For KPFK 90.7 FM in Los Angeles, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Anti-War Radio.
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Good times.
Alright, so all this week at AntiWar.com, we've been covering the bad news, the good news too, but mostly the bad news of course, such as the House of Representatives narrowly rejected an Afghanistan exit measure yesterday.
Although a slight victory, they did actually approve a ban on the use of ground troops in Libya, heading off the obvious path Obama has got us set on there.
So that was the best news out of the Capitol I've heard in a long, long time right there.
There were massive rallies in Iraq at the behest of Muqtada al-Sadr, demanding the end to the American occupation at the end of the year, if not sooner.
Suicide truck bombings in Pakistan and an attack on one of their military bases that lasted all day long.
I think that was on Monday or Tuesday.
And of course the revolution continues by other means in Syria, in Bahrain and in Yemen.
It looks like they're actually making progress.
More and more tribes are turning on so-called President Saleh.
They're numbering his days in the single digits.
For sure it looks like now, although I guess we'll see, he's hung on pretty strong.
And of course the House and the Senate have conspired with President Obama to extend the Patriot Act and its very worst provisions for another four years.
And we've been covering all of that at Antiwar.com this week.
But now I'm happy to go to our guest.
It's Adam Morrow.
We've talked to him a couple of times here on the show on KPFK.
He's a reporter for Interpress Service.
And he's been in Egypt throughout this revolution, and especially keeping an eye on the changes, such as they are, in Egypt's foreign policy.
I'm very happy to welcome Adam back to the show.
How are you, Adam?
How are you?
Good.
I'm good, Scott.
Good to talk to you again.
Good to talk to you.
Good to be back.
Well, I'm very happy to have you here.
And there's such exciting news out of Egypt.
It's been clear from the get-go that because the entire structure of the society is so intertwined with the military in that country that the successful deposing of Hosni Mubarak was still just the first step on a real steep uphill climb for the revolutionaries to really get the changes in the society that they want.
And it's been, of course, a real question whether large disorganized masses can keep their act together and keep their will cohesive and strong in order to follow through and make sure that those changes that they demanded back a few months ago are still carried out.
And so it's been interesting to see the news out of Egypt and which way these things are going.
It seems like there's been at least a bit of accountability for Hosni Mubarak and his family.
And I guess there were a couple of show trials for cops who had attacked the protesters back before Mubarak had been ousted.
But most especially of interest, I think, is the nature of Egypt's foreign policy and the way that they're treating the situation in Palestine.
For one, their newly reopened relationship with Iran.
For another, and I was hoping that not only could you teach us about the developments along these lines, but maybe give us the context too and explain to us what this really symbolizes in terms of the will of the Egyptian people overriding the will of the generals who've run the society up until now.
Sure.
Sure, sure.
That's a really good point you made earlier that really can't be stressed enough is that Mubarak's ouster on February 11th really was just the first step in what looks like is going to be a very, very long process.
A very, very long and very, very difficult and obstacle-fraught transition to democracy.
I don't know if your listeners know about what happened today.
Protesters returned to Cairo's Tahrir Square again today for what was widely billed up through the last week was widely billed as a second revolution or a second day of anger.
Now, after Hosni Mubarak was...
He actually wasn't ousted.
He simply delegated his authority to the military, to a supreme military council here who is currently ruling the nation's affairs on a temporary basis, on what has been promised would be a temporary basis in the run-up to eventual presidential and parliamentary elections that are supposed to happen within one year.
Now, a lot of people, a lot of the protesters, much of the public is saying...
They're sort of saying two things.
First, they're complaining of a security vacuum.
They're complaining of the security vacuum that was an inevitable result of the withdrawal of police after the army took over everything.
So, they have problems with that, and they're also having problems with, as you said, accountability.
They don't feel enough has been done in terms of prosecuting big figures associated with the former regime.
Now, there have been a bunch of very recent...
Just within the last couple of days, I think there have been a couple of widely publicized sentences handed down, very steep sentences handed down on former security service personnel.
But nothing has really reached the upper echelons yet.
A lot of people are complaining that these are...
These people are scapegoats, and they want to see the big figures.
