12/02/14 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
First up today on the show is our friend Adam Morrow on the phone again from Cairo, Egypt.
Welcome back, Adam.
How are you?
Good.
I'm good.
How are you, Scott?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us again on the show.
My pleasure.
Hey, yeah, so I hear they dropped all charges against the former dictator Hosni Mubarak.
Is that so?
That is correct.
Yeah, all charges against Mubarak, as well as all charges against – there were several interior ministry officials, as well as his notorious former interior minister, Habib al-Adly, were all dropped.
The main charge being the murder of some 800 protesters during the 2011 uprising.
So, yeah, they've been exonerated of all charges until further notice.
Apparently, the prosecutors have said they would appeal the charge, but the sense is that that's sort of window dressing just for appearance's sake, and that these guys are probably going to walk.
Man, so then, I don't know, what's the public mood about that?
It seems symbolically to be like the jackboot crushing its heel all the way, extinguishing the very last little bit of that Arab Spring from 2011 with that, huh?
Right, right.
Well, yeah, that's certainly how it's being interpreted by a lot of people here.
There were protests.
Demonstrations very rare now, but demonstrations nevertheless broke out in Tahrir Square.
That was the day before yesterday when the verdict was announced, and reports said that three people were killed in the square when police violently broke up the protests.
So, it did cause – it certainly elicited a reaction.
I guess that explains – I know for the last 48 hours, Tahrir Square has been closed for the most part, although it's been intermittently opening and closing like they sort of don't really know what to do, the authorities don't really know what to do.
Because on one side, Tahrir Square has become such a symbol, they want it to be open to traffic to prove that everything is stable and normal, but at the same time, they want to preempt any possible demonstrations.
So, for the last 48 hours, we've been seeing it sort of open and shut, open and shut, with the possible anticipation of future protests, but probably not.
I mean, the security response now on any sort of public protest is so heavy-handed at this point that the likelihood of more demonstrations isn't too high.
Yeah.
Man, so, yeah, I was going to kind of sarcastically ask, well, why aren't there very many protests these days?
And then you go on to answer, yeah, a few people were killed for daring to even show up.
That's how it is.
So tell us, then, if you could.
Well, let me just say very quickly, Scott, in 2011, in the 18 days in 2011, and a lot of the demonstrations that happened after the uprising, you would have police sort of taking a gradual approach, sort of starting with tear gas, then graduating to birdshot, and then graduating to heavy ammunition, whereas now, two and a half years later, three years after all of that, with all of the escalation that we've seen, you now have them beginning with heavy ammunition in many cases.
And, in fact, they've almost come out and warned and said, you know, any sort of demonstrations, public protests will be met with live ammunition from the get-go.
So this is one of the reasons why you're seeing fewer protests.
Man.
So how pervasive is the atmosphere of fear, then?
Because it seems like, back in 2011, the consensus was the entire society, everybody on the right and everybody on the left, and everybody who's not an officer would like to have a devolution of power from the military dictatorship to the people here.
Right, right.
Well, that was in the immediate wake of the uprising, and it did seem like that.
When the regime was on the defensive and everybody was sort of scurrying under rocks and sort of running for cover, basically.
In the three years since, though, they've managed to regroup.
What is popularly referred to as the deep state has managed to regroup, and they weren't as unpopular as what you just described.
I mean, we always come back to the 2012 election results, in which Mubarak's last prime minister, Ahmad Shafik, narrowly lost something like 48% of the vote.
So they're not, you know, this is a substantial segment of society.
And these aren't people necessarily like regime loyalists.
People have to understand these aren't people that like the regime just because for the sake of the regime.
There are hundreds of thousands of people out there whose livelihoods depend on the regime because of the sprawling public sector that the government has, that this regime has built.
You know, there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who rely on a government paycheck at the end of every month.
And if a regime falls and housecleaning starts and redundant personnel get laid off, all of those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people stand to lose their jobs in the event of some major rotation of power.
So you also have that.
You also have like just a lot of government employees, hundreds of thousands of government employees who are just sort of, you know, paid into the system, you know, who have just sort of invested into the system in the sense that they're, you know, it's the system, it's the regime that's giving them their paychecks at the end of every month, and they don't want to get the ax if a new person comes in and deems them, you know, unnecessary.
So there you go.
You have your answer.
How do people tolerate fascism when they are forced to depend on it and they don't know how they're going to get from here to there?
That's the answer.
Is that a question for me?
Yeah, no, I was just kind of musing out loud, I guess.
I mean, you know, the people of Egypt overthrew a fascist dictatorship, and now, eh, what are you going to do?
Right, right, right.
