The article below states that: “The Egyptian government has restricted Internet and mobile-phone access in the nation of about 87 million people and detained senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, a main opposition group.” But the muslim Brotherhood is not a main opposition group as it’s leadership decided to join the protests late and with reluctance. Are we being set up to see this story in terms of crushing “extremism?” There may be some very desperate people in our goernment right now. Look out. Share widely. General Joe

Obama Forced to Rethink Mideast Policy as Protests Roil Egypt
WikiLeaks exposes US complicity in murder, torture, by Egyptian government and more news

By Indira A.R. Lakshmanan and General Joe
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) -- After decades of backing authoritarian regimes in the Mideast and North Africa as bulwarks against Muslim extremism, the U.S. faces an urgent challenge as popular uprisings sweep the region: how to defend U.S. economic and security interests while supporting democratic values.
President Barack Obama urged non-violence on all sides as Egyptian protesters faced off against police and tanks. In televised remarks from the White House, Obama said he told President Hosni Mubarak that he must take “concrete steps and actions that deliver” political, social and economic change.
“The future of Egypt will be determined by the Egyptian people,” Obama said. “Governments have an obligation to respond to their citizens.”
While the U.S. president was careful not to side with the demonstrators over the Egyptian government, the White House also announced it would review assistance to Egypt, the fourth- largest recipient of U.S. aid in 2011. It was the strongest sign yet that a popular uprising may cause the U.S. to distance itself from a longtime ally.
Stocks worldwide plunged yesterday the most since November, while crude oil posted the biggest jump since 2009.
Regional Protests
Protests against poverty and lack of government accountability have spread through the region this month. The ouster of longtime Tunisian leader Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has inspired knock-on protests in Egypt, Algeria, Yemen and Jordan.
Egypt, along with all Arab countries except Lebanon and Iraq, is classified as an authoritarian regime in the Economist Intelligence Unit’s 2010 Democracy Index.
Still, from making peace with Israel in 1979 to serving as a powerful counterweight to the influence of Iran and anti-U.S. militant groups Hamas and Hezbollah, Egypt “has been so supportive of U.S. interests” that the U.S. cannot “suddenly walk away” from Mubarak, said Aaron David Miller, a former Mideast peace negotiator during several U.S. administrations. “At the same time, we do have a stake in encouraging progressive, centrist moderate forces.”
Obama is wise, he said, to “stay on the sidelines and keep American fingerprints off too much support of the regime on one hand and too much support for protesters on the other.”
Miller, now a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, said even if the Obama administration does “find the right set of talking points, at the end will it matter? Tunisia, Lebanon, Egypt, Yemen all have something in common: the U.S. is not driving the train on any of these” revolts. “It’s driven by local factors.”
Internet Access
The Egyptian government has restricted Internet and mobile- phone access in the nation of about 87 million people and detained senior leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, a main opposition group.
White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said yesterday the U.S. will review its assistance to Egypt in light of the protests.
More than 80 percent of U.S. aid to Egypt, or $1.3 billion, is military assistance, according to the U.S. State Department. Aid to Egypt is exceeded only by Afghanistan, Pakistan and Israel in the State Department’s 2011 budget.
Farah Pandith, Obama’s special representative to Muslim communities, said the administration has tried to reach out to the street as well as the rulers in the Middle East.
“Our relationship with Egypt is multifaceted; it isn’t just around one thing or another,” Pandith said yesterday at the Foreign Press Center in Washington. “We have a relationship with both the government and with the people of Egypt,”
Too Little, Too Late
Some democracy advocates in the region say Obama has recognized the movement too little, too late.
Mohamed ElBaradei, an Egyptian opposition figure and former United Nations official and Nobel laureate who returned to Cairo Jan. 27 to join the protests, accused the U.S. of “pushing Egypt and pushing the whole Arab world into radicalization with this inept policy of supporting repression.”
In a Jan. 26 critique posted on The Daily Beast website, ElBaradei said he was “flabbergasted” by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s comments the previous day that Mubarak’s government was stable and should try to respond to the people’s needs. “If you would like to know why the United States does not have credibility in the Middle East, that is precisely the answer,” he wrote.
Behind the Curve
The Obama administration’s calls for reform in Egypt now are hopelessly behind the curve and may be interpreted in the region as “implicit American endorsement” of the regime, said Steven Cook, fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington.
The U.S. has been scrambling to play catch up with fast- changing events, said Robert Danin, a former official with the so-called Quartet for Middle East Peace, which includes the U.S., the European Union, the UN and Russia.
“On one hand, it’s tried to affirm its continued support for Hosni Mubarak, a regime that has advanced American interests in the region, and at the same time articulate principles of what the protesters are calling for - short of regime change. The problem with this is it comes pretty late in the day.”
“The worse it gets in Egypt,” added Danin, also a fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington, the harder it will be to reconcile those two approaches.
No Meddling
Shibley Telhami, a former adviser to the U.S. Mission to the UN and the Iraq Study Group, said it’s critical that the U.S. not attempt to insert itself in the events, lest that be perceived as meddling.
If the popular movement is seen as masterminded by Washington, “it could backfire” and Muslim extremists may exploit the situation for their own benefit, said Telhami, a Middle East fellow at the Brookings Institution in Washington. “We’ve lost the ability to control events on the ground.”
Egypt has been the anchor for U.S. foreign policy in the Arab world since the 1970s, and under Mubarak, has remained a strong defender of U.S. interests in the region on a host of issues, from countering Iran’s nuclear aspirations to preventing weapons smuggling from Egypt to Gaza, as recent U.S. cables released by WikiLeaks show.
“Any major change in Egyptian foreign policy” under a potential new government “has huge consequences for the U.S.,” Telhami added.
The White House must be ready to seize the moment to overhaul U.S. policy for the entire region, many observers say.
“The events in Egypt as well as in Tunisia, Yemen, Jordan, and Algeria should spark a broader rethink in America’s approach to the entire region,” Brian Katulis, a fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, wrote yesterday. “Currently, the Obama administration is largely stuck in a reactive and tactical crisis management mode on many key fronts.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Indira Lakshmanan in Washington at  ilakshmanan@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Silva at  msilva34@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: January 29, 2011 00:00 EST

