CBS Reporter ‘Sexually Assaulted’ Amid Egyptian Celebration of Democracy
Lara Logan in Iraq.
There is always a dark element to herd behavior, be it “authoritarian” or “revolutionary.” Melissa Maerz reports in the LA Times:
Lara Logan is recovering in an American hospital this week after being sexually assaulted and beaten by a mob in Egypt’s Tahrir Square late on Friday.
The same day that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, Logan was surveying the mood of anti-Mubarak protesters for a “60 Minutes” story when she and her team “were surrounded by a dangerous element amidst the celebration,” CBS said in a statement Tuesday. The network said that a group of 200 people were then “whipped into a frenzy,” pulling Logan away from her crew and attacking her until a group of women and Egyptian soldiers intervened …
During her time in Egypt, Logan had been outspoken about the Mubarak regime’s efforts to intimidate foreign journalists. “We’re being prevented from telling this story,” Logan said during…
Glenn Beck: “Don’t Use Google” Because They Are “Deeply In Bed With The Government” (Video)
The Joy of Beck. Via Media Matters:
Colbert’s Reasoning For The Riots In Egypt
Comedy Central’s February 14, 2011 broadcast of The Colbert Report, ridicules Glenn Beck’s reasoning behind the riots in Egypt. Instead, Colbert links the uprising to King Tut’s missing penis.
The American Military’s New Fiefdom: Egypt
With the American military as its greatest benefactor, the Egyptian military has assumed control of the day-to-day functions of government, but which direction will this force take and who under whose auspices are members of the Egyptian military operating?
FMF funds totalled 1.8 B in FY 2009, who do you think is in charge?
Is this move towards military rule a remnant of the previous administration’s new domino theory in the middle east or the first decisive step in the new administration’s new “plan” for the region? The Project for the New American Century spent many years strong-arming an already pliant Bush administration into increasing military aid to regions like the middle east, but only to regimes it could “work with“.
Consider this excerpt from diplomatic cables addressed to a General Schwartz from 2009:
Your visit will fall on the anniversary of the April 6, 2008 nation-wide strike protesting political and economic conditions. At least one…
Egypt And The Shaping Of A New World Order
Mark LeVine writes at Al Jazeera:
A most modern and insane revolt
The following description, I believe, sums up what Egypt faces today as well as, if not better, than most:
“It is not a revolution, not in the literal sense of the term, not a way of standing up and straightening things out. It is the insurrection of men with bare hands who want to lift the fearful weight, the weight of the entire world order that bears down on each of us — but more specifically on them, these … workers and peasants at the frontiers of empires. It is perhaps the first great insurrection against global systems, the form of revolt that is the most modern and the most insane.
One can understand the difficulties facing the politicians. They outline solutions, which are easier to find than people say … All of them are based on the elimination of the [president].…
Mubarak Refuses To Leave – Can Egypt Avoid Coup Or Violent Revolution?
Tahrir Square, Feb. 10, 2011.
All of Egypt was at fever pitch in anticipation that President Hosni Mubarak would resign in a televised speech this evening. Instead he refused to move and set himself up for massive conflict with a broad mass of Egyptians who want a real democracy in this large, civilized, educated but desperately poor country. What happens next is anyone’s guess. Al Jazeera continues to have the best coverage of any media service; here’s their latest report:
Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president, has refused to step down from his post, saying that he will not bow to “foreign pressure” in a televised address to the nation.
Mubarak announced that he had put into place a framework that would lead to the amendment of six constitutional articles in the address late on Thursday night.
“I can not and will not accept to be dictated orders from outside, no matter what the source is,”…
Egyptian Google Exec Released After Unlawful Arrest
Photo: Jerry Jackson (CC)
After Amnesty raised concerns that the Egyptian executive of Google was being held without reason, he was released today, 10 days after his disappearance. CNN reports:
Google executive Wael Ghonim was released Monday in Egypt, the company announced.
“Huge relief — Wael Ghonim has been released. Our love to him and his family,” the company tweeted shortly after 8 p.m. in Cairo (1 p.m. ET).
Ghonim’s Twitter account, which had not had a posting since he went missing January 28, carried a tweet around the same time.
“Freedom is a bless (sic) that deserves fighting for it,” the tweet said, ending with the hashtag “#Jan25,” a reference to the Egypt protests.
