the CIA, but what it doesn't show is how they are even remotely connected to the revolution in Egypt (Egypt being the subject of this thread and the example I'm most familiar with). In the Middle East, we also had the "Cedar Revolution" in Lebanon and the "Green Revolution" in Iran. All these zionist/CIA backed "revolutions" had a number of things in common:

a) All of them targeted countries whose governments were known to be either hostile to, or in alliance with more powerful states that stood in the way of American/Israeli hegemonic ambitions. The purpose of the "revolutions" was regime change for the purpose of weakening and besieging opponents of the US and Israel (Russia and Iran) and bringing these countries into the American/Israeli sphere of influence.

b) In all these "color revolutions", there was a clearly-defined leadership of the "revolutionaries" that was openly pro-capitalist and hostile to workers' rights. Iran's "revolutionary" leader, Mousavi, oversaw the persecution, torture and murder of thousands of Iranian Leftists as Iran's Prime Minister in the 1980s. In the case of Lebanon's "Cedar Revolution" (aka "the Gucci Revolution" or the cynically-named "Independence Intifada"), the fascist right-wing Phalangists were in the vanguard, as well as other pro-American and covertly or even overtly pro-Israeli elements, and a large number of the protesters were highly Westernized and pro-American students of the elite American University of Beirut. Such statements by the anti-Resistance, pro-Western "revolutionaries" were not unusual:

“I love America. Tell Bush to come here. Thank him, thank [French President Jacques] Chirac. This is a great day for all Arab people,” said an Arab Christian named Sady.

“Americans are welcome. We need them,” said a demonstrator named Paul, a member of the Lebanese Forces, a Christian militia.

When told that U.S. troops were not likely to come, Paul said: “Well, then we need the French. We need NATO. We need help to clear our country of these dogs.” Link

Also,

Near the Mohammad Al Amin Mosque of former Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri in Beirut, I interviewed a founder of the Martyrs' Square tent city and asked about US-Israeli sponsorship of the 'Independence Intifadah'. Surrounded by red and white Lebanese flags, soldier Michael Sweiden of the Lebanese Forces emphasized he was Christian Lebanese.

"We love Israel", he told me. "Israel helps us. Israel is like our mother."

Years before its role in the so-called "Cedar Revolution" (a moniker coined by US Undersecretary of State Paula Dobriansky, a signatory to the Project for a New American Century), Israel awarded citizenship and grants of up to $10,000 to South Lebanon Army soldiers who collaborated with the Israeli Defense Forces during Lebanon's civil war. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz revealed, "Senior officials at Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's office were in touch with Lebanese leaders even before the current crisis." Backed by American and Israeli neocons, a Christian Lebanese Likud is proxying Israel's second invasion.

One example is the Lebanese Foundation for Peace, a self-styled "Government of Lebanon in Exile in Jerusalem" founded by former Lebanese Forces' military intelligence officer Nagi Najjar. Najjar, a CIA consultant, who testified not so long ago in support of Ariel Sharon's "complete innocence" in the Sabra and Shatila affair against charges by Human Rights Watch and regional governments. Najjar has also paired with Mossad agent Yossef Bodansky while lobbying the U.S. congress to intervene in Hezbollah-dominated south Lebanon. His NGO, The Lebanese Foundation for Peace, endorsed the AIPAC-sponsored sanctions against Syria, known as the Syria Accountability / Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003. On his LFP website featuring an Israeli flag, Najjar's "government in exile" issued an official declaration; "We, the people of Free Lebanon, thank Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and Foreign Minister Silvan Shalom for the campaign launched by the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Afffairs aimed at ousting Syria from occupying Lebanon."

Another NGO of the Lebanese Likud is the United States Committee for a Free Lebanon. Its President, Ziad Abdel Nour is the son of wealthy Lebanese Minister of Parliament Khalil Abdel Nour. USCFL partners with designated "democratizers" such as the American Enterprise Institute (created by Lebanese-American William Baroody, Sr.), Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Republican Jewish Coalition, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, Middle East Forum, the Hudson Institute and kindred pro-Israel lobbies.

The USCFL hails former Lebanese president Amin Gemayel for signing a peace deal with Israel in 1983. (According to the UAE's late president Sheik Zayed bin sultan Al Nahyan, Saddam Hussein agreed to leave Iraq before the war in 2003 to halt the invasion. But Amin Gemayel, the mediator between Saddam and the US administration, wrongly informed the US that Hussein had rejected all offers of exile). Abdel Nour's other links include the World Lebanese Organization, which advocates Israel's re-occupation of south Lebanon. In 2000, he and neocon Daniel Pipes composed the policy paper "Ending Syria's Occupation of Lebanon: the US Role" and together co-author the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin. The bulletin is a project of the neocon Middle East Forum and is a frequent resource for American intelligence agencies. Link

c) In the phony "color revolutions" in Iran and Lebanon, the Western media used deliberately deceptive tactics to exaggerate the size and importance of the protests, and ignored subsequent popular counter-demonstrations that dwarfed those of the "revolutionaries". In Lebanon, for example, the "Cedar Revolution" that was trumpeted by the Western media, and which forced the Karami government to resign, never exceeded 70,000 protesters, while the subsequent counter-demonstration led by the Resistance brought out between 200,000 (CNN), 500,000 (BBC) and 1.5 million protesters (Al Jazeera), to the thunderous silence of the Western media. Similarly, in Iran, the Western media neglected to mention that the so-called "Green Revolution" was largely limited to certain neighborhoods in the capital Tehran (Iran is a huge country). But even in Tehran, much larger pro-Ahmadinejad demonstrations were not only played down, but deliberately misrepresented as pro-Mousavi demonstrations!!

In Egypt, the exact opposite was true. The Egyptian revolution rose up against a right-wing, IMF and World Bank dominated regime that collaborated with Israel in the criminal siege of Gaza, that provided Israel with 40% of its energy needs by exporting Egyptian gas to Israel practically for free against the people's will, that was totally dependent on and subservient to the United States. The pipeline that pumps gas to Israel has been blown up TWICE, while those who signed the agreement to provide Israel with gas face charges of high treason.

For the first time in decades, as a direct result of this revolution, Egypt's Communist Party has come out into the open and is organizing itself into an official party, along with four other Leftist parties. Independent trade unions are sprouting up all over the country as well as legal challenges to the corrupt deals that led to the transfer of public sector companies into the hands of private foreign "investors". Israel's and the US' business partners are either under arrest or in hiding, sought by Interpol. Instead of the American flag representing "freedom", as typically in the so-called "color revolutions", it is being burned:



Yeah, the Mossad and neo-cons are behind this:



There were some signs telling Mubarak to go that were written in HEBREW, for pete's sake, and chants of "Talk to him in Hebrew, he doesn't understand Arabic!" were common before he was toppled. (It rhymes in Arabic).



The protests demanded that the Rafah border be opened, and for the Camp David agreement to be either reviewed or scrapped altogether. One of the major accomplishments of the revolution is the reconciliation between Fateh and Hamas and their commitment to join forces against their only real enemy, Israel!

A major characteristic of the revolution is hostility to the United States and Israel, who are rightly seen as the Mubarak regime's only real supporters. This is true across the board, from its extreme Right to the extreme Left.

But according to you, lupercal, the US and Israel are the revolution's organizers.

ok, I'm getting bored.

For the first time ever, I'm considering using the "ignore" button so I'm not aggravated into wasting any more time responding to this sort of thing.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Alice you must realize that this makes no sense? If Mubarak was an absolute dictator, then he wasn't a puppet. If he was a puppet, then his ministers weren't accountable to him.

Are you doing that on purpose?

Yes, yes he is.

Just saw the debunking.

While we are on the subject of who called this first, I seem to remember Alice saying this for years, that Egypt was ready to go pop and the rest of the Middle East with it, especially after Khalid Said was killed.

[lupercal]

Ok, lupercal, I just wasted 26 minutes and 11 seconds of my precious time watching this video that you claim shows "some of the evidence" basically that the Mossad or right-wing zionists were and are driving the Egyptian revolution.

