Judge Ends Broadcast of Mubarak at Trial

[alp227]

Source: The New York Times

CAIRO — The spectacle of the deposed president Hosni Mubarak lying in a cage for trial will no longer be televised, the Egyptian judge hearing the case ruled Monday.

The decision will transform the public experience of the trial. The broadcast of the criminal trial’s first day, on Aug. 3, had served as a national catharsis for post-revolutionary Egypt and electrified the Arab world with the image of an autocrat brought down for the first time by his own people to the standing of an ordinary criminal. On Monday, the second day of proceedings, Judge Ahmed Refaat said that he was turning off the cameras “to protect the public interest.”

The Mubarak family was evidently pleased. For most of the court day, the former president’s sons, Gamal and Alaa, who are facing charges of corruption along with their father, stood in white prison uniforms attempting to block the cameras’ views of their father. But at the end they left smirking and waving. Gamal, once his father’s heir apparent, flashed a victory sign with two fingers of a bound hand.

Mr. Mubarak, 83, once again entered and left on a stretcher, though his face maintained the same frown and wrinkled lips and sneer of cold command that he wore at the height of his power. The metal cage the Mubaraks shared is the standard dock for defendants in an Egyptian criminal trial, and it imparts an unmistakable aura of guilt on its occupants before any verdict is rendered.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/16/world/middleeast/16egypt.html

[Hubert Flottz]

1. The powers that be can't handle the truth.

If Mubarak told the truth and started naming names the shit would hit the fan all over the world. Even the US was no doubt enabling Mubarak all along. We proved where we stand at Abu Ghraib, on "Human Rights." The fact that America's war crimes go unpunished to this day, undermines any standing we've ever had regarding human rights.