You know, it's really something.
It's horrible.
And I guess, you know, don't get me wrong, it's not that the military didn't, you know, kill better than a thousand Muslim Brotherhood supporters after the coup and make sure that they were clear that they were not going to tolerate any kind of revolution against them anymore.
That's certainly the case.
So what are they going to do, really?
It's not like the people of Egypt are armed or, you know, have any defense against these guys.
Back in 2011, the only reason Mubarak left was because the junior officers took the side of the people in Tahrir Square instead of their senior officers.
But, you know, that was pretty much at one time.
That whole operation, that whole devolution of power in 2011 looks a bit like an operation now, looks a bit like a bit of intelligent public relations that they pulled off, looks like a bit of a good cop, bad cop routine that they sort of did, where they were like, okay, police are bad, Mubarak is bad, he's going to step down, and now this military, this army that's made up of your brothers and sisters who love you so much and are out to protect the welfare of the people are going to step in and make sure everything goes okay for this interim period.
And we've since learned that the entire military institution isn't as benign as it was originally cast to be in those heady days of 2011.
So I think that was kind of a good cop, bad cop routine they sort of did, where they had the military step in and pose as the good cop, these noble officers who refused to open fire on their fellow Egyptians, when in fact it was the military establishment that Mubarak was representing the whole time.
So it wasn't actually a real change in power when Mubarak stepped down and handed things over to the military.
It was just a clever bit of window dressing that they did.
And at the end of the day, the same sort of power center still remained intact.
I think that's what happened in those moments.
Didn't it take the counter-coup to seize the power back from the elected parliament and the elected president and the change that had really been made?
Yeah, that's exactly what happened.
It was a counter-revolution.
I mean, you hit the nail on the head.
I mean, the original revolution, though, wasn't just bogus.
I mean, maybe the military decided then that Mubarak was expendable, and maybe they decided, well, we'll just have Sisi move in in a couple years or something.
But it's not like Good Cop put the Muslim Brotherhood in power deliberately, did they?
No, no, no, no, no.
I didn't mean to belittle the whole January 25th revolution as an operation.
I mean, the January 25th revolution or uprising or whatever you want to call it was absolutely legitimate.
I mean, I saw it unfold in front of my eyes.
I mean, this was a grassroots thing that was totally people-driven.
But the way they handled it, they were forced into a situation where they knew they had to relinquish some power.
So I think what they did was they sort of cut Mubarak loose, let him relinquish power, sort of put the blame on the police, the ones who were the main instigators of all the violence.
And then that sort of mollified the people enough.
The people sort of bought into this whole army of sort of benign protector of the nation, and for that reason just sort of ceded power to the military voluntarily until elections could be held.
All right, well, I'm sorry.
We've got to take this break, Adam.
So please hold it right there.
When we get back, everybody, we'll be talking more Egyptian politics with Adam Morrow.
Mubarak, they dismissed all charges against Mubarak, his friend and successor, C.C. Harris.
We'll be right back, though.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, y'all.
Welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
I'm talking with Adam Morrow, a reporter for Interpress Service, or was anyway.
Yeah, we're talking about Egypt, the American-backed fascist dictatorship there of Field Marshal Fatah al-Sisi.
And we're talking about the Arab Spring Revolution and its cancellation.
And now kind of the ultimate insult to injury here.
They're even letting Mubarak off, the former dictator, on the charges of massacring the people in Tahrir Square that were, in fact, killed.
Even though the big massacre never happened, thank goodness.
And so I'm sorry, I forget exactly where we left off.
It was somewhere about – something about the military's reaction to the elections and the rise to power of the Muslim Brotherhood in the parliament and the presidency there.
Adam?
Yeah, yeah.
We were talking about – also we were talking about 2011 and sort of how that all went down.
But I think it's important that people realize now that this Mubarak verdict is – and just how politicized it is and how much evidence there apparently seems to – that it's just a poor job that the prosecution did.
And the fact that it's on the record that high-ranking officers were tampering with evidence and were destroying evidence and this sort of thing.
And just the irregularities and the legal violations that appear to have been involved in this case.
And the fact that he was exonerated anyway, the fact that all the defendants were let off for these crimes anyway, really constitutes the ultimate proof that what happened a year and a half ago was a counter-revolution.
This June 30th demonstration that led to this military coup, that this was not a people-driven military coup or was a popular uprising against Morsi or any of that sort of stuff.
But this was a straight-up counter-revolution which is basically putting all the same people back in power, basically dismantling and destroying any vestige of what had been a democratically elected – or electoral politics in general, real genuine electoral politics.
