“A 24-year-old man died tonight at Qasr El-Eini hospital in Cairo after suffering a severe drop in blood pressure and heart failure after allegedly being tortured by prison officials. Essam Ali Atta Ali was serving a two-year prison sentence in the maximum security ward at Tora Prison after being prosecuted in a military court on 25 February in relation to the illegal occupation of an apartment. According to the victim’s cellmates, prison officials sought to punish Ali after catching him smuggling a mobile SIM card into the ward. Prison officers reportedly pushed hoses into Ali’s mouth and anus, causing severe bleeding. Ali’s brother told media that he saw his brother’s corpse at the hospital and it exhibited signs of serious injuries. According to several media reports, an officer from Tora Prison left Ali at the hospital as he lay in a critical condition. Attending physicians immediately noticed liquid secretions emanating from Ali’s mouth and suspected foul play. In the late hours of Thursday, MD Aida Seif El-Dawla of El-Nadeem Centre for the rehabilitation of victims of torture, broke the news of Ali’s death to the public through Facebook and Twitter. She called on activist lawyers to support a traumatised family in their quest for answers. Ali’s mother told media that her son was a victim of police brutality and that she will not rest until his killers are brought to justice………”
Is Egypt going back to the future? The military trials for civilians, arrest of bloggers, and torture continue, proving that the new Egypt is not much different from the rest. The SCAF junta is writing its own constitution for the country. It looks like Egypt is back into the camp of Arab moderates of the New Middle East again. Trials of civilians in military courts, arbitrary arrests and torture are nothing new in our region: both moderate and radical regimes have used them extensively. From Tehran to Riyadh to Manama and Cairo and Damascus, and a few other places. They all imprison and torture and execute and exile. The only difference is that some are called republics and others are called monarchies; some are allied to the West others are hostile to the West. Cheers
mhg
“JEDDAH: A terror cell planning attacks against the Saudi Embassy, the King Fahd Causeway and other vital installations in Bahrain has been broken up, a Bahraini Interior Ministry spokesman said Saturday. Four members of the cell were detained in Qatar and turned over to Manama, while a fifth Bahraini was arrested inside the country, said Gen. Tareq Al-Hasan. The alleged targets also included the Bahraini Interior Ministry and other individuals. Al-Hasan said the four arrested in Qatar had been traveling by car from Saudi Arabia. Security officers at a checkpoint seized “documents and a computer containing information of a security nature (and) details on certain vital sites.” They were also carrying US dollars and Iranian rials………..”
If I were an Iranian official plotting terrorism in Bahrain or in Saudi Arabia, I would never hand the terrorists Iranian money, for two reasons: (1) American dollars, or Euro, or Gulf currencies are easier to use, and (2) Iranian money would look suspicious if these men get caught. A smart Iranian “control” would have them carry wads of Israeli NIS. If I wanted to make sure everyone “knew” the Iranians were behind a plot, I’d give the terrorists some Iranian currency, a lot of it. So, somebody is very stupid: it can be the Iranians, or the Bahrainis, or the Saudis. Who do you think is that stupid? Could it be all of the above? I suspect any of the above have operatives who are stupid enough. The good news (or is it the bad news) is that we have not read anything (yet) linking this “plot” to an Iranian used car dealer in Texas named Arbabsiar. But it is early.
The Bahrain and Saudi media are running away with it. Saudi semi-official network Alarabiya headlines that members of the appointed Bahrain sectarian “parliament” have claimed Iran and Hezbollah were involved (they forgot to add North Korea). Qatari media have not reported on this, yet. Which is also odd, but maybe they are as suspicious of the timing of this as I am.
I think somebody somewhere ought to quit while they are ahead: the question is where is that somebody? Tehran or Manama or Riyadh? Cheers
mhg
Watched part of the GOP South Carolina foreign policy debate, The highlights, rather the Lowlights:
Q (Major Garrett): “How would you think outside the box in foreign policy…” Newt Gingrich: “I would explicitly adopt the Reagan John-Paul II agenda…..”
John-Paul II foreign policy? I fully expected Garrett to retort with a resounding: “WTF”? John-Paul II had a military jingoistic foreign policy of bombing Iran and boycotting UNESCO for admitting the Palestinians? One more lie………..
