The Regime Digs in Deeper - By Robert Fisk

[Tony Gosling]

Former Interior minister, Habib el-Adly, 
questioned over false flag bomb attacks against Coptic Christian Churches
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2011/2/7/941993/-Egyptian-bomb-dropsInterior-Minister-threw-it
http://www.thedailynewsegypt.com/crime-a-accidents/prosecution-investigates-interior-min-alleged-involvement-in-church-attack.html
According the UK diplomatic sources quoted in the 
reports, the former interior minister had built 
up in over six years a special security system 
that was managed by 22 officers and that employed 
a number of former radical Islamists, drug 
dealers and some security firms to carry out acts 
of sabotage around the country in case the regime was under threat to collapse.
The proclamation also pointed, sourcing reports 
on UK intelligence services, that interior 
ministry officer Maj. Fathi Abdelwahid began in 
Dec. 11, 2011 preparing Ahmed Mohamed Khaled, who 
had spent 11 years in Egyptian prisons, to 
contact an extremist group named Jundullah and 
coordinate with it the attack on the Alexandria church.
http://www.alarabiya.net/articles/2011/02/07/136723.html


see also Fisk & Pilger below.........


The Revolt in Egypt is Coming Home
by John Pilger, February 10, 2011
http://original.antiwar.com/pilger/2011/02/09/the-revolt-in-egypt-is-coming-home/

The uprising in Egypt is our theater of the 
possible. It is what people across the world have 
struggled for and their thought controllers have 
feared. Western commentators invariably misuse 
the words "we" and "us" to speak on behalf of 
those with power who see the rest of humanity as 
useful or expendable. The "we" and "us" are 
universal now. Tunisia came first, but the 
spectacle always promised to be Egyptian.

As a reporter, I have felt this over the years. 
In Cairo’s Tahrir (Liberation) Square in 1970, 
the coffin of the great nationalist Gamal Abdul 
Nasser coffin bobbed on an ocean of people who, 
under him, had glimpsed freedom. One of them, a 
teacher, described the disgraced past as "grown 
men chasing cricket balls for the British at the 
Cairo Club." The parable was for all Arabs and 
much of the world. Three years later, the 
Egyptian Third Army crossed the Suez Canal and 
overran Israel’s fortresses in Sinai. Returning 
from this battlefield to Cairo, I joined a 
million others in Liberation Square. Their 
restored respect was like a presence – until the 
United States rearmed the Israelis and beckoned an Egyptian defeat.

Thereafter, President Anwar Sadat became 
America’s man through the usual billion-dollar 
bribery and, for this, he was assassinated in 
1980. Under his successor, Hosni Mubarak, 
dissenters came to Liberation Square at their 
peril. Enriched by Washington’s bag men, 
Mubarak’s latest American-Israeli project is the 
building of an underground wall behind which the 
Palestinians of Gaza are to be imprisoned forever.

Today, the problem for the people in Liberation 
Square lies not in Egypt. On 6 February, the New 
York Times reported: "The Obama administration 
formally threw its weight behind a gradual 
transition in Egypt, backing attempts by the 
country’s vice president, General Omar Suleiman, 
to broker a compromise with opposition groups 
 
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said it was 
important to support Mr. Suleiman as he seeks to defuse street protests
"

Having rescued him from would be assassins, 
Suleiman is, in effect, Mubarak’s bodyguard,. His 
other distinction, documented in Jane Mayer’s 
investigative book, The Dark Side, is as 
supervisor of American "rendition flights" to 
Egypt where people are tortured on demand of the 
CIA. He is also, as WikiLeaks reveals, a favorite 
in Tel Aviv. When President Obama was asked in 
2009 if he regarded Mubarak as authoritarian, his 
swift reply was "no." He called him a peacemaker, 
echoing that other great liberal tribune, Tony 
Blair, to whom Mubarak is "a force for good."

The grisly Suleiman is now the peacemaker and the 
force for good, the man of "compromise" who will 
oversee the "gradual transition" and "defuse the 
protests." This attempt to suffocate the Egyptian 
revolt will call on the fact that a substantial 
proportion of the population, from businessmen to 
journalists to petty officials, have provided its 
apparatus. In one sense, they reflect those in 
the Western liberal class who backed Obama’s 
"hope and change" and Blair’s equally bogus 
"political Cinemascope" (Henry Porter in the 
Guardian, 1995). No matter how different they 
appear and postulate, both groups are the 
domesticated backers and beneficiaries of the status quo.

