Alright, good morning everybody, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and if you didn't hear the news, guess what the news is.
After disappointing everyone terribly last night in his speech, the dictator of Egypt, Hosni Mubarak, announced that, well, last night when he announced that he would not be leaving power, that he would be handing over power to the Vice President but would stay in office until the day he died, something like that.
Well, I woke up this morning to what turned out to be evening over there in Egypt, and a brand new statement was issued by Vice President Omar Suleiman saying that Mubarak is in fact leaving town, AntiWar.com's got a headline saying that Mubarak has been escorted out of Cairo by the military, and I'm very happy to have back on the show Adam Morrow from Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, he's on the phone live from Cairo right now.
We finished up the show talking with him yesterday in anticipation of the big speech that was supposed to come last night but ended up coming this morning, at least Los Angeles time.
Welcome back to the show, Adam.
Scott, nice to see you again, nice to talk to you again.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here, so I've got to tell you, well, and this is where we ended the interview yesterday too, I've never seen anything as beautiful as these hundreds of thousands, perhaps more than a million people out in the streets of Cairo celebrating the fall of their dictator.
It's a remarkable sight, people are out all over the city, I live across the river, across the Nile from Tahrir Square, but still maybe just only two or three kilometers away, and the streets are packed, the streets are clogged with cars, people waving Egyptian flags, honking their horns, carrying their kids on their shoulders, I've seen, it reminds me of when Egypt wins a soccer tournament, wins an important soccer tournament, but even things like those have been dwarfed by the sort of festivities and reveling in the streets that we're seeing today.
Yeah, it really is something else.
Now, boy, when I called the quits late last night, there were a bunch of people who were angry and were marching over to the presidential palace, looked like there might end up being a showdown between the presidential guard and the army who were at that point protecting the protesters.
Was that part of the pressure that forced this decision to finally be made, or do you know what happened?
That's a very good question.
I know the people that marched on the palace are still there, are sort of planning to stay there until the situation is clarified a little bit more, because we're still getting details.
When they say the army's taking over, we still don't know exactly what that means.
The army is something that the Egyptian army has cloaked in secrecy for decades.
In fact, I think there are even laws about writing about it, where reporters can't even refer to the army without getting into legal trouble here.
So exactly where the army stands on a lot of issues is a big question.
People generally have respect for the army here, unlike the police, who they generally detest because of the reputation for corruption and abuse.
People actually have quite a bit of respect for the army, because they see the army as sort of ...
They remember what the army did during the several wars with Israel in the past several decades, and they have fond memories, and they have a lot of respect for the army as an institution, unlike the police.
So people are happy in general, but like I said, the army is still nevertheless a bit of a question mark in terms of the sort of policies it's going to adopt, how it's going to oversee these reforms that have been promised.
So there are still a lot of unanswered questions.
People of course are extremely happy to see the back of Mubarak, who, as you know, everybody under 30 years old is the only president that they've known.
So there's euphoria on the streets right now, but we're definitely going to see in the coming hours and days, we're definitely going to get more details in terms of the nuts and bolts as to who's actually running the country.
All right, well, let's get back to that in a minute.
Let's talk a little bit about the last three weeks of the people power on display here.
I mean, this is the quintessential nonviolent revolution, 300 people thereabouts paid with their lives.
More, according to The Guardian today, were rounded up and tortured, including by that very same army.
I'm sure a lot of information is going to come out in the next days about the death toll might be a lot higher.
There might have been a lot of nasty stuff that went unreported at the time.
So I'm expecting a lot of, we're going to hear a lot of nasty details about some of the stuff, a lot of, maybe some of the torture that happened.
The mob, Adam, responded by holding peace signs in the air and saying, no, you're leaving, your day's done and we're not going until you go.
And that was it.
Yeah, yeah.
It was a remarkable show of peaceful resistance and self-restraint because the pro-Mubarak forces were definitely out to instigate fights.
