Swami's confession By VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN - FRONTLINE Magazine, Chennai, India

 Though under the law, Swami Aseemanand's confession could led to his death by hanging, Indian Muslim may consider his repentance ---- caused through the medium of a Muslim young man of impeccable manners, no doubt nurtured in a peace-loving Islamic culture, who was wrongly and possibly deliberately incarcerated by India's brutal communalised  Police Force given full support by the ruling Brahmins to crackdown on Indian Muslim citizens to demonize and demoralized them, ---- as a potent alternative route to the heart of their Hindu brethren in India. 

An overwhelming majority of Indians, who happen to be Hindu or Muslims or belonging to other faiths or no faith, are all peace-loving. Unlike US and Europe, India's indigenous people are not war obsessed. That has been their weakness as well as their strength. 

It is time Indian Muslims inspire them to tread the path of love, affection, mutual help and respect so that India as a nation should unite and be blessed with a bulwark against foreign divisive forces and unitedly keep India free.


Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

----


http://www.hinduonnet.com/fline/stories/20110211280310700.htm

Volume 28 - Issue 03 :: Jan. 29-Feb. 11, 2011

TERRORISM

Swami's confession

 
VENKITESH RAMAKRISHNAN

Swami Aseemanand's confessions on the involvement of Hindutva outfits in terror attacks leave investigating agencies red-faced.

THE HINDU ARCHIVES 

 Swami Aseemanand, a file photograph. He was originally arrested in connection with the 2006 Malegaon blasts but his reported confessions of December 18, 2010, point to his involvement in as many as five terror attacks.

WHATEVER the final verdict on the reported confessions made recently by Swami Aseemanand, leader of Abhinav Bharat, a Hindutva extremist organisation, the fact is that they have raised vital questions about terrorist activity in India. The most important of these relates to the process that security agencies adopt for investigating terrorist attacks and the projections they make as part of it.

The confessions also suggest that a widespread network of Hindutva terror groups has advanced its extremist activities systematically over the past six to seven years with help from many leaders in mainstream Hindutva organisations as also groups within these organisations that are a part of the Rashtriya Swayamsewak Sangh (RSS)-led Sangh Parivar.

Another important question relates to the responsibility of the government and the larger judicial establishment towards persons found to have been implicated wrongly and arrested in many terror-related cases that have taken a dramatic about-turn as a result of new revelations such as the one made by Swami Aseemanand. This also raises the question as to how the government and other institutions plan to redress the wrong done to these innocent persons.

On the central question raised by Swami Aseemanand's confessions, that is, of the process of investigation into a terror attack, administrative and political authorities claim that the multidimensional investigations carried out by a clutch of agencies, including the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), working together or separately, are done secretly and confidentially.

However, it has been the practice in the immediate aftermath of almost every attack to blame “jehadi groups” working within the country or their so-called cohorts based in different parts of the world, including neighbouring countries. The experience has been that investigating agencies and those who wield control over them in the security establishment or the Home Ministry at the Centre or in the States help in the propagation of such jehad-oriented stories. Aseemanand's reported confessions raise questions about this practice as well as the line of investigation that has been adopted in many cases over the past decade.

Aseemanand was originally arrested in connection with the 2006 Malegaon blasts but his reported confessions of December 18, 2010, point to his involvement in as many as five terror attacks. According to the reported confession, Aseemanand and his associates, who were members of Hindutva terror outfits, were involved in the many terror attacks, including the bomb blasts in the Samjhauta Express (February 2007) and those at Hyderabad Mecca Masjid (May 2007) and Ajmer dargah (October 2007). The associates apparently included Sadhvi Pragya Singh Thakur, Lokesh Sharma, Lt Col Prasad Shrikant Purohit, Retired Major Ramesh Upadhyay, Swami Dayanand Pandey (all of whom were arrested during the course of the investigations) and Sandeep Dange, who is absconding, and Sunil Joshi, who was apparently killed by a few of his own associates. The name of Indresh Kumar, a member of the RSS national executive, also finds mention in the recorded confession.

According to it, these Hindutva activists had joined hands to carry out attacks at Muslim places of worship or in areas with a significant population of Muslims. A common feature of the terror strikes was that a large number of the victims were Muslims. The deadliest attack by this group was on the Samjhauta Express on the night of February 18-19, 2007, in which 68 persons were killed.

 Significantly, in all the terror attacks referred to in Aseemanand's confessions, the line of investigation by different agencies focussed only on “jehadi terror groups” and their national and international associates such as the Students Islamic Movement of India (SIMI), the Lakshar–e-Taiba (LeT) and the Harkat-ul-Jehad-e-Islami (HuJI).

The Samjhauta Express blasts, for instance, were described as a macabre attack by the LeT. This line of investigation and the projections made on that basis found such widespread currency that this was highlighted even in international forums such as the United Nations. The U.N.'s listing of the LeT as a terror outfit in its international watch list made a specific mention of the Samjhauta Express blasts. Similarly, it was widely propagated that the Mecca Masjid blasts were planned and executed by the HuJI. Hundreds of people from different parts of the country were arrested in these cases as part of the investigation, which has now been exposed as fallacious, and kept either in custody or in jail for long periods of time.

For example, as many as 60 persons were arrested immediately after the Mecca Masjid blasts following the HuJI attack theory. The line of investigation advanced at that time by the Hyderabad police and broadly supported by Central investigating agencies was as follows: Shahid Bilal, a resident of Moosrambagh in the old city of Hyderabad had carried out these blasts in order to create communal tension. There were two first information reports (FIRs) in this case, one dealing with the blasts and the other dealing with the recovery of unexploded explosives.

Charges ranging from involvement in seditious activity to conspiracy were brought against all the 60. The viewing of recordings of the demolition of the Babri Masjid was held to be an act that spurred the suspects into indulging in terrorist acts.

