IPS News journalist Adam Morrow discusses Egypt’s counterrevolution; the Muslim Brotherhood officials in jail or in hiding; how Iran’s secular progressives have discredited themselves by backing the antidemocratic military coup; and Israel’s long-held desire to repossess the Sinai Peninsula.
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Next up is our friend Adam Morrow from Interpress Service.
That's IPSNews.net.
And if I'm right, which I might be, his latest is News Titans Around Freedom in Egypt.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
How are you?
Good, Scott.
Thanks.
I'm sitting in the middle of Cairo traffic right now, so you might get a little bit of honking and stuff just for the next couple of minutes.
I was going to say, it sounds like you just got hit by a car.
You all right?
No, no, I'm OK.
OK, good.
Well, thank you for joining us.
We changed the schedule of the show, so I know I've got you at an earlier time than you're used to.
And I appreciate you making time for us today.
So the big question, obviously, is how goes the counterrevolution there in Egypt?
Oh, it's going very well, actually.
Never been better.
I don't know if you're following events, but what we're seeing in the Sinai Peninsula and in certain areas of Upper Egypt now, we've sort of moved on to a whole new level here.
Massive military operations going on in the Sinai Peninsula, with the government promising to basically wipe out all militant activity in the area.
And we also, we've just had the, there's just been an eruption of military activity in the city of Minya, in the Upper Egyptian province of Minya as well, which just began a couple of days ago.
So things are still, things are still very hot.
Not a lot of things going on in Cairo right now.
A lot of the protests and stuff are no longer going on in the middle of Cairo.
You're still getting a lot of isolated stuff outside of the capital on a daily basis.
And that involves regular clashes, sporadic clashes, as well as ongoing arrests of Islamist figures, specifically Muslim Brotherhood.
They're just being rounded up, the leaders of the old Muslim Brotherhood party?
Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is not a political party, but they do have, their political party is called the Freedom and Justice Party.
And anybody affiliated with either of those organizations is either behind bars now, I'm talking about upper, you know, I'm talking about high-ranking members, are either behind bars at this point or are on the lam, you know, or are in hiding.
So, so yeah.
All right, now, well, so it sounds like, kind of in a nutshell, the old Mubarak military dictatorship is back, only without him, although I guess he's been sprung from prison.
But they don't, it sounds like they don't have the control that they did have back before the Arab Spring broke out.
Well, it's good, it's good that you refer to this as a counter-revolution, because that's exactly what it is.
I mean, a lot of people are still in denial.
You know, people still, a lot of people are still thinking of what happened on June 30th and the subsequent ouster of Mohamed Morsi as president with some kind of popular uprising.
You know, it's still very much couched.
If you listen to the pro-army media, and the pro-army, even the pro-army private media is all trumpeting what happened as very much as a popular uprising.
So, so a lot of people are still living in that sort of fantasy, you know, that this is all the result of a popular revolution, when in fact it was a well-planned, well-coordinated, and brilliantly executed counter-revolution that basically brought the Mubarak regime back.
Like you said, I mean, Mubarak was just a figurehead.
I mean, he's, even if he isn't personally at the helm anymore, it's still the same deep state apparatus that was there in his time.
And even, I can't remember if we had spoken before this, but he was actually released from prison.
I mean, he was, he was sort of, he wasn't released, he still faces several charges, but he was let out of jail.
I think he's in a military hospital now, on the same day that a lot of these big Brotherhood guys were going into prison.
So this was a very, very, that was about two or three weeks ago, so that was very, very symbolic, where you actually had, you actually had Hosni Mubarak being helicoptered out of, out of Torah prison in Cairo, just as Mohamed Morsi and a bunch of other guys were having their, were having their detentions renewed for another 15 days.
So it's, I mean, it's extremely obvious what's going on.
It's almost to the point where it's like they want, you know, they want people to know what's happened.
You know, they want to know that they, they want people to know that the old order is back, reinstated, and not just reinstated like before, but now reinstated with a popular mandate.