Congratulations Alice, your very first statement is false. I've made no such spurious claim, nor does the video, and I notice you haven't backed your claim with any documentation. But I'm not surprised that's how it appeared to you because that's how nearly every US-UK intel operation appears to you, except this one, which you seem convinced is an anomaly, unlike every other Middle Eastern and African destabilization of the last 58 years. I don't imagine you're much interested in reality, but for the record, here's a good account of what's really going on, in print and in toto to help you avoid making any more embarrassing false claims (and please note the actual documentation following):
.............................................

Egypt's Revolution: Creative Destruction for a 'Greater Middle East'?
F. William Engdahl, February 5, 2011 http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/p ... 0Style.pdf


Fast on the heels of the regime change in Tunisia came a popular-based protest movement launched on January 25 against the entrenched order of Egypt's Hosni Mubarak. Contrary to the carefully-cultivated impression that the Obama Administration is trying to retain the present regime of Mubarak, Washington in fact is orchestrating the Egyptian as well as other regional regime changes from Syria to Yemen to Jordan and well beyond in a process some refer to as "creative destruction."

The template for such covert regime change has been developed by the Pentagon, US intelligence agencies and various think-tanks such as RAND Corporation over decades, beginning with the May 1968 destabilization of the de Gaulle presidency in France. This is the first time since the US- backed regime changes in Eastern Europe some two decades back that Washington has initiated simultaneous operations in many countries in a region. It is a strategy born of a certain desperation and one not without significant risk for the Pentagon and for the long-term Wall Street agenda. What the outcome will be for the peoples of the region and for the world is as yet unclear.

Yet while the ultimate outcome of defiant street protests in Cairo and across Egypt and the Islamic world remains unclear, the broad outlines of a US covert strategy are already clear.

No one can dispute the genuine grievances motivating millions to take to the streets at risk of life.No one can defend atrocities of the Mubarak regime and its torture and repression of dissent. No one can dispute the explosive rise in food prices as Chicago and Wall Street commodity speculators, and the conversion of American farmland to the insane cultivation of corn for ethanol fuel drive grain prices through the roof. Egypt is the world's largest wheat importer, much of it from the USA. Chicago wheat futures rose by a staggering 74% between June and November 2010 leading to an Egyptian food price inflation of some 30% despite government subsidies.

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt's Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

To say relations between Obama and Mubarak were ice cold from the outset would be no
exaggeration. Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the mildersounding "New Middle East."

As real as the factors are that are driving millions into the streets across North Africa and the Middle East, what cannot be ignored is the fact that Washington is deciding the timing and as they see it, trying to shape the ultimate outcome of comprehensive regime change destabilizations across the Islamic world. The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.2

The strategy had been in various State Department and Pentagon files since at least a decade or longer. After George W. Bush declared a War on Terror in 2001 it was called the Greater Middle East Project. Today it is known as the less threatening-sounding “New Middle East” project. It is a strategy to break open the states of the region from Morocco to Afghanistan, the region defined by David Rockefeller's friend Samuel Huntington in his infamous Clash of Civilizations essay in Foreign Affairs.

Egypt rising?

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim
Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new
production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

Some background on the actors on the ground is useful before looking at what Washington's longterm strategic plan might be for the Islamic world from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and ultimately into the Islamic populations of Central Asia, to the borders of China and Russia.

Washington 'soft' revolutions

The protests that led to the abrupt firing of the entire Egyptian government by President Mubarak on the heels of the panicked flight of Tunisia's Ben Ali into a Saudi exile are not at all as "spontaneous" as the Obama White House, Clinton State Department or CNN, BBC and other major media in the West make them to be.

They are being organized in a Ukrainian-style high-tech electronic fashion with large internet-linked networks of youth tied to Mohammed ElBaradei and the banned and murky secret Muslim Brotherhood, whose links to British and American intelligence and freemasonry are widely reported.3

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran's Ahmedinejad in 2009.

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass
protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.

April 6 is headed by one Ahmed Maher Ibrahim, a 29-year-old civil engineer, who set up the
Facebook site to support a workers' call for a strike on April 6, 2008. According to a New York Times account from 2009, some 800,000 Egyptians, most youth, were already then Facebook or Twitter members. In an interview with the Washington-based Carnegie
Endowment, April 6 Movement head Maher stated, "Being the first youth movement in Egypt to use internet-based modes of communication like Facebook and Twitter, we aim to promote democracy by encouraging public involvement in the political process." 4

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei's National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.5

Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events. Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood. ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.6

Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Kefaya—Pentagon 'non-violent warfare'

Kefaya is at the heart of mobilizing the Egyptian protest demonstrations that back ElBaradei's candidacy. The word Kefaya translates to "enough!" Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color
Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means "enough!"

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp's misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as "non-violence as a method of warfare." 8
The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.

The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood. 9 Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement capitalized early on new social media and
digital technology as its main means of mobilization. In particular, political blogging, posting
uncensored youtube shorts and photographic images were skillfully and extremely professionally used. At a rally already back in December 2009 Kefaya had announced support for the candidacy of Mohammed ElBaradei for the 2011 Egyptian elections.10

RAND and Kefaya

No less a US defense establishment think-tank than the RAND Corporation has conducted a
detailed study of Kefaya. The Kefaya study as RAND themselves note, was "sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Department of the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community." 11

A nicer bunch of democratically-oriented gentlemen and women could hardly be found.
In their 2008 report to the Pentagon, the RAND researchers noted the following in relation toEgypt's Kefaya:

"The United States has professed an interest in greater democratization in the Arab world,
particularly since the September 2001 attacks by terrorists from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Egypt, and Lebanon. This interest has been part of an effort to reduce destabilizing political violence and terrorism. As President George W. Bush noted in a 2003 address to the National Endowment for Democracy, “As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment, and violence ready for export” (The White House, 2003). The United States has used varying means to pursue democratization, including a military intervention that, though launched for other reasons, had the installation of a democratic government as one of its end goals.
However, indigenous reform movements are best positioned to advance democratization in their own country." 12

RAND researchers have spent years perfecting techniques of unconventional regime change under the name "swarming," the method of deploying mass mobs of digitally-linked youth in hit-and-run protest formations moving like swarms of bees.13 Washington and the stable of "human rights" and "democracy" and "non-violence" NGOs it oversees, over the past decade or more has increasingly relied on sophisticated "spontaneous" nurturing of local indigenous protest movements to create pro-Washington regime change and to
advance the Pentagon agenda of global Full Spectrum Dominance. As the RAND study of Kefaya states in its concluding recommendations to the Pentagon:

"The US government already supports reform efforts through organizations such as the US Agency for International Development and the United Nations Development Programme. Given the current negative popular standing of the United States in the region, US support for reform initiatives is best carried out through nongovernmental and nonprofit institutions." 14 The RAND 2008 study was even more concrete about future US Government support for Egyptian and other "reform" movements:

"The US government should encourage nongovernmental organizations to offer training to
reformers, including guidance on coalition building and how to deal with internal differences in pursuit of democratic reform. Academic institutions (or even nongovernmental organizations associated with US political parties, such as the International Republican Institute or the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs) could carry out such training, which would equip reform leaders to reconcile their differences peacefully and democratically. "Fourth, the United States should help reformers obtain and use information technology, perhaps by offering incentives for US companies to invest in the region’s communications infrastructure and information technology. US information technology companies could also help ensure that the Web sites of reformers can remain in operation and could invest in technologies such as anonymizers that could offer some shelter from government scrutiny. This could also be accomplished by employing technological safegaurds to prevent regimes from sabotaging the Web sites of reformers. " 15

As their Kefaya monograph states, it was prepared in 2008 by the "RAND National Security Research Division’s Alternative Strategy Initiative, sponsored by the Rapid Reaction Technology Office in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, technology, and Logistics. The Alternative Strategy Initiative, just to underscore the point, includes "research on creative use of the media, radicalization of youth, civic involvement to stem sectarian violence, the provision of social services to mobilize aggrieved sectors of indigenous populations, and the topic of this volume, alternative movements." 16



In May 2009 just before Obama's Cairo trip to meet Mubarak, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton hosted a number of the young Egyptian activists in Washington under the auspices of Freedom House, another "human rights" Washington-based NGO with a long history of involvement in USsponsored regime change from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and other Color Revolutions. Clinton and Acting Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs Jeffrey Feltman met the sixteen activists at the end of a two-month "fellowship" organized by Freedom House’s New Generation program.17

Freedom House and Washington's government-funded regime change NGO, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) are at the heart of the uprisings now sweeping across the Islamic world. They fit the geographic context of what George W. Bush proclaimed after 2001 as his Greater
Middle East Project to bring "democracy" and "liberal free market" economic reform to the Islamic
countries from Afghanistan to Morocco. When Washington talks about introducing “liberal free
market reform” people should watch out. It is little more than code for bringing those economies
under the yoke of the dollar system and all that implies.