Herman Cain, the Pizza Man, is reported to have said that President Barack Obama’s reaction to the Arab Spring has allowed the movement to go in the wrong direction..….
Little Ricky Santorum, in desperation, essentially endorsed state-sponsored terrorism: “there are scientists turning up dead in Iran. I hope the United States is involved in that….”
I have modified my original suggestion about “some” of these guys (and gal) going for a hike along the Iraq-Iran border. Initially I thought Newt Gingrich needs it the most. Now I think they all ought to go to the Iran-Iraq border, and quickly. Cheers
mhg
“eAsiaMediaHub US EAP Media Hub: #SecClinton: Assad has lost his legitimacy to rule & he should step down #Syria”
“Hezbollah Secretary-General Hassan Nasrallah on Friday warned Israel and the US that a war against Iran and Syria would lead to an all-out regional conflict. “They should understand that a war on Iran and Syria will not remain in Iran and Syrian territory, but it will engulf the whole region and there is no escaping this reality,” Nasrallah said during a televised speech honoring “Martyrs’ Day.”……. “Iran is strong, united and has a one-of-a-kind leader and it will retaliate harshly,” he said in his speech, which was delivered in Beirut’s southern neighborhood ………..”
“Hezbollah Secretary General Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah called on the US administration and the Zionist entity to understand very well that a war against Iran and Syria will not stay inside Iran and Syria, but will roll instead and spread out to the entire region.…….. “
Hassan Nasrallah is sticking by the Syrian regime, even as the Iranian patrons are (very) slowly moving away. Perhaps the Iranians can see some writing on the wall, or hedging their bets as all politicians (by definition) do. Clearly one does not expect Nasrallah to see eye to eye with Secretary Clinton on Syria, certainly on Lebanon, but diverging from a possible Iranian view is unusual. Of course he diverges only from the views expressed by President Ahmadinejad, which are not necessarily the views of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, not these days. Meanwhile a consensus is emerging that the Assad dynasty rule is about to expire. Things are getting interesting in Syria, but they will get even more interesting after the fall of the Ba’ath party. Cheers
mhg
“The external opposition continues to fudge its stance on external intervention, and with good reason: the internal opposition rejects it. This is the flaw to the model – for the majority in Syria deeply oppose external intervention, fearing civil conflict. Hence Syrians face a long period of externally mounted insurgency, siege and international attrition. Both sides will pay in blood. But the real danger, as Hannah himself noted, is that the Saudis might “once again fire up the old Sunni jihadist network and point it in the general direction of Shiite Iran”, which puts Syria first in line. In fact, that is exactly what is happening, but the west, as before in Afghanistan, prefers not to notice – so long as the drama plays well to western audiences. As Foreign Affairs reported last month, Saudi and its Gulf allies are firing up the radical Salafists (fundamentalist Sunnis), not only to weaken Iran, but to do what they see is necessary to survive – to disrupt and emasculate the awakenings that threaten absolute monarchism. This is happening in Syria, Libya, Egypt…………..”
