07/03/14 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Where I do a show.
Alright, next up is Adam Morrow.
He's a journalist living in Cairo.
Reports for Interpress Service, IPSNews.net.
And great to have you back on the show.
Adam, how are you?
Thanks, thanks Scott.
I'm good.
How are you doing?
I'm doing good.
I appreciate you joining us today.
It's the 3rd of July, so that makes it then the one year anniversary of the counter-revolution in Egypt.
I guess, well, let's go ahead.
You tell the story of the coup and then what's happened in the last year.
I'll take some notes and try to follow up where I can.
Sure.
Well, just starting with what happened today, you had demonstrations across the country of varying sizes.
Again, it's difficult to, it's always difficult to determine exactly how big these demonstrations are because the only media that covers them really is Al Jazeera, the Qatar news network, Al Jazeera.
All the local Egyptian channels will studiously avoid covering them.
So again, it's difficult to tell how big the Morsi protests were that we saw today.
At least one person was killed.
I think pro-Morsi people are saying that there were three deaths at the hands of security forces, but I think officially they're just saying one.
So that's basically what happened today.
Of course, what we saw today wasn't nearly as big as past protests.
You've got tens of thousands of pro-Morsi people are in prison now, and security services tend to immediately start with live ammunition when they break up these protests.
So it looks like they were very quickly dispersed.
Nothing too big.
People were expecting maybe something larger to mark the first anniversary of the coup, but again, you've got tens of thousands in jail and you've got very, very heavy-handed policing, seem to have made pretty short work of the planned protests today.
And it was one year ago today that basically the military stepped in on the back of opposition protests.
Egypt's formidable military apparatus stepped in and forcibly removed Mohamed Morsi from office.
He had only been in office for one year.
If you remember, he won 2012 elections.
He was removed from office and he was replaced with an interim government that served until about a month ago when the army chief who basically spearheaded his removal was elected president in a very, very dubious election in which he is said to have got 97 percent of the vote.
So now you have Abdel Fattah al-Sisi as president of Egypt, one year after removing the democratically elected president from office.
And it looks like basically what you had before the January 25, 2011 revolution, you have a very similar situation now.
Egypt is back to square one with an awful economy, a collapsing bureaucracy.
The country is completely broke, tourism is in shambles, and huge, huge segments of the population are very, very frustrated over unemployment and the usual chronic unemployment, et cetera.
So basically we're back again to where we were in 2010 as of now.
Man, that ain't just the worst shame, Adam.
And for those who are maybe new to the show or somewhat new to the show, I've been speaking with Adam Morrow since the Arab Spring broke out back in January, or it could have been February of 2011, and sort of keeping track mostly through you.
I've had some other guests on from time to time about Egypt, but mostly you're my Egypt guy.
So as the narrative has unfolded in front of us here, it's like marching to war in Iraq back in 2002 and 2003.
It's just the slowest motion train wreck.
No, no, no, no, man.
Yeah, and just when you get a little bit of hope after something like January 25, there was so much hope, so much euphoria for the future, which makes it all the more heartbreaking the way things have turned out.
Another very sad aspect of all of this is that in 2011 you really did see a strong popular presence.
You really had all strata of society sort of coming out and hitting the streets opposed to Mubarak.
Not everybody, of course, not everybody, but large portions of the population coming out, whereas this time around when you'd think there would be even more of a reason to demonstrate, you're actually seeing this incredible apathy, which I think is probably the result of, you know, this is something that a big mistake that the so-called revolutionaries made, is that the average Egyptian never saw any benefits of the revolution.
You know, they saw this revolution happen.
They sort of looked askance at it, didn't know what to expect, and then they didn't, you know, any benefits accrue to them as a result of it.
And for that reason, you know, this time around people are much more apathetic.
You know, people are like, we don't want to go through all of that again.
We tried our little experiment with democracy.
It didn't work for us.
You know, so you've got these very, people are very, very resigned right now, which is also very, it's really tragic.