Washington's NED in a larger agenda

If we make a list of the countries in the region which are undergoing mass-based protest
movements since the Tunisian and Egyptian events and overlay them onto a map, we find an
almost perfect convergence between the protest countries today and the original map of the
Washington Greater Middle East Project that was first unveiled during the George W. Bush
Presidency after 2001.

Washington's NED has been quietly engaged in preparing a wave of regime destabilizations across North Africa and the Middle East since the 2001-2003 US military invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. The list of where the NED is active is revealing. Its website lists Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Sudan as well, interestingly, as Israel. Coincidentally these countries are almost all today subject to "spontaneous" popular regime-change uprisings.

The International Republican Institute and the National Democratic Institute for International
Affairs mentioned by the RAND document study of Kefaya are subsidiary organizations of the
Washington-based and US Congress-financed National Endowment for Democracy.
The NED is the coordinating Washington agency for regime destabilization and change. It is active
from Tibet to Ukraine, from Venezuela to Tunisia, from Kuwait to Morocco in reshaping the world
after the collapse of the Soviet Union into what George H.W. Bush in a 1991 speech to Congress
proclaimed triumphantly as the dawn of a New World Order. 18

As the architect and first head of the NED, Allen Weinstein told the Washington Post in 1991 that,
"a lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA"19
The NED Board of Directors includes or has included former Defense Secretary and CIA Deputy
head, Frank Carlucci of the Carlyle Group; retired General Wesley Clark of NATO; neo-conservative
warhawk Zalmay Khalilzad who was architect of George W. Bush's Afghan invasion and later
ambassador to Afghanistan as well as to occupied Iraq. Another NED board member, Vin Weber,
co-chaired a major independent task force on US Policy toward Reform in the Arab World with
former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and was a founding member of the ultra-hawkish
Project for a New American Century think-tank with Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, which
advocated forced regime change in Iraq as early as 1998.20

The NED is supposedly a private, non-government, non-profit foundation, but it receives a yearly
appropriation for its international work from the US Congress. The National Endowment for
Democracy is dependent on the US taxpayer for funding, but because NED is not a government
agency, it is not subject to normal Congressional oversight.
NED money is channelled into target countries through four “core foundations”—the National
Democratic Institute for International Affairs, linked to the Democratic Party; the International
Republican Institute tied to the Republican Party; the American Center for International Labor
Solidarity linked to the AFL-CIO US labor federation as well as the US State Department; and the
Center for International Private Enterprise linked to the free-market US Chamber of Commerce.
The late political analyst Barbara Conry noted that,
"NED has taken advantage of its alleged private status to influence foreign elections, an activity
that is beyond the scope of AID or USIA and would otherwise be possible only through a CIA covert
operation. Such activities, it may also be worth noting, would be illegal for foreign groups
operating in the United States." 21

Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to
Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and
Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the
reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED. 22

In 2005 US President George W. Bush made a speech to the NED. In a long, rambling discourse
which equated "Islamic radicalism" with the evils of communism as the new enemy, and using a
deliberately softer term "broader Middle East" for the term Greater Middle East that had aroused
much distruct in the Islamic world, Bush stated,

"The fifth element of our strategy in the war on terror is to deny the militants future recruits by
replacing hatred and resentment with democracy and hope across the broader Middle East. This is
a difficult and long-term project, yet there's no alternative to it. Our future and the future of that
region are linked. If the broader Middle East is left to grow in bitterness, if countries remain in
misery, while radicals stir the resentments of millions, then that part of the world will be a source
of endless conflict and mounting danger, and for our generation and the next. If the peoples of
that region are permitted to choose their own destiny, and advance by their own energy and by
their participation as free men and women, then the extremists will be marginalized, and the flow
of violent radicalism to the rest of the world will slow, and eventually end...We're encouraging our
friends in the Middle East, including Egypt and Saudi Arabia, to take the path of reform, to
strengthen their own societies in the fight against terror by respecting the rights and choices of
their own people. We're standing with dissidents and exiles against oppressive regimes, because
we know that the dissidents of today will be the democratic leaders of tomorrow..." 23

The US Project for a 'Greater Middle East'

The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to
Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department
strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.
The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change
operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former
Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a
white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.
That policy recommendation was titled A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm. It
was the first Washington think-tank paper to openly call for removing Saddam Hussein in Iraq, for
an aggressive military stance toward the Palestinians, striking Syria and Syrian targets in
Lebanon.24 Reportedly, the Netanyahu government at that time buried the Perle-Feith report, as
being far too risky.
By the time of the events of September 11, 2001 and the return to Washington of the archwarhawk
neoconservatives around Perle and others, the Bush Administration put highest priority
on an expanded version of the Perle-Feith paper, calling it their Greater Middle East Project. Feith
was named Bush’s Under Secretary of Defense.

Behind the facade of proclaiming democratic reforms of autocratic regimes in the entire region, the
Greater Middle East was and is a blueprint to extend US military control and to break open the
statist economies in the entire span of states from Morocco to the borders of China and Russia.
In May 2005, before the rubble from the US bombing of Baghdad had cleared, George W. Bush, a
President not remembered as a great friend of democracy, proclaimed a policy of "spreading
democracy" to the entire region and explicitly noted that that meant "the establishment of a USMiddle
East free trade area within a decade." 25

Prior to the June 2004 G8 Summit on Sea Island, Georgia, Washington issued a working paper,
"G8-Greater Middle East Partnership." Under the section titled Economic Opportunities was
Washington's dramatic call for "an economic transformation similar in magnitude to that
undertaken by the formerly communist countries of Central and Eastern Europe."
The US paper said that the key to this would be the strengthening of the private sector as the way
to prosperity and democracy. It misleadingly claimed it would be done via the miracle of
microfinance where as the paper put it, "a mere $100 million a year for five years will lift 1.2
million entrepreneurs (750,000 of them women) out of poverty, through $400 loans to each." 26
The US plan envisioned takeover of regional banking and financial affairs by new institutions
ostensibly international but, like World Bank and IMF, de facto controlled by Washington, including
WTO. The goal of Washington’s long-term project is to completely control the oil, to completely
control the oil revenue flows, to completely control the entire economies of the region, from
Morocco to the borders of China and all in between. It is a project as bold as it is desperate.
Once the G8 US paper was leaked in 2004 in the Arabic Al-Hayat, opposition to it spread widely
across the region, with a major protest to the US definition of the Greater Middle East. As an article
in the French Le Monde Diplomatique in April 2004 noted, "besides the Arab countries, it covers
Afghanistan, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, whose only common denominator is that they lie in
the zone where hostility to the US is strongest, in which Islamic fundamentalism in its anti-Western
form is most rife." 27 It should be noted that the NED is also active inside Israel with a number of
programs.
Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of
Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration
to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

Will it work?