The investigation into the Samjhauta Express blasts has also been nothing short of a roller coaster ride. The attack on the train named after the Urdu and Hindi word for accord or compromise was perceived as an attack on the efforts to strengthen India-Pakistan cooperation. The train connects New Delhi to Lahore and passes through the India-Pakistan border in Punjab at Attari.

On the basis of the perception that the blasts were perpetrated by those who wanted to scuttle or at least impair India-Pakistan cooperation, both the Indian and Pakistan governments condemned the attack. A day after the bombings, Indian investigating agencies said it was a suitcase bomb attack carried out by five people associated with the LeT. The agencies even released sketches of two suspects. Later, some people who allegedly sold the suitcases to the alleged attackers were arrested from Indore. But that was about all in terms of concrete progress.

R.V. MOORTHY 

THE DEADLIEST ATTACK by Aseemanand and his associates, according to his confession, was on the Samjhauta Express in February 2007, in which 68 persons were killed. Here, an NSG commando inspects a bombed out coach of the train near Panipat station, 80 km from New Delhi.

Things started to unfold differently in November 2008 when the interrogation of Lt Col Purohit revealed that there could be a Hindutva terror dimension to the attack. This aspect gained momentum in October 2010 when the charge sheet prepared by the Rajasthan anti-terrorism squad stated that a meeting of Hindutva bomb makers in February 2006 discussed the Samjhauta Express as a potential target for attack. In yet another development, WikiLeaks linked David Headley, the suspected brain behind the Mumbai attacks of November 26, 2008, to the bombing. Aseemanand's confessions have come as the latest twist in this series of events.

The Sangh Parivar as a whole, and specifically the RSS and its political arm the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have pointed to the changing facets in the investigations to claim that the Congress-led United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government at the Centre is using various agencies to prop up a “misnomer” called “Hindu terror”. According to an editorial in Organiser, the journal of the RSS, Aseemanand's confessions are nothing but the concoctions of the investigating agencies to suit the political needs of the Congress.

The editorial stated: “So far there has been no instance of any Hindu organisation boasting credit for a terror strike anywhere in the world. So far no outfit has claimed to work underground to advance a Hindu agenda through arbitrary force, undemocratic means or through intimidation. Normally gangs resort to such methods when they are in a miserable minority and have no hope of achieving their goal through democratic, constitutional methods. Or when they are not confident of the support they enjoy in society. In any case, even home-grown terrorism cannot sustain without technical and logistic support and funds from outside the country. By general consensus there is no religion or colour for terrorism. But the jihadi outfits do not make any secret of the religious agenda they want to enforce. By all these parameters Hindu terror is a misnomer.”

It also wondered why “only the persons named in alleged Hindu radicalism seem to be making ‘confessions'” and why “we have not heard of a [Ajmal] Kasab, [Mohammad] Afzal [a.k.a Afzal Guru] or Geelani or such other jihadi terrorists making any confession”. The Sangh Parivar leaders, including BJP president Nitin Gadkari, have made bold to absolve RSS national executive committee member Indresh Kumar of all culpability and have appeared along with him in several public functions.

Notwithstanding such protestations, there is enough evidence to show that Hindutva terror groups have time and again received overt or covert support from mainstream Hindutva organisations. Not only the cases cited by Aseemanand but also a number of untoward happenings in Maharashtra underscore this point. Independent civil society investigations into the blast in the house of an RSS worker in Nanded, which resulted in the death of two Sangh Parivar activists, and the attacks later in Parbhani, Beed and Jalna have underscored the collusion between leaders and activists of mainstream Hindutva organisations and peripheral Hindutva terror units.

Incidentally, Aseemanand himself came into prominence within the Hindutva fold when he organised a massive Hindutva-oriented conference in the tribal-dominated Dangs district of Gujarat in 2006. That conference, where plans were made for the coming decades, was perceived by Sangh Parivar observers as a milestone event. Aseemanand worked closely with the BJP's Hindutva icon, Chief Minister Narendra Modi, and his ministerial colleagues in convening the conference. A similar meeting is being organised in 2011, obviously without the presence of Aseemanand, but of course with the blessings of Narendra Modi. Clearly, these connections and the push they give to fringe Hindutva groups cannot be wished away.

According to the Lucknow-based political observer Indra Bhushan Singh, who is also a senior lawyer in the Lucknow High Court, the trajectory of terrorism of different hues can be distilled and identified properly only if such organisational activity, too, is monitored properly.

He said: “Only such scrutiny will lead to correct investigations and correct conclusions. Unfortunately, our investigating agencies seem to be perennially in reaction mode and not in a proactive mode. That is why we have spectacles such as the investigation into the 2006 Varanasi blasts, where a man was arrested and even convicted but a couple of years later new accused were discovered and paraded from different parts of the country. Clearly, this is an issue involving basic human rights and demands serious attention and concrete action from different sections of society, including lawmakers. “

Indra Bhushan Singh's contention has special relevance in the context of Aseemanand's confessions and the effect it will have on people linked to the several attacks he has mentioned. However, given the track record of the investigating agencies and their political bosses, it may be too much to expect concrete measures to correct the flip-flop methods that drive terror investigations.

As Islamist Group Rises, Its Intentions Are Unclear By Scott Shane - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/04/world/middleeast/04brotherhood.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22&pagewanted=all#h[]

As Islamist Group Rises, Its Intentions Are Unclear

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: February 3, 2011

¶ WASHINGTON — After maintaining a low profile in protests led largely by secular young Egyptians, the Muslim Brotherhood, the country’s largest opposition force, appeared to be taking a more assertive role on Thursday, issuing a statement asking for President Hosni Mubarak to step aside for a transitional government.

