Thursday, February 10, 2011

Captive Nation - Egypt And The West - MEDIA LENS. UK

http://medialens.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=602:egypt-in-chains-torture-military-aid-and-the-real-predators&catid=24:alerts-2011&Itemid=68

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February 09, 2011

Captive Nation - Egypt And The West


In 1886, Tolstoy wrote:

‘Slavery has long been abolished. It was abolished in Rome, and in America, and in Russia, but what was abolished was the word and not the thing in itself.’ (Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?, Green Classics, 1991, p.104)

In 2011, ‘the thing in itself’ is alive and well in Egypt. What an extraordinary spectacle it is - a dictatorship behaving as though an entire people were its personal property. Henchmen aside, the people have spoken, almost as one, and their demands are very clear. The blunt government response, in effect: We react as we want. If we don’t want to, we don’t have to. Why? Because we have a monopoly of violence.

A government thus stands exposed for what it is, a parasite feeding off the people it claims to represent.

And what of the West? Obama - Washington's bargain basement bodhisattva - said:

‘We pray that the violence in Egypt will end and that the rights and aspirations of the Egyptian people will be realised and that a better day will dawn over Egypt and throughout the world.’

, again, had the perfect retort:

‘I came to the simple and natural conclusion that if I pity a tired horse on which I am riding, the first thing I must do if I am really sorry for it, is to get off and walk on my own feet.’ (Tolstoy, op. cit., p.111) 

But this the US elites pulling Obama’s strings will never do of their own volition – they have been riding the tired horse far too long. Thus, Hillary Clinton said of the Egyptian dictator on March 10, 2009:

‘I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family. So I hope to see him often here in Egypt and in the United States.’

Thus, Middle East Envoy, Tony Blair, said of Mubarak on February 1, 2011:

‘Well, where you stand on him depends on whether you've worked with him from the outside or on the inside. And for those of us who worked with him over the - particularly now I worked with him on the Middle East peace process between the Israelis and the Palestinians, so this is somebody I'm constantly in contact with and working with. And on that issue, I have to say, he's been immensely courageous and a force for good.’

As ever, Blair knows: he is ‘on the inside’ and has ‘worked with him’. As ever, Blair is sincere: ‘I have to say’ - truth compels him. As ever, Blair’s ‘force for good’ is enforcing somebody’s hell.
On January 30, 2011, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published a report, ‘“Work on Him Until He Confesses” - Impunity for Torture in Egypt.’

The report observes:

‘According to Egyptian lawyers and domestic and international human rights groups… law enforcement officials have used torture and ill-treatment on a widespread, deliberate, and systematic basis over the past two decades to glean confessions and information, or to punish detainees. The United Nations Committee Against Torture has confirmed the systematic nature of torture in Egypt.’

Abuses include ‘beatings, electric shocks, suspension in painful positions, forced standing for long periods, waterboarding, as well as rape and threatening to rape victims and their family’.

The horrors constitute ‘an epidemic of habitual, widespread, and deliberate torture perpetrated on a regular basis by security forces against political dissidents, Islamists allegedly engaged in terrorist activity, and ordinary citizens suspected of links to criminal activity or who simply look suspicious’.

Our search of the LexisNexis database found that HRW’s report has so far received three mentions in the national UK press.

Military 'Aid' – Corporate Welfare At A Price

Western journalists, then, are confronted by three salient facts in Egypt:

1) Mubarak’s regime is a brutal military dictatorship responsible for widespread torture.
2) The Egyptian people are clearly intent on removing this dictator.

But also:

3) A major reason why the Egyptian people are currently unable to achieve this aim is that the United States supports the tyranny with around $1.3 billion in military 'aid' every year.

According to LexisNexis, over the last month, the word 'Mubarak' has appeared in 1,652 UK press articles. The words 'Mubarak' and 'military aid' have appeared in 11 national UK articles.

With rare exceptions, these mentions are mere crumbs, one-liners in passing. In The Times, Bill Emmott observes that ‘the Mubarak regime is still receiving $1.3 billion of military aid each year from America, making it the second biggest recipient of American aid after Israel’. (Emmott, 'Obama's riddle: withdraw or keep military aid?,’ The Times, January 31, 2011 Monday)
The Guardian has published one in-depth online article by investigative journalist Pratap Chatterjee, who wrote:

‘So, when protesters in Cairo last week were struck by tear gas canisters fired by Egyptian security officials, it was not surprising that pictures taken by ABC TV would show that the canisters were manufactured in the US. Nor does it seem that surprising that a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald would find 12-gauge shotgun shells with “MADE IN USA” stamped on their brass heads when he visited the wounded in a makeshift casualty ward in a tiny mosque behind Tahrir (Liberation) Square.’ 