They wanted to turn the demonstrations into a violent phenomenon.
And people were smart enough, the Egyptian people were smart enough on the whole not to fall for it, not to take the bait.
They kept themselves together very well.
In fact, I know that in Tahrir Square itself, several provocateurs were arrested, scores of provocateurs were arrested.
These were pro-Mubarak people that had infiltrated into the square posing as protesters and then tried to start fights, tried to get people riled up.
I think we've seen the same sort of phenomenon in some protests that we've seen in some Western capitals in recent years.
Well, and it seemed like there's been a lot of spontaneous order to the live feed from Al Jazeera.
English consistently shows the little tent city in the center of Tahrir Square there.
And that's what, makeshift hospitals and food pantries and so forth.
Right.
Well, I have a good friend who's right there right now, and he told me some interesting stuff about what's happening in Tahrir Square.
He said that in the beginning, the first couple of weeks, it was pretty rough.
In the first 10 days, it was pretty rough because they had no bathrooms out there, and the police and the army apparently were stopping people from bringing food and water and supplies inside.
So it was pretty rough going for the first 10 days or so.
As of yesterday, they had reached such a degree of sophistication that they were actually bringing in professional electricians who were setting up electric outlets that were feeding off of lampposts so everybody could recharge their mobile phones.
They were bringing in carpenters who were literally bringing cement in, in order to build small bathrooms, of which they built something like 12.
And my friend said they did in a couple of hours what it usually takes the government years to do in terms of providing infrastructure to the people.
So I thought that was very telling.
It really is something to see.
Wow.
Well, you know, I guess I can't leave this out.
I'm trying to prioritize what are the most important points to try to get addressed here and in what order for the time.
That's a tall order, given everything that's happened.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm a Texan and right now I live in California and you're an American too.
And, you know, for me, the most important part of this of all overall, the whole thing and and also the part most left out of the media narrative on MSNBC this morning is that it is the United States that has foisted this 30 year tortured dictatorship on these people and brought them to this point.
That's right.
That's absolutely right.
One of the incredible aspects of this whole thing was watching the U.S. reaction, watching how or watching Washington's reaction in particular, watching how these people are, our politicians were put on the spot, put in a situation where while saying at one time that they supported democracy and they supported the seeds of democracy and they supported, you know, human rights and all of the things that that America is supposed to stand for.
At the same time, they were obviously doing their best, I think, to keep Mubarak in power.
So so that was definitely one of the most interesting, interesting aspects of this whole thing is it really, really exposed Washington's double standards in terms of in terms of foreign policy in the Middle East in particular.
Right.
Well, and, you know, they're not subtle about it either.
And I think, you know, from maybe it's part of the domestic politics that they have to show how on top of things they are when they really have no business doing it.
They leaked it right to The New York Times a week and a day ago that, yeah, we're doing everything we can to put our, you know, George Bush's friend, a torturer, the former head of the Interior Ministry, or I forget exactly, General Omar Suleyman in power.
And so if Mubarak goes, maybe we'll be able to get away with keeping our puppet dictatorship.
The protesters will go home.
And so now we're just working on getting Mubarak to step down.
And there is obvious as that it was right there on the front page of The New York Times.
Right.
Right.
What really killed yesterday was a very bad day for Suleyman in general, because I don't know if you're aware of these WikiLeaks that came out, either yesterday or the day before.
No, I knew of some that came out, I guess, last week.
What were they?
Was it?
Are they that old at this point?
Maybe they only sort of hit the they only sort of hit the headlines in the last couple of days here.
This is the stuff about things that were sent to the Israelis about about his involvement in the specifically in the Israeli Palestine file.
Right.
All right.
Well, we'll pick that up on the other side of this break.
We have to go out and take this break.
Everybody, it's Adam Morrow.
He writes for Interpress Service.
He's in Cairo, Egypt right now.
And Mubarak is leaving power.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show, Santi War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
We're talking with Adam Morrow.
