12/01/15 – Murtaza Hussain – The Scott Horton Show

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Okay, guys, welcome back.
All right, that's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Up next is Murtaza Hussain writing for The Intercept at theintercept.com.
ISIS recruitment thrives in brutal prisons run by U.S.-backed Egypt.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing, Murtaza?
Good.
How about you?
I'm doing good.
Very happy to have you back on the show.
Very happy to read this journalism.
Very important stuff that you have here.
We'll be running it tomorrow, if we're not already, running it on antiwar.com.
So let's go ahead and get into this here.
Who is Mohamed Soltan?
Mohamed Soltan is an American citizen who was detained in Egypt after the military coup in 2013.
He was in prison for roughly two years, and for over a year he was on a hunger strike in Egypt, and he lost about 130 pounds, and he was in a very dire physical state, which ultimately resulted in the U.S. government putting pressure on the Egyptian government to release him before he died.
This article, which is published at Intercept, documents some of the things he saw in jail and the way that recruiters for groups like ISIS would use the brutality of the Egyptian government as a recruiting tool.
So in telling his story in the article here, you revisit the way that he and his father were arrested and came to be in jail as part of the story of the revolution of the Arab Spring in Egypt in 2011 and the counter-revolution in 2013 that these two were caught up in.
So maybe if you could just remind everybody real quick about how that all came about.
Right.
So in 2013, after the coup in Egypt that deposed the first democratically elected government in Egyptian history, even though it was not a government which was popular with everybody, of course, it resulted in this wide-ranging crackdown on all facets of Egyptian society leftists, liberals, Muslim Brotherhood members, Salafis, anyone basically who was dissenting from the new military government.
Now, Mohammed Sultan's father was part of the Morsi government.
He was a minister in that government, although Mohammed Sultan himself was not part of it and in fact was opposed to the Morsi government's policies in most regards.
Like a lot of Egyptian families, just like a lot of Syrian families, you'll see a lot of polarization within families.
So he had uncles who were part of the Sisi government and he had other relatives who were part of the Morsi government.
And there really was a lot of acrimony and animosity over these political divisions.
And then after, in 2013, when the coup occurred and there was a huge massacre of protesters who supported the Morsi government in Cairo, Mohammed Sultan was among those shot and later detained by the government which commenced this long prison ordeal.
You say that while Mohammed Sultan was in prison that the Islamic State, there are different factions all, as you say, they were all rounded up together, whether they had anything to do with each other or not, and they're all kind of in there, and that the Islamic State is a very powerful faction.
I guess we could think of parallels to, I don't know, white supremacist gangs in American prisons or something like that.
They're one of the dominant factions in there.
And so what was it about their shtick that he thought was so newsworthy he would share with you?
You know, there are so many different factions in these prisons and the Islamic State doesn't really have a presence in Egypt per se, but the nature of the group is that it's not really, you don't have to fill out a membership form or be part of anything, you can just pledge allegiance to it.
Anyone can just pledge allegiance to it just by their word of mouth, and they can start claiming that they support the group.
So what he told me is that there are a lot of people in jail who maybe they had, like, they were part of different factions before, but once they were in jail, everyone gets news to the outside world and people know what's going on, and people start pledging allegiance to Islamic State, and there were a few people who were in there who were jihadists, and they said, well, you know, we're down with Islamic State now, and they, in between, you know, these horrible torture sessions, because Egyptian prisons are notorious for their extreme implementation of torture and murder and all these other things, they would have everyone get together and talk, and it would be all the groups, liberals, the Islamists, the jihadists, and the jihadists would tell them, look, you guys, all of you, you put your trust in democracy, and then democracy happened, and the world didn't even respect you enough to think that you deserve to have it, and now the guy who killed your friends and your family members is being vetted in Washington and at Davos and London, and all these world leaders are shaking his hand and arming his regime, and no one cares about you.
And, you know, he said, what he told me is that they'd listen to these guys give their talk on the subject, and at the end of it, no one really knew how to rebut it, because technically it was all true, and their conclusion was, well, you should join ISIS, and people, because the old world only understands force, and at the end of the day, they don't believe in values, and the only thing they understand is violence.
And he said that everyone was speechless, just because of the gravity of the situation they were in and the things which were being said, there was not really any other alternative argument to make, they just were quiet.