“We demand that this regime is overthrown, and we demand the formation of a national unity government for all the factions,” the Brotherhood said in a statement broadcast by Al Jazeera.

¶ The Obama administration has spoken cautiously about the future role of the Brotherhood, which has long been banned by Mr. Mubarak’s government, saying only that all parties must renounce violence and accept democracy. But one of the few near certainties of a post-Mubarak Egypt is that the Muslim Brotherhood will emerge as a powerful political force.

¶ The unanswered question, according to experts on the region, is whether that will prove a manageable challenge for the United States and Israel or a catastrophe for American interests in the Middle East.

¶ The Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, is the oldest and largest Islamist movement in the world, with affiliates in most Muslim countries and adherents in Europe and the United States.

¶ Its size and diversity, and the legal ban that has kept it from genuine political power in Egypt for decades, make it hard to characterize simply. As the Roman Catholic Church includes both those who practice leftist liberation theology and conservative anti-abortion advocates, so the Brotherhood includes both practical reformers and firebrand ideologues.

¶ Which of those tendencies might rise to dominance in a new Egypt is under intense discussion inside the Obama administration, where officials say they may be willing to consult with the Brotherhood during a political transition.

¶ Bruce Riedel, a veteran observer of the Muslim world at the Brookings Institution, said the United States had no choice but to accept the group’s role.

¶ “If we really want democracy in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood is going to be a big part of the picture,” said Mr. Riedel, who was the Egypt desk officer at the Central Intelligence Agency when Mr. Mubarak came to power in 1981. “Rather than demonizing them, we ought to start engaging them now.”

¶ American politicians and pundits have used the Brotherhood as a sort of boogeyman, tagging it as a radical menace and the grandfather of Al Qaeda. That lineage is accurate in a literal sense: some Qaeda leaders, notably the terrorist network’s Egyptian second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, have roots in the organization. But Qaeda leaders despise the Brotherhood because it has renounced violence and chosen to compete in elections.

¶ “The Brotherhood hates Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda hates the Brotherhood,” said Shadi Hamid, director of research at the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar. “So if we’re talking about counterterrorism, engaging with the Brotherhood will advance our interests in the region.”

¶ Mr. Hamid said the Muslim Brotherhood’s deep hostility to Israel — which reflects majority public opinion in Egypt — would pose difficulties for American policy. Its conservative views on the rights of women and intolerance of religious minorities are offensive by Western standards. But he said that the group was far from monolithic and that it was divided between those who would never accept Israel’s right to exist and those who accepted a two-state solution in which Israel and Palestine exist side by side.

¶ “Yes, in their heart of hearts, they hate Israel,” Mr. Hamid said. “But they know they have to live in this world and respect the geopolitical scene.”

¶ The Muslim Brotherhood was founded by an Egyptian schoolteacher and imam, Hassan al-Banna, as a grass-roots association whose goal was to promote the reform of Muslim society by a greater adherence to Islam, through preaching, outreach and the provision of social services.

¶ “It was a bottom-up, gradual process, beginning with the individual and ultimately reaching all of society,” said Carrie Rosefsky Wickham, a political scientist at Emory University and the author of “Mobilizing Islam,” a 2002 book on Egypt and the Muslim Brotherhood. “It’s roughly analogous to the evangelical Christian goal of sharing the gospel. Politics were secondary.”

¶ But Mr. Banna did speak of jihad, too, as a struggle against colonialism and Zionism, Ms. Wickham said. Quotations from the Brotherhood’s founder have been highlighted in recent years by Western critics who portray the movement as a militant threat.

¶ In the 1970s, after years of brutal repression by the state, the Egyptian president at the time, Anwar el-Sadat, permitted the Brotherhood to operate quietly and to open a Cairo office, and the Brotherhood formally renounced violence as a means of achieving power in Egypt. The group did not, however, reject violence in other circumstances, and its leaders have endorsed acts of terrorism against Israel and against American troops in Iraq.

¶ A prominent Brotherhood thinker, Sayyid Qutb, who was imprisoned by the Egyptian government and executed in 1966, was an important theorist of violent jihad and a spiritual progenitor of Osama bin Laden, the founder of Al Qaeda, and Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical preacher now hiding in Yemen. But the Brotherhood took a different direction after Mr. Qutb’s death, and Qaeda leaders came to hold the organization in contempt.

¶ A milestone in the Brotherhood’s evolution in Egypt came in 1984, when its leaders decided to compete in parliamentary elections. Since then, it has been alternately tolerated and repressed in Egyptian politics, where most estimates of its actual support begin at 20 percent of the electorate.

¶ “The paradox has been that the better the Brotherhood performs, the more repression it has attracted,” Ms. Wickham said. After it won 88 seats in Parliament in the 2005 elections, Mr. Mubarak’s government responded with a new crackdown.

¶ In an interview just before the current wave of protests began in Egypt, Essam el-Erian, a leading figure in the Brotherhood, said the group did not seek to monopolize power. “We want an atmosphere for fair competition now that can allow us to compete for power in the future,” Mr. Erian said. “And we want stability and freedom for people, not chaos.”

¶ The Brotherhood, whose leaders are mostly much older than the protest organizers, joined the demonstrations only after they were under way. The hesitancy may reflect in part the grim history of the state’s ruthlessness, said Abdel Halim Qandil, the general coordinator of Kifaya, a secular opposition movement.

¶ “The Brotherhood was rebuilt over the last three decades as a social religious movement,” Mr. Qandil said. “They are having difficulty transforming that into a political movement.”

¶ Mr. Qandil nonetheless estimated that in a free election, the Brotherhood would win about a third of the seats in Parliament, support that he suggested might ebb as competing parties gained attention.