He's on the line live from Cairo, Egypt today.
And you're right about the WikiLeaks.
There's some more WikiLeaks.
There were some a couple of weeks ago about the police state there, Adam.
But this morning, apparently, were published some new WikiLeaks about Omar Suleiman, the new dictator of Egypt after Mubarak promising the Americans and the Israelis, I guess, both that he would stop Hamas from winning the election of 2005.
So apparently he's as incompetent at his job as they are at theirs.
Right.
Right.
Right.
I hadn't heard that one.
That must be a new one.
The one that I had heard, the leaks that I had heard within the last 48 hours or so were basically the complicity, his complicity and Egypt's complicity in the ongoing siege of Gaza, the three-plus-year-old siege of Gaza, which Egypt is participating in, which Egypt is abetting Israel in carrying out.
At one point in the leak, he's quoted as saying that he wanted the Gazans to remain in a state of hunger.
He wanted them to starve to death, but he wanted them to go hungry.
So just really, really low, really low stuff like that.
Well, that's exactly the language that the Israelis use as well in the WikiLeaks.
Exactly.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
Right.
Exactly.
I mean, more or less confirming that Egyptian foreign policy was in lockstep with Israeli policy, which, needless to say, is a very unpopular concept on the street.
All right.
So, look, here's the thing, though, in context, and I could be wrong, so you correct me if I'm wrong.
But it seems to me like the military is not going anywhere.
It's the respected institution, and as we've been learning on the show over the past week, they are a major part of the economy.
They own, you know, virtually everything of importance, whatever.
So no matter what happens, the military government of Egypt is going to remain.
The question is, who's going to be the civilian face on the front of it?
Will it be Omar Suleiman, or will it be Mohamed ElBaradei, or will it be somebody else?
Am I wrong or right about that?
Well, from what I understand is the military is going to run the show until September.
So I imagine they'll have some kind of military figure running the show or running the affairs of the state until September, at which point elections, free elections, are supposed to be held, at which point your civilian leader will be elected.
That's what the information I'm getting points to.
So there you have it.
But again, like I said earlier, the military is such a question mark.
Who will be appointed to lead the country within the next six months is still uncertain, as far as I know, unless new news has come out within the last couple of minutes.
Yeah.
Well, I wonder if the protesters, well, I think, shouldn't it go without saying, but I guess we need to mention, are they going to settle for Suleiman at all, or has this really changed nothing?
No, Suleiman was, he was, as of yesterday, I mean, he was a burnt card.
He's out.
I mean, they tried that and he was rejected overwhelmingly by absolutely everyone.
So they might be celebrating in Tahrir Square right now, but that doesn't mean they're leaving.
Yeah, that's a very good point.
And I've asked a couple of people, like I said, the activists who are camped out around the walls of the presidential palace, that they are not going anywhere for the time being.
We sort of had false starts before as well.
I mean, not to be pessimistic or anything, but there have been some false starts before where people sort of thought it was over.
And then it turned out, you know, the regime sort of backtracked.
And then, I mean, it's a different situation now that the military is stepping in.
But let me just say, over the course of the last two weeks, when the military was initially deployed on the streets of Cairo and Alexandria and Suez on, I believe it was the 29th, it was Saturday the 29th, which was the fifth day of the demonstration, which began on the 25th.
They were initially welcomed by the cheers of protesters and demonstrators.
They were touching scenes of protesters jumping up on tanks and embracing these army guys.
And everybody talked about the noble army coming in, stepping in basically to save protesters from police violence.
Since then, in the last 10 or 15 days or so since, some complaints have arisen about the army, that they weren't doing enough to stop pro-Mubarak people from attacking protesters.
And there were even reports that they were preventing, they were aiding in the prevention of getting food and supplies into the protesters at Tahrif Square.
So there was a bit, over the course of the last 10 or so days, there was a little bit of disillusionment with the army on the part of the protesters.