At this writing it is unclear what the ultimate upshot of the latest US-led destabilizations across the
Islamic world will bring. It is not clear what will result for Washington and the advocates of a USdominated
New World Order. Their agenda is clearly one of creating a Greater Middle East under
firm US grip as a major control of the capital flows and energy flows of a future China, Russia and
a European Union that might one day entertain thoughts of drifting away from that American order.
It has huge potential implications for the future of Israel as well. As one US commentator put it,
"The Israeli calculation today is that if 'Mubarak goes' (which is usually stated as 'If America lets
Mubarak go'), Egypt goes. If Tunisia goes (same elaboration), Morocco and Algeria go. Turkey has
already gone (for which the Israelis have only themselves to blame). Syria is gone (in part because
Israel wanted to cut it off from Sea of Galilee water access). Gaza has gone to Hamas, and the
Palestine Authority might soon be gone too (to Hamas?). That leaves Israel amid the ruins of a
policy of military domination of the region." 28
The Washington strategy of "creative destruction" is clearly causing sleepless nights not only in the
Islamic world but also reportedly in Tel Aviv, and ultimately by now also in Beijing and Moscow and
across Central Asia.

NOTES

1 DEBKA, Mubarak believes a US-backed Egyptian military faction plotted his ouster, February 4, 2011,
accessed in http://www.debka.com/weekly/480/. DEBKA is open about its good ties to Israeli intelligence and
security agencies. While its writings must be read with that in mind, certain reports they publish often
contain interesting leads for further investigation.

2 Ibid.

3 The Center for Grassroots Oversight, 1954-1970: CIA and the Muslim Brotherhood ally to oppose
Egyptian President Nasser, http://www.historycommons.org/context.jsp?
item=western_support_for_islamic_militancy_202700&scale=0. According to the late Miles Copeland, a
CIA official stationed in Egypt during the Nasser era, the CIA allied with the Muslim Brotherhood which
was opposed to Nasser's secular regime as well as his nationalist opposition to brotherhood pan-Islamic
ideology.

4 Jijo Jacob, What is Egypt's April 6 Movement?, February 1, 2011, accessed in
http://www.ibtimes.com/articles/107387/ ... vement.htm

5 Ibid.

6 Janine Zacharia, Opposition groups rally around Mohamed ElBaradei, Washington Post, January 31,
2011, accessed in http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/
content/article/2011/01/31/AR2011013103470_2.html?sid=ST2011013003319.

7 National Endowment for Democracy, Middle East and North Africa Program Highlights 2009, accessed in
http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle ... highlights.

8 Amitabh Pal, Gene Sharp: The Progressive Interview, The Progressive, March 1, 2007.

9 Emmanuel Sivan, Why Radical Muslims Aren't Taking over Governments, Middle East Quarterly,
December 1997, pp. 3-9
10 Carnegie Endowment, The Egyptian Movement for Change (Kifaya), accessed in
http://egyptelections.carnegieendowment ... nge-kifaya

11 Nadia Oweidat, et al, The Kefaya Movement: A Case Study of a Grassroots Reform Initiative, Prepared
for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Santa Monica, Ca., RAND_778.pdf, 2008, p. iv.

12 Ibid.

13 For a more detailed discussion of the RAND "swarming" techniques see F. William Engdahl, Full
Spectrum Dominance: Totalitarian Democracy in the New World Order, edition.engdahl, 2009, pp. 34-41.

14 Nadia Oweidat et al, op. cit., p. 48.

15 Ibid., p. 50.

16 Ibid., p. iii.

17 Michel Chossudovsky, The Protest Movement in Egypt: "Dictators" do not Dictate, They Obey Orders,
January 29, 2011, accessed in http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php? ... &aid=22993

18 George Herbert Walker Bush, State of the Union Address to Congress, 29 January 1991. In the speech
Bush at one point declared in a triumphant air of celebration of the collapse of the Sovoiet Union, "What
is at stake is more than one small country, it is a big idea—a new world order..."

19 Allen Weinstein, quoted in David Ignatius, Openness is the Secret to Democracy, Washington Post
National Weekly Edition, 30 September 1991, pp. 24-25.

20 National Endowment for Democracy, Board of Directors, accessed in http://www.ned.org/about/board

21 Barbara Conry, Loose Cannon: The National Endowment for Democracy, Cato Foreign Policy Briefing
No. 27, November 8, 1993, accessed in http://www.cato.org/pubs/fpbriefs/fpb-027.html.

22 National Endowment for Democracy, 2009 Annual Report, Middle East and North Africa, accessed in
http://www.ned.org/publications/annual- ... ual-report.

23 George W. Bush, Speech at the National Endowment for Democracy, Washington, DC, October 6, 2005,
accessed in http://www.presidentialrhetoric.com/spe ... 06.05.html.

24 Richard Perle, Douglas Feith et al, A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm, 1996,
Washington and Tel Aviv, The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, accessed in
http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm

25 George W. Bush, Remarks by the President in Commencement Address at the University of South
Carolina, White House, 9 May 2003.

26 Gilbert Achcar, Fantasy of a Region that Doesn't Exist: Greater Middle East, the US plan, Le Monde
Diplomatique, April 4, 2004, accessed in http://mondediplo.com/2004/04/04world

27 Ibid.

28 William Pfaff, American-Israel Policy Tested by Arab Uprisings, accessed in
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/ame ... _20110201/
.................

De rien.

[barracuda]

F. William Engdahl

Caveat emptor.

[JackRiddler]

.

Of course he does it on purpose. Probably as unpaid, self-appointed freelance. (I'm of the camp that likes to think that for all the billions it eats out of our pockets, the CIA can surely train better disinformation trolls than this.) The alternative is ugly to contemplate: He's really stupid, and you're spending page after page arguing with him. After a year or more of this pretend-contrarianism and brutally dumb counter-factualism, everyone should know there's a cure for lupus. Don't feed the sheep in wolf's clothing! Ignore ("foe") is a great feature.

Besides, for each popular resistance he wants to run down and defame, he has his own threads where he can invert reality without derailing real threads, like this one. Ignore him, and he'll go back to bumping those.

For example:

Mubarak the Great: Unsung Martyr and Immortal Hero of Anti-Imperialism - by lupercal
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=31179

"Hey You Tunisian Riff Raff, I rented this chair! GTFO My Beach!" - by lupercal
viewtopic.php?f=8&t=30949

etc.

[lupercal]

^ Stooge. For the record those are bogus thread titles. Please let's stick to the topic if we can and avoid the ad hominems okay? Or at least make them funnier. Believe it or not I went to some trouble to format Engdahl's article from a PDF though I've since found it online here in case it'll make for easier reading:

http://www.voltairenet.org/article168381.html

p.s. barracuda that's interesting though a bit inconclusive so I'll have to return to that rabbit hole later. Meantime here's Engdahl's Voltairenet bio from the link above:

F. William Engdahl

US-German author and analyst of geopolitical and economic issues. His books include A Century of War : Anglo-American Oil Politics and the New World Order (2011, republished in a new edition) and Gods of Money: Wall Street and the Death of the American Century (2010)

and here's his site, "William Engdahl - Geopolitics Geoeconomics": http://www.engdahl.oilgeopolitics.net/index.html

[AlicetheKurious]

What is widely ignored in the CNN and BBC and other Western media coverage of the Egypt events is the fact that whatever his excesses at home, Egypt's Mubarak represented a major obstacle within the region to the larger US agenda.

"The fact"? How?

Mubarak was staunchly opposed to Obama policies on Iran and how to deal with its nuclear program, on Obama policies towards the Persian Gulf states, to Syria and to Lebanon as well as to the Palestinians.1 He was a formidable thorn in the larger Washington agenda for the entire region, Washington’s Greater Middle East Project, more recently redubbed the mildersounding "New Middle East."