¶ Asked about the Muslim Brotherhood, Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, said Monday that the United States would work with any group that showed “adherence to the law, adherence to nonviolence, and a willingness to be part of a democratic process, but not use that democratic process to simply instill yourself into power.” Some experts on the Brotherhood say the group has met the requirements of nonviolence and participation in elections in Egypt for decades.

¶ But even among specialists, the degree of uncertainty about the Brotherhood’s future is striking. Several admitted they could not say for sure whether participation in government would have a moderating effect on the group, or whether moderation might prove to have been a convenient false front to be cast off if the group attained real power.

¶ Skeptics point to the example of the Palestinian group Hamas, the Brotherhood offshoot that has often used terrorism. Ms. Wickham, of Emory, said Hamas was a national resistance that was fighting Israeli occupation and thus was not a model for a future Egyptian Brotherhood.

¶ But she admitted that after 20 years of studying the group, whose internal deliberations are secret, she found it difficult to predict what it might do after Mr. Mubarak left power. Is the Brotherhood willing to be one party among equals in Egyptian politics, or is it merely biding its time before seeking a monopoly?

¶ The answer is elusive, Ms. Wickham said, even though the Brotherhood “has a 30-year behavior as actors in a competitive political process.” That is why it is crucial, she said, that Egypt’s electoral laws and Constitution be rewritten during a transition, as widely discussed, to prevent any party from seizing absolute control.

¶ “Institutional checks and balances are critical,” she said.
¶

¶David D. Kirkpatrick contributed reporting from Cairo, and Michael Slackman from Berlin.

SHAME ON ARAB AND MUSLIM WORLD!!! By Ghulam Muhammed

SHAME ON ARAB AND MUSLIM WORLD!!!

The entire tone and tenor of the following New York Times report is a shame for any nation or people that have any self-respect, dignity or aspiration of freedom and liberty in this world of history's most oppressive force manifested by the United States of America.

The manner in which so many technocrats/bureaucrats in so many offices of US administrations in Washington and bureaus and embassies around the world, is described issuing minute by minute direction of a supposed 'people's revolution' in Egypt in effect mocks any aspiration of the sovereign and security of a nation of 80 million people and with that the entire population of over a billion people of Arab and Muslim world.

Just as people have risen against the oppressive regime of Husni Mubarak in Egypt, it is time people of the world should rise against the oppressive hegemony of the United States of America.

Let it be as peaceful revolution as people gathered in Liberation (Tahrir) Square have staged.

Unless a world wide peaceful movement against US oppressive hegemony over practically each and every nation in the supposedly Free World is organized, a new Age of Slavery will be ushered in to darken the entire globe. Let Obama head the storm brewing all over the world.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

http://ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com 

------------------------
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/03/world/middleeast/03diplomacy.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2&pagewanted=all#h[]

Sudden Split Recasts U.S. Foreign Policy

By HELENE COOPER, MARK LANDLER and MARK MAZZETTI

Published: February 2, 2011

WASHINGTON — After days of delicate public and private diplomacy, the United States openly broke with its most stalwart ally in the Arab world on Wednesday, as the Obama administration strongly condemned violence by allies of President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt against protesters and called on him to speed up his exit from power.

Egypt’s government hit back swiftly. The Foreign Ministry released a defiant statement saying the calls from “foreign parties” had been “rejected and aimed to incite the internal situation in Egypt.” And Egyptian officials reached out to reporters to make clear how angry they were at their onetime friend.

Separately, in an interview, a senior Egyptian government official took aim at President Obama’s call on Tuesday night for a political transition to begin “now” — a call that infuriated Cairo.

But the White House was not backing down. “I want to be clear,” said Robert Gibbs, the press secretary. “ ‘Now’ started yesterday.”

The Obama administration seemed determined Wednesday to put as much daylight as possible between Mr. Obama and Mr. Mubarak, once considered an unshakable American supporter in a tumultuous region, with Mr. Gibbs once again raising the specter of a cutoff of American aid to the Mubarak government if the Egyptian president failed to bend.

“There are things that the government needs to do,” he said. “There are reforms that need to be undertaken. And there are opposition entities that have to be included in the conversations as we move toward free and fair elections.” Those elections are currently scheduled for September, but the State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said, “The sooner that can happen, the better.”

The open rupture between the United States and Egypt illustrates how swift and dramatic changes in Cairo are altering the calculus of the entire region and the administration’s foreign policy agenda. Besides Egypt, there were upheavals this week among other close American allies in the fight against Al Qaeda, and in the long struggle to reach a Middle East peace. Israeli officials expressed concern that Mr. Mubarak’s abrupt exit could jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.

Even as the White House was trying to react to the latest flare-up of violence in Egypt on Wednesday — Mr. Gibbs pointedly criticized attacks against the media in Egypt and against “peaceful demonstrators” — officials at the Pentagon, the State Department, the Central Intelligence Agency and the White House were running various scenarios across the region in an effort to keep up with events.

What would the covert American war in Yemen look like if the supportive Yemeni president were to be forced out? Will Mr. Mubarak’s successor duplicate his support of the Middle East peace process? Will the shifts in the region benefit Islamic extremists, who will try to capitalize on unrest, or will it show the Arab street the power of a secular uprising?

“A full range of events are being discussed in many buildings throughout Washington,” Mr. Gibbs said.

As evidence of how far the rift has gone, a senior Egyptian official reached out to a reporter to criticize Mr. Obama’s remarks.

“There is a contradiction between calling on the transition to begin now, and the calls which President Mubarak himself has made for an orderly transition,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “Mubarak’s primary responsibility is to ensure an orderly and peaceful transfer of power. We can’t do that if we have a vacuum of power.” He said that the Egyptian government has “a serious issue with how the White House is spinning this.”