By contrast, when we turn away from the establishment media, we find ample discussion of the missing facts. On Democracy Now!, the superb Amy Goodman comments:

‘According to lists of arms sales notifications compiled by the Pentagon’s Defense Security Assistance Agency, in the last decade alone, the Department of Defense has brokered over $11 billion in U.S. arms offers to the Egyptian regime on behalf of weapons manufacturers Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon and General Electric.’

Goodman interviewed William Hartung, author of Prophets of War: Lockheed Martin and the 

Making of the Military-Industrial Complex. Hartung said:

‘Mubarak has been getting $1.3 billion per year, like clockwork, since the beginning of his regime. So that’s about $40 billion…’

He also explained that this was an example of socialism-for-the-rich:

‘It’s a form of corporate welfare for companies like Lockheed Martin and General Dynamics, because it goes to Egypt, then it comes back for F-16 aircraft, for M1 tanks, for aircraft engines, for all kinds of missiles, for guns, for tear gas canisters, as was discussed, a company called Combined Systems International, which actually has its name on the side of the canisters that have been found on the streets there.’ (Hartung, ibid.)

In an article for Huffington Post, Hartung added more detail:

‘Aside from some leftover Soviet equipment from the pre-Camp David era (before 1979), the Egyptian military is virtually made in the USA. Fighter planes (Lockheed Martin F-16s), tanks (General Dynamics's M-1A1s), missiles (Harpoon, TOW, Hellfire, and Stinger, made by Boeing, Raytheon, and Lockheed Martin), howitzers (United Defense), aircraft engines (General Electric) have all been purchased for the Egyptian armed forces with U.S. taxpayer dollars. The biggest winners have been Lockheed Martin ($3.8 billion); General Dynamics ($2.5 billion); Boeing ($1.7 billion); Raytheon ($750 million); and GE ($750 million).’

According to Campaign Against the Arms Trade, Britain sold £16.4m worth of arms to Egypt in 2009 - 81 export licences were approved for a wide range of weapons systems components.

Alas, the US is not eager to cut its supply of weapons to Mubarak. Admiral Mike Mullen, the chair of the US joint chiefs of staff, said the US should wait before suspending aid:

‘There is a lot of uncertainty out there and I would just caution against doing anything until we really understand what's going on. I recognise that [$1.3bn] certainly is a significant investment, but it's an investment that has paid off for a long, long time.’

Paid off for whom? Leading Arab scholar-activist Gilbert Achcar explains: ‘the truth is that the army as an institution is not “neutral” at all. If it has not been used yet to repress the movement, it is only because Mubarak and the general staff did not see it appropriate to resort to such a move, probably because they fear that the soldiers would be reluctant to carry out a repression’.

Stability Through Repression

What mainstream media consumers will find almost nowhere (perhaps literally nowhere) is a detailed analysis of how US-UK support for Mubarak fits with a pattern of US-UK support for dictators across the world over many decades, indeed centuries. A US Department of State memorandum of March 15, 1946, commented:

‘The position of the rulers of the Persian Gulf might be thought of as that of independence, regulated, supervised and defined’ by the British government. (Quoted, Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.22)

Five years later, a State Department memo gave an idea of how the British defined ‘independence’ in the region:

‘North Africa enjoys stability, even though stability is obtained largely through repression.’ (Curtis, ibid., p.31)

In January 1956, the Foreign Office noted that Egyptian nationalist leader Gamal Abdel Nasser was ‘avowedly anti-communist’ but was ‘unfortunately... strongly neutralist’. (Curtis, ibid., p.96)
Winston Churchill regarded it as outrageous that, thanks to Nasser, Britain could no longer dictate terms. Churchill urged prime minister Anthony Eden to tell the Egyptians ‘that if we had any more of their cheek we will set the Jews on them and drive them into the gutter from which they should never have emerged’. (Quoted, John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried, Bookmarks, 2006, p.172) 

Anthony Nutting, a junior minister at the Foreign Office, recommended a restrained response to Nasser. In reply, Eden made his feelings clear:

‘I want him destroyed, can’t you understand? I want him murdered, and if you and the Foreign Office don’t agree, then you’d better come to the cabinet and explain why.’

When Nutting pointed out that they had no alternative government to replace Nasser, Eden replied: ‘I don’t give a damn if there’s anarchy and chaos in Egypt.’ (Newsinger, ibid., pp. 173-174)
And there is, of course, next to no mention in the media of how this long history of support for repression is rooted in the needs of Western realpolitik, itself rooted in the need of Western corporations for control of human and natural resources. The trend is so striking, so obvious even from released government documents, and makes complete logical sense. But on some level, mostly beneath conscious awareness, journalists understand that this is not a fit topic for discussion within the corporate media. Some of our society’s interior décor can be challenged, but the fundamental design and foundations of the building are presumably just fine. To say otherwise would be honest but ‘biased’ journalism, and ‘neutrality’ comes first (in fact, that’s a big reason why 'neutrality' comes first).