"A formidable thorn?" Bullshit. One reason Mubarak was so disliked is precisely that he did everything the Americans and the Israelis wanted, no matter how repulsive, at the expense of the Egyptian, Palestinian and Lebanese people. The more hated he became domestically, and by peoples across the Arab world, the more dependent he became and the more he clung to his American and Israeli patrons. Are you aware that on his last day in power, the only person whose phone calls he was still accepting were those of his close friend the Israeli war criminal Binyamin Ben Eliezer who was infamous in Egypt for his horrible crimes against Egyptian POWs? Egypt's relations with Iran were openly hostile and Egyptian and other Shi'ites were routinely harassed by Egyptian State Security. At the height of Israel's bombing campaign against Lebanon in 2006, Mubarak dutifully parroted the American/Israeli line which accused the Lebanese Resistance of responsibility for Israel's criminal attack, and he even provoked Lebanese and Arab outrage by insulting its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and referring to him as "that guy, whats-his-name". The personnel at the Egyptian embassy in Beirut was openly charged by Lebanon's former General Security Chief Jamil al-Sayyed back in September 2010 with conspiring with other pro-American parties to destabilize Lebanon, and the Egyptian ambassador, Ahmed Hilmi, explicitly threatened war against Syria. With Mubarak in power, Egyptian embassies in the Middle East and around the world were frequently the site of protests against Egypt's collaboration in Israel's barbaric siege against Gaza.

The day of the remarkably well-coordinated popular demonstrations demanding Mubarak step down, key members of the Egyptian military command including Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Sami Hafez Enan were all in Washington as guests of the Pentagon. That conveniently neutralized the decisive force of the Army to stop the anti-Mubarak protests from growing in the critical early days.

No, the army could not have stopped the protests. Egypt has one of the largest and well-equipped police and internal security forces in the world, nearly 2 million strong, and they failed. Mubarak sent in his Republican Guard, and they failed. Mubarak did issue orders to the army and the air force to kill the protesters, but the officers and troops refused. Faced with the very real threat of mutiny in the ranks and possibly even a coup, the army brass had little choice but to side (or at least pretend to side) with the revolution.

The current Pentagon scenario for Egypt reads like a Cecil B. DeMille Hollywood spectacular, only this one with a cast of millions of Twitter-savvy well-trained youth, networks of Muslim Brotherhood operatives, working with a US-trained military. In the starring role of the new production at the moment is none other than a Nobel Peace Prize winner who conveniently appears to pull all the threads of opposition to the ancien regime into what appears as a seamless transition into a New Egypt under a self-proclaimed liberal democratic revolution.

That "scenario" would have been soooo much more impressive if it hadn't been written by the author AFTER the revolution. As for "the starring role", that shows how little the author knows: since last year, when he burst onto the domestic scene, grassroots public support for and interest in Al Baradei has largely dissipated, making him a very minor player today. (I must say, though, I do find his views interesting and attractive, but like the vast majority of Egyptians, I wouldn't vote for him.) By the way, he has withdrawn his presidential candidacy.

At this point the anti-Mubarak movement looks like anything but a threat to US influence in the region, quite the opposite. It has all the footprints of another US-backed regime change along the model of the 2003-2004 Color Revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine and the failed Green Revolution against Iran's Ahmedinejad in 2009.

Bullshit. See my previous post.

The call for an Egyptian general strike and a January 25 Day of Anger that sparked the mass protests demanding Mubarak resign was issued by a Facebook-based organization calling itself the April 6 Movement. The protests were so substantial and well-organized that it forced Mubarak to ask his cabinet to resign and appoint a new vice president, Gen. Omar Suleiman, former Minister of Intelligence.

That's so funny. The Leftist April 6 Movement has its roots in a strike back in December 2006, by 3000 women workers in a textile factory in the town of Mahalla in the Nile Delta, which is the center of Egypt's textile industry. The government had promised them bonuses and failed to deliver. The women called for their male colleagues join them and within days the entire town was rocked by strikes and sit-ins demanding a decent minimum wage and working conditions. From Mahalla, the strikes began to spread across the country, making them virtually impossible to control. By February 2008, workers across the nation were rising up and soon were joined by doctors, tax collectors, you name it. During this period, an estimated 200,000 workers joined the strike wave. The demands were not only economic, but also political, against Mubarak's disastrous privatization policy and his plan to bequeath the presidency to his son Gamal, and against the IMF and Western imperialism. The Mubarak regime refused to address the terrible conditions that had sparked the strikes and treated them as a security problem to be mercilessly crushed.

The reason it's called April 6 is that this is the date in 2008 when workers in Mahalla asked for one big protest across the nation to force the government to respond to their demands. Instead, the town of Mahalla was invaded by a massive police force who beat, tear-gassed and shot the protesters. The town's electricity was cut, and hundreds of people were arrested; many of them are still missing. Mubarak's security forces cracked down on Leftists across the country, ransacking the homes of and arresting professors, bloggers and political activists. Activists began to use the internet to keep track of arrests, to exchange information and to promote national and international solidarity with Egyptian workers. And that's how "April 6" became a nation-wide rallying cry, a Facebook group and an important Leftist movement in Egypt.

Maher also announced that his April 6 Movement backs former UN International Atomic Energy Aagency (IAEA) head and declared Egyptian Presidential candidate, ElBaradei along with ElBaradei's National Association for Change (NAC) coalition. The NAC includes among others George Ishak, a leader in Kefaya Movement, and Mohamed Saad El-Katatni, president of the parliamentary bloc of the controversial Ikhwan or Muslim Brotherhood.

...Not far in the background is the more discreet Muslim Brotherhood. ElBaradei at this point is being projected as the central figure in a future Egyptian parliamentary democratic change. Curiously, though he has not lived in Egypt for the past thirty years, he has won the backing of every imaginable part of the Eyptian political spectrum from communists to Muslim Brotherhood to Kefaya and April 6 young activists.

Hellooo. Practically everybody who opposed Mubarak supported Baradei's NAC at the time. Unlike local activists, El Baradei enjoyed the advantage that the Mubarak regime couldn't really touch him because of his high international profile and status. He was a Nobel laureate, and he had received Egypt's most prestigious honor from Mubarak himself, the Nile Award. Because of who he is, he became an ideal "human shield" behind which all regime opponents could and did rally. Everybody, including me.

Judging from the calm demeanour ElBaradei presents these days to CNN interviewers, he also likely has the backing of leading Egyptian generals opposed to the Mubarak rule for whatever reasons as well as some very influential persons in Washington.

Well, they're out of luck, then, because he's just withdrawn his candidacy, as I mentioned earlier. The fact is, under Mubarak he was the only alternative to Mubarak's hated son Gamal, but in the new political landscape where many excellent and far more qualified and popular candidates have come forward, he is no longer a player.

Today Kefaya is at the center of the unfolding Egyptian events.

No, it's not.

The word Kefaya translates to "enough!" Curiously, the planners at the Washington National Endowment for Democracy (NED) 7 and related color revolution NGOs apparently were bereft of creative new catchy names for their Egyptian Color Revolution. In their November 2003 Rose Revolution in Georgia, the US-financed NGOs chose the catch word, Kmara! In order to identify the youth-based regime change movement. Kmara in Georgian also means "enough!"

That's funny. I remember the Israeli Yesh Gvul! (Enough!) movement from the 1980s. Was it founded by the NED too?

Like Kefaya, Kmara in Georgia was also built by the Washington-financed trainers from the NED and other groups such as Gene Sharp's misleadingly-named Albert Einstein Institution which uses what Sharp once identified as "non-violence as a method of warfare."

The various youth networks in Georgia as in Kefaya were carefully trained as a loose, decentralized network of cells, deliberately avoiding a central organization that could be broken and could have brought the movement to a halt. Training of activists in techniques of non-violent resistance was done at sports facilities, making it appear innocuous. Activists were also given training in political marketing, media relations, mobilization and recruiting skills.

Pure, unadulterated bullshit.

The formal name of Kefaya is Egyptian Movement for Change. It was founded in 2004 by select Egyptian intellectuals at the home of Abu ‘l-Ala Madi, leader of the al-Wasat party, a party reportedly created by the Muslim Brotherhood. Kefaya was created as a coalition movement united only by the call for an end Mubarak’s rule.

Kefaya! (Enough!) was founded in 2004 in response to clear signs that Mubarak was preparing to transfer his 23-year old dictatorship to his son Gamal. It was a loose association of dissident university professors and other intellectuals and writers and journalists comprising a very wide spectrum of views and ideologies. Their bravery in standing up to Mubarak earned them a huge amount of attention and public support, but by 2006 the workers' strikes and other grassroots rebellions had far outstripped them and relegated them to the background.