None of the big figures have yet to really...
Have yet to have a big sentence handed down to them, a life sentence or a death sentence.
Some people have even spoken about...
Although, I know just yesterday, Hosni Mubarak and his two sons were both...
I think they were both subject to extensive...
I think charges were...
I think charges were pressed.
I think charges were pressed, charges of participating or condoning the murder of protesters.
But these charges have yet to be implemented.
And I also think those sentences that were just handed down yesterday were also possibly a reaction to today's events, today's so-called second revolution, although which it should be added, though, didn't really get the numbers that it had hoped for.
From what I can tell, and I've spoken to several people who were there in the square today, certainly didn't pass the million-man mark by a long shot.
So it didn't have the turnout today that you did several months ago when you had the really big million-man demonstrations.
Well, and now, you know, I'm so unfamiliar with Egypt's political system.
I mean, obviously, it's a top-down kind of dictatorship, but I wonder, you know, about what kind of local jurisdictions exist in Egypt and what kind of pressure they're feeling and maybe, you know, they also would then be redirecting some of the pressure they're feeling upward toward the central authority.
Right.
Well, I mean, under Mubarak, Egypt was a, you know, completely top-down dictatorship with this sort of, you know, with this sort of facade of democracy.
They sort of played this game where they had, you know, these fake opposition parties, and they would get together in parliament.
But the parliament was always firmly dominated by Mubarak's ruling party.
Now you basically have a, you know, a transitional rule by 18 figures that make up this high military council.
So, I mean, practically speaking, there's no more of a democratic process than there was under Mubarak at this point.
I think emergency law is still in effect.
There are still curfews.
They're much later now.
I think 2 a.m. now is the curfew.
And you also have, people are also complaining, this is one of the big complaints at the demonstration today, is that military tribunals are still being carried out.
Civilians are still being subject to military tribunals.
And that was always a massive, massive complaint of the opposition under Mubarak as well.
And the military here seems to be, the high military council seems to be continuing this practice of subjecting civilians, usually protesters, to military tribunals.
That's not a particularly good sign.
Well, and as you say, though, part of one of the results of the revolution was the disbanding of the police, so now there's really no security force at all but the army.
So I guess that's to be expected to continue for how long?
Right, right.
They promised the security service, the state security service, which belonged to the Interior Ministry, and we've discussed it before, was really the biggest perpetrator, the biggest perpetrator of human rights offenses and that sort of thing.
And they were most directly, these forces that were most directly involved in these blatant attacks on protesters that we saw during the 18-day uprising.
That outfit, that apparatus was disbanded, was formally disbanded by the Supreme Council about a month ago, maybe three weeks, a month ago, something like this.
And they have since promised to replace it with a, what is it called, national security force as opposed to before the state security force.
It's a sort of superficial change to the name.
I think that they said that they got rid of the corps of officers that had been largely involved in human rights abuses and this sort of thing and had been involved in domestic defiance, which they also played a role in, and had promised to sort of unveil this new, this new upgraded, cleaned security force in the weeks and months ahead.
But of course, needless to say, people are very skeptical about that as well and fear that it's just a window dressing.
So is there really nothing like a county level or a local mayor who has his own city police force?
Well, you have these municipal councils.
After the parliament, you've got these municipal councils that are very active on a, I guess you'd call it, on a city level throughout the country.
I don't know how many of those.
There are lots of them.
And this has been one of the problems, is that this is one of the things that, one of the demands that was actually mentioned in today's protest was that they want all of those completely dissolved because those apparently remain bastions of the old National Democratic Party.
So on that level in particular, it seems to be particularly compromised.
They really got their fangs in deep on the municipal level.
Boy, well, I guess now people are calling for the...
It sounds, Adam, like, you know, we better change the subject of foreign policy so we can find a place where things have changed.
I mean, it doesn't sound like...
It's funny.
The same thing was going through my head.
Yeah, I was thinking the exact same thing.
The good news, if you're looking for it, is to be found in terms of foreign policy, although that, too, is still sort of very much in the air.
You mentioned Gaza in your introduction and specifically Egypt's policy vis-à-vis Gaza, and that has been subject to complete change over the course of the last month.
We have a foreign minister, a new foreign minister, who was put in shortly after Mubarak's removal, who had, even before his appointment, had sort of gone on record as saying that the ongoing siege of Gaza by the Israelis and the Egyptian role played in that siege was shameful.
I think he actually referred to it as shameful and said it had to be reversed.
Well, and what time is it in...
What time is it at the Gaza-Egypt border right now?
It's Saturday.
It's supposed to be lifted starting sometime any minute now, right?
Right, right, right.
Yeah, this is the big sort of, you know, the big watershed that's just sort of come out in the last couple of days.
They had the...
Nabil al-Arabi, who's the new foreign minister, had promised, I think it was about a month ago, I'm sure you remember, it was about a month ago that he said the Rafah border crossing into the Gaza Strip was going to be opened on a permanent basis.
Maybe it was five weeks ago or so.
And I was...
He said it would open, I believe, within ten days is what he said.
And I also was beginning to question, you know, like, as all of us know, even in the United States, you know, promises by governments and that sort of thing really can't be taken at face value, and you really have to wait for the implementation before you can celebrate anything.
So up until this point, you know, up to this point, the border had remained closed.
And then, what was it, the day before yesterday or maybe yesterday, he came out and said, okay, we're going to finally open it on Saturday.
So it should, yeah, it should be opened within the next couple of hours.
Now, how open is open, do you think?
Free travel or trade and trucks only or medical emergencies or what are the limitations that you expect out of it?
Yeah, that's actually really the heart of it.
You're getting at the heart of the question right now because it's very easy to just say, oh, yeah, well, we opened the border.
But you actually have to look at what exactly is being allowed into and out of the Gaza Strip.
And after, in the immediate wake of the revolution, they didn't make much about opening the border.
They did open the border to a degree, and they sort of, this was widely publicized, you know, post-Mubarak Egypt, opening the border.
But then it turns out that they were only opening it to humanitarian cases, usually Palestinians or Gazans inside the Strip who needed medical attention in Egypt.
I think there were students who studied abroad who were let out to attend, you know, their universities.
But aside from that, there was no actual material entering into the Strip, you know, in bulk.
There were no truckloads full of consumer goods and buildings, specifically building supplies, which is what they need more than anything after the 2008, 2009 war.
They're in desperate, desperate need of building supplies.
And those things weren't being allowed in.
So, you know, it can be deceptive.
They have a way of spinning it when, you know, they'll make much of having opened it, when in fact it's still not operating as a fully sovereign international border should, which has provisions for human traffic as well as commercial cargo.
So that is going to be the thing to watch as the border is opened tomorrow, just what exactly happened.
I mean, it would be very nice to see the borders open and fleets of trucks full of aid and, you know, and not just aid, but, you know, commercial transactions going down.
But whether or not that's going to happen, I don't know.
And that's the sort of thing that if that does happen, then you're looking at a serious collision course with Israel, which firmly rejects any of that talk.
Well, I wonder if, well, I'm sure, I guess, the military ruling council of Egypt has taken that into account, that they're going to get some kind of reaction from the Israelis.
So do you think they're going to be, you know, restrained by that, or they're going to really be picking a fight here?
Yeah, well, that's the question.
I mean, the question is, what are the intentions of this ruling military council?
This is another thing that nobody really knows who exactly these guys are.
The average Egyptian certainly doesn't know who exactly comprises the military council and their histories, et cetera, et cetera.
And there has been a very, very long tradition of extremely close military-to-military relationship between the U.S. and Egypt.
Extremely close.
Egypt gets a lot in military aid every year, as you know, a lot of money.
And I think it gets equipment as well from the U.S., and there's a lot of training that goes on, and, you know, training for exchange, training program-type things.
And that goes back, that's been going on for decades.
So just how far the military council is willing to adopt policies that are out of step with Israeli wishes and, by extension, Washington's wishes, that is, I mean, I don't know.
You know, that's still sort of anybody, we just don't know exactly how it's going to play out.
These promises to open the border could be, you know, could be sort of intended for domestic consumption, to just sort of settle people down and to just, you know, please the public.
There's a longstanding demand of the opposition.
Well, now, there's the...
Whether or not they're willing to go the whole way, whether or not they're willing to go the whole way and just open the borders up completely and then inevitably open themselves up to charges of aiding and abetting Hamas, the Hamas government, in weaponizing itself.
You know, this I really don't know yet.
Right.
Well, we just won't go back to the history of the last time that Egypt armed Hamas.
It was a big oops because they were helping the CIA trying to arm Fatah in order to overthrow the results of the U.S. and Israeli enforced election of 2006 and the results they didn't like.
But, anyway, all those guns just ended up in Hamas' hands.
Right, right.
If I might just add another thing specifically about Hamas, there's also been an interesting...
Again, I'm sure your listeners know about the Palestinian reconciliation deal.
Yeah, I wanted to ask you, what was the Egyptian role in that?
The Egyptian role...
Egypt has always assumed responsibility ever since the big breakup between Hamas and Fatah in late 2006 and then it sort of culminated in 2007 when Hamas took control of the Gaza Strip.
Ever since then, Egypt has sort of taken it upon itself to...
You know, it still sees itself as a regional leader and because Gaza is right on its front door, it assumes the mandate of brokering and agreement between the two groups.
Now, the problem was under Mubarak because Mubarak was such a Zionist-friendly regime and so completely subservient to Washingtonian dictates.
The Egyptian side was completely biased in the favor of Fatah, of course, because Fatah is a fellow U.S. proxy, basically.
I mean, Fatah gets a lot of money, gets a lot of support from the United States.
So these reconciliation talks that went on for years under...
Actually, it was under Omar Suleiman who was the head of Egyptian General Intelligence, was the guy who was in charge of that file, went on for years, and they talked about the Shalit file, you know, the Israeli that was captured.
They talked about exchanging prisoners.
They talked about this stuff for years, and there would be occasional glimmers of hope and people thought that an agreement was in the offing and that it would inevitably be derailed.
And basically the consensus now is that that Egyptian mediation at the time under Mubarak was destined to failure.
It was almost intended to fail because it was so incredibly biased against Hamas.
They were trying to push Hamas to agree to all of these conditions that it didn't want to agree to in order to reconcile, and Hamas inevitably rejected them.
So it never got anywhere.
Now, within one or two months of the fall of Ladak, it's very interesting to see that Cairo was hosting Hamas officials again after a hiatus of...
I think it might have been as much as a year.
It could be more.
It could be less.
But Hamas had sort of become persona non grata in Cairo for the last couple of...certainly the last couple of months before the revolution because they just simply weren't willing to play along.
They weren't willing to give up, you know, their basic principles in order to reconcile with Fef, which is what Egypt wanted them to do.
So as soon as Mubarak is gone, and by extension all of Suleiman, they came to Cairo, they sat down, they seemed like almost immediately signed this reconciliation deal, much to the chagrin of the Israelis and Washington also.
Well, just to parenthesis here, I made all these wild assertions.
I ought to give my footnote, or my primary footnote, is the Gaza bombshell by David Rose from April 2008 in Vanity Fair about how the Bush administration, trying to undo the results of their election in the Gaza Strip in 2006, ended up empowering Hamas by trying to arm up Fatah to overthrow them.
And what a giant debacle that all was.
But now, so let me ask you if...
Well, I mean, you know, who knows?
The best you can glean from these developments, does this mean that...
Well, for example, does that make you more hopeful about the future of the Rafah border crossing, for example?
If the government of Egypt is willing to sit down and deal with the government of Hamas on terms other than those created in Tel Aviv?
I'm hopeful, and I'm very optimistic.
And what I'm very glad to see is that this issue is very much at the heart of the wider Egyptian revolutionary movement.
It's important to note that not much has been spoken about foreign policy, if you'll recall.
The first couple of months were very much...
The public consciousness was very much focused on domestic security issues, rightfully so, understandably so, because the country was in such an uncertain state.
But what's interesting, within the last month, you really had attention begin to focus, popular attention begin to focus on not just unpopular domestic policies, Mubarak-era domestic policies, but the unpopular Mubarak-era foreign policies, Gaza being absolutely the number one issue.
What with there being the world's largest concentration camp right on the border of Egypt.
So I don't know if you followed this, the whole Third Intifada phenomenon that happened, what was it, between the 13th and the 15th of this month.
Right, the anniversary of the Nakba.
Thousands of...
It was the anniversary of the Nakba, and it was a huge rally at Tahrir Square again, involving hundreds of thousands.
I don't think they broke the million mark, but there were hundreds of thousands.
It was very impressive.
It was certainly bigger than what happened today.
And that was sort of a twin rally for both national unity, because Egypt had just seen a spate of sectarian incidents, so it was a call for national unity, and it was also a show of solidarity for the Palestinians, especially the Gazans.
And at that point, if you recall, that day coincided with other similar demonstrations happening throughout the Arab world, some of them quite close to the borders of Israel, resulting in actual injuries, and the Israeli army actually fired on people.
Yeah, with tanks.
They fired on unarmed civilian protesters with tanks, the Israelis did.
Right, right.
I mean, not particularly surprising, considering how they usually respond to any sort of opposition, peaceful or otherwise.
But what happened in Egypt was that you actually had tens of thousands of Egyptians, at least, basically saying that they were prepared to march to the Rafah border, to basically march the Rafah border and protest there or, you know, sit in until, and basically until the border was definitively opened.
And what happened was two sort of things prevented that.
One of them was the army locked down the Sinai Peninsula, basically, and if you wanted to get from Cairo to Egypt, from Egypt proper, to the Rafah border, you have to go across the length of the Sinai Peninsula.
And the Sinai Peninsula was completely locked down, and that's very easy to do because you've got just a couple of strategic bridges over the canal.
But if you close those, I mean, you basically make any sort of march from Cairo to the border impossible.
So that happened.
And then more interesting, that was sort of predictable.
And then more interestingly, you actually had Khaled Nashal, who's the head of the Hamas political bureau in Damascus, basically coming out, basically issuing a statement to the Egyptian people, urging them not to do that, urging them that it was too unorganized, that they didn't want to sort of disorganize mass crowding the border, because even for them it would sort of represent a bit of a security risk.
You know, nobody was, and also the Hamas didn't want to take a fight with the Egyptian government.
They didn't want to alienate the ruling, you know, the ruling council here.
So you actually had Hamas telling Egyptians, just wait, you know, we urge you not to do this.
We appreciate the show of support.
But, you know, the border will be opened in due time, and we're used to waiting, and we can wait some more.
But we don't, you know, we don't.
It just showed a lot of, it just showed a lot of, the movement showed a lot of forethought, you know.
And I think it is cooperating closely with the Egypt government at this point, and has received several unexpected concessions from Egypt, and doesn't want to rock the boat, and certainly doesn't want to have tens of thousands of Egyptians suddenly storming the border.
That being said, though, it really was a remarkable show of Egyptian support for the people of Gaza, and confirmed that the Gaza issue has not been forgotten on the part of the bulk of the Egyptian people.
Right on.
Well, listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time on the show today, Adam.
I hope that maybe I can have you on my other radio show sometime next week, so we can go over, you know, the results of all this, and the opening of the Rafah crossing, as well as I ran out of time to ask you about the changing Egyptian relationship with the state of Iran.
And so, you know, I don't think we really have time to work that in today, but maybe we can follow up next week.
Sure.
My pleasure.
All right, everybody, that is Adam Morrow.
He is a reporter from Interpress Service, that's IPSnews.net, and reports from Cairo there.
He's got a couple of recent ones at IPSnews.net, Hidden Hands, Stoke, Sectarian Strife, and this one was Political Punch with a Religious Thrust.
He covers mostly Egyptian foreign policy for IPSnews, and you can find quite a bit of it at antiwar.com as well, although I don't know if we have a hot link right to his name yet.
We're working on it.
So that's it for today's show.
We'll be back here with more antiwar radio next Friday from 6.30 to 7, and every Friday from 6.30 to 7 here on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A.
Stop by antiwar.com and especially antiwar.com/radio for all my interview archives, about 1,800 or so of them there for you at antiwar.com/radio if you're into that kind of thing.