Because if you remember, I mentioned this last time, you had this thing on 26th of July, it was a second demonstration where Abdullah Fattah al-Sisi, who's the defense minister, basically asked the public to hit the streets, to give him a popular mandate to destroy the Brotherhood.
And people came out in the millions on that day.
So now you, you have this, you know, you have this, you have basically Mubarak 2.0, as I like to call it, where you've got the Mubarak regime, but now it feels massively, massively empowered because it feels like it has this popular mandate from the people.
So it's almost as if you have the Mubarak regime having won elections, having won fair elections, you know, and every, everything that entails.
So basically you're seeing, you're seeing the Mubarak regime is back and it's just no holds barred, doing everything it ever wanted, you know, blanket arrests on all of its opponents.
And the arrest campaign, by the way, has spread to beyond just Islamist circles at this point.
You're seeing liberal figures getting, getting, being arrested.
You're seeing members of the April 6th movement being brought in for questioning and stuff like that.
If you remember, the April 6th youth movement played a prominent role in the January 25th 2011 revolution.
And you've even had some interesting cases with journalists, journalists with the pro-army media, who just started asking too many questions being arrested.
There was one guy in particular who was, who was arrested a week ago.
And he was a journalist for a very well-known pro-army newspaper.
And he had sort of questioned, he sort of, on Facebook, he sort of came out and started questioning a lot of the reports that the military was issuing and the pro-army media was issuing.
And he was immediately arrested after that.
So it's scary.
It's sort of reached scary proportions where people are afraid to speak their minds.
People are self-censoring themselves.
You know, people aren't being as outspoken as they used to be on social media.
Because what you've got now is this just totally out of control, extremely xenophobic, extremely defensive, you know, reinstated Mubarak regime.
So it's quite creepy.
And again, I can't stress the importance of this whole popular mandate idea.
This idea that they feel that the public has given them a mandate to do whatever they want.
And also, if you remember, you've got a lot of- Let me ask you about that, because it seems like they've got a great kernel of truth to latch onto there, which is, you know, you mentioned this April 6th movement.
And, you know, even as we talked about this back in the beginning of January 2011, you did have a lot of these socialist groups and liberal groups, and they were really the ones who pushed the revolution at first.
It's just the problem was, for them, is they weren't the majority.
The great silent majority of the Egyptians out there, mom and pa, you know, family Egyptians, they prefer the Muslim Brotherhood, which, of course, was the only real organized movement of power outside of the deep state, anywhere in the country for anyone to go to anyway.
And so you did have a situation where the liberals were on the side of the military dictatorship, which they saw as more secular and closer to their goals, if not ready to let them get elected.
And then, as you say, now the military's even arresting them.
But that's what they get, kind of a thing.
But that was the way that they were able to spin it, like this is what the people of Egypt want, is because it is what some of the people of Egypt wanted.
Right, right.
Plus, they've given the government that they've installed, they've given it a very liberal facade.
You know, they've drawn a lot of its members from the Egyptian Social Democratic Party and other, quote, unquote, liberal, you know, liberal parties, socialist parties, leftist parties, and that sort of thing.
So it definitely has this facade, this liberal facade, despite the fact that it's entirely anti-democratic and all of its leaders are entirely, you know, never won any elections.
You have a lot of these, the failed presidential candidates from the 2012 election are all very big, are all completely behind the military.
You mentioned Hamdin Sabahi an interview or two ago, if you remember.
He was the big leftist candidate in 2012.
I think he came in third.
I think he actually came in after Morsi and Shafiq.
I think he came in number three.
And he's shown himself, you know, a lot of liberal people and leftist people sort of had pinned their hopes to him as Egypt's possible next, you know, as Egypt's next leader.
And a lot of people like this, and this includes Amr Moussa, as well as another example of this, have really sort of discredited themselves now in the wake of everything that's happened because they've completely lined up behind the military coup and have completely condoned everything that the military has done.
So that there really are very, very few big public figures left who have managed to maintain any kind of credibility.
If you remember, Bradaei, Mohamed Bradaei, he did quit.