Kefaya as part of the amorphous April 6 Movement...

No, it wasn't. Shows what he knows. Then the author goes into a long spiel about how interested the Americans were in the Kefaya movement, and how they studied it. So? Of course they did. Read it carefully. He neglects to offer a shred of proof that the Kefaya movement was in any way connected to the Rand Corporation, still less that they founded or "ran" it. They studied it. His transparent attempt to simply insinuate what he fails to substantiate in any way, is pathetic.

Significantly the NED details its various projects today in Islamic countries, including in addition to
Egypt, in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, Algeria, Morocco, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Syria, Iran and Afghanistan. In short, most every country which is presently feeling the earthquake effects of the reform protests sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa is a target of NED.

Of course it is. Nobody knows that better than us. That's why we Arabs are always being accused of being too "conspiracy-minded" and suspicious, when actually we have a deep reservoir of experience to draw from.

The spreading regime change operations by Washington from Tunisia to Sudan, from Yemen to Egypt to Syria are best viewed in the context of a long-standing Pentagon and State Department strategy for the entire Islamic world from Kabul in Afghanistan to Rabat in Morocco.

The rough outlines of the Washington strategy, based in part on their successful regime change operations in the former Warsaw Pact communist bloc of Eastern Europe, were drawn up by former Pentagon consultant and neo-conservative, Richard Perle and later Bush official Douglas Feith in a white paper they drew up for the then-new Israeli Likud regime of Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996.

Wait a minute. I thought you said my "very first statement was false", which referred to your claim that the Mossad or right-wing zionists are behind the Egyptian revolution. So, are they or aren't they? Get your story straight.

Notably, in 2004 it was vehement opposition from two Middle East leaders—Hosni Mubarak of Egypt and the King of Saudi Arabia—that forced the ideological zealots of the Bush Administration to temporarily put the Project for the Greater Middle East on a back burner.

Right. The king of Saudi Arabia and Mubarak are brave anti-imperialist and anti-American freedom fighters, and America gives a hoot what they think. Funny how nobody else knows that about them.

What a ridiculous article. Only goes to show that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. I think a big problem with American aspiring manipulators in general, and this is further exaggerated at the elite level, but invisible to "analysts" like Engdahl, is that they really have no idea how irrelevant and transparent America's attempted manipulations are. Whatever ability to bamboozle others to America's point of view that they used to have (long ago!) has long been squandered by its decision makers' own stupidity and ignorance and naked greed. The only people who are as stupid and arrogant and easily fooled as you, lupercal, and your American "masterminds" assume others to be, seem to be your own fellow Americans, back home.

That's why until America genuinely embraces the democratic values it currently abuses, America is doomed to rely on ill-fated "friendships" in this region only with those who are hopelessly corrupt and losers who wouldn't last a day in power without brute force. Every single one of America's agents are known and remain in their positions because they are imposed in those positions by coercion, by terrorism, not because they've managed to fool others into believing that they are freedom fighters or agents of democracy. The people will always loathe and despise them and rise up against them, and when they're overthrown, each time America will find itself as repudiated and discredited as they are.

Whoops. I fed the energy sink again. I think it's past time for me to hit that "ignore" button...

[lupercal]

^ Alice I completely understand your desire to see the Egyptian coup as an indigenous uprising but the record clearly shows that it wasn't. To take one example: the millions of dollars funneled into Egyptian destabilization efforts through US intel-front NED in one year, 2009, as reported in the NED 2009 Annual Report, published in June 2010:

Egypt

American Center for International Labor Solidarity
$318,757
To support freedom of association in Egypt through partnerships with four Labor Support Organizations (LSOs) to increase their capacity to advocate for and defend worker rights, strengthen respect for the rule of law, and build bridges between Egyptian workers and other labor movements. The Solidarity Center will support trainings for lawyers, an interactive website for journalists, a campaign for a new labor law, a strategic campaigning workshop, and roundtables with labor leaders from four countries.

Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-Violence Studies (AITAS)
$48,900
To strengthen youth understanding of the Egyptian parliament and enhance regional activists’ use of new technologies as accountability tools. AITAS will conduct a series of workshops for 300 university students to raise their awareness of parliament’s functions and engage them in monitoring parliamentary committees. AITAS will also host 8 month-long internships for youth activists from the Middle East and North Africa to share its experiences using web-based technologies in monitoring efforts.

Arab Foundation for Supporting Civil Society (AFSCS)
$25,000
To promote the independence of civil society institutions and raise public awareness of their importance and the challenges they face through cooperation and support from the media. AFSCS will conduct four training workshops for a total of 100 journalists and representatives of civil society institutions on monitoring violations against civil society organizations, and extend its outreach on these efforts through a web site and newsletter focused on civil society issues.

Arab Society for Human Rights (ASHR)
$22,600
To promote legal awareness among journalists about freedom of expression under Egyptian laws and encourage greater and better informed media coverage of human rights issues. ASHR will conduct a series of six three-day training workshops in Alexandria on media law and the rights of media professionals for 80 journalists from the governorates of Giza, Port Said, Sohag, Ismailiya, Al-Sharkiya, Kafr Al Shaykh, and Marsa Matrouh.

Association for Women’s Total Advancement and Development (AWTAD)
$20,000
To strengthen a business association that links civic engagement to the private sector and targets young professionals. AWTAD will conduct two leadership development courses for Cairo-based young professionals to expand its membership base and offer ongoing professional development workshops to strengthen member involvement. For each course, AWTAD will lead an eight-week, one-on-one mentoring program for 25 mentees and established private sector professionals.

Association of the Egyptian Female Lawyers (AEFL)
$22,000
To strengthen women’s leadership and participation in the decision-making process within bar associations in the governorates of Giza, Beni Suef, Minya, and Qena. AEFL will train a cadre of women lawyers within local bar associations who will subsequently train an additional 100 female lawyers in each target governorate. Trainees will form a network to provide continued support to women lawyers seeking leadership positions within the bar association.

Bridge Center for Dialogue and Development (BTRD)
$25,000
To promote youth expression and engagement in community issues through new media. BTRD will train youth between the ages of 16 and 26 in the use of new and traditional media tools to report on issues facing their communities. BRTD will also create a website for human rights videos and new media campaigns in Egypt. The website will host trainees’ completed projects and provide a blog-like forum for them to engage in an ongoing dialogue on their projects.

Budgetary and Human Rights Observatory (BAHRO)
$25,000
To promote accountability and transparency, increase public awareness of the national budget, and engage civil society organizations in public budget monitoring and advocacy efforts. BAHRO will analyze and provide a mid-term evaluation of the projected national budget and fund allocations for Egypt’s five-year development plan (2008 -2012) versus actual expenditures and implementation of development initiatives.

Center for Egyptian Women’s Legal Assistance (CEWLA)
$34,400
To promote and engage youth in democratic dialogue and strengthen their oversight of political reform implementation. CEWLA will train 25 youth leaders on Egypt’s political reform plan and techniques for interacting with government officials. The youth will then conduct five half-day dialogue sessions with officials to monitor the implementation of proposed reforms in public political participation with a focus on youth and women’s participation.

Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
$187,569
To engage civil society organizations to participate in the democratic process by strengthening their capacity to advocate for free market legislative reform, and to build consensus on needed changes to the Egyptian legal environment to remove impediments to competition in a free market. CIPE will work with the Federation of Economic Development Associations (FEDA) to organize policy reform roundtables, draft policy position papers and an economic analysis report, and conduct policy and advocacy planning sessions for SME business associations.

El-hak Center for Democracy and Human Rights
$19,400
To raise young local journalists’ awareness of their rights in order to enable them to report more effectively on local community issues. El-hak will conduct eight workshops on journalists’ rights for a total of 200 young local journalists in the Gharbeya, Beni Suef, Qena, and Port Said governorates; establish a network of local journalists; and develop a newsletter and website for the exchange of best practices and professional advice.

