My Other Blog & Comments

News and Information Feed

Friday, February 04, 2011

After subsidizing Mubarak's repressive state violence for decades, two-faced Washington Establishment pretends to sympathize with plight of the people

From:
Obama’s crocodile tears over Egypt’s violence

(WSWS.org) -- by Bill Van Auken --

“We pray that the violence in Egypt will end, and that the rights and aspirations of the Egyptian people will be realized, and that a better day will dawn over Egypt,” President Barack Obama solemnly intoned at the beginning of his remarks to the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday morning.

This annual celebration of official righteousness is, appropriately enough, convened by the Fellowship Foundation, a shadowy, politically connected group with a long record of organizing “prayer circles” that bring together foreign dictators, American politicians and military contractors. Defending the practice, the group’s organizer noted, “the Bible is full of mass murderers.”

Obama’s prayer follows a series of White House and State Department statements “deploring” the violence in Egypt and expressing moral indignation over the attacks by the regime of President Hosni Mubarak on peaceful protesters and the media.

Who do they think they are kidding? For 30 years, US administrations, Democratic and Republican alike, including that of Obama, have backed Mubarak precisely because of his ability to impose policies supported by Washington against the overwhelming opposition of the Egyptian people. That this required systematic and relentless violence was well understood.

If Obama is crying crocodile tears now over the violence that has left hundreds dead and thousands wounded in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Suez and across Egypt, it is only because this violence has stopped working, and the Egyptian people continue to resist and struggle.

He wasn’t crying when he delivered his speech in Cairo in June 2009, which included not a word of criticism of the Mubarak regime. Instead, he praised the Egyptian dictator as a “stalwart ally” and a “force for stability and good in the region.”

Like his predecessors at the White House, Obama has sent an estimated $2 billion annually—second only to US aid to Israel—to prop up Mubarak’s dictatorship. The vast bulk of this money has gone to the army and police forces for the purpose of repressing the people of Egypt and the entire region.

That the president and other top US officials were hardly unaware of the violence carried out daily by the regime has been substantiated by documentary proof thanks to the secret diplomatic cables from the Cairo embassy released by WikiLeaks. A cable sent to Washington by the US ambassador in Cairo just months before Obama’s speech noted matter-of-factly that police brutality in Egypt is “routine and pervasive”, with “literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.”

This was hardly news. The Egyptian government has ruled through a virtually uninterrupted state of emergency over the course of Mubarak’s entire presidency. This allowed administrative detention without trial, the criminalization of strikes and the outlawing of any non-sanctioned gathering of five or more people...

While Washington is now expressing its indignation over the arrests and intimidation of US and other foreign journalists covering the events in Egypt, it took no action against its client Mubarak as his regime arrested, tortured and “disappeared” journalists over the years, including for such offenses as “misquoting” his ministers, raising questions about his own health or writing derogatory reports about his son and chosen successor, Gamal.

The US viewed with approval the rounding up and detention without charges of thousands of members of the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups.

Washington likewise made no issue over the barbaric forms of torture meted out against thousands upon thousands of political prisoners, which ranged from burning people on their chest and legs to attaching electrodes to their tongues, nipples and genitals, to hanging them upside down to beatings and rapes.

On the contrary, the US government and its intelligence agencies viewed Mubarak’s torturers as a resource. It is likely that CIA officials watching the televised coverage of the goon squads attacking the protesters in Tahrir Square would have recognized some of their ringleaders, having rubbed shoulders with them in the torture chambers of Cairo’s Lazoughli Street secret police headquarters or Maulhaq al-Mazra prison.

Under an “extraordinary rendition program” begun under the Clinton administration in the 1990s, alleged terror suspects abducted by the CIA elsewhere in the world were flown in hoods and shackles to Egypt for the express purpose of being interrogated under torture. This grisly arrangement, which established a seamless unity between the Egyptian torture regime and US imperialism’s intervention in the Middle East, was worked out between US intelligence and the head of Mubarak’s secret police, Omar Suleiman. Recently named as vice president, Suleiman has been in regular telephone discussions with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Vice President Joe Biden and other US officials.

Moreover, the role of the Egyptian regime as the “stalwart ally” of both the US and Israel has facilitated massive violence, from the US invasion of Iraq to the Israeli wars in Lebanon and the Gaza Strip.

This is the objective and historical context in which Obama’s prayer for an end to violence and his crocodile tears over the repression in Egypt must be evaluated.

Behind its pseudo-democratic posturing, the US administration is playing for time. Within ruling circles and the US military-intelligence apparatus, there no doubt exist divisions and conflicting assessments over whether Mubarak can succeed in suppressing the masses or whether immediate steps must be taken to refurbish the regime...MORE...LINK

No comments: