07/09/13 – Adam Morrow – The Scott Horton Show

Hey all, Scott Worden here for the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Are you sick of the neocons in the Israel lobby pretending as though they've earned some kind of monopoly on foreign policy wisdom in Washington, D.C.?
These peanut clowns who've never been right about anything?
Well, the Council for the National Interest is pushing back, putting America first, and telling the lobby to go take a hike.
The empire's bad enough without the neocons making it all about the interests of a foreign state.
Help CNI promote peace.
Visit their site at councilforthenationalinterest.org and click Donate under About Us at the top of the page.
That's councilforthenationalinterest.org.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show here.
I'm your host, Scott Worden.
This is the Scott Worden Show.
I'm at scottworden.org.
Keep all my interview archives there, more than 2,800 of them.
Scott, why are you yelling?
I'm listening to a lot of music.
2,800 of them now going back to 2003 there at scottworden.org.
Also, you can follow me on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube at scottwordenshow.
All right, next up, it's our friend Adam Morrow.
He's on the line from Cairo, Egypt.
He writes for InterPress Service.
His co-author is, and I'm sorry that this always goes without saying, tell him I said sorry, Khaled Moussa al-Amrani.
His co-author at InterPress Service, ipsnews.net.
You can also read him from time to time at the Asia Times.
That's atimes.com.
So, what's new in Cairo these days, Adam?
Yeah, okay.
Early, yeah, in the early hours of Monday morning, yesterday morning, apparently 51 pro-Morsi protesters were killed in clashes with the military.
Now, because the situation is so weird here and the media is so incredibly politicized, it's incredibly difficult to find out what's going on.
I mean, media has been a big part of everything that's happened in Egypt over the course of the last couple of years.
That's something that should be borne in mind is the role that the media, especially social media, played in the 2011 revolution and everything that's happened since, including the recent 30 June protests and everything that's happened in the last couple of weeks and even days.
So, you have these conflicting reports of what exactly happened.
You know, you have, ever since President Morsi's ouster by the military last week, you've had tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of pro-Morsi protesters demanding his reinstatement, most of whom have gathered in the Rabaa al-Adawiyah Mosque, which is in Cairo's Nasser City District.
But you also have a lot that were camped out by the Presidential Guard Headquarters, which is also in the Nasser City District.
And these protesters believe that the president is actually being held inside the Presidential Guard Headquarters.
So, they're out there demanding his release.
And at some point early yesterday morning, something happened.
The military is basically saying they were attacked by armed groups, and the protesters are saying that the military just started to open fire on them, killing 51 of them.
Now, one officer was killed in the melee, and a lot of them were injured.
So, the military was also being subject to some kind of fire.
Now, what's interesting about this is there are also these reports from different sides and different witnesses describing a third party that might have been firing from adjacent rooftops and that sort of thing, that might have been firing at both sides, which is extremely disturbing.
And it's something that we've seen in the past.
We've seen hints of in the past, in past post-revolution conflicts and street battles.
We've seen this third element that would sort of show up.
And it almost appears as if they're trying to instigate clashes between two different sides by firing down on both sides.
But again, all of this is impossible to confirm, just because, again, it's very difficult to know what media outlets to trust, because basically all of the Islamist stations have been shut down.
They were all shut down immediately after Morsi's ouster.
And so, all you've got is media here that's, for the most part, allied with the military, is pro-military.
Are you there, Scott?
I'm here.
I'm listening closely.
Yeah.
Oh, good.
Okay.
Now, just as a sort of indication of this, I can just tell you what happened yesterday when the military read out, held a press conference and gave its side of the story.
Gazeta, which has been Qatar-based Gazeta, which has basically been the only station in Egypt that's consistently been showing the pro-Morsi side.
All the other stations are ignoring the pro-Morsi protests and that sort of thing.
The only station that's been sort of giving the Islamist side in all of this, it has been al-Jazeera.
And at the army press conference yesterday, where they gave their side of the story, all of the other journalists actually ejected the Gazeta representative from the room.
It wasn't the authorities, but other journalists actually insisted on forcing the al-Jazeera staff out of the press conference.