You know, it's sort of like, you know, we had our chance, and we just couldn't get our acts together enough, and we couldn't work together, and so the status quo has been reimposed on us, and now, you know, there's kind of this sort of hopelessness that's really, really, really unfortunate.
But that's what you got.
All right, well, let me oversimplify some things, and you straighten it out, but if I understand your story, basically it sounds like after the revolution of 2011 and Mubarak being deposed, that you really had three sort of major factions, and I guess two of them much bigger than the third, the first two being the state itself, the executive branch, and the military, and all the judges, and all the bureaucrats.
The deep state, the so-called deep state.
Yeah, well, and even the surface one, too, right?
And then you had the Muslim Brotherhood, who was the only, they're de facto legal, the only real outside group, political group allowed to exist, even though they're officially outlawed.
They pretty much, you know, and that's basically the private businessmen, and that kind of thing, and the religious leaders.
And then you had the liberals, and the union people, and maybe the young and tech savvy, and they were the smallest portion.
But then, so what happened was, it was supposed to be the Brotherhood and the young and the liberal who were working together to maintain a democratic system with regular elections and move toward more self-government, less emergency law, less totalitarianism, and their enemy in that was the state, but instead they fought with each other, and the Muslim Brotherhood wouldn't include the liberals at all, and the liberals refused to have anything to do with the Muslim Brotherhood.
And so the military came and said, OK, Muslim Brotherhood, the liberals want us to get rid of you, and so we're getting rid of you.
And that was what happened a year ago.
Now, I know that ain't quite right, because that's my oversimplification from Texas, but please quibble with me and help straighten me out here.
No, that is more or less what happened.
And another thing, like I was saying earlier about the apathy now, those liberal forces, those so-called liberal forces and revolutionary forces, about which so much was made, so much was made in the wake of 2011.
So talk of this new ascendant Egyptian youth, this Internet-savvy Facebook youth were leading the road to reform and democracy and all of this stuff.
And that whole crowd, that third force that you just mentioned, are nowhere to be seen now.
You'd think now more than ever they would be.
Well, and their leaders are in prison, right?
Just like the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yeah, I mean, a handful of them.
A lot of people will talk about the government cracking down on the Islamists and the liberal leaders of the January 6th revolution, but bear in mind you've got tens of thousands of Islamists locked up.
And a handful, I mean, I don't want to give wrong numbers here, but you can't possibly compare in terms of the numbers of people that are being locked up.
You can't compare.
Again, there are tens of thousands of Islamists who are languishing in prison right now, and you've got horrible stories coming out.
You've got allegations of gang rape going on in these prisons.
You've got the most horrific stuff you can imagine, which kind of rings true because the government is kind of like a rabid animal after the terrible turnout in the last election has made them even more defensive than they were before.
So it's really, I mean, these people are capable of doing anything to secure their authority at this point.
So I think they're doing really horrible stuff.
I know what international human rights groups are coming out.
I think Amnesty or Human Rights, one or the other just came out and said it was like unprecedented decline in human rights in Egypt over the last several, you know, since...
All right, give us a minute, Adam.
We've got to take this break.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Adam Moore on Egypt.
From Egypt on Egypt.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And I'm on the line with Adam Morrow.
He's a reporter in Cairo, Egypt.
I'm talking about the results of the coup a year ago.
The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government and its replacement by this pretended elected dictatorship of Field Marshal Sisi here.
Tell me this, Adam, and lots to go over here.
Tell me, what, if any, was the American role in the coup there?
Man, that's a great question, and that's one that definitely needs further research.
I mean, they definitely kept themselves very far from it.
If there was American involvement, they did a very good job sort of keeping it under wraps.
They certainly seemed surprised when it happened.