It's such an amazing story, you know, Adam Morrow from Interpress Service is a journalist who lives there in Cairo, and we talked about all of this in real time, you know, from the real revolution that overthrew Mubarak through the counter-revolution, the fake one, a year and a half later there, and how it all happened, and how the Muslim Brotherhood, like them or not, however you characterize them, they were rich old men, and therefore conservative, they're not fire-breathing suicide-bombing radicals like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Al-Qaeda, or even maybe Syrian Muslim Brotherhood guys, who had maybe even more reason to be that much more radical, that kind of thing, but this was basically the civilian Republican party of Egypt, and what America did was, and it was so obvious at the time, again it's not even told you so, or you know, 20-20 hindsight kind of thing, it's more, yeah, told you so in real time, that by overthrowing them, and rounding up all their supporters and putting them all in prison, all they're doing is proving Al-Qaeda right, that America doesn't really support democracy, and if they ever had democracy, and if we had self-rule in our own countries, then we would kick them out, and so they'll never allow it, and then, I think I had missed at the time, I don't remember noticing this at the time, I think I had missed at the time, and I only found it years later, someone brought it up to me that Zawahiri actually did put out a podcast in August of 2013 saying I told you so, and there's a whole write-up on it, and he's saying isn't this exactly what I said, so I had been saying, you know, I bet Zawahiri is saying I told you so, just assuming, because he did, and no, in fact, yeah, he's taken exact credit for that, and saying that, you know, the Americans will do anything to prevent the people of the Arab world from ruling themselves, and so this proved him exactly right, as you said, technically, regardless of the fact that they're ISIS guys or Al-Qaeda guys making the argument, technically, facts are facts, and so what are they supposed to do about it?
It just makes perfect sense that somebody fresh out of the torture chamber is going to find this argument appealing, just like Ayman al-Zawahiri found it appealing, as you note in your article, back in the late 70s or 80s, whenever it was, when he was rounded up with the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood and was tortured by Mubarak.
Yeah, exactly, it's just, it really sucks, but it just plays exactly into their narrative, and the birth of Islamic radicalism, it happened in Egyptian prisons, that's where it happened in the post-colonial era, with the torture of all these guys, and people like Sayyid Qutb, who end up being the most, and Ayman al-Zawahiri, who end up being the most influential and dominant figures in this movement, you know, in the modern era, it's because these guys all underwent the horrible torture of the Egyptian prison system, which the US has long known as abusive, and, you know, they even used that abuse to their advantage in certain circumstances by sending people they know or they want to have tortured to Egypt.
There was this famous quote by Robert Baer after 9-11, he was a former CIA agent, saying that when we wanted someone to disappear and never see them again, we'd send them to Egypt in our rendition program.
Absolutely.
Now, I'm sorry, hold it right there, we'll be right back, everybody, with Murtaza Hussain from The Intercept, you've got to read this thing, ISIS recruitment thrives in brutal prisons in US-backed Egypt.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm doing interviews, as is my want.
We're talking with Murtaza Hussein, reporter for The Intercept, and he's got this great story about a guy named Mohammed Sultan, who's an American citizen who was kidnapped and tortured by the Egyptian military dictatorship, which is, of course, a wholly owned subsidiary of the American empire.
At the break, I almost interrupted you to say it.
I'm glad I didn't.
Murtaza, you brought up the great Robert Bear quote.
If you want them tortured, you send them to Syria.
If you want them to disappear forever, you send them to Egypt.
You had a very early year on that quote.
I didn't realize you're talking before the extraordinary rendition program of George W. Bush ever started.
He was talking Clinton years.
This is how business is done, Mubarak's torture prisons.
I got that right?
That's right.
Yes.
And, of course, we know the rendition program does go back to the Clinton years.
Absolutely.
Certainly.
I wanted to mention, too, that in Loretta Napoleone's great work on Zarqawi, she shows that he was nothing but a two-bit rapist until he was tortured by America's sock puppet regime in Jordan, and then he found a higher calling in life and went off to join up with the Mujahideen in Afghanistan and all of that, and became Iraq War II's worst al-Qaeda leader and all that kind of thing.
Helped create the Islamic State, really, or the early version of it, after the invasion, of course.
But important point to make for the young listener.
But anyway, so yeah, there's that.
And then, so I was going to ask you if you could please relate to the audience what it was that Sultan told you about the kinds of torture and what's really going on there.
Can you paint a picture of an Egyptian prison and why somebody might become a terrorist leader after they suffered through one?
Right.
So, basically, people were held in underground dungeons where they didn't see any sunlight or the sky for potentially years and years, and they'd be repeatedly tortured by their guards in the worst ways possible, beatings, abuse, sexual abuse, humiliation, day in and day out.
And, you know, their conditions were awful.