For the Obama administration and the Egyptian government, the flip from allies to open confrontation has been fast. When former President George Bush was briefed ahead of his recent call to Mr. Mubarak — a call Mr. Bush volunteered to make because he was an old friend — Mr. Bush was given no instructions to push the leader toward the exit, according to people familiar with the conversations.

“No one wanted the vacuum of power that would happen if Mubarak left too soon,” said a former senior official who was consulted by the White House.

Now, though, administration officials are calling for visible steps from the Mubarak government. At a minimum, the Obama administration wants to make sure that political opponents of Mr. Mubarak are included in negotiations — which the United States wants to see begin at once — over how to restructure Egypt’s political system in a way that will take into account the grievances of the protesters.

American officials do not want a repeat of past promises from the Mubarak government for free elections that were followed by a shutting of the process to its opposition. After watching Mr. Mubarak’s statement — in which he fell far short of sweeping reform — Mr. Obama decided to toughen his own language further, demanding that change begin immediately. “The language was crafted after he spoke,” a senior administration official said.

“They want something better than when Mubarak said, ‘I want my Parliament to amend the articles of the Constitution relating to the presidential elections,’” said Brian Katulis, a foreign policy expert at the Center for American Progress. “If you’re the opposition, you’re thinking: ‘This is the Parliament which was elected in sham elections? No way.’ ”

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton called Egypt’s vice president, Omar Suleiman, in the afternoon to reinforce Mr. Obama’s call for Mr. Mubarak to begin a transition immediately. 

Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, both called their counterparts on Wednesday as well. Officials said the administration is worried about a call for even larger protests on Friday, and said Wednesday’s clashes had narrowed Mr. Mubarak’s options.

Mr. Obama’s private emissary to Mr. Mubarak, Frank G. Wisner, abruptly left Cairo on Wednesday evening after only two meetings, one with the president and one with Mr. Suleiman.
“We felt that he had done what he could do,” the official said. “They had a conversation, and we felt that it had gone as far as it could.”

For the United States, the unfolding crisis is about much more than just a rift with an ally.
With the popular revolts in Egypt and Yemen — and a government already deposed in Tunisia — American counterterrorism officials are concerned that radical factions in those countries could find a new foothold amid the chaos. The United States is heavily reliant on foreign partners, and officials and outside experts said that losing Mr. Mubarak or President Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen would deal a short-term blow to its counterterrorism campaign.
Or perhaps not.

“There’s part of this that’s dangerous to Al Qaeda,” said Juan Zarate of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, who was a top counterterrorism official during George W. Bush’s administration. “If the street protests lead to a peaceful, pluralistic transition, that does huge damage to the Al Qaeda narrative,” he said. That narrative holds that authoritarian pro-American governments should be deposed by violent jihad.

Still, some cautioned that it could take months or years for the long-term impact of the recent uprisings to be revealed. Citing Lebanon’s Cedar Revolution of 2005, Bruce Hoffman of Georgetown University pointed out that the uprising had the immediate impact of bringing down the country’s Syria-backed government and causing the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon, but six years later the militant group Hezbollah is now Lebanon’s de-facto government.

Experts said Mr. Saleh might be able to navigate the shoals of popular unrest more expertly than President Mubarak.

Described by American officials as a wily survivor, Mr. Saleh has spent years dealing with strife inside Yemen, from Shiite separatists to militants linked to Al Qaeda. Some in Washington questioned whether the pledge he made Wednesday to step cede power in 2013 was sincere, or a clever tactic to appease his enemies in Yemen.

“Saleh is used to dancing in the snake pit,” Mr. Zarate said.

David E. Sanger contributed reporting.

Things Have To Change In Order To Remain The Same | Winners and Losers From a Pharaoh's Fall

http://www.vdare.com/roberts/110131_change.htm

January 31, 2011

Things Have To Change In Order To Remain The Same

By Paul Craig Roberts

The hypocrisy of the US government is yet again demonstrated in full bore force. The US government invaded Iraq and Afghanistan, laid waste to much of the countries including entire villages and towns, and massacred untold numbers of civilians in order “to bring democracy” to Iraq and Afghanistan.  Now after days of Egyptians in the streets demanding “Mubarak must go,” the US government remains aligned with its puppet Egyptian ruler, even suggesting that Mubarak, after running a police state for three decades, is the appropriate person to implement democracy in Egypt.

On January 30, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that “freedom and democracy” America neither seeks nor supports the ouster of the Egyptian dictator.

Israeli prime minister Netanyahu told the US and Europe that criticism of Mubarak must be curbed in order “to preserve stability in the region.”

By “stability” Netanyahu means the unimpeded ability of Israel to continue oppressing the Palestinians and stealing their country. Mubarak has been for three decades the well-paid enforcer for the US and Israel, sealing off Gaza from the outside world and preventing aid flows across the Egyptian border. Mubarak and his family have become multi-billionaires, thanks to the American taxpayer, and the US government, both Republicans and Democrats, do not want to lose their heavy investment in Mubarak.

The US government has long corrupted Arab governments by paying rulers installed by the US to represent US/Israeli interests rather than the interest of Arab peoples. Arabs put up with American-financed oppression for many years, but now are showing signs of rebellion.

The murderous American-installed dictator in Tunis was overthrown by people taking to the streets. Rebellion has spread to Egypt and there are also street protests against the US-supported rulers in Yemen and Jordan.

 

These uprisings might succeed in ousting puppet rulers, but will the result be anything more than the exchange of a new American puppet ruler for the old?  Mubarak might go, but whoever takes his place is likely to find himself wearing the same American harness.

What dictators do is to eliminate alternative leadership.  Potential leaders are either assassinated, exiled, or imprisoned. Moreover, anything short of a full-fledged revolution, such as the Iranian one, leaves in place a bureaucracy accustomed to business as usual.  In addition, Egypt and the country’s military have grown accustomed to American support and will want the money to keep flowing.  It is the flow of this money that ensures the purchase of the replacement government.