He was the sole person to sort of, to pull out of the whole thing, to walk out of the government in the last month after the violent dispersal of those two big sit-ins in Cairo, if you remember, in which hundreds of people were killed by security forces.
He walked out.
But aside from that, everybody, all these so-called liberal personages seem more than happy with the way things are going, which is pretty incredible and kind of creepy.
Well, you saw the same kind of thing happen in Turkey to a degree, right, with the riots there, where the military are the old guards of the secular state.
And if you let them have democracy, majority rules, then they elect the right-wingers, the conservatives, the religious.
And so the people who have, you know, more, I guess, modern or Western-ish values, they lose out in a democratic system.
And so then all of a sudden, democracy becomes not their highest goal anymore.
Secularism or whatever other parts of their liberal agenda take precedence over majority getting what they want, which is not what they want, you know?
Right.
Well, we've always sort of maintained in our conversations here, we've always sort of recognized the fact that at the end of the day, the battle in Egypt is going to come down between, you know, the Mubarakist, fascist, really, you know, side and the Islamist side.
I mean, that's, a lot of people like to say, oh, no, that's not true, that's an oversimplification.
There is a third way, but I mean, everything we've seen for the past two, three years, I mean, nobody's, no decent or respectable or credible personality has emerged to represent this so-called third way.
Well, in the brotherhood, Morsi and his people really blew it too.
And maybe the military never really gave them the chance, but they pretty much moved to marginalize any, you know, supporters they could have gained on the left rather than trying to forge as many alliances outside of the military as they possibly could.
So they would have a mandate to limit the military's power going into the future, they just blew it, huh?
That might be overstated.
I think we're gonna see now, now that people are sort of having a relook, now that people are sort of reconsidering the Morsi's single year in power.
I think people might come, I think that might be overstated, this idea that they marginal it, that they didn't want any, you know, that they basically turned down all of these offers of, you know, alliances and that sort of thing.
I think that that's a little bit overstated.
And I think there was a concerted effort on a part of a lot of these liberal groups to act to shun him, basically.
I think he tried to make an effort to build a little bit of a consensus, but I think a lot of these groups had decided from day one, from the day he was elected, not to cooperate with him, or at least to pretend to try to cooperate with him, but then sort of at a critical juncture to then pull out, you know, to pull out of any kind of alliance with him.
So I'm not entirely convinced- Well, at the same time, you said on the show too that they really, for example, they didn't really work to bring the liberals in on the writing of the constitution.
And they really kind of picked that fight that ended with the liberals boycotting the whole thing, right, or no?
I thought the liberals were actually, in that case, and the liberals constituted about 25% of the assembly, roughly.
And I don't think they went into that whole constitution drafting process in good faith.
I think they could have done, I think they were very quick to walk out.
I think a lot of- I think you said that at the time too, yeah.
But you were critical of the Brotherhood at that point as well, I thought, that they really could have played their hand a lot better when it came to forging those alliances outside of the military.
Sure, sure.
Look, everybody has made mistakes.
I'm certainly not trying to, you know, I'm not trying to erase mistakes committed by the Brotherhood, but my point is I think they're massively exaggerated.
I do think they made mistakes.
I think they got, first of all, I don't think they were at all ready for the task at hand, for the task of governing Egypt.
I don't think they recognized the extent and how deeply entrenched this deep state thing was gonna be.
I think they were naive in thinking that all it would take might be a couple of elections, and then the state would obey their new elected leaders.
I think that was very naive.
And I just think they were totally, totally unprepared for the difficulties that were associated with ruling a country as big as Egypt.
So that was their first mistake.
I think maybe they got complacent during, my conclusion is that basically over the 30 years of Mubarak, they just became complacent, you know, and sort of, you know, just absolutely were not up to the task.
When the opportunity finally presented itself after January 25th, they were just completely caught unaware and weren't ready for it.
I mean, they tried to deal with it as best they could, but they just weren't ready.
All right, now, what can you tell us about at least the word on the street or the common understanding about the, again, military dictatorship's relationship with the USA?
Yeah, okay.
I personally, if you're talking about word on the street, if you talk to the average Egyptian who supports the coup, they're gonna tell you, oh, we hate America.