Minutes later, Ghonim added this tweet: “Gave my 2 cents to Dr. Hosam Badrawy. who was reason why I am out today. Asked him resign cause that’s the only way I’ll respect him.”
Hossam Badrawi, often described as a relatively liberal politician,…
Mummies And Dummies: Leave Or Stay, The Egyptian Crisis Will Only Get Deeper With No Quick Fix Likely
The African journalist Nathanial Manheru chose a quote from French icon Andre Malraux’s Anti-Memoirs to understand current events in Egypt: “It is in Egypt that we are reminded that (man) invented the tomb.”
The tomb may be the appropriate metaphor not only for wannabe President for forever Hosni Mubarak but also for the 30 plus year neo-colonial economic system that he has presided over. Not surprisingly Frank Wisner Jr., the former U.S. Ambassador and son of a CIA dirty trickster, wants the President to stick around—in the country’s interest, of course.
Battle of the Pyramids by Francois Watteau, 1798-1799.
And Western countries are now aligning with the people in the suites—not the streets. So much for the bottom-up democracy that President Obama has appeared to support. We want freedom there—but we can wait!
What’s next for Egypt?
The 82 year old President seems stuck in the final stages of his own mummification. At the same time…
Tear Gas Canister Stamped ‘Made In USA’ Used Against Egyptian Protesters
Via HuffPo. Richard Engel reporting for NBC News:
You talked earlier about anti-American sentiment and a lot of that has been because the United States while today the Press Secretary is saying how they’ve been talking about Egypt and the need for reform and bringing up this at every meeting that’s not the way many Egyptians see it. Most Egyptians see the United States as having stood solidly by President Mubarak while the government here grew more and more corrupt.
And they see the Americans as complicit in it. And just today, for example, when we were out on streets this is what a lot of people were showing us about American involvement. If you can see in my hands this is one of the tear gas canisters and very clearly written in English on it, it says “Made in the USA by Combined Tactical Systems from Jamestown, Pennsylvania.” And they say this is the kind of support that the United States has been giving to the Egyptian government and bears some responsibility, although today it it trying to say that it never backed Mubarak so much, it has been calling for reforms for a long time, Egyptians don’t see it that way.
Proof That The United States Is Behind The Fall Of Mubarak
President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and President Barack Obama, Sept. 2010.
Elad Pressman, editor of a major Israeli political website, was my guest on my radio show and did he have news! The Daily Telegraph had dug into WikiLeaks documents and pieced together a report that convincingly proves the United States was behind the violent Egyptian protests:
The American Embassy in Cairo helped a young dissident attend a US-sponsored summit for activists in New York, while working to keep his identity secret from Egyptian state police.
On his return to Cairo in December 2008, the activist told US diplomats that an alliance of opposition groups had drawn up a plan to overthrow President Hosni Mubarak and install a democratic government in 2011. He has already been arrested by Egyptian security in connection with the demonstrations and his identity is being protected by The Daily Telegraph. The disclosures, contained in…
McCain Calls Democracy In Middle East A “Virus”
“This virus is spreading throughout the Middle East. This is probably the most dangerous period of history…in the Middle East.” Speaking to FOX News, John McCain echoes the current sentiments of many politicians and pundits distressed by recent events in Egypt and Tunisia. Because the rules are, democracy only belongs in the countries where we choose to impose it. Via Think Progress:
Rachel Maddow Breaks Down Mubarak’s Disinformation Campaign
Some of the best reporting I’ve heard from Rachel Maddow. Could Mubarak’s tactics work in the U.S.?
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
President Obama, Say The ‘D-Word’
Photo: Muhammad Ghafari. Giza, Egypt (CC)
Mark LeVine writes on Al Jazeera:
It’s incredible, really. The president of the United States can’t bring himself to talk about democracy in the Middle East. He can dance around it, use euphemisms, throw out words like “freedom” and “tolerance” and “non-violent” and especially “reform,” but he can’t say the one word that really matters: democracy.
How did this happen? After all, in his famous 2009 Cairo speech to the Muslim world, Obama spoke the word loudly and clearly — at least once.