It is all part of the Saudi-led GCC-funded Arab Counterrevolution. Its only goal is to maintain the status quo on the Gulf , at any price. Status quo means only one thing: keeping the al-Saud dynasty in power, with absolute unquestionable authority. Before the Arab “Spring”, it was aimed at any change in the broader Arab status quo. At the time they used developments in Iraq, post the invasion they had supported and participated in, to stoke sectarian fires. Even old Hosni Mubarak managed, with Saudi help, to ‘discover’ plots by Shi’as to convert his people and take over Egypt. They exaggerated fears of an Iranian threat with the goal of dividing the somnolent and often tame peoples of the GCC states into Sunni and Shi’a factions. It always works on the Gulf: fearful Sunnis seek the protection of the corrupt ruling dynasties, angry Shi’as become more vocal in their demands, which in turn is used by the palace Salafis to further stoke the fires of division. Amazing how one ancient doubtful Hadith about absolute loyalty to the (Muslim) ruler is being used by Salafi clerics to counter the Arab revolutions, but only in selective countries. Cheers
mhg
BFF “Egypt’s ruling military council is silencing critics while polishing its image amid increasing signs that it is plotting to stay in power behind the scenes even after a new parliament is in place early next year. Activists and politicians are worried that the military, the country’s most revered institution before the revolution that overthrew President Hosni Mubarak in February, refuses to have its authority and financial interests answerable to an emerging democracy. Concerns were heightened this week when the military-backed interim government announced parameters for writing Egypt’s new constitution. The proposals allow the generals to appoint 80% of the constitutional committee. They also state that the defense budget would be kept secret and the military would be the “guardian” of the constitution, raising the possibility of intervention in legislative and presidential affairs……….” Egypt will probably have an elected parliament and president. But the military will remain the most powerful institution in the country: the military, not the parliament, not the president, not even the lousy Mubarak-appointed and Saudi-oriented Shaikh of al-Azhar. Like Turkey of old, like some Latin American nations of the past, the military junta is here to stay. It will not rule directly, its Arab and Western friends must have told the generals that is not a good idea. It will rule by pulling the strings, by drawing “red lines”: Arab potentates are fond of “red lines” that people should not cross. Like I said once before here, they will have their own Supreme Ayatollah Tantawi. That is Mubarak’s revenge against the Egyptian people, if they accept it. Cheers
mhg
BFF “This summer a senior Saudi official told John Hannah, Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, that from the outset of the upheaval in Syria, the king has believed that regime change would be highly beneficial to Saudi interests: “The king knows that other than the collapse of the Islamic Republic itself, nothing would weaken Iran more than losing Syria.” This is today’s “great game” – losing Syria. And this is how it is played: set up a hurried transitional council as sole representative of the Syrian people, irrespective of whether it has any real legs inside Syria; feed in armed insurgents from neighbouring states; impose sanctions that will hurt the middle classes; mount a media campaign to denigrate any Syrian efforts at reform; try to instigate divisions within the army and the elite; and ultimately President Assad will fall – so its initiators insist……….. The radical armed elements being used in Syria as auxiliaries to depose Assad run counter to the prospect of any outcome emerging within the western paradigm. These groups may well have a bloody and very undemocratic agenda of their own………The origins of the “lose Assad” operation preceded the Arab awakening: they reach back to Israel’s failure in its 2006 war to seriously damage Hezbollah, and the post-conflict US assessment that it was Syria that represented Hezbollah’s achilles heel – as the vulnerable conduit linking Hezbollah to Iran. US officials speculated as to what might be done to block this vital corridor, but it was Prince Bandar of Saudi Arabia………….”
Bandar Bin Sultan, Saudi Prince of thieves, is advising the West on how to topple the Ba’athist dictatorship in Damascus and almost certainly install a worse regime of Salafis and other fundamentalists. That may be fine with the al-Saud rulers in Riyadh: the Salafis are their fifth columnists, bought and paid for, from the Persian-American Gulf states to Egypt and North Africa. The West will almost certainly miss the Assad dictatorship, once the Islamists rule in Damascus. Imagine the Taliban wedged between Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, and Israel. It is especially the latter border that should give the West second thoughts. (I trust there is no need for my regular readers to have me repeat the well-known story that BAE Systems had given bribes commissions of about GBP1 billion (US$ 2 billion) to Saudi Prince Bandar Bin Sultan for his role in a huge British-Saudi arms deal. Tony (Yo) Blair killed the British Serious Frauds Office (SFO) investigation of it because it threatened a new British deal to sell weapons systems and pay the princes yet more bribes commissions. That came to be known as the al-Yamama scandal, and it set Tony Blair on his path to multimillion contracts with Arab and other oil potentates after he left office).
Cheers
mhg
BFF “Chairman of Iran’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Hassan Firouzabadi warned on Wednesday that any possible attack on Syria will put an end to the existence of the United States and the Zionist regime.
“If the Westerners break up the resistance front against the occupying Zionist regime, all Muslims will rise up, and in that case there will remain no U.S. and no Zionist regime,” he said.
They are talking about the use of Libya’s model for Syria to frighten and weaken the position of the Syrian government, but in fact they are not capable of implementing such a plan for Syria, he said.
On the developments in the Middle East and North Africa, he said that the Zionist regime is the real loser of the Islamic awaking in the region.…..”