The destruction of the only real source, the only real opposition, which was the Brotherhood, the only real organized political opposition in the country, which was the Brotherhood.
And the return to the Mubarak regime, if not the actual man, then certainly the people that were running the show behind the scenes.
The same people are back in command now and will basically do anything that it takes to make sure that the January 25th thing is not replicated.
Tell me, why do the Saudis hate the Muslim Brotherhood so much?
Is it just because they believe in standing for election and they don't want that idea to spread?
Or is there more to it than that?
I think it's because the Brotherhood represents the only real legitimate sort of political reform movement that has real Islamist credentials.
The Saudis can always fall back on their Islamist credentials to legitimize their regime.
Whereas the Brotherhood, it's a real force for political change.
It's devoted to political change.
It's eschewed violence.
It's not violent or fanatical.
It's very moderate.
And it's Islamist.
It's the sort of thing that obviously really, really scares them.
Just based on their reaction to everything that's happened, it's the one force that really, really scares them and makes them fear for their own legitimacy.
That could possibly threaten their legitimacy, I think.
But if a Muslim Brotherhood type organization ever got root in Saudi Arabia, it could really stand a chance to threaten their decades-long grip on power.
That's what I think it is.
I think it's a legitimate, reformist, Islamist political force in the region.
You're possibly the only one.
You've got lots of different Islamist groups.
We've talked about this before, but most of them are like, you've got a lot of these jihadist ones that are closely associated with violence and beheadings and this sort of thing, whereas the Muslim Brotherhood is a totally legitimate, again, entirely political organization and a force for reform with serious Islamist credentials.
And I think that was enough to really, really put the fear of God, so to speak, into the Saudi regime.
And they really, really saw it as a threat to the point where not only did they have to destroy it in Egypt, but they are now going after the Brotherhood globally.
They are now trying to discredit it in the UK, trying to say that it's a terrorist organization.
Well, and at the same time, it's interesting how they say they want to support the moderate Sunni Islamists in Syria, which would be the Muslim Brotherhood, right?
Exactly.
Here's the guys that they just overthrew in Egypt.
Here's a quote from Loretta Napoleone's new book that I'm reading, The Islamist Phoenix, about the Islamic State.
And this is ripped straight out of one of my interviews from a few years back about what could happen here.
And it's this guy loyal to Baghdadi saying, Look at Egypt.
Look at the way it ended for Muslims who cast their vote for the deposed president, Mohammed Morsi, and believed in your democracy, in your lies.
Democracy doesn't exist.
Do you think you're free?
This is a message that he's saying, mocking, or basically in a way mocking and trying to recruit Muslims living in the West and saying, Oh yeah, this is how much the Americans believe in democracy.
This is how much power you'll ever have if you participate in the game, as much as the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt have in their graves and in their prison cells.
So just make it again.
It's just like Ayman al-Zawahiri had been railing against the Muslim Brotherhood for years for even wanting to stand in an election.
Then they stood in a couple, won them, and had them canceled, which just proves Zawahiri right, which just proves Baghdadi right, at least on the question of whether the Western powers mean what they say about democratic power, or whether they just want loyal sock puppets.
Just look at the reality.
How is that deniable to some, I don't know, Egyptian or Jordanian or Saudi citizen in his 20s looking at this recent history and the way the Americans and their allies behave there?
Oh yeah, absolutely.
We've spoken about this before, and I agree wholeheartedly that it's a huge strategic mistake to put this message out.
Basically you've got this moderate force, like you said before, you've got this moderate Islamist force that's eschewed violence and has reiterated its commitment to the purely political for decades, and then to suddenly, when they actually perform well in elections and actually get their hands on the reins of power, to then go after them, destroy them, and accuse them of being terrorists and doing all this terrorist stuff that they never even did, yeah, is absolutely a recipe for disaster.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised if young Muslims in the region of Islamist tendencies learned those lessons.
But that's kind of exactly what Sisi and company want.
See, they don't want these guys to be politically minded, and they don't want them to operate purely in the realm of electoral politics.
Why?
Because they'll win.
Because they'll win elections.
They know that.
These rulers know that.
So they want them to marginalize themselves by resorting to terrorist attacks.
So it's better to enter into this existential zero-sum battle with them, and make it this military versus Muslim terrorists, this sort of neoconservative fantasy of perpetual war between these two camps, rather than have any sort of meaningful political or electoral competition.
I'm sorry we're out of time, Adam.
We've got to go.
But they'll win.
Sure.
Right.
Thanks again.
Good to talk to you again soon.
Take care, Scott.
We'll be right back, y'all.
Hey, y'all.
Scott here.
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