We talked about this a little bit last time and how it seems like most of the planning and the logistics and the money for the coup last year, or the counterrevolution, as you very accurately described it before that, was done, we used the term in-house last time, was done in the region basically by longstanding allies of the Egyptian deep state, those being specifically Saudi Arabia at the top of the list, and then the United Arab Emirates as well, which has become increasingly aggressive in sort of its foreign policy, and Kuwait to a less extent, all of which would have given billions, I think it's something like $20 billion, if you can combine totals, $20 billion at this point, into propping up the Egyptian economy, despite all of its, under all of its post-coup circumstances.
Again, I mentioned earlier that the tourism industry is destroyed.
That had long been a main foreign currency earner for the country, as well as other sources of revenue have sort of dried up in the last couple years.
So the Gulf states have all stepped in to keep Sisi's Egypt afloat.
And yet, even despite that, even despite these huge cash infusions, you still have infrastructure that's literally crumbling in front of your eyes here.
I mean, we get, at this point, we get between two or three electricity cuts that last about an hour every day, and that's even in upscale areas of the capital.
Just as an indication of how bad the sort of infrastructure here is, and just sort of how poorly everything is going.
Everybody's been complaining about that for months.
Sisi hasn't been able to fix that.
That was one of the main reasons, if you remember, that was one of the main reasons people were running out on the streets to get Morsi out, was because of his inability to fix the electricity crisis.
And yet that has remained unabated.
The electricity crisis has remained unabated until now.
And despite all of the Saudi largesse, they still can't seem to get their acts together.
And I think the Gulf countries themselves have even told Egypt, they're like, you guys have to get your acts together here, because we're not going to funnel money indefinitely.
We're not going to just pour.
Egypt has become this huge regional money pit that they're just pouring money on top of, just in order to justify the exclusion of the Islamist trend here.
And so now, but what about America's military's relationship with the Egyptian military?
Honestly, it's a totally different direction.
I think, I don't know enough about the inner workings of sort of U.S. foreign policymaking to know if it's possible that certain segments of the U.S. intelligence apparatus, for example, or even the executive branch, I mean, I don't know if they knew about it.
Well, remember now, Phil Giraldi was telling us a year and a half ago, so six months after the, no, yeah, yeah, yeah, six months before the coup, a year after, two years after the revolution, now I'm losing track.
Right.
Anyway, six months before the coup, he was saying the Saudis are bankrolling riots in the streets to destabilize the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yeah, yeah, that's absolutely true.
So if Phil knew that, then the CIA was telling him that, and so D.C. knew that six months before, at least.
That's what I mean, that's what I figure.
They must have known what was going on.
You had Ahmed Shafi, who was Morsi's main competitor in the 2012 polls, who narrowly lost to Morsi in 2012, setting up an operations room in Abu Dhabi, and he actually, he said in an article, he was quoted by Reuters or something like that, not admitting as much, saying we're sitting here in an operations room coordinating the protests from Abu Dhabi.
So, I mean, that stuff's on the record.
You had Naguib Sawiris, who was this huge Coptic billionaire.
He was incredibly, incredibly anti-Islamist, basically admitting also in a wire story that he was funding the Tamarud movement, if you remember that, the petition campaign, the anti-Morsi petition campaign that sort of started the, sort of got the whole protesting going back in the...
And yet the dictatorship, the current pharaoh says that America's behind the Muslim Brotherhood.
Oh, yeah, yeah, that's just transparent crap, though.
I mean, that's just, yeah, no, I mean, I don't know if anybody's actually buying that.
But that's, it's interesting to note for people who are new at this, that legitimacy comes with denouncing the United States.
It's the only way that anybody can get ahead in the world anywhere but here.
In the Middle East, anyway, yeah.
Yeah.
All right, anyway.
Listen, you had also asked me before, I don't know if you wanted to talk about this, I just wanted to say about in terms of other regional issues that are going on, crazy stuff going on in Iraq and stuff going on in Syria with the launch of this caliphate and all of this.
Well, they say, yeah, there are guys with ISIS flags in the Sinai Peninsula, Adam.
What about that?
Those black flags had been spotted earlier.
That's not a new thing.
Those black flags cropped up at some funeral that was held, I think, during Morsi's time.