And then after the military announcement was read out, they all clapped in unison.
And this can be seen on video.
So, I mean, this is what we're talking about.
The vast bulk of the media at this point is very pro-military.
So it's very hard to get a reliable account of the other side of the story.
Is it right that Qatar, I guess, because al-Jazeera, that's the government of Qatar.
They're state-run TV, right?
So is that basically as simple as Qatar supports the Muslim Brotherhood and the Saudis oppose them?
And so America's with the Saudis in a way?
Sure.
You can definitely see that as a sort of general dichotomy that's being played out.
Qatar has traditionally supported the Muslim Brotherhood.
They were very close with them.
They supported them during their one year in power, when Morsi was in power.
Whereas most other Gulf states, specifically Saudi and the Emirates, have just been highly, highly critical of the Muslim Brotherhood, to the extent that the Emirates says that it's actually arrested Muslim Brotherhood sleeper cells that were in the Emirates, but were there trying to overthrow the government there.
I can't confirm that, whether that's true or not, whether these guys were actually Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood people over there.
The Emirati authorities have actually arrested guys that they claim were of the Brotherhood over there.
And Abu Dhabi, which is in the Emirates, has also played host to Ahmed Shafit for the last year.
And Ahmed Shafit was Hosni Mubarak's last prime minister, who basically ran against Morsi in elections one year ago, and narrowly lost to Morsi, if you remember that.
We talked about that a couple times.
And he's been hosted by Abu Dhabi for the last year.
So my prediction is basically that he will eventually come back as this sort of, you know, he's been waiting in the wings, allowing Egypt to watch Egypt from abroad just sort of fall into turmoil.
He'll be brought back.
He'll receive an enormous crowd to welcome him.
Millions of people are going to welcome him at the airport as this sort of returning hero who's coming back to restore security, to restore the economy, and to sort of bring things back to the way they were.
That's what my fears are in the event that fresh presidential elections are held.
And they're being planned now.
I mean, they're talking about fresh presidential elections in another six months.
While the Islamists here are all saying that this is not a second revolution, that the June 30th, you know, the huge June 30th demonstration thing, they're saying that that's not a second revolution, as a lot of the liberals here are saying.
They're calling it a straight-up counterrevolution, saying that this is actually the old regime coming back in disguise.
And there's a lot of things to suggest that they may be on to something in that regard, especially the fact that all the Islamists were cracked down upon and arrested as soon as Morsi was ousted.
Right.
Well, and what disguise, right?
I thought it's pretty openly the regime coming back, or I guess the disguise would be the small factions of labor unionists and socialists and stuff, or what?
El-Baradei supporters?
Well, basically, I think the whole Baradei thing and all of this thing, and first of all, you've got fresh problems, because the only Islamist party to stay within this opposition coalition that's now sort of running things is the Salafist Nour Party, which is extremely ultra-conservative.
It's the one Islamist party that sort of sold Morsi out and sort of joined the opposition and all of this thing, along with the military.
But now they've quit over the massacre, right?
They quit over the massacre, that's correct.
But even before they quit, if you remember, all of these liberal figures were being touted for the premiership and for vice president and all that sort of thing, and they were vetoing all of those guys, because all of a sudden the Nour Party has found itself in bed with the hardcore liberal opposition and the army.
So now they're in a situation where all of these liberal appointments are being made, and in order to maintain their Islamist credibility, they had to veto them.
So splits are already appearing in this new coalition, this new weird interim coalition, which in my opinion is just basically the Mubarak regime and the military given this sort of friendly liberal face with Baradai slapped on top of it.
Well, and the last thing I saw, it's funny, the El Baradai thing.
As we've talked about before, I still have a soft spot for him after he debunked lies about Iran's nuclear program in such heroic ways for a decade, and really lies about Iraq's nuclear program before that.
And yet, anyway, it's been fun to watch how obviously hardly anyone in Egypt supports him, but he's the choice of the Europeans or the Americans or somebody to run things.
Exactly.
And they named him to be prime minister, and then they had to take that back over the objections of the Islamists, I guess, and then he was going to be the vice president.