-----

And again demonstrating the value of wikileaks:

WikiLeaks exposes US complicity in murder, torture, by Egyptian government
By Tom Eley 
29 January 2011
On Friday, WikiLeaks released dozens of diplomatic cables that together reveal the US has long been aware of the criminality of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and its savage abuses, including torture, random arrest, and extra-judicial killings. The documents also reveal that plans for the military-supervised transfer of power from Hosni Mubarak to his son, Gamal, were presented to Washington.
The document release, which coincided with mass demonstrations and clashes with police in Cairo, Suez, and other cities, will only serve to further discredit Mubarak, and is a major embarrassment to the Obama administration, whose leading representatives, including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have continued to insist that the Mubarak regime is not a dictatorship, while hypocritically calling for “restraint.”
The documents, diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Cairo from 2009 and 2010, make clear that the Obama administration was well aware that the Mubarak regime held onto power by terrorizing the population. But Washington tacitly supported the dictatorship and its crimes because Egypt is considered the most important component to US strategy for a wide region encompassing the Middle East, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.
Perhaps the most damning cable is from Ambassador Margaret Scobey, dated January 15, 2009. The letter calls police brutality “routine and pervasive” and states that “police using force to extract confessions from criminals [is] a daily event.” Embassy informants “estimate there are literally hundreds of torture incidents every day in Cairo police stations alone.”
The rampant abuse of alleged criminals extends to political opponents, the cable notes. One activist, part of what the embassy referred to as “the April 6 Facebook strike,” was arrested on November 20, 2008. “[T]he GOE [government of Egypt] is probably torturing him to scare other ‘April 6’ members into abandoning their political activities,” it adds. The cable also refers to the “sexual molestation of a female ‘April 6 activist.” Scobey reported that another blogger said security forces stopped torturing him only “when he began cooperating.”
The same cable refers to “standing orders from the Interior Ministry between 2000 and 2006 for the police to shoot, beat and humiliate judges in order to undermine judicial independence.”
The Mubarak regime arrests journalists, even poets. A July 28, 2009 letter from the Cairo embassy notes that “a recent series of selective [government] actions against journalists, bloggers and even an amateur poet illustrates the variety of methods available to the GOE to suppress critical opinion, including an array of investigative authorities and public and private legal actions.”
A cable from the Cairo embassy dated January 12, 2009 gives the lie to Obama administration’s claim that the Mubarak regime is not a dictatorship. It refers to the quasi-legal basis of the government, which has ruled through “emergency powers” for decades: “Egypt’s State of Emergency, in effect almost continuously since 1967, allows for the application of the 1958 Emergency Law, which grants the GOE broad powers to arrest individuals without charge and to detain them indefinitely.” It adds that the regime “has also used the Emergency Law in some recent cases to target bloggers and labor demonstrators.”
The cable describes the law. “The Emergency Law creates state security courts, which issue verdicts that cannot be appealed, and can only be modified by the president,” the note explains. “[It] allows the president broad powers to ‘place restrictions’ on freedom of assembly. Separately, the penal code criminalizes the assembly of 5 or more people in a gathering that could ‘threaten public order.’”
US diplomats appear to have been most preoccupied with “succession” after the death of the elderly Mubarak. A cable dated July 30, 2009, entitled “Military will ensure transfer of power,” reveals that the State Department was banking on Egypt’s army overseeing a stable transition of power, most likely to Mubarak’s son, Gamal.