Egyptian Center for the Right of Education.
$25,300
To strengthen an independent teachers network and enable its members to advocate for the welfare of teachers and lobby for reforms. ECER will conduct a training-of-trainers (TOT) workshop for 15 network members. Approximately five of the TOT participants will be selected to conduct two workshops on advocacy campaigns and collective bargaining. Each workshop will be attended by 30 member teachers.

Egyptian Democracy Institute (EDI)
$48,900
To promote accountability and transparency in parliament through public participation, and to build legislative capacity. EDI will produce quarterly monitoring reports and hold seminars to discuss the overall performance of Parliament and offer recommendations on legislation proposed in the People’s Assembly. EDI will monitor, collect, and document evidence of corruption in Cairo and Alexandria, as well as shortcomings in the delivery of public services in the governorates of the greater Cairo region and Alexandria to share with MPs representing those communities.

Egyptian Union of Liberal Youth (EULY)
$33,300
To expand the use of new media among youth activists for the promotion of democratic ideas and values. EULY will train 60 youth activists to use filmmaking for the dissemination of democratic ideas and values. The Union will lead a total of four two-month long training workshops in Cairo to build the political knowledge and technical filmmaking skills of participating youth involved in NGOs. Each participating NGO will then produce and distribute a short film about its organization’s mission or about an issue for which they are advocating.

Fares Organization for Social Care (FOSC)
$20,500
To promote democratic ideas and values among university students in Mansoura and build the capacity of a local NGO in Mansoura working to promote civic and political participation. FOSC will conduct a field study to assess Mansoura University students’ perceptions and knowledge of democratic ideas and values, train youth in the topics where their understanding is limited, and engage students in a theatrical production on political participation that will be presented in various youth centers across the city and surrounding districts.

Hukuk Elnas
$50,000
To promote the concept of street law in Egypt and the Middle East North Africa Region and to strengthen Egyptians’ awareness of their legal rights. Hukuk Elnas will create a web portal to raise Egyptians’ knowledge and awareness of their fundamental rights using simplified, colloquial language. The organization’s lawyers will provide pro-bono legal advice through a 24-hour telephone hotline and instant messaging. Hukuk Elnas will develop a training curriculum to share with other Egyptian and regional NGOs interested in promoting the concept of street law.

Human Development Association (HDA)
$20,000
To establish a cadre of young local journalists and lawyers in the Daqahliyah province who are able to monitor citizen rights in the media and courts, and to promote citizen engagement and public pressure on local authorities. HDA will train a cadre of 25 young local media professionals and 75 legal activists to monitor and support citizen rights, and encourage citizens to pursue their rights through a hotline for citizen complaints and monthly discussion forums.

Ibn Khaldun Center for Development Studies (ICDS)
$65,000
To disseminate information on civil society and democratization in the Arab world and promote democratic ideas and values. ICDS will publish a monthly newsletter and annual report on civil society and democratization in the Arab world, and will hold weekly discussion seminars on topics related to civil society and democratization. In addition, the center will contract an external evaluation consultant to review and assess ICDS’s programs and institutional needs and provide recommendations for strengthening the center.


International Center for Justice and Legal Support and Advocating (formerly known as Justice Association in Gharbeya)
$17,000
To strengthen women’s leadership within political parties in the West Delta region and to build the capacity of a civil society organization in the Gharbeya governorate. The Center will establish a political party women’s networking and professional development group to promote collaboration among women party members across ideological lines. The women’s forum will be supported by a series of professional development training workshops to enhance party women’s skills in legislative analysis and development, media outreach, and membership development.

Justice and Citizenship Center for Human Rights (JCCHR)
$20,000
To promote transparency and accountability of local government councils in the Minya governorate and to engage citizens in the decision-making process at the local level. JCCHR will observe and report on local council sessions, develop and administer surveys to local government officials and citizens, disseminate information to the public on local government activities, and organize discussions among local government officials, community leaders and media professionals.

Lawyers Union for Democratic and Legal Studies (LUDLS)
$20,000
To support freedom of association by strengthening young activists’ ability to express and organize themselves peacefully within the bounds of the law. LUDLS will train 250 youth activists on peaceful assembly and dispute resolution as well as produce a resource report on the these topics.

Mogtamaana for Development and Human Rights Association
$20,300
To promote transparency and accountability of local government councils and engage citizens in the decision-making process. Mogtamaana will pilot a local council monitoring program in the Giza governorate by observing and reporting on local council meetings, developing and administering surveys to local government officials and citizens, disseminating information to the public on local government activities, and organizing discussions between officials and citizens.

National Association for the Defense of Rights and Freedoms (NADRF)
$81,000
To build the capacity of grassroots community organizations in developing and managing programs promoting women’s political participation and strengthen the ability of women candidates for the 2010 parliamentary elections. NADRF will train provincial women candidates in the 2010 parliamentary elections and their campaign assistants in managing election campaigns. NADRF will train 30 women trainers (TOT) on leadership and management, who will then lead awareness seminars. NADRF will also conduct a comprehensive evaluation of its three-year program on women’s rights awareness.

One World Foundation for Development and Civil Society Care
$24,500
To raise awareness among local journalists in Beni Suef, Qena, and Ismailiya about government decentralization and specifically the role of journalists in the process. One World will conduct four workshops for a total of 95 local journalists in Qena, Beni Suef, and Ismailiya on the role of the media in supporting decentralization and promoting transparency in local government, and establish a cadre of media professionals supporting the decentralization process.

Our Hands for Comprehensive Development
$19,200
To engage Minya youth in civic activism and encourage youth-led initiatives and volunteerism. Our Hands will hold two public meetings for local youth to discuss challenges and to identify youth leaders who would benefit from additional training courses. Participants will produce a short film on youth political participation, and develop and implement action plans for resolving problems facing youth in the governorate. Our Hands will also provide Minya youth an opportunity to learn from the experience of and network with Cairo-based activists and NGOs.

Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED)
$45,300
To explore the feasibility of establishing a Cairo-based policy center to support Egyptian civic organizations’ and activists’ ability to advocate for policy reforms. POMED will engage in an one-year exploratory phase to identify key coalition members, local staff, the center’s legal status in Egypt, and develop one-year and three-year strategic plans.

Regional Center for Research and Consultations (RCRC)
$20,000
To identify the strengths and weaknesses in the performance of elected women parliamentarians and to strengthen the performance of female MPs. RCRC will analyze and assess the performance of past and current female parliamentarians and produce a training manual based on its findings to serve as a tool for female MPs, their staff, and NGOs that provide support to them. RCRC will launch an event to disseminate its findings and recommendations as well as test the training curriculum in a training workshop for 15 parliamentary staff and researchers.

Rural Development Association (RDA)
$25,000
To build the capacity of local councils in the Minofiya governorate and strengthen members’ effectiveness in responding to community needs, engage citizens in the decision-making process at the local level, and promote transparency and accountability of local government councils. RDA will develop a cadre of trainers from among local council members and lead a series of community forums where citizens will address community issues directly with local officials. RDA will also create a website to report on local initiatives discussed at the community forums.

Rural Studies Center (RSC)
$27,000
To raise awareness of transparency and accountability issues as well as mechanisms available for combating corruption at the local level. RSC will develop a resource guide on the role of legal mechanisms available to local councils, lead six three-day seminars on accountability and transparency for 30 local council members and 30 rural community leaders, and maintain a website in support of its anti-corruption campaign.

Rural Women Development Association (RWDA)
$20,500
To engage citizens in the decision-making process and public administration at the local level and to strengthen rural women’s engagement in local affairs. RWDA will empower its rural community to play a role in local administration; and bring together constituents and local officials to discuss and identify solutions for community problems, guide advocacy efforts to exert pressure on local officials, and strengthen local women’s leadership skills and civic knowledge through awareness seminars and a women’s parliament club.

SAWA Association for the Development of Society, Woman, Child and Environment
$19,000
To strengthen the rule of law on civic and human rights-related cases in Giza. SAWA will develop a cadre of lawyers to pursue the enforcement of existing national and international laws concerning civic and human rights. SAWA will train young lawyers in Giza and place them as volunteers within local NGOs to provide legal assistance to the organizations and their beneficiaries.