Their food would be terrible, they'd constantly be goaded into committing suicide, and even encouraged to commit suicide and given the tools to do that.
It would just be the most dehumanizing and seemingly hopeless situation one could possibly imagine.
And in such a situation, inevitably, groups like Islamic State, which proposed very radical solutions, can find a foothold.
I mean, and that's amazing to even think of, leaving razor blades in the guy's cell.
Go ahead, dude, put yourself out of your misery in this kind of thing, like, dang.
And then, well, no, I don't want to spoil it, everybody go read this horrifying nightmare of an article here, ISIS Recruitment Thrives in Brutal Prisons, but I think people get the idea real quick.
And then, it's interesting, too, the way he describes it.
You have a couple of different references to the fact that everybody in there is just absolutely broken spirits.
I mean, they have been through extraordinary rendition, for sure, except the ISIS guys, who are all smiles because the world is theirs.
Can you talk a little bit more about that?
Yeah, so as you mentioned, there's people who are understandably very depressed and hopeless in these jails, but the ISIS guys, they're the only ones who they have any hope for their vision for society being implemented in any place, and they hear about the outside world and they get a steady stream of reports about their group expanding in Iraq and Syria and Libya and the Sinai Peninsula, and they're like, look, there's no hope of the liberals or leftists ever coming to power, there's no hope of the Brotherhood ever coming back into power.
The only people who have any hope of their ideals ever being achieved are us.
So they have this very condescending attitude towards everybody else, and they would sort of be a lot of mockery of those people, very overt mockery of those people who had believed in democracy, which was pretty much everyone else in jail, and they said, well, you put your faith in this and look how things turn out for you.
You're in a dungeon and the whole world's okay with that.
And it becomes very, you know, they're contemptuous and arrogant because in a way they and the regime are the only ones who are winning.
Yeah.
Well, now, was there any sense that the people who really don't subscribe to that and aren't going to, that they were being reaffirmed in their belief in little d democracy, however defined, or they were all just hoping to survive and that was it at that point?
What Sultan told me is that for the most part people just focus on survival, but, you know, when you're in there for so long, inevitably some people, they can sort of, but these ideas easily start making sense to them and they're like, well, there's no other option and democracy just seems like a joke.
Now, there's not any prospect of democracy happening in Egypt anytime soon, whereas just a few years ago, it seemed like the dawn of a new great era and that's all come crashing down with a regime which is, you know, almost unarguably worse than the Mubarak regime that preceded it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, the thing is, too, is even from an American imperial point of view, it seems like, you know, betting on Egyptian democracy for, you know, the medium term at least would have been the best bet.
As he says in here, this dictatorship is not stable.
As you say, this place is a whole powder keg now and, you know, creating a military dictatorship will have the outside appearance of stability maybe, but you're just making matters worse.
But, you know, really the, you know, putting, in other words, putting the lid on the pot makes it boil over faster kind of a thing.
It seems like leaving those old, you know, conservative old Muslim Brotherhood leaders, elected ones in power would have been a lot better way to take the pressure of the young radicals off and instead they did exactly the wrong thing.
And I have to admit that even reading your article, it just makes it sound like our government does nothing but read all of our warnings about everything they do and they just use it as a script and that they're doing it on purpose at this point.
It's like it's almost hard to imagine that they could be this ham-handed in the way that they do their business.
Yeah, it's really sad, like everything that's been done has played exactly in the hands of the most radical people.
And look, it doesn't have to be, we don't have to say that all hope is lost now, nothing can be done.
There's things the U.S. can do right now, they're giving this aid to Egypt, they don't have to cut it off per se, but at minimum they can say we're giving you billions of dollars a year, you should address the situation in your prisons to make sure that it's not happening, you should impose some sort of, or restore some semblance of a democratic process to society again so people can say, well look, we don't have to join ISIS, there's other ways, even the faintest glimmer of hope that we can achieve our goals within normal peaceful channels within Egypt.
But unfortunately the U.S. so far has been giving Sisi just a blank check to do whatever he wants and they'll continue funding his regime, which I think will be looked back upon as a mistake if it's not rectified in the near future.
Yeah, well, the Vice President called, or no, pardon me, the Secretary of State Kerry called the military coup the restoration of democracy, so they've made their position pretty clear, I guess.
Thanks very much, come back on the show Murtaza, great work here.
My pleasure, thanks for having me.
That's Murtaza Hussain, y'all, he's at the Intercept, ISIS recruitment thrives in brutal prisons run by U.S.-backed Egypt.
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