And so the real story goes unreported: if Egypt’s freedom fighters succeed in ousting Mubarak, far deadlier predators will be lying in wait for them. Us!

SUGGESTED ACTION

The goal of Media Lens is to promote rationality, compassion and respect for others. If you do write to journalists, we strongly urge you to maintain a polite, non-aggressive and non-abusive tone.

Write to: Alan Rusbridger, Guardian editor
Email: alan.rusbridger@guardian.co.uk
Write to Simon Kelner, acting editor of the Independent
Email: s.kelner@independent.co.uk
Write to John Mulholland, editor of the Observer
Email: john.mulholland@observer.co.uk

Europe Must Reclaim the Mediterranean - By Brad Macdonald - The Trumpet.com




Europe Must Reclaim the Mediterranean

February 10, 2011 | From theTrumpet.com

For Europe, preventing radical Islam from gaining a foothold in North Africa and the Middle East is a matter of survival.





In the world of geopolitics, the map is a prophetic instrument.

Consider the political upheavals in Egypt and the inevitable emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo’s new government. More broadly, consider radical Islam’s growing presence and influence in places like Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Lebanon and Pakistan. As extremist Islamic forces gain footholds in these countries, will they provoke transformations beyond the Middle East and North Africa? If so, where?

For the answers, we need only study a world map.

What quickly becomes apparent is radical Islam’s rise as a potent and controlling force in the southern and eastern Mediterranean. And who, outside that theater, does this trend threaten more than any other region? In virtually every conceivable way—politically, economically, strategically, demographically, culturally—it threatens Europe!

In an article aptly titled “If This Is Young Arabs’ 1989, Europe Must Be Ready With a Bold Response,” the Guardian’s Timothy Garton Ash warned last week that if violent, anti-Western Islamic forces gain the upper hand in Egypt and throughout North Africa, “producing so many new Irans,” then “heaven help us all” (emphasis mine throughout). The stakes in the Mediterranean could hardly be higher for Europe, Ash stated: “If that does not add up to a vital European interest, I don’t know what does.”

Shamefully, few commentators beyond Mr. Ash have analyzed the rise of radical Islam in Egypt, Tunisia and throughout the Arab world in this context. Some of Europe’s leaders, on the other hand, know precisely what is at stake. Last Friday, for example, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer, in an article that warranted more attention than it received, warned it was time for 
Europe to think “geopolitically, not just fiscally, about the Mediterranean.”

In a glimpse of how European elites are digesting events in Egypt, Fischer warned that “what the European Union is facing in the Mediterranean region isn’t primarily a currency problem; first and foremost, it is a strategic problem—one that requires finding solutions urgently.”

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Description: Map of radical Islam and Europe’s strategic assets
Copyright © 2011 Philadelphia Church of God, All Rights Reserved.

In other words, the possibility of losing southern and eastern Mediterranean countries to radical Islam is a greater problem than even the eurozone crisis!

To understand Fischer’s alarm, a person need only consider a map of the Mediterranean Sea in light of radical Islam’s growing footprint in Egypt, Tunisia, Lebanon and throughout much of North Africa and the Middle East.

One of Europe’s most important strategic assets is the Strait of Gibraltar. Situated on Spain’s southern tip, dividing Europe from Africa, the sea-lane is the western gateway into the Mediterranean Sea. Each year more than 80,000 vessels, many carrying goods to and from the shores of Europe’s largest economies, particularly Spain, Italy and Greece, transit the maritime gateway. The Port of Gibraltar is a deep-water port, one of the busiest and most important in Europe.

From Gibraltar, one can peer across less than 15 miles of ocean and see Morocco, a bustling nation of 31 million, 96 percent of whom are Muslim. Morocco’s government and populace is relatively stable, but experts say Islamic terrorist organizations in recent years have taken root in the country. Some have joined forces with drug cartels smuggling their wares into Europe. Others are actively working to overthrow the Moroccan government.

Moreover, neighboring Algeria has emerged as a terrorist mecca. According to former cia official and counterterrorism expert Charles Allen, al Qaeda is using Algeria as a breeding ground. Al Qaeda “functions as an umbrella organization for a disparate collection of Sunni Muslim terrorist elements determined to attack what they see as apostate regimes in Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, Mauritania and Morocco,” he said. Another expert said the region is emerging as al Qaeda’s next Afghanistan.