 

Because the US dollar is the world reserve currency, the US government has financial dominance and the ability to financially isolate other countries, such as Iran. To break free of America’s grip, one of two things would have to happen.  Revolution would have to sweep the Arab world and result in an economic unity that could foster indigenous economic development, or the US dollar has to fail as world currency.

Arab disunity has long been the means by which the Western countries have dominated the Middle East.  Without this disunity, Israel and the US could not abuse the Palestinians in the manner in which they have for decades, and without this disunity the US could not have invaded Iraq.  It is unlikely that the Arabs will suddenly unite themselves.

The collapse of the dollar is more likely.  Indeed, the policy of the US government to maximize both budget and trade deficits, and the policy of the Federal Reserve to monetize the budget deficit and the fraudulent paper assets of the large banks, have the dollar heading for demise.

 

As the supply of dollars grows, the value diminishes. Perhaps the time is not far off when rulers cease to sell out their peoples for American money.

Paul Craig Roberts [email him] was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury during President Reagan’s first term.  He was Associate Editor of the Wall Street Journal.  He has held numerous academic appointments, including the William E. Simon Chair, Center for Strategic and International Studies, Georgetown University, and Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institution, Stanford University. He was awarded the Legion of Honor by French President Francois Mitterrand. He is the author of Supply-Side Revolution : An Insider's Account of Policymaking in Washington;  Alienation and the Soviet Economy and Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, and is the co-author with Lawrence M. Stratton of The Tyranny of Good Intentions : How Prosecutors and Bureaucrats Are Trampling the Constitution in the Name of Justice. Click here for Peter Brimelow’s Forbes Magazine interview with Roberts about the epidemic of prosecutorial misconduct.

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Patrick J. Buchanan Archive

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January 31, 2011

Winners and Losers From a Pharaoh's Fall

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Among the biggest losers of the Egyptian uprising are, first, the Mubaraks, who are finished, and, next, the United States and Israel.

Hosni Mubarak will be out by year's end, if not the end of this month, or week. He will not run again and will not be succeeded by son Gamal, whom he had groomed and who has fled to London.

Today, the lead party in determining Egypt's future is the army. Cheered in the streets of Cairo, respected by the people, that army is not going to fire on peaceful demonstrators to keep in power a regime with one foot already in the grave.

Only if fired on by provocateurs is the army likely to clear Tahrir Square the way the Chinese army cleared Tiananmen Square.

But the army does have an immense stake in who rules, and that stake would not be well served by one-man, one-vote democracy.

Like the Turkish army, the Egyptian army sees itself as guardian of the nation. From the Egyptian military have come all four of the leaders who have ruled since the 1952 colonel's revolt that ousted King Farouk: Gens. Naguib, Sadat and Mubarak, and Col. Nasser

The military has also been for 30 years the recipient of $1.2 billion dollars a year from the United States. Its weapons come from America. Moreover, the army has a vital interest in the "cold peace" with Israel that has kept it out of war since 1973, produced the return of Sinai, and maintained Egypt's role as the leader of the moderate Arabs and major ally of the United States.

The Egyptian army is also aware of what happened to the Iranian generals when the Shah fell, and what is happening to the Turkish army as the Islamicizing regime of Prime Minister Erdogan strips that army of its role as arbiter of whether a Turkish regime stays or goes.

The Egyptian army will not yield its position readily, which is why it may tilt to the ex-generals Mubarak named Friday as vice president and prime minister.

The army's rival is the Muslim Brotherhood. The oldest Islamic movement in the Middle East, the most unified opponent of the regime, its future in a democratic Egypt, as part of a ruling coalition or major opposition party, seems assured.

And while the crowds in Cairo and Alexandria are united in what they wish to be rid of, the Muslim Brotherhood is united in knowing the kind of state and nation it wishes to establish.

Why are the United States and Israel seemingly certain losers from the fall of Mubarak? Because in any free and fair election in the Middle East, a majority will vote for rulers who will distance the country from America and sever ties to Israel.

When it comes to America and Israel, there is little doubt where the "Arab street" stands. And the freer the elections, the more the views of the Arab street will be reflected in the new Arab regime.

But why do they hate us? Is it because of who we are?

Surely, it is not our freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly or free elections for which we are hated. For this is what the demonstrators are clamoring for. Indeed, it is in the name of these freedoms that the Egyptian people are demanding that we cease standing behind Mubarak and stand with them.

No, the United States is not hated across the region because of the freedoms we enjoy or even because of the lectures on democracy we do not cease to deliver. We are hated because we are perceived as hypocrites who say one thing and do another.

The Arabs say we support despots who deny them the rights we cherish. They say we preach endlessly of human rights but imposed savage sanctions on Iraq for a dozen years before 2003 that brought premature death to half a million children. They say we use our power to invade countries that never attacked us.

They say we have provided Israel with the weapons to crush the Palestinians and steal their land, and that we practice a moral double standard. We condemn attacks on Israelis, but sit silent as Israel bombs Lebanon for five weeks and conducts a war on Gaza, killing 1,400 and wounding thousands, most of them civilians.

Any truth to all this? Or is this just Arab propaganda?

After losing Turkey as an ally, Israel has just seen Hezbollah come to power in Beirut and the Palestinian Authority stripped of its credibility by the Wikileaks exposure of its groveling to America and Israel. Now Israel faces the near certainty of a more hostile Egypt.

As for America, if we are about to be thrown out of the Middle East, it would be neither undeserved nor an unmitigated disaster.

After all, it's their world, not ours.

COPYRIGHT CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.