And then now the last thing I saw anyway said, well, we're going to make him deputy foreign minister.
So send him to New York and just get him the hell out of here, I think.
Right, right, right.
And like you said, let's not forget that this is a guy who, despite his very high international profile, really doesn't show that much acceptance on the Egyptian street, except in very liberal circles, which is the minority.
I would say most Egyptians don't really see him as a representative of the Egyptian people, mainly because he's been more of an international player for so long and is more associated with international organizations and not so much Egypt.
Now, am I right, though, that that's what's going on there where they're kicking him upstairs and go represent us at the U.N. or something, and they're really marginalizing him?
Well, I don't know.
How about I ask you this instead?
This is at least a sensical question.
Eric Margulies was on the show yesterday, and he said that this should mostly be seen as a U.S. military job because the Egyptian military really is just absolutely joined at the hip like Siamese twins with the U.S. military.
That's all it is.
So I even said, well, so what is this, a CIA job?
And he goes, no, no, no, like I said, it's the Pentagon.
And the CIA, they're just, you know, playing auxiliary and helping.
Right, well, it's funny.
That wasn't a question, actually.
I promised a question there, and I didn't give you a question.
Well, what do you think of that, Adam?
Sure, sure.
Well, I mean, the whole U.S. connection is interesting because basically you have both sides of the dispute here basically accusing the other one of being supported by the U.S.
You know, the Islamists will say this is a return of the regime, and this definitely has the U.S. behind it.
It certainly has the Gulf states behind it, and as we all know, the Gulf states are puppets of the United States.
So it would be very hard for this thing to go down, and like your guest said earlier, it's very unlikely that the Egyptian military would take such a step without a U.S. green light.
Now, at the same time, you have these anti-Morsi protesters who are claiming that the Brotherhood is actually some kind of, you know, creation of the United States that's there to impose some kind of U.S.
-approved brand of Islam or something like that.
And that sort of dovetails with events in Syria as well, where you've got the U.S. kind of siding with these Salafist insurgents in Syria against the Assad regime.
So, I mean, they do have certain points that they can look to to sort of justify their assertions.
Like, if you remember, we talked about maybe two months ago, Morsi made a huge misstep by basically – I mean, he had been forced deeper into his Salafist right-wing camp because he was getting nowhere with the liberals and the leftists.
So in a thot to the Salafists, basically, he severed relations with Damascus.
And that – a lot of people say that that might have been one of the things that had, you know, ultimately alienated the military and made them decide to sort of step in.
And, again, it can also open up accusations against the Muslim Brotherhood that it is somehow in bed with the United States, because, you know, the United States had only just shortly before announced its own commitment to start beefing up support for the rebels in Syria.
So this U.S. connection thing is kind of a hot potato.
But from what I can tell, from what I can tell, I definitely see the big push that got – the military push that got Morsi out.
I definitely – I don't think it possibly could have happened without the U.S. consent.
Yeah.
Isn't – I don't know, man.
For anybody who's new at foreign policy listening to this, that's got to be kind of confusing.
Wait a minute.
So the democratically elected – I've been following foreign policy for years, and I've never been more confused.
Quite frankly, the way – with all of these weird shifting alliances, it's getting increasingly sort of difficult to tell the good guys from the bad guys or who's playing who.
And, again, like I said earlier, the role that the media has played in all of this cannot be understated, where you've got – you know, you've got your crazy Zionist American media seeming to back – like, for example, CNN has come under massive attack by the anti-Morsi people.
They're infuriated by CNN, which has been – with the coverage of which has been relatively sympathetic to the Islamists, has been surprisingly sympathetic to the Islamists.
Right.
So it's – everything's sort of upside down, and it's just – you know, everybody's just trying to put two and two together, and it's all extremely confusing.
And meanwhile, you've got these continued bouts of violence that are – you know, you've got – nobody knows what's happening in the Sinai Peninsula.
There have been multiple attacks on police and military, you know, assets in the Sinai Peninsula.
Again, even these things, though, are difficult to confirm.
You know, there are reports of these things.