I heard a lot of them saying, what have they really done for us until now?
There were also some attempts, this is going back about two or three days ago, when Tahrir had reached sort of maximum capacity, when the tanks, you sort of had this trench warfare situation going on, where tanks would try to take a couple meters here and there.
They would just say, oh, we just need to maneuver the tanks a little bit.
We just need to move them around a little bit.
And they'd try to take a couple meters of the square that way.
So there was some thought that they were trying to slowly squeeze protesters out of the square.
What was incredible, though, is the protesters actually slept, not only next to the tanks, but actually inside the tank trench, on and inside the tank trench, meaning that if these tanks wanted to move, they were actually going to have to crush people.
Thank God that didn't happen.
But it just shows the resolve of these protesters who were literally sleeping in and under tank trench to prevent the army from getting any, so much as one meter of ground from Tahrir.
All right.
So now what are the demands?
Because if the military is basically going to stay and whatever civilian takes over is going to be, I don't know, he'll have whatever share of the power he has there.
Are they saying what they want?
Regular elections where the unbanning of opposition parties, I've heard that.
Are we talking about an end to torture and impunity in the police state?
And what's all the list of demands here that would make a difference other than just the face making a difference?
Sure, sure.
All those things that you mentioned are important.
Free and fair elections that are overseen by the judicial branch, as well as possible international oversight.
Certainly at the top of the list is to Egypt's longstanding emergency law, which was imposed by Mubarak shortly after he assumed the presidency in 1981.
After the death of Sadat, President Anwar Sadat, who killed, and I believe it was 1980 or 81, Mubarak assumed power and immediately imposed the emergency law.
And that law has been in effect ever since, has been renewed in two year increments ever since then.
So the, so the cancellation of that emergency law is definitely at the top of the list.
Okay.
So now what all, well, we don't even have time to talk about that.
So I'll just talk about this.
Adam Morrow is a reporter from Interpress Service.
That's, you know, Jim Loeb and Gareth Porter and all the greats over there at IPSnews.net.
And he's live on the phone from Cairo right now.
We talked with him yesterday about his article co-written with Khaled Moussa al-Amrani called Muslims and Christians Protest as One, which I highly recommend.
It's original.antiwar.com/Adam Morrow, Khaled Moussa al-Amrani.
Geez, I can't tell you that link.
We'll have to figure out a hot link for that.
Actually go to yesterday's interview on the page at antiwar.com today, and you can link right to the article that way.
And you can hear yesterday's interview as well there.
Hey, Scott, if you don't mind, I wanted to sort of mention something I don't think we got to yesterday on the issue of Muslim Christian relations.
Okay, great.
We'll talk more about that when we get back.
It's Adam Morrow from Interpress Service, Antiwar Radio.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and I'm talking with Adam Morrow.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service.
IPSnews.net.
If you go to antiwar.com right now at the top of the page, you'll find my interview from yesterday, and you can find a hot link to his most recent article there, Muslims and Christians Protest as One.
And before I let Adam start talking again, I've got to beseech you.
If you can get to a computer monitor and a high bandwidth communication with the rest of the world there, you've got to check out english.aljazeera.net/watch underscore now and behold what is going on in Tahir Square in Cairo.
It's the history of the world being written here today, and it's a beautiful thing.
All right, so now where were we, Adam?
Well, we were just talking about the issue of Muslim Christian relations, and the article that I wrote is all about Muslim Christian solidarity during these protests.
Muslim and Christian demonstrators demonstrating together and taking on police brutality together.
And what's interesting, what I don't think we mentioned last night was, like I said earlier, now that the regime has fallen, I think a lot of sort of nasty, nasty stuff is going to come out of the closet.
We're going to hear a lot of things, a lot of information about crimes that were committed, both during the recent uprising and over the course of the last 30 years even, I think.
A lot of skeletons are going to roll out of the closet.