Patrick J. Buchanan needs no introduction to VDARE.COM readers; his book State of Emergency: The Third World Invasion and Conquest of America, can be ordered from Amazon.com. His latest book is Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, reviewed here by Paul Craig Roberts.

Israel, Alone Again? By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI - The New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/opinion/02Halevi.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha212

Op-Ed Contributor

Israel, Alone Again?

By YOSSI KLEIN HALEVI

Published: February 1, 2011

Jerusalem

ISRAELIS want to rejoice over the outbreak of protests in Egypt’s city squares. They want to believe that this is the Arab world’s 1989 moment. Perhaps, they say, the poisonous reflex of blaming the Jewish state for the Middle East’s ills will be replaced by an honest self-assessment.

But few Israelis really believe in that hopeful outcome. Instead, the grim assumption is that it is just a matter of time before the only real opposition group in Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, takes power. Israelis fear that Egypt will go the way of Iran or Turkey, with Islamists gaining control through violence or gradual co-optation.

Either result would be the end of Israel’s most important relationship in the Arab world. The Muslim Brotherhood has long stated its opposition to peace with Israel and has pledged to revoke the 1979 Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty if it comes into power. Given the strengthening of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas’s control of Gaza and the unraveling of the Turkish-Israeli alliance, an Islamist Egypt could produce the ultimate Israeli nightmare: living in a country surrounded by Iran’s allies or proxies.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the icon of the Egyptian protesters, and many Western analysts say that the Egyptian branch of the Brotherhood has forsworn violence in favor of soup kitchens and medical clinics. Even if that is true, it is small comfort to Israelis, who fear that the Brotherhood’s nonviolence has been a tactical maneuver and know that its worldview is rooted in crude anti-Semitism.
 
The Brotherhood and its offshoots have been the main purveyors of the Muslim world’s widespread conspiracy theories about the Jews, from blaming the Israeli intelligence service for 9/11 to accusing Zionists of inventing the Holocaust to blackmail the West.

Others argue that the responsibilities of governance would moderate the Brotherhood, but here that is dismissed as Western naïveté: the same prediction, after all, was made about the Iranian regime, Hezbollah and Hamas.

The fear of an Islamist encirclement has reminded Israelis of their predicament in the Middle East. In its relationship with the Palestinians, Israel is Goliath. But in its relationship with the Arab and Muslim worlds, Israel remains David.

Since its founding, Israel has tried to break through the military and diplomatic siege imposed by its neighbors. In the absence of acceptance from the Arab world, it found allies on the periphery of the Middle East, Iran and Turkey. Peace with Israel’s immediate neighbors would wait.

That doctrine began to be reversed in 1979, when the Israeli-Iranian alliance collapsed and was in effect replaced by the Egyptian-Israeli treaty that same year. The removal of Egypt from the anti-Israeli front left the Arab world without a credible military option; indeed, the last conventional war fought by Arab nations against Israel was the 1973 joint Egyptian-Syrian attack on Yom Kippur.

Since then all of Israel’s military conflicts — from the first Lebanon war in 1982 to the Gaza war of 2009 — have been asymmetrical confrontations against terrorists. While those conflicts have presented Israel with strategic, diplomatic and moral problems, it no longer faced an existential threat from the Arab world.

For Israel, then, peace with Egypt has been not only strategically but also psychologically essential. Israelis understand that the end of their conflict with the Arab world depends in large part on the durability of the peace with Egypt — for all its limitations, it is the only successful model of a land-for-peace agreement.

Above all, though, Israeli optimism has been sustained by the memory of the improbable partnership between President Anwar el-Sadat of Egypt and Israel’s prime minister, Menachem Begin. Only four years before flying to Tel Aviv on his peace mission, Sadat had attacked Israel on its holiest day. Begin, Israel’s most hawkish prime minister until that time, withdrew from the Sinai Peninsula, an area more than three times the size of Israel.

Though Egypt failed to deliver the normalization in relations Israelis craved, the thousands of Israeli tourists who have filled the beaches of the Sinai coast experienced something of the promise of real peace. At least in one corner of the Arab Middle East, they felt welcomed. A demilitarized Sinai proved that Israel could forfeit strategic depth and still feel reasonably secure.

The Sinai boundary is the only one of Israel’s borders that hasn’t been fenced off. Israelis now worry that this fragile opening to the Arab world is about to close.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute and a contributing editor to The New Republic.

U.S. media gloss over Washington's role in Egyptian repression - FAIR

http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=4245

Media Advisory

The Delicate Tightrope of Supporting a Dictator
U.S. media gloss over Washington's role in Egyptian repression

2/1/11

The political context of the current Egyptian uprising is clear: The United States has steadfastly supported dictator Hosni Mubarak, whose rule has been marked by sham elections and the jailing and torture of dissidents, propping up his regime since 1981 with some $60 billion in aid, most of it military.

But since U.S. corporate media are accustomed to viewing international affairs through the lens of U.S. elite interests, much of the current coverage elides Washington's role, or presents it as a "tightrope" balancing act for the Obama administration.

As one New York Times story (1/26/11) put it, "The administration has tried to balance its ties to Mr. Mubarak with expressions of concern about rigged elections and jailed dissidents in his country." USA Today (2/1/11) announced: "The upheaval in Egypt has put the United States in a delicate diplomatic situation: pressing for a more democratic Egypt, but wary that too much change could threaten the stability that Egypt helps bring to the Middle East."

On the PBS NewsHour, Margaret Warner (1/31/11) said, "The chaos in Egypt posed a delicate diplomatic challenge for the United States: appealing for democracy without alienating an ally." Or as NBC Nightly News anchor Kate Snow (1/29/11) asked: "Is it a bit of a tightrope that the U.S. has to walk here, though, in terms of wanting to promote democracy on the one hand, but being a longtime ally of the Mubarak administration?"