Those black flags cropped up, and everybody made a big deal of them at the time.
That was like more than a year ago.
So that's not an entirely new thing.
But I will tell you in terms of the Muslim Brotherhood, they've very carefully avoided commenting or issuing statements in support or against any of these foreign movements, any of these big Islamist groups that are cropping up now.
They studiously avoided issuing anything like that.
So they're sort of staying out of the fray.
They're focusing entirely on the domestic issue right now, and they're certainly not issuing any, you know, certainly haven't come out in support of any of the things that are happening in Syria or Iraq recently.
That's interesting.
Yeah, well, and they've got their own fish to fry right now, especially considering it sounds like you're saying most of them are in prison.
Yeah, exactly, exactly.
And now, by the way, how many Muslim Brotherhood people have been sentenced to death now?
Oh, it's very difficult to determine because some of them can be appealed and others can't.
It's in the hundreds.
I mean, it's in the hundreds, including the group's number one, Mohammed Badia, who's the supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood, has been sentenced to death.
And are there anything to the charges that they did anything other than being the guys that were overthrown?
Oh, no.
I mean, they say it's because they incited violence.
I mean, they've got a bunch of trumped-up charges, which are completely ludicrous.
I mean, if you look at the charges, if you look at the sentencing of the Al Jazeera journalists, that was based on absolutely ludicrous evidence.
I mean, there was no evidence that was brought to bear against those three Al Jazeera journalists who were all in prison for something like seven years each.
That was two weeks ago or so.
And now John Kerry's over there still giving them money.
And they said, hey, John Kerry, I guess if I read this right, Adam, it was, hey, John Kerry, you just left Egypt where you said they were great, and as your plane was taken off, they announced the conviction of these Al Jazeera guys.
And I forgot what I read.
He said something about how well, good, or so what, or something.
I mean, what's he going to say?
Listen, listen, I apologize in advance if my phone goes dead and my battery's getting low, but I will just say that the United States vis-a-vis Egypt, even going back to 2011 and before, has always been sort of, what's the word, has always been sort of, you know, psychotic in that it's got two, you know, it's at one, you know, on one level they want Egypt to remain stable and they want it to remain, you know, they want it to abide by the Camp David peace agreement and be stable so their Suez Canal will give them access to, you know, the global trade lanes and all of that sort of thing.
But at the same time, they also have to talk the democracy talk as well.
And so they always have to support, you know, like, you know, supposedly democratic trends or, you know, democratic transitions, and they have to say bad things about dictators.
So you double speak with the U.S. all the time.
They're always caught.
It's funny.
I mean, it sort of came to a head in January 2011 when at one point, you know, they were saying Mubarak is great and he's going to stay and he's not going anywhere.
And at the other, you know, and the next day they're lauding the, you know, these young Democrats in Tahrir Square.
So this back and forth with the United States is nothing new.
Yeah.
Well, yeah, it's interesting there.
I guess they're still sending the weapons and they're just pretending that the law that says they can't, you know, benefit.
Exactly.
Exactly.
At the end of the day, I'm sure they're very happy to see Egypt.
You know, they don't want to see regular protests and all this protest activity and stuff, but they do want to see a stable Egypt more than anything else.
They prefer to know.
Yeah, I mean, this Sisi is just a clone of Mubarak at this point, right, isn't he?
Say that again?
Isn't Sisi basically just a clone of Mubarak, exactly the kind of guy that they would prefer to have in power there?
Yeah.
A lot of people try to say that there are differences and that sort of thing, but at the end of the day, if you look at the people he's appointed, if you look at all the people around him, if you look at his new prime minister, for example, who was a longstanding member of Mubarak's policy secretariat, infamous policy secretariat, all the people around him are from the old regime.
So, I mean, again, like you said at the beginning of the show, it was definitely a counterrevolution.
All right, thanks.
That's Adam Morrow, everybody.
Thanks, Adam.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here for LibertyStickers.com.
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