So – but we really don't know.
We really don't know what's going on in Sinai right now.
And, you know, this opens up another longstanding worry vis-à-vis Sinai that, you know, if things get totally out of control in Sinai, Israel will then be furnished with an excuse to reoccupy the peninsula, which has always been a longstanding fear of Egypt.
Well, I think there's Americans involved in the peace mission there, the international occupation of Sinai right now, supposedly to prevent that.
Oh, yeah.
So there's something that could blow up and get crazy.
Yeah.
Now, as far as CNN goes, their slant toward the Islamists simply means they're interviewing Muslim Brotherhood guys from time to time.
But their narrative – and I've been watching CNN International.
That's the one that I watch.
Their narrative has been very much the American narrative that this is the true revolution, being safeguarded by the army and that kind of thing.
But they do interview Muslim Brotherhood guys from time to time.
That's what makes it beyond the page.
That would make more sense.
Yeah.
That would definitely make more sense to me.
And also I think there is a difference.
I'm not an expert on American media because I don't watch that much of it.
But I do get the impression that there is a gap between coverage on CNN International and the CNN that Americans watch.
Correct me if I'm wrong.
No, they're just watching the trial of the security guard that killed the black kid.
Right, the Zimmerman thing.
Right, right, right.
I wasn't sure if you'd even heard of it.
Poor guy.
The guy moves to Cairo.
He still can't get away from this Tanya Harding gossip nonsense as top headlines.
It's amazing to me.
Right.
But anyway.
Right, right, right.
So now, geez, I had a great question I was going to ask you about.
Well, I don't know.
So what do you think comes next then?
Well, what I fear is going to happen.
I'll just sort of, you know, this is speculation.
What I fear, though, is we're sort of in fertile territory right now.
This is very fertile ground right now because we don't – because the media is so politicized and we don't really know.
We can't – it's very difficult to get accurate information.
And remember, Egypt is a very big country.
There's a massive – you know, Upper Egypt is this massive, massive southern region about which we – in Cairo it's kind of difficult to know exactly what's going on unless you have lots of correspondence on the ground, being able to report firsthand, which isn't really the case right now.
And also the Sinai Peninsula, it's very difficult to tell what's going on right now.
So what I kind of fear is that you might see atrocities being committed either in Upper Egypt or elsewhere in sort of these remote areas.
You might have these atrocities being committed that are going to be blamed on Islamists.
And that might be atrocities just against, you know, normal sort of civilians, as you saw in Algeria in the early 90s and mid-90s.
Or you might see atrocities against Christians, which would be a total nightmare.
And then, you know, the military would very quickly blame this on Islamist groups and seize this as a justification to completely crush the Islamists, with the backing of much of the public, by the way.
And meanwhile, and we'll never know whether the Islamists actually had a hand in these said atrocities.
You know, this is the sort of scary juncture that we're at right now.
It would be very easy for intelligence outfits, for example, to go somewhere and to kill 20 Christians somewhere in Upper Egypt.
And everybody would just assume because of the incredibly, you know, because of the fevered polarization right now, it would be very, you know, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine at all that everyone would immediately just assume that this atrocity had been committed by the Gemma Islamia, for example, which is one of the allies of the Muslim Brotherhood now.
Or some other radical, you know, some other radical Islamist group.
And then it would just be, and then the military at that point would just have carte blanche to just destroy all of these movements of terrorists.
Yeah, well, you know, I think you win more flies with honey if you're trying to get them that way.
Because all they seem to do is just prove that if you really want to accomplish your goals, you're pretty much left with suicide bombing.
It's your only tactic that, you know, running for office sure as hell isn't going to get you anywhere.
Sure, sure.
I mean, look, they've been pushed into a corner.
They feel very much under siege.
And if you think about it, I mean, you do have five electoral processes that have taken place in Egypt since the 2011 revolution, all of which were, you know, which were deemed to be fair.
Some of them had minor problems associated with them.
The last constitutional referendum, there were definitely some issues.
But in general, in general, you have had five electoral processes that were, you know, which were for the most part rendered free, you know, declared free and fair.