An L.A. Times editorial (1/28/11) implausibly argued that the U.S. record of support for Mubarak would assist efforts to promote democracy: "As an ally and benefactor, the United States has helped prop up the 82-year-old strongman since he took power 30 years ago, and today it is in a unique position to impress upon him the importance of democracy."

Some of the recently released WikiLeaks cables on Egypt provided another window into media thinking on the issue. The January 28 New York Times story was headlined, "Cables Show Delicate U.S. Dealings With Egypt's Leaders." The same day, the London Guardian had a very different headline: "WikiLeaks Cables Show Close U.S. Relationship With Egyptian President." The Times account buried some of the more damning details, which make clear that U.S. officials are keenly aware of the prevalence of torture and brutality under Mubarak (FAIR Blog, 1/28/11).

ABC's Christiane Amanpour offered what amounted to a rationalization of U.S. support for Egypt, explaining (1/26/11) that

the implications are really big because this is very fundamental. Egypt receives the most American aid, more than $1 billion a year. It has the same goals as the United States against radicalization and terrorism, pro the Israeli peace process. But the United States, many people are saying, needs to get ahead of the curve, because otherwise it might be left behind as the people demonstrate their will.

Some outlets saw a distinct shift in the Obama administration's position--well ahead of any evidence to that effect. The Washington Post published a January 27 piece headlined "As Arabs Protest, U.S. Speaks Up," which declared that the White House was "openly supporting the anti-government demonstrations shaking the Arab Middle East," adding that the administration had "thrown U.S. support clearly behind the protesters, speaking daily in favor of free speech and assembly even when the protests target longtime U.S. allies such as Egypt."

The Post's evidence, however, was thin: a quote from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stating that the Mubarak government should "respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people." The strongest support for the notion that the U.S. was backing the street protests came from an anonymous administration official--hardly an indication of "speak[ing] up" in "open support."

Another Post article tried to make the case again on January 31:

The Obama administration firmly aligned itself on Sunday with the protest movement that has overtaken Egypt, calling for an "orderly transition" to a more representative government amid rising U.S. concern that the demonstrations are turning violent and that unrest could spread across the Arab world.

Several paragraphs later, though, the Post added that the "shift in message had no visible effect in Cairo and other Egyptian cities," and reported that prominent activist Mohamed ElBaradei's assessment was that the rhetoric "had landed 'like lead" in the Egyptian capital."

It would seem that Egyptians have a clearer view of U.S. policy than many pundits and mainstream journalists. That point was driven home when NBC reporter Richard Engel, to his credit, brandished a tear gas canister that had been fired at protesters (1/28/11):

These were the tear gas canisters that were fired by all those riot police today. And if you look at them closely, they say clearly in English, "Made in the USA." Egyptians have been picking them up, they've been looking them over.

But then, as if this straightforward illustration of the U.S. role in Egyptian repression was too revealing, Engel qualified his observation: "And from an Egyptian perspective, it does seem like Mubarak and the United States are working together. So the U.S. is walking a fine line here."

It does not, in fact, take an "Egyptian perspective" to appreciate how crucial U.S. support has been to the Mubarak dictatorship. One only needs to look at the history of the past three decades--a history U.S. media would prefer that we overlook, or treat as part of a delicate "balancing act."

See FAIR's Archives for more on:
Middle East

Egypt revolt is 'step towards Islamic Middle East' - AFP

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hnxI5FGq1dnLMDd3ulh-kRh-2t3w?docId=CNG.30ff0b57ab72bd5eaa39bfcd8d0f2119.331

Egypt revolt is 'step towards Islamic Middle East'

(AFP) – 7 hours ago

TEHRAN — Iran said on Tuesday the uprising in Egypt will help create an Islamic Middle East but accused US officials of interfering in the "freedom seeking" movement which has rocked the Arab nation.

"With the knowledge that I have of the great revolutionary and history making people of Egypt, I am sure they will play their role in creating an Islamic Middle East for all freedom, justice and independence seekers," Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi was quoted as saying on state television's website.

Salehi, who was officially endorsed by the Iranian parliament on Sunday as foreign minister, said the uprising in Egypt "showed the need for a change in the region and the end of unpopular regimes."

"The people of Tunisia and Egypt prove that the time of controlling regimes by world arrogance (the West) has ended and people are trying to have their own self-determination," said Salehi, who also currently oversees Iran's controversial nuclear programme.

"Unfortunately we are witnessing the direct interference .... of some American officials in the developments in Egypt," he said, and added the Egyptians were showing "they are no longer ready to stand idle in face of crimes by the Zionist regime."
In the initial days of the Tunisian uprising, Iran had said it was "worried" about the events in that country.
"We are worried about the situation in Tunisia...We hope the Muslim Tunisian nation's demands are fulfilled through peaceful and non-violent means," the foreign ministry had said on January 16.
On Tuesday, Salehi said Iran will offer its support to the protesters in Egypt.

"On our part we are going along with the freedom seekers of the world and support the uprising of the great nation of Egypt. We sympathise with those injured and killed" in the protests, he said.

Egypt has been rocked by deadly protests for more than a week and on Tuesday Egyptians planned more mass marches in their campaign to oust the embattled President Hosni Mubarak.

The USA, a key ally of Cairo, has urged Mubarak to do more to defuse the crisis, with President Barack Obama calling for "an orderly transition to a government that is responsive to the aspirations of the Egyptian people."

Iran itself was rocked by similar protests against President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad after he was re-elected in June 2009.

Dozens of Iranian protesters who took to Tehran streets were killed in clashes with security forces and militiamen who cracked down on them in a bid to quell what was one of the worst crises in the Islamic republic since the 1979 revolution which toppled the US-backed shah.

Copyright © 2011 AFP. All rights reserved. More »