“The fourth issue that I will address is democracy,” he declared, before explaining that while the United States won’t impose its own system, it was committed to governments that “reflect the will of the people… I do have an unyielding belief that all people yearn for certain things: the ability to speak your mind and have a say in how you are governed; confidence in the…
Al Jazeera English Blacked Out Across Most Of U.S.
Freedom of the press? Ryan Grim writes on the Huffington Post:
WASHINGTON — Canadian television viewers looking for the most thorough and in-depth coverage of the uprising in Egypt have the option of tuning into Al Jazeera English, whose on-the-ground coverage of the turmoil is unmatched by any other outlet. American viewers, meanwhile, have little choice but to wait until one of the U.S. cable-company-approved networks broadcasts footage from AJE, which the company makes publicly available. What they can’t do is watch the network directly.
Other than in a handful of pockets across the U.S. — including Ohio, Vermont and Washington, D.C. — cable carriers do not give viewers the choice of watching Al Jazeera. That corporate censorship comes as American diplomats harshly criticize the Egyptian government for blocking Internet communication inside the country and as Egypt attempts to block Al Jazeera from broadcasting.
The result of the Al Jazeera English blackout in the United States has…
Web-Free ‘Tweeting’ Brought To Egypt By Google
It’s good to know the world won’t stop if the internet does. Well, as long as cellphone service is always available. Via The Strait Times:
GOOGLE, in response to the Internet blockade in Egypt, said on Monday that it had created a way to post messages to microblogging service Twitter by making telephone calls.
Google worked with Twitter and freshly acquired SayNow, a startup specialising in social online voice platforms, to make it possible for anyone to ‘tweet’ by leaving a message at any of three telephone numbers.
‘Like many people we’ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground,’ Google product manager Abdel-Karim Mardini and SayNow co-founder Ujjwal Singh said in a blog post.
‘Over the weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service – the ability for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection,’ they…
How Egypt Is Gypped By The West
Demonstrators on Army Truck in Tahrir Square, Cairo, 29 Jan. 2011 Photo: Ramy Raoof (CC)
This is an upstairs/downstairs story that takes us from the peak of a Western mountaintop for the wealthy to spreading mass despair in the valleys of the Third World poor.
It is about how the solutions for the world financial crisis that the CEOs and Big Pols are massaging in a posh conference center in snowy Davos, Switzerland have turned into a global economic catastrophe in the streets of Cairo, the current ground zero of a certain-to-spread wave of international unrest.
Yes, the tens of thousands in the streets demanding the ouster of the cruel Mubarak regime are there now pressing for their right to make a political choice but they are being driven by an economic disaster that has sent unemployment skyrocketing and food prices climbing.
People are out in the streets not just to meet but by…
The Carnage Following Egyptian Protests (Video)
The best reporting from Cairo so far has been from the Qatar-based satellite TV network Al Jazeera. Here’s the latest report on the developing situation in Egypt from Al Jazeera’s Dan Nolan, who says Egyptian military tanks have rolled into cities including Cairo, in President Hosni Mubarak’s attempt to restore order. Mubarak’s speech on Saturday did not appease his people and protests continue for a fifth day, with demonstrators still calling for an end to his 30-year reign.
No Internet In Egypt As Protests Escalate
By Ronnie Kerr at Vator.tv:
First Facebook and Twitter were made inaccessible, now the entire Web. Blocking access to Twitter and Facebook just wasn’t enough for the Egyptian government. Around 11 hours ago — or a little after midnight in Egypt — the Internet went completely dark.
Source: Vator.tv
Now protesters all across Egypt must find a way to organize without the Web and, in Cairo, with an elite special operations force deployed to put a stop to massive demonstrations that have rippled across the state, ignited by a revolt in Tunisia that successfully toppled the regime there.
Both were drastic measures taken as preemptive steps by the Egyptian government ahead of possibly the largest demonstrations yet, which Reuters says are planned for Friday after weekly prayers.
But neither the people taking to the streets in Tunisia nor those in Iran during the summer of 2009 ever had to face a complete blackout of the Internet, a…
Noam Chomsky On WikiLeaks, Middle East Uprisings And More
Thanks to Wiley for sending along this video of Noam Chomsky speaking at the University of Tennessee on January 25, 2011, which as Wiley points out was “the night of the State of the Union — he sort of gave his own version.”