In Britain, the BBC’s Today program is their 
voice. Here, serious diversions from the status 
quo are known as "Lord knows what." On 28 January 
the Washington correspondent Paul Adams declared, 
"The Americans are in a very difficult situation. 
They do want to see some kind of democratic 
reform but they are also conscious that they need 
strong leaders capable of making decisions. They 
regard President Mubarak as an absolute bulwark, 
a key strategic ally in the region. Egypt is the 
country along with Israel on which American 
Middle East diplomacy absolutely hinges. They 
don’t want to see anything that smacks of a 
chaotic handover to frankly Lord knows what."

Fear of Lord Knows What requires that the 
historical truth of American and British 
"diplomacy" as largely responsible for the 
suffering in the Middle East is suppressed or 
reversed. Forget the Balfour Declaration that led 
to the imposition of expansionist Israel. Forget 
secret Anglo-American sponsorship of Islamic 
jihadists as a "bulwark" against the democratic 
control of oil. Forget the overthrow of democracy 
in Iran and the installation of the tyrant Shah, 
and the slaughter and destruction in Iraq. Forget 
the American fighter jets, cluster bombs, white 
phosphorous, and depleted uranium that are 
performance-tested on children in Gaza. And now, 
in the cause of preventing "chaos," forget the 
denial of almost every basic civil liberty in 
Omar Suleiman’s contrite "new" regime in Cairo.

The uprising in Egypt has discredited every 
Western media stereotype about the Arabs. The 
courage, determination, eloquence, and grace of 
those in Liberation Square contrast with "our" 
specious fear-mongering with its al-Qaeda and 
Iran bogeys and iron-clad assumptions, bereft of 
irony, of the "moral leadership of the West." It 
is not surprising that the recent source of truth 
about the imperial abuse of the Middle East, 
WikiLeaks, is itself subjected to craven, petty 
abuse in those self-congratulating newspapers 
that set the limits of elite liberal debate on 
both sides of the Atlantic. Perhaps they are 
worried. Across the world, public awareness is 
rising and bypassing them. In Washington and 
London, the regimes are fragile and barely 
democratic. Having long burned down societies 
abroad, they are now doing something similar at 
home, with lies and without a mandate. To their 
victims, the resistance in Cairo’s Liberation 
Square must seem an inspiration. "We won’t stop," 
said the young Egyptian woman on TV, "we won’t go 
home." Try kettling a million people in the 
center of London, bent on civil disobedience, and 
try imagining it could not happen.




Week 3, day 16, and with every passing hour, The Regime Digs in Deeper
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27444.htm
By Robert Fisk

February 09, 2011 "The Independent" -- Blood 
turns brown with age. Revolutions do not. Vile 
rags now hang in a corner of the square, the last 
clothes worn by the martyrs of Tahrir: a doctor, 
a lawyer among them, a young woman, their 
pictures strewn above the crowds, the fabric of 
the T-shirts and trousers stained the colour of 
mud. But yesterday, the people honoured their 
dead in their tens of thousands for the largest 
protest march ever against President Hosni 
Mubarak's dictatorship, a sweating, pushing, 
shouting, weeping, joyful people, impatient, 
fearful that the world may forget their courage 
and their sacrifice. It took three hours to force 
our way into the square, two hours to plunge 
through a sea of human bodies to leave. High 
above us, a ghastly photomontage flapped in the 
wind: Hosni Mubarak's head superimposed upon the 
terrible picture of Saddam Hussein with a noose round his neck.

Uprisings don't follow timetables. And Mubarak 
will search for some revenge for yesterday's 
renewed explosion of anger and frustration at his 
30-year rule. For two days, his new back-to-work 
government had tried to portray Egypt as a nation 
slipping back into its old, autocratic torpor. 
Gas stations open, a series of obligatory traffic 
jams, banks handing out money – albeit in 
suitably small amounts – shops gingerly doing 
business, ministers sitting to attention on state 
television as the man who would remain king for 
another five months lectured them on the need to 
bring order out of chaos – his only stated reason for hanging grimly to power.

But Issam Etman proved him wrong. Shoved and 
battered by the thousands around him, he carried 
his five-year- old daughter Hadiga on his 
shoulders. "I am here for my daughter," he 
shouted above the protest. "It is for her freedom 
that I want Mubarak to go. I am not poor. I run a 
transport company and a gas station. Everything 
is shut now and I'm suffering, but I don't care. 
I am paying my staff from my own pocket. This is 
about freedom. Anything is worth that." And all 
the while, the little girl sat on Issam Etman's 
shoulders and stared at the epic crowds in 
wonderment; no Harry Potter extravaganza would match this.

