U.S. Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt

[unhappycamper]

U.S. Chickens Come Home to Roost in Egypt
by Marjorie Cohn
Published on Wednesday, February 2, 2011 by CommonDreams.org

Barack Obama, like his predecessors, has supported Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to the tune of $1.3 billion annually, mostly in military aid. In return, Egypt minds U.S. interests in the Middle East, notably providing a buffer between Israel and the rest of the Arab world. Egypt collaborates with Israel to isolate Gaza with a punishing blockade, to the consternation of Arabs throughout the Middle East. The United States could not have fought its wars in Iraq without Egypt’s logistical support.

Now with a revolution against Mubarak by two million Egyptians, all bets are off about who will replace him and whether the successor government will be friendly to the United States.

Mubarak’s “whole system is corrupt,” said Hesham Korayem, an Egyptian who taught at City University of New York and provides frequent commentary on Egyptian and Saudi television. He told me there is virtually no middle class in Egypt, only the extremely rich (about 20 to 25 percent of the population) and the extremely poor (75 percent). The parliament has no input into what Mubarak does with the money the United States gives him, $300 million of which comes to the dictator in cash each year.

Torture is commonplace in Egypt, according to Korayem. Indeed, Omar Suleiman, Egypt’s intelligence chief whom Mubarak just named Vice-President, was the lynchpin for Egyptian torture when the CIA sent prisoners to Egypt in its extraordinary rendition program. Stephen Grey noted in Ghost Plane, “n secret, men like Omar Suleiman, the country’s most powerful spy and secret politician, did our work, the sort of work that Western countries have no appetite to do ourselves.”

In her chapter in the newly published book, “The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse,” Jane Mayer cites Egypt as the most common destination for suspects rendered by the United States. “The largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid after Israel,” Mayer writes, “Egypt was a key strategic ally, and its secret police force, the Mukhabarat, had a reputation for brutality.” She describes the rendering of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi to Egypt, where he was tortured and made a false confession that Colin Powell cited as he importuned the Security Council to approve the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Al-Libi later recanted his confession.

[amyrose2712]

1. K

[Quantess]

2. Bookmarked for later.

[malaise]

3. Won't be just in Egypt when the dust settles

Time for a new order - the 30 year neo-con and neo-liberal bullshit has been exposed big time - Reagan and Thatcher's New World Order was anything but democratic. It is fugging fascism - control by bankers, corporations, and other elites, and impression management by corporate media tools.

Both were suffering from dementia literally and figuratively.

[mopinko]

4. and they justify it because

so much of that aid comes back to the u.s. as purchases of military equipment. yes, the military-industrial complex is every bit as bad as eisenhower thought it would be, and then some. i think the trickle down of that, societies destroyed by cruelty and murder is something he could not have predicted in his worse nightmares. even after seeing the nazi death camps.