Why is Obama supporting the Brotherhood?
Why, you know, they'll talk about American Zionist plots with the Brotherhood and with Qatar and with other countries to divide Egypt.
This also, I think, is massively, this, I think, is actually, I think, is propaganda.
I think this is just anti-Brotherhood propaganda.
There's also this idea of just because the states was willing to play ball with the Brotherhood as the new elected leaders, that doesn't imply, you know, a secret deal, you know, a secret arrangement or so that the two sides are in bed with one another.
And I also, we've talked about this before as well.
I also don't think, I don't think the US was surprised by the military coup.
I can't imagine.
I mean, that would have been an amazing intelligence failure on the level of 9-11 if they were taken by surprise by what happened on July 3rd.
So I'm sure that they knew about it.
And plus, it was all quarterbacked by very, very close US allies.
I mean, most of the planning and the money for it.
And you called this, remember, you had another guest.
I can't remember who, talking about Saudi support for the counter-revolution, and that's been completely vindicated.
That's definitely the case.
Yeah, it's Phil Taroli, former CIA officer.
Yeah, that's right, yeah.
But Saudi and the Emirates, as well as, to a lesser extent, Kuwait and some of the other Gulf countries, except for Qatar, of course, are all deeply implicated in this thing, especially the United Arab Emirates has taken a central role in all of this, hosting Shafiq, continues to host Shafiq, continues to provide lots of money, and I'm sure logistics and things like this to the new military rulers here.
All of these countries came out with huge, announced huge aid packages, huge cash injections to Egypt as soon as the coup happened.
And these are, at least as we know, these are all U.S. satellite countries, so the idea that this is somehow, that the Brotherhood was somehow pro-America, or represented the U.S. interests, and this military coup somehow represents independent Egyptian policy, I think this is just fantasy.
Yeah, it's quite clearly the other way around, I think.
Considering the stuff that the Israelis are coming out now with, in terms of pushing for support, going around and lobbying international capitals to support Egypt's new military rulers, strongly suggests that, you know, strongly suggests that they're very happy about what happened, and probably did consider a Muslim Brotherhood-ruled Egypt, certainly not a short-term, but possibly a medium and long-term threat to Israel.
Well, America supports the dictatorship in Egypt for the same reason we support the revolution in Syria, because that's what Israel wants.
Pretty much as simple as that.
Right, right.
Extremely selective, yeah.
And by the way, what's up at the Rafah border crossing these days?
Well, Sinai in general has become a theater of war, practically.
You're having daily attacks, and big stuff, too.
Just a couple of days ago, you had an attack on a military intelligence headquarters in Sinai, and now military intelligence is what the new defense minister, or is what the defense minister comes from.
That's the apparatus that he hails from.
And that was hit, and I think 11 guys were killed in that attack, which is quite remarkable, I mean, that they actually got a military intelligence headquarters.
So, I mean, it's, I mean, it's, yes.
But at the same time, though, it's very difficult to tell, it's very difficult to confirm what's going on in the peninsula now as well, because the only coverage that's coming out of it, the only sort of news coverage, and the only people that are allowed near it are firmly pro-army media organizations or outlets.
So again, even that stuff is very difficult to determine exactly who's behind these attacks.
That's a very, very good question.
I've actually written stories recently about that, that haven't been published because they were sort of too sensitive, you know, just because of the sensitivity of the issue.
This whole Sinai file is of the utmost sensitivity, mainly, I think, because it's, you know, basically because it sits on the border of Israel.
But who exactly these attacks are being carried out by is, remains unknown.
I mean, there are these, they're called militant groups, but even locals, even Sinai locals, even the tribes people in Sinai don't know who these groups are.
If you talk to eyewitnesses and local people in Sinai, we'll say, we don't know who these guys are.
You know, these aren't just like local tribesmen who are rising up against the military.
No, these are unidentified, heavily armed groups that seem to, you know, that are obviously, you know, heavily financed and supported by someone.
Well, that's interesting.
I mean, no reason for America or Israel to continue to destabilize Egypt at this point, right?