“NDP [National Democratic Party] insider and former minister Dr. Ali El Deen Hilal Dessouki dismissed public and media speculation about succession,” in discussions with embassy officials, the cable notes. “He said Egyptian military and security services would ensure a smooth transfer of power, even to a civilian… His assurances that the Egyptian military and security services would ensure a smooth succession to a civilian [by implication Gamal Mubarak] were unusually straightforward and blunt.”
“Dr. Dessouki's most important message, he said was to always keep in mind that ‘the real center of power in Egypt is the military,’ a reference he said included all security forces,” the cable concluded.
In the same conversation Dessouki called opposition parties and democracy “a long term goal.”
A number of the cables deal with an easing of tensions between Egypt and the US in the wake of Obama assuming the presidency.
A May 19, 2009 letter explains that Mubarak had been “encouraged” by Obama and Clinton and that he was anxious to demonstrate Egypt remained the central US ally in the region. Mubarak “railed” against the US invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush, which he viewed to be a disaster not because it destroyed more than a million lives and an entire society, but because he believes it strengthened Iran’s position. The dictator also blames the US for the strength of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine’s Gaza Strip.
The cables suggest that Mubarak has an almost pathological fear of Iran, that he opposes negotiations over its nuclear energy program, and favors “confrontation through isolation.” One cable suggests this fear dates to the 1979 Iranian revolution. “He can harken back to the Shah of Iran: the U.S. encouraged him to accept reforms, only to watch the country fall into the hands of revolutionary religious extremists.”
A March 30, 2009, cable reveals the Mubarak regime’s preoccupation with the dangers posed to it by the Internet. The government “has arrested and jailed bloggers who have” insulted either “President Mubarak or Islam.” The cable observed that “Egypt has an estimated 160,000 bloggers who write in Arabic, and sometimes in English, about a wide variety of topics, from social life to politics to literature… [A] solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics. Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly.”
There was a dim awareness in the US embassy in Egypt that the economic crisis was destabilizing the Mubarak regime. “[E]conomic problems have frustrated many Egyptians. Egypt's per capita GDP was on par with South Korea's 30 years ago; today it is comparable to Indonesia's. There were bread riots in 2008 for the first time since 1977. Political reforms have stalled and the GOE has resorted to heavy-handed tactics against individuals and groups,” a March 30, 2009 cable notes.
The cables demonstrate the courage of the Egyptian demonstrators in the face of the brutality of the Mubarak regime, as WikiLeaks editor Maria Luisa Rivera notes in introducing them. “As an Internet blackout imposed by the state covers the country, every citizen and grassroots organization will now be exposed to arbitrary police forces,” she writes. “As secret documents from US prove, during the demonstrations today, authorities might use physical threats, legal threats and extraordinary laws such the Emergency Law as an excuse to persecute and prosecute activists during the pacific demonstrations taking place in Cairo and other cities.”
She continues, “Excessive use of force by police during the protests [has already] led to arbitrary executions and detentions in a vast array of abuses, a situation that is known and acknowledged in the past by US diplomats based in Egypt. It is important to bear in mind the long record of police abuse and torture by Egyptian police forces.”

Make the whole world aware of the slimy role the US has played in Egypt. The US will try to distance itself from this regime. But one of the reasons it is so hated is precisely because of it’s close ties to US imperialism. Spread these notes widely, everywhere. General Joe

PS: Ajeezera reports the death toll now stands at 95 with many resulting from live ammunition.