The Revolt in Egypt is Coming Home
(Antiwar.com) -- by John Pilger --
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...MORE...LINK
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Egypt's sadistic torturer in chief and US rendition specialist General Omar Suleiman, designated by Washington liberals as "transition" authority
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