About his threat of “no USA and no Zionist regime“: somehow I don’t buy it.Besides, it is very un-General-like and rude. Even Patton would not use such terms.Patton used worse, but not in public, and he was a realist, not a panderer.
I got news for this strange Iranian general. This Arab ‘awakening’ did not start as an Islamic awakening. Many Islamists went AWOL, stayed home, or sided with the regimes initially. They joined toward the end, and I suspect some of them, nay many of them, especially the Salafis, are on the side of the Arab Counterrevolution led by Saudi Arabia and others. Yet he is right in the sense that Islamists will gain much, perhaps more than the secular young people who started the uprisings.Unfortunately. Cheers
mhg
“Once friends, Turkey and Iran are finding that their reactions to the Arab Spring revolutions are driving them apart and renewing an old regional rivalry. One sign of the deepening divide was obvious from the attendee list for an international conference on Afghanistan security that opened today in Istanbul. Every primary player is here: 14 regional nations, with the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in attendance, as well as more than a dozen other countries, including the United States. But Iran had planned to send just its low-ranking deputy foreign minister, despite its long border with Afghanistan and claims of being a regional superpower. While Iran relented at the last minute and sent Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi, the diplomatic tension indicates how the people-power uprisings have helped transform the Turkey-Iran friendship into an escalating rivalry. So far, analysts say, Turkey appears the winner in pushing for secular, democratic outcomes …………..”
It almost looks like that old rivalry that was fought on territory extending from the Caspian Sea to Mesopotamia. Eventually the Turks ended up with what is now Iraq as well as the rest of the Arab East (it was mainly Iraq they fought over and kept winning and losing to each other). There is no doubt that the Arab uprisings have enhanced the Turkish role in the Middle East. The Arab uprisings have also sharpened the contrast between the Turkish model and the Iranian one. Many more Arabs now look toward Turkey, a NATO member, as an example. Perhaps it is the comparison between the elected Turkish leaders and their own thuggish Arab dictators and absolute tribal kings. It is also partly the contrast between Turkish leaders and the inarticulate Iranian clergy who come across as repressive (mainly because they are repressive). The Turks have also benefited from moving away from their “former” Israeli friends in recent months. Either way the Turks have benefited from the Arab uprisings, for now. The Iranians are on the defensive mainly because their system of government is not nearly as free and democratic as the Turkish one. They have also suffered partly as a result of a furious Saudi sectarian media campaign that has continued since the Iraqi elections of 2005. The Saudi dynasty rules Arab airwaves, or most of them. That Saudi campaign has not only been aimed at the Iranian regime: more ominously it has also targeted Arab Shi’as and poisoned relationships within many societies on the Persian-American Gulf. Cheers
mhg
“Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani said there would be a vote for an advisory council in 2013, in line with a constitution introduced eight years ago. The decision is another victory, though a small one given the delayed and partial nature of the change, for the Arab Spring which Qatar did so much to foment. The royal family’s failure to introduce any semblance of the democracy it was helping elsewhere to promote, through the Al-Jazeera television channel which it owns, and finance with its large-scale backing for the revolution in Libya, has drawn increasing political attention to itself. “We have always preferred that regimes start changes on their own and lead the movement of transformation, instead of seeing people rise up,” the Emir said in a nod to the contradiction………...”
No doubt the Qatari potentate had to do something. His Aljazeera network could not continue publicizing Arab uprisings against despots in Syria and Libya and other places while his own people had no representation. A two-third elected parliament is better than no parliament, depending on what other actions the government takes to influence the elections. The “devil is in the detail” and all that. It will be better than Bahrain which has nominally a half-elected legislature but it is effectively no more elected than 30% or so. It is even better than the case of Saudi Arabia where no one votes for a legislature or a dog-catcher and the ‘Shoura” council is fully appointed by the royal family. The Saudi “elections” they are talking about are for toothless municipal councils, which will also act as “advisory”, pending the accession to the throne of Prince Nayef (Naif) who will then get rid of them. Arab potentates on the Gulf are learning how to “game the system”. Just as Mubarak and Saleh did, they can have all the pretensions of popular elections, without the headache and inconvenience of actual accountability.It would also make the Western allies happier, once they learn to turn a blind eye.
Rattlesnake Ridge 
BFF