Many of the protesters – so many were flocking to 
the square yesterday evening that the protest 
site had overflowed onto the Nile river bridges 
and the other squares of central Cairo – had come 
for the first time. The soldiers of Egypt's Third 
Army must have been outnumbered 40,000 to one and 
they sat meekly on their tanks and armoured 
personnel carriers, smiling nervously as old men 
and youths and young women sat around their tank 
tracks, sleeping on the armour, heads on the 
great steel wheels; a military force turned to 
impotence by an army of dissent. Many said they 
had come because they were frightened; because 
they feared the world was losing interest in 
their struggle, because Mubarak had not yet left 
his palace, because the crowds had grown smaller 
in recent days, because some of the camera crews 
had left for other tragedies and other 
dictatorships, because the smell of betrayal was 
in the air. If the Republic of Tahrir dries up, 
then the national awakening is over. But 
yesterday proved that the revolution is alive.

Its mistake was to underestimate the ability of 
the regime to live too, to survive, to turn on 
its tormentors, to switch off the cameras and 
harass the only voice of these people – the 
journalists – and to persuade those old enemies 
of revolution, the "moderates" whom the West 
loves, to debase their only demand. What is five 
more months if the old man goes in September? 
Even Amr Moussa, most respected of the crowds' 
favourite Egyptians, turns out to want the old 
boy to carry on to the end. And woeful, in truth, 
is the political understanding of this innocent but often untutored mass.

Regimes grow iron roots. When the Syrians left 
Lebanon in 2005, the Lebanese thought that it was 
enough to lop off the head, to get the soldiers 
and the intelligence officers out of their 
country. But I remember the astonishment with 
which we all discovered the depth of Syria's 
talons. They lay deep in the earth of Lebanon, to 
the very bedrock. The assassinations went on. And 
so, too, it is in Egypt. The Ministry of Interior 
thugs, the state security police, the dictator 
who gives them their orders, are still in 
operation – and if one head should roll, there 
will be other heads to be pasted onto the 
familiar portrait to send those cruel men back into the streets.

There are some in Egypt – I met one last night, a 
friend of mine – who are wealthy and genuinely 
support the democracy movement and want Mubarak 
to go but are fearful that if he steps now from 
his palace, the military will be able to impose 
their own emergency laws before a single reform 
has been discussed. "I want to get reforms in 
place before the man leaves," my friend said. "If 
he goes now, the new leader will be under no 
obligation to carry out reforms. These should be 
agreed to now and done quickly – it's the 
legislature, the judiciary, the constitutional 
changes, the presidential terms that matter. As 
soon as Mubarak leaves, the men with brass on 
their shoulders will say: 'It's over – go home!' 
And then we'll have a five-year military council. 
So let the old man stay till September."

But it's easy to accuse the hundreds of thousands 
of democracy protestors of naivety, of 
simple-mindedness, of over-reliance on the 
Internet and Facebook. Indeed, there is growing 
evidence that "virtual reality" became reality 
for the young of Egypt, that they came to believe 
in the screen rather than the street – and that 
when they took to the streets, they were deeply 
shocked by the state violence and the regime's 
continued, brutal, physical strength. Yet for 
people to taste this new freedom is overwhelming. 
How can a people who have lived under 
dictatorship for so long plan their revolution? 
We in the West forget this. We are so 
institutionalized that everything in our future 
is programmed. Egypt is a thunderstorm without 
direction, an inundation of popular expression 
which does not fit neatly into our revolutionary 
history books or our political meteorology.

All revolutions have their "martyrs", and the 
faces of Ahmed Bassiouni and young Sally Zahrani 
and Moahmoud Mohamed Hassan float on billboards 
around the square, along with pictures of 
dreadfully mutilated heads with the one word 
"unidentified" printed beside them with appalling 
finality. If the crowds abandon Tahrir now, these 
dead will also have been betrayed. And if we 
really believe the regime-or-chaos theory which 
still grips Washington and London and Paris, the 
secular, democratic, civilized nature of this 
great protest will also be betrayed. The deadly 
Stalinism of the massive Mugamma government 
offices, the tattered green flag of the pathetic 
Arab League headquarters, the military-guarded 
pile of the Egyptian Museum with the golden death 
mask of Tutankhamen – a symbol of Egypt's mighty 
past – buried deep into its halls; these are the 
stage props of the Republic of Tahrir.

Week three – day sixteen – lacks the romance and 
the promise of the Day of Rage and the great 
battles against the Egyptian Ministry of Interior 
goons and the moment, just over a week ago, when 
the army refused Mubarak's orders to crush, quite 
literally, the people in the square. Will there 
be a week six or a day 32? Will the cameras still 
be there? Will the people? Will we? Yesterday 
proved our predictions wrong again. But they will 
have to remember that the iron fingernails of 
this regime have long ago grown into the sand, 
deeper than the pyramids, more powerful than 
ideology. We have not seen the last of this 
particular creature. Nor of its vengeance.
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