And the Islamists won all of them.
And now you see them, and now you see all of those electoral victories being taken away in one fell swoop.
You know, you have the constitution that was passed by 64% of the public has been completely suspended.
You have the Shura Council, which was the legislative body, the upper house of parliament that had been endowed with temporary legislative powers.
That was Islamist-run.
It was 75% or more Islamist.
And that's been dissolved.
You had the parliament that was 75% Islamist that was dissolved in 2012 by military decree.
And now you have the presidency who won in fair elections by a slight margin, but, you know, nevertheless won.
And now the president, you know, that presidency has now been taken away by them.
And they view this all as being very unfair.
And, you know, it's understandable that they would see it that way.
So they're going to think they no longer have any record.
There's no reason to, you know, to enter into any kind of democratic process because it's failed them, because it's fixed.
It's fundamentally rigged.
So I don't really see why they would bother even trying in any sort of upcoming, you know, electoral process.
Right.
And then, as Eric Margulies was saying on the show yesterday, same thing in Algeria in 93.
Same thing in Gaza in 2005 and 6.
And same thing every time anybody has a fair election in the Middle East.
They always elect people that the Americans don't want to win.
So back to dictatorship you go.
And by the way, I meant to mention this when we're still talking about the American role here, and that was the piece in the New York Times.
Muslim Brotherhood said U.S. diplomats urged it to accept overthrow.
And just a little bit more about the American role in there.
It's not actually that blatant.
But, of course, to the Muslim Brotherhood, all of their quotes are, yes, see, the Americans made us do it.
In fact, before, I don't have it in front of me, but it was on the blog at antiwar.com.
They had a thing about how he said, you know what, I don't care what the military says about their 48 hours.
It's up to the Americans to decide whether I stay or go.
That was basically, you know, right there in his, you know, over my dead body speech or whatever.
He said it's really up to the Americans.
Everybody knows that.
And then apparently they told him, yeah, beat it.
So he finally did.
Okay, is that all coming from the New York Times?
Is that all according to the New York Times?
Let's see.
The second one, or the first thing I mentioned there was from the New York Times.
And then the one about how it's up to the Americans in the first place is actually, I'm going to have to page down to get to it, Adam.
See, I'm sitting here talking about things while I ain't ready.
I'm almost there, though.
It's at antiwar.com/blog for anybody playing along.
There you go.
Morsi aid.
Egyptian army can't oust president without, quote, American approval.
And he's saying it in defiance.
It's a Guardian piece.
He's saying it in defiance, that you can't do that unless the Americans say it's okay.
Wow.
Wow.
Okay.
And then so here, let me tell you the title of that article, everybody, is Egypt's Presidency Defies Threat of Military Coup.
That's from the 1st of July.
Okay.
Was that an exclusive comment that only the Guardian carried?
Because, I mean, it's, again, it's...
Possibly.
Very hard to separate fact from fiction with mainstream media, as you know.
Yeah, no, you're absolutely right.
You're absolutely right.
I don't know.
I haven't had a chance to Google and compare it.
Right.
He could very well have said it, but then again, I mean...
He says, it's, obviously, we feel this is a military coup, a presidential aid said, unnamed presidential aid said, but the conviction within the presidency is that the coup won't be able to move forward without American approval.
Okay, listen.
Well, first of all, I would...
I have a serious problem with these anonymous sources because we've seen so much of that in Egypt over the last year.
It's been...
There have been so many things that have come out according to these unnamed sources who insist on anonymity, these unnamed security sources or unnamed judicial sources or unnamed presidential sources.
And quite frankly, if I don't have a name, I'm going to just assume, you know, until I have a name of somebody who's willing to go on record with something.
And there, the guy has presidential advisors.
We know the names of his presidential advisors.
Why wouldn't this guy have a name so we could double check what he said?
Do you know what I mean?
Right.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I would be very leery of any quotes at this point because things are so charged and politically driven.
I would be very, very wary of taking something at face value unless you had, unless it was attributed to a specific person who could in turn be, you know, who could in turn be challenged on it and asked with whom it could be confirmed, you know?