For Europe, the rising dominance of radical Islam in territory adjacent to its most crucial sea-lane amounts to a major strategic threat!

Roughly 1,000 miles east of Morocco is Tunisia. We’re told that this country, after the recent ousting of its authoritarian president, is embracing the democratic election of a new government. No one knows what this government will look like, but experts expect Islamist political parties will emerge with considerable influence. The leading Islamist party, Ennahdha—known for its anti-Western, extremist roots—is expected to gain significant power.

For Europe, Tunisia is immensely important. The shores of Sicily are less than 150 miles away, and the region has historically been a staging ground for armies seeking to invade Europe via the Italian peninsula.

For Europe, the emergence in Tunisia of a government that identifies with radical Islam—and possibly condones its ambitions for an Islamic caliphate—is a strategic threat!

Then there’s the Suez Canal, which bisects Egypt, connecting the Mediterranean Sea with the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. Each day, 2 to 3 million barrels of oil and fuel products pass through the canal and the energy pipelines that transit the Suez desert, which is controlled by Egypt. About two thirds of that energy ends up in Europe, where it accounts for 5 to 7 percent of the continent’s oil consumption. As Joel Hilliker highlighted last week, if the Muslim Brotherhood gains the levers of power in Cairo, it will be able to shut down the Suez, halting the flow of oil and goods.

For Europe, the transition of the Suez Canal into the hands of radical Islam would be a strategic and financial catastrophe!

Beyond Egypt, radical Islam is making its presence felt in Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia and Yemen. Except for Ethiopia, each of these countries is adjacent to the Red Sea or the Gulf of Aden, the vital sea-lanes connecting the Arabian Sea with the Mediterranean Sea, connecting Asia with Europe. Beyond their role as maritime highways, the Red Sea and Gulf of Aden contain vital ports from which oil is shipped to the world.

For Europe, the possibility of the Red Sea falling under the influence of radical Islam is a strategic and economic nightmare!

Another sliver of territory of extreme importance to Europe is the Dardanelle Strait and the Sea of Marmara, both of which connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean. Historically, these have generally marked the line between Europe and the Middle East. Today, these vital sea-lanes are controlled by Turkey. Since World War i this nation has been a secular state nurturing warm relations with the West, especially Europe. For Europe, as long as Turkey remained a secular, pro-Western state, there was no need to worry about the vital sea-lanes.

In the last couple of years, however, Turkey has given Europe cause for concern. Hardline Islamist forces have gained greater influence, both politically and religiously. More worryingly, Istanbul seems to be losing interest in sustaining rosy relations with the West, including Europe; it is showing an ominous tendency to prioritize relations with its Muslim neighbors, particularly Iran. Just this week Turkey and Iran furthered their diplomatic and political alignment, concluding agreements that will triple bilateral trade between the two states.

For Europe, the thought of Iran’s mullahs exploiting relations with Turkey to meddle in the Dardanelles and the Black Sea is deeply alarming!

Truly, when you look at the map and track the rise of radical Islam, it’s difficult to exaggerate just how much is at stake for Europe in the Mediterranean. Historically, the Mediterranean Sea belongs to Europe. Strategically, the Straits of Gibraltar, the coast of Tunisia, the Suez Canal and Red Sea, the Dardanelles and the island of Cyprus are absolutely vital to Europe’s national security.
In the last two months, it has become obvious that radical Islam—a vehemently anti-Western, intensely violent, aggressive and uncompromising force—is engaged in a campaign to take control of Europe’s southern flank. Iran is at the vanguard of this uprising.

As reality sinks in, Europe is realizing: Inaction is not an option!

This explains why Joshcka Fischer is imploring Europe to seriously engage governments in North Africa and the Middle East that have yet to come under the influence of radical Islamic forces. 

“European officials in Brussels and the major European Union governments should not go for political and economic half-measures when it comes to the Mediterranean states,” he wrote. In the time ahead, the EU will likely heed Fischer’s advice and engage more directly in North Africa and the Middle East. It has too much at stake to do nothing!

More significantly, the rise of radical Islam in the Mediterranean Sea—the region Winston Churchill termed Europe’s soft underbelly—will serve as a powerful impetus for Europe to continue to forge itself into a streamlined and dominant political, economic and military superstate. Be assured, events in Egypt are serving to assure Europe that if it wants to survive as a unified power—if it wants continued access to energy and resources from Africa and the Middle East—if it wants to stop radical Islam’s war on Christians—if it wants to purge the Islamic extremists from the Continent—then it must develop the political and military might to confront Iran and its radical Islamic proxies.

Watch Europe closely. It knows the window of opportunity to tackle radical Islam’s mounting armies is closing. It is about to reclaim the Mediterranean! •