Sons of Land Center for Human Rights (SLCHR)
$30,000
To support the workers’ movement and promote the rights of temporary workers in al-Sharkiya, Daqahliyah, and Dumyat governorates. SLCHR will build workers’ capacity to demand their rights through two workshops and four seminars, while advocating for their rights through a media campaign and direct legal assistance. SLCHR will focus on workers who are hired on temporary contracts.

Youth Forum
$19,000
To expand and maintain a network of youth activists on Egyptian university campuses and to encourage the participation of university students in student union elections and civic activities on campus. Youth Forum will conduct a civic and political awareness training program for 150 university students in the Gharbeya, Suez, Minya, and Assiut governorates. The Forum will lead a total of six, repetitive two-day training workshops to build the political knowledge and leadership skills of university students in these target governorates.

http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle ... rica/egypt

And Egypt is just one of 15 "Middle East & North Africa" regions, in addition to which there are "MENA Regional" allotments, also from 2009:

MENA Regional

American Center for International Labor Solidarity
$640,000
To support union educators and individual activists in Morocco and Algeria through participatory and popular education programs that are democratic, value participants’ life experience and knowledge, and support workers to change their organizations and their communities. Solidarity Center will support activist networking and campaigning for labor and socio-economic rights in specific workplaces and sectors. Follow-up activities move towards deeper programmatic partnership, and ensure that participants commit to a strategic program of action.

American Center for International Labor Solidarity
$253,169
Teachers unions serve as important training grounds for democratic practices for their members. Teachers unions in Yemen and Palestine have the unique potential to carry the lessons of democracy into their nations’ classrooms and thereby lay the foundation for stronger democratic practices and institutions in the future. The Solidarity Center proposes to continue a project begun in 2008 with the American Federation of Teachers (AFT) on a capacity-building program in Yemen and Palestine that will help these organizations achieve this promise.

Arab Institute for Human Rights (AIHR)
$120,100
To enable NGOs and HR activists in the Maghreb, Levant and Gulf to strengthen theoretical knowledge and effective techniques to disseminate a culture of HR in their region the AIHR will conduct two workshops, basic and advanced, on human rights concepts and mechanisms for 40 human rights activists from the Gulf and Levant, and one workshop on citizen journalism for 15 activists from North Africa.

Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
$129,187
To build the case for corporate governance and to strengthen public awareness about the importance of internationally-based corporate governance standards. The project will be implemented as a joint initiative between CIPE and the Global Corporate Governance Forum, which will develop a series of case studies in print and video format and will launch them through two seminars in the region targeting a wide range of stakeholders.

Center for International Private Enterprise (CIPE)
$96,209
To enable and engage market-oriented, democratic reformers by providing content and platforms linking political and economic reforms. By delivering relevant, credible, and timely content in a user-friendly way; expanding the program’s e-mail list; and driving traffic to CIPE’s websites, CIPE will implement its online strategy to engage stakeholders in a more targeted fashion.

Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID)
$292,700
To raise awareness among both Islamist and secularist democracy activists in the region on the compatibility of Islam with universal human rights, pluralism and democracy and to provide them with a platform. CSID will produce its Democracy Watch on civic activities, organize four three-day training-of-trainers workshops and assist the trainees to conduct trainings in their own country. CSID will then hold a regional meeting for leaders from these countries through parliament, media and other public venues.

Gulf & Middle East Association for Civil Society (GMEACS)
$91,600
To raise awareness among victims of human rights violations to confront their governments, to build the institutional capacity of regional human rights network, and to establish a culture of human rights, justice and equality in the repressive Gulf countries. The GMEACS will use Endowment support to report on human rights violations in the Gulf countries and further institutionalize its organizational set up in London and enhance its tri-lingual website.

International Center for Journalists, Inc. (ICFJ)
$99,900
To enhance independent and investigative journalism in the MENA region. ICFJ will lead five online training courses on investigative journalism and digital journalism for 140 journalists. In addition ICFJ will enhance its news coverage of media assistance developments, including feature stories on specific media initiatives and detailed articles on specific needs of journalists and other media professionals.

International Forum for Islamic Dialogue (IFID)
$412,100
To strengthen a network of moderate Islamic thinkers to disseminate views relating to Islam, democracy, pluralism and universal human, political, and civil rights and to build a core group of educators among Muslim youth. The IFID will strengthen its regional network of educators and centers in Iraq, Sudan, Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco and develop new centers in Yemen, Bahrain and Lebanon. IFID will hold a meeting in Beirut for members of its regional network.

International Forum for Islamic Dialogue (IFID)
$97,348*
To strengthen a network of liberal Islamic thinkers that will act as a vehicle to disseminate enlightened views relating to Islam, democracy, pluralism and universal human, political, and civil rights, and to build a core group of educators among Muslim youth who will disseminate that information. IFID will assist local facilitators in Morocco, Iraq and Egypt to hold workshops in their countries, enhance its bilingual English and Arabic website and publish issues of its Arabic and English newsletters.

International Republican Institute (IRI)
$500,000
To provide women in the Arab region with valuable skills necessary to succeed as elected officials, within civil society, and as community leaders. IRI will provide a space in which women leaders at various levels of the political sphere can enhance their individual skill sets through advanced trainings and networking opportunities with their peers.

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)
$276,000
To continue and build upon the Young Women Leaders Academy. The regional program will combine NDI’s skills-based training expertise and a rigorous academic curriculum to provide young women with the knowledge and skills necessary to actively participate in the political process. Participants will utilize their newly acquired knowledge and skills in an internship with a political party or civil society organization.

National Democratic Institute for International Affairs (NDI)
$270,000
To facilitate increased networking and sharing by democrats across the region. NDI will enhance the multilingual Aswat portal with new material and technical upgrades. The NDI will partner with technology strategists to produce resources and tools promoting the use of community-building technology in campaigns and provide technical support to regional advocacy groups. NDI will also continue engaging a representative Advisory Board of experienced reformers.

Network of Democrats in the Arab World (NDAW)
$67,000
To build institutional capacity and expand membership of democracy advocates and to help local branches understand and address. NDAW will establish an office and a secretariat in Amman, Jordan, expand its membership outreach, strengthen NDAW’s organizational capacity, produce a monthly bulletin, and maintain and develop its website. NDAW will also conduct four two-day networking meetings to strengthen its main local chapters and build their network capacity.

Search for Common Ground (SFCG)
$130,600
To help grassroots voices across the MENA region to create a citizen journalism movement inspiring dialogue on national and regional issues. SFCG will strengthen voices of democrats and reformers in the Middle East and North Africa by publicizing 40 articles on its online newsletter The Common Ground News Service (CGNews) and subsequent publication of these articles in reputable regional newspapers. In addition, SFCG will conduct a three-day workshop to train 15 bloggers from the Maghreb in citizen journalism.

http://www.ned.org/where-we-work/middle ... a-regional

And the NED is just one of many bogus "civil society" intel fronts, operating in one country, in one recent year, and only according to its public account sheet, which is probably a fraction of was actually spent. So the reality is that the "uprising" was, as Engdahl extensively documents, a well-planned US intel operation, nearly identical to many similar ones.

And finally, as to the thread itself, let us take a hint from the late great Gil Scott-Heron:

[JackRiddler]

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"Enough"! Now that's an unusual slogan. Did they also demand freedom and justice? Land, bread and peace? Liberty, equality and fraternity? Surely this is no coincidence. And it turns out these people use the Internet. How did they learn modern PR techniques? Who taught them rap music? Why do they borrow strategies from Americans, like Martin Luther King? They even speak English! The only explanation is that a central committee issues the orders for the whole lot.

It reminds me of Ronald Reagan's evidence that the Soviets were secretly coordinating the international protests against the US war on Central America. Wherever the country and whatever its language, Reagan always saw signs that said, "US Out of El Salvador." In perfect English, those fiends.

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