And one of the things that's come up just within the last couple of days, within the context of the Muslim Christian issue, is the suggestion or unconfirmed reports that information has come out that the interior ministry was possibly behind the Alexandria church bombing that happened on New Year's Eve.
I don't know if you remember that.
That was about a month and a half ago, if you remember.
New Year's Eve, a big Catholic Christian church in Alexandria was blown up.
The government blamed it on an Al-Qaeda offshoot, but the perpetrators were never found.
But it was something that had caused a lot of friction, a lot of tension between the two communities.
And now people are saying that there's information circulating that the interior ministry himself or the interior ministry itself might have actually had a hand in that bombing, which would be quite an explosive revelation if it turns out to be true.
Well, now, wasn't there kind of a big uproar about the rigged election for the lower house of parliament in November?
And Mubarak was having trouble with that.
And this seemed like a pretty good distraction.
They blamed it on Al-Qaeda, right?
Oh, right.
Yeah, maybe it was a distraction for that.
That's true.
The elections had only just finished a month before.
They were rigged, blatantly rigged.
I think the ruling party won 97 percent of the house.
And yeah, that's actually a possible theory that it was somehow done to deflect attention, negative attention away from the government.
Yeah, that idea was brought up by Lou Rockwell on the show the other day.
He just assumed that, of course, the government was blowing up something to deflect attention.
Sounds like par for the course.
Right, right.
Well, these guys are half-trained by the Soviets, half-trained by the Americans, right?
Right, right, right.
Well, if you read my article, you'll find at the end it sort of concludes with several of the sources, both Muslim and Christian, saying that all of this Muslim-Christian tension that we've had over the last 10-odd years, 90 percent of it was the government's fault, was because of government negligence and mismanagement of the issues and even downright instigation.
So it's very possible that we'll see a new dawn of Muslim-Christian cooperation and coexistence in Egypt once this whole thing blows over.
Yeah, well, I can't help but wonder what this is going to mean for the rest of the Middle East and really, I mean, from Morocco to Indonesia, the entire Muslim world.
I'm looking at somebody shooting off Roman candles over Tahrir Square right now as a million people are celebrating the downfall of Hosni Mubarak.
That's some powerful images, even way over here in Los Angeles.
I wonder what this looks like on TV in, say, Saudi Arabia.
Right.
You know, this came on the back of the Tunisia uprising that saw the end of the Ben Ali regime that had ruled Tunisia for 23 years.
And that regime was notorious as being the most repressive in the Middle East.
And as great as that was, and certainly not to downplay the Tunisia, the successful Tunisia uprising, but Egypt is a much, much larger and more strategically important country to the powers that be.
It's the largest, the most populous Arab country with 80 million people, by far the largest in terms of population.
It's strategically located between Africa and Asia.
It formed the land bridge between these two continents.
Whoever controls Egypt will control the Suez Canal, which is incredibly important for international commerce as well as military, as well as naval movement, especially by the U.S. naval forces.
And perhaps most importantly of all for Washington, it shares a 250-kilometer border with Israel, roughly 250.
I could be wrong, give or take on that.
But it shares a very long border with Israel.
It's what's known as a confrontation state with Israel.
So whoever controls Egypt, that fight for Egypt is of paramount importance, and far more important than Tunisia.
Again, not to downplay the revolution there.
And you can almost see why the U.S. would be loath to lose its man in Cairo.
Yeah, well, you know, it was hilarious this morning before I could get the computers up and going and get Al Jazeera on.
I was suffering Chris Matthews talking about, you know, Obama's heart is with the people there and all this stuff.
And I'm thinking, really, you know?
Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's, uh, his heart is with Omar Suleyman.
I read it in the New York Times, Chris, you know?
Right, right, right.
Yeah, it made my blood boil to, to, to see him standing there and trying to, to, to palm himself off as a, uh, as a champion of democracy and, and to try to make Washington look like it, it, it's a, it's a promoter of, of, of human rights and, uh, and democracy around the world.