You know, the other story, the New York Times story is based on anonymous sources as well.
U.S. diplomats contacted Brotherhood leaders to persuade them.
Right, right.
They're asking us to legitimize it.
It's very dodgy.
This stuff is very dodgy.
Again, it could be true.
Again, I'm not dismissing it.
Well, you know, there's a story that the Islamists were throwing little kids off a tower or something like that.
And then later on there was at least a couple of stories saying that it appeared staged and not what it seems and whatever.
I don't know the final way of saying that.
Oh, there's tons of that stuff, Scott, especially on the social media.
The Egyptian social media is abuzz with this kind of propaganda and counter-propaganda.
There was talk that, you know, like supposedly the Islamists had posted pictures of children that had been killed yesterday morning in the violence yesterday morning.
And then it later turned out that these children were from the Syrian conflict.
And, you know, you don't know whether this was actually, you know, an underhanded attempt by the Islamists to fool people or whether it was the Islamist opponents who put up the picture in order to later discredit what they say.
You know, this is just – and this is, by the way, this isn't something we've been seeing vis-à-vis the Syria conflict for at least a year now where you would have pictures showing things, supposed horrific stuff happening in Syria.
Right, many hostages.
And this, by the way – Many hostages.
I'm sorry, we're out of time, Adam.
We've got to go.
We've got to go.
Thank you so much.
Good talking to you, Scott.
Good talking to you.
We'll talk again soon.
And, yeah, again soon, very soon.
That's Adam Morrow from Cairo, Egypt there.
Interpress Services, IPSnews.net.
And we're all out of time.
See you all tomorrow, 11 and 1, Texas time here on No Agenda Radio.
Hey, Al Scott Horton here for WallStreetWindow.com.
Mike Swanson is a successful former hedge fund manager whose site is unique on the web.
Subscribers are allowed a window into Mike's very real main account and receive announcements and explanations for all his market moves.
The Federal Reserve has been inflating the money supply to finance the bank bailouts and terror war overseas.
So Mike's betting on commodities, mining stocks, European markets, and other hedges against a depreciating dollar.
Play along on paper or with real money and be your own judge of Mike's investment strategies.
See what happens at WallStreetWindow.com.
Hey, you own a business?
Maybe we should consider advertising on the show.
See if we can make a little bit of money.
My email address is scott at scott horton dot org.
And they're only just getting started.
So check out listenandthink.com.
You may be able to get your first audio book absolutely free.
That's Listen and Think Audio at listenandthink.com.
Oh, man, I'm late.
Sure hope I can make my flight.
Stand there.
Me?
I am standing here.
Come here.
Okay.
Hands up.
Turn around.
Whoa, easy.
Into the scanner.
Ooh, what's this in your pants?
Hey, slow down.
It's just my...
Hold it right there.
Your wallet has tripped the metal detector.
What's this?
The Bill of Rights?
That's right.
It's just a harmless stainless steel business card-sized copy of the Bill of Rights from securityedition.com.
There for exposing the TSA as a bunch of liberty-destroying goons who've never protected anyone from anything.
Sir, now give me back my wallet and get out of my way.
Got a plane to catch.
Have a nice day.
Play a leading role in the security theater with the Bill of Rights Security Edition from securityedition.com.
It's the size of a business card, so it fits right in your wallet and it's guaranteed to trip the metal detectors wherever the police state goes.
That's securityedition.com.
And don't forget their great Fourth Amendment socks.
Hey, guys, I got his laptop.
Hey, all.
Scott here, hawking stickers for the back of your truck.
They've got some great ones at libertystickers.com.
Get your son killed, Jeb Bush 2016.
FDR, no longer the worst president in American history.
The National Security Agency, blackmailing your congressman since 1952.
And USA, sometimes we back Al-Qaeda, sometimes we don't.
And there's over a thousand other great ones on the wars, police state, elections, the Federal Reserve, and more at libertystickers.com.
They'll take care of all your custom printing for your bandier business at thebumpersticker.com.
Libertystickers.com.
Everyone else's stickers suck.
Libertystickers.com.