Well, I'm wondering if a part of this might have to do with Israeli designs on Sinai.
I mean, that's been a longstanding fear of, you know, Egyptian fear ever since they got Sinai back, you know, in the 1980s.
Hey, listen, tell me this.
It seems like, you know, one of the major complaints about the Brotherhood era was, and even the New York Times kind of admitted that, wow, isn't that interesting, how there was no police presence anywhere.
It was still illegal for you to make your own, I'm sure, but there was no police presence to keep people safe, to provide basic security in the streets of Cairo during Muslim Brotherhood rule.
And then as soon as the coup happened, all of a sudden the police were back on the beat and the streets were safer and the rape count went down or whatever it is, right?
Oh, yeah.
So what I wonder though is, is the police state worse now or better?
Because it seems like the flip side of that is the people were being spared the torture police state for a little while and now it's back.
So I just wonder, is it, life for the average resident of Cairo, are they more or less likely to get a secret trial and maybe tortured to death now than before?
Only if they dissent politically in any way.
If they choose to express any sort of political dissent, they absolutely risk death and torture.
And how does that compare to a year ago?
If they're just a normal citizen or a shop owner though, I mean, they can rest assured that the police are back on the streets and they'll be happy and they've got their long, they've got their desired stability.
Yeah.
But now what about a year ago?
Was it, you're just as likely to be tortured by the Muslim Brotherhood's police state?
No, no, no.
I mean, the thing is, what's so funny is, but I mean, in a word, the police simply refused to deploy when Morsi was sworn in.
They just simply didn't go to work.
They just said, we're not gonna listen to any orders and we're not gonna deploy.
I know, I've heard sources, interior ministry sources, basically saying after June 30th and then the July 3rd coup, basically saying, yeah, we're all excited.
We're all getting ready to go back to work.
We had a vacation for a couple of years and now we're, you know, for a year.
And now, well, everybody's getting back.
Everybody's getting ready to return to their posts.
Just a business as usual, just like before, just like before the revolution, all the same guys, all the same people.
Let's all go back to work, you know, just like clockwork.
Well, I guess it's just my bent that I would prefer to have no police, right?
Instead of that being a complaint that under the Brotherhood, there were no police, I would think that would be the best thing about them was they couldn't get the police to go to work.
I've mentioned in past conversations that despite the fact that there was no police, even in a city of 20 million people like Cairo, there wasn't, you know, the security situation never really got too bad, even despite the total absence of police.
And that's because, you know, that's because, you know, Egyptian culture and Arab culture is just different from what we've got in the West, where if you took police off the streets, I think within a couple of days, you'd have some very serious stuff on your hands.
But we're- For a little while anyway.
You know, but yeah, but I mean, life just sort of went on and you also have this tendency in Egypt because Egyptian society is still very community-based or, you know, you still had this idea of sort of neighborhoods sort of watching out for each other, you know, neighbors sort of looking out for each other.
You had a lot of that sort of things going on, a lot of that sort of thing going on.
So there was a lot of exaggeration about when Morsi was around, because everything, all of, you know, all of these crises were constantly being exaggerated by everybody and being blamed on Morsi.
And that was one of them was the lack of security.
But actually at the end of the day, I don't, I think that the crime here without, in the absence of the police, actually never, never reached crisis proportions, crisis, you know.
All right, now very quickly here, Adam, we're almost out of time, but could you give us your best ballpark estimate of how many people were killed in the initial weeks of the counter-revolution there?
It's extremely difficult to say.
Now, this is one of the things I will fault the Brotherhood for, is I do, they tend to, both sides exaggerate.
The government plays down the numbers.
The Brotherhood, I think, probably plays up the numbers.
Again, it's impossible to tell though, because I mean, apparently there's still a lot of people that are missing.
There are hundreds of people missing.
I'm sorry, we're out of time, we absolutely have to go.
Adam Morrow, everybody, IPSnews.net.
Thanks very much, Adam.
See y'all tomorrow.
Why does the U.S. support the tortured dictatorship in Egypt?
Because that's what Israel wants.
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