But this, I'll tell you, this, this is one of the, one of the coolest effects of this whole, this whole uprising is the fact that it, it, it really showed up Washington.
It really exposed them for what they were in front of the entire world, you know?
I mean, the, the, the more savvy, the savvier people have figured out by now that, that America isn't about democracy promotion.
And that's not, that's not the reason it's doing what it's doing in the Middle East, is not to promote democracy.
Uh, but I think what happened after Egypt, a lot of people who hadn't really caught on yet and who might've actually still believed the hype about, about democracy, uh, will, will now have no choice but to, but to come to terms with the fact that America is not a promoter of, of democracy and human rights, uh, certainly not in the Middle East.
Right.
And all you gotta do is just look at, uh, the Kings Abdullah in Jordan and Saudi Arabia, their existence is testimony to the ultimate corruption and hypocrisy of the United States.
Absolutely.
Well, I'll tell you, after, after this thing, I don't know how much longer the Hashemites have in Jordan.
Uh, the, uh, the Hashemite rulers there, uh, King Abdullah II, uh, I don't know how, uh, how much longer, I don't know if his days are numbered or not, but I think also the West Bank under a Palestinian authority, a president, uh, Mahmoud Abbas, uh, I also think is going to have to, uh, have to, is also in jeopardy right now because of what's happening in Egypt.
Because really this, this just showed that if people can sort of get together and, and agree on a single day on which to come out to hit the streets, uh, you know, it's just a matter of organization, but they can really change the status quo.
And if they can change the status quo in Egypt, which was locked down by a very repressive regime for 30 years, then it can happen anywhere.
Right.
I mean, simple fact, it's just mathematics.
There are millions of Egyptians comes down to it.
They can crush that government if it comes to a fight, even, you know, and that's the same thing in every state on this planet.
That's as just Armando says in his article today on antiwar.com, uh, that's the problem from the point of view in every capital city on the planet here right now is what a precedent this is setting.
I read something a couple of weeks ago about how protests in Belarus started cranking up in response to even, I think, Tunisia before Egypt.
That's very interesting.
So let me ask you one more thing.
Uh, this gentleman that you've arranged for me to interview on the KPFK show tonight here in Los Angeles.
What can you tell me about him?
Is he a journalist or he's just an Egyptian friend of yours or what's the deal?
An Egyptian American friend of mine who's lived here, I guess he came to, he's lived here for about 10 years.
Uh, and he's been, he's been participating very enthusiastically in the protests for the last 10 days or so.
He's been sleeping out in pocket square, uh, for the last three or four days.
I know he's, he's spent the night there.
It's the last three or four or five days.
That's great.
Uh, yeah.
Is there anything that he's written that you could point me toward?
He's not a writer.
Okay.
He's not a writer, so he doesn't, he doesn't have any writing online, but he, I've actually, I've quoted him in several of my articles.
He's given me really, really good insights from, from, from, you know, directly from talking square.
Uh, he's got a, he's got a lot of really interesting insights about who exactly is participating and sort of the, uh, sort of the, uh, the eclectic nature of the demonstrators.
They are all the different kinds of people from all walks of life, from all over the country who were there.
Uh, everybody's, uh, getting along really well, uh, incredible sense of camaraderie or camaraderie.
As I mentioned in the article, incredible solidarity between Christians and Muslims and leftists and the old and the young and, uh, the religious and the non-religious.
So he, he should be able to give you some quite, some quite good, uh, some quite good stuff.
Wow.
That sounds great.
I can't wait to talk to him.
Uh, I can't tell you how much I appreciate that hookup and how much I appreciate your time on the show yesterday and today as well.
Uh, I wish you and, uh, everybody that you're writing about over there the best of luck.
Thanks so much.
Happy to do it.
Everybody that is Adam Morrow, reporter for interpress service, IPS news.net.
