All right, y'all, welcome to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Horton, and we got another jam-packed show full of interviews for y'all today.
Maybe I'll get to have my own say in the last half hour.
Maybe we'll have some guests then, too.
Still working on a couple of them.
But we're going to get started right now with Jason Ditz, news editor at Antiwar.com.
That's news.antiwar.com, where Jason keeps track of every important news story on Earth for you all day, every day, including what is the top headline right now and the most important story in a long, long time, it seems to me.
Welcome to the show, Jason.
All right.
Okay, there you are.
Hey, all right, so tell us about this most important story.
Okay, well, the reports right now are that, at least according to Leon Panetta, Aljazeera Barak is supposed to step down tonight.
Leon Panetta, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Right.
And yeah, all the TV is saying so, and I'm looking at the live feed from Al Jazeera English right now.
There's got to be tens of thousands of people, if not more than that, out in the streets.
Of course, it's nighttime in Cairo, but Tahir Square, they have the makeshift camp in the center with their hospitals and that kind of thing, and the crowds are just humongous.
So it looks like they're celebrating at least a partial victory there right now.
Well, and if it happens, it certainly would be good news for them.
Revolution is the headline there at Al Jazeera.
CNN or which was it I was watching, CNBC or something claimed to have two sources claiming this.
So I guess he hasn't given the big speech yet, but it sounds like he's going to be stepping down three weeks of peaceful protests and they got rid of their dictator.
It worked.
It's incredible.
I mean, and all the rhetoric and all the threats against the protesters has been picking up over the last couple of days.
I mean, Vice President Suleiman threatening that, you know, we can never allow these public protests to continue and the bats of the night are going to come out and get everybody and everything.
But it seems like that was just sort of the last gasp attempt to try to stop them.
And the protest is won.
Well, now, some of the protest factions have been attempting to negotiate with the government.
Do you think that really did much to weaken the position of those led, I guess, somewhat by Mohammed ElBaradei, who are saying, you know, they will not compromise?
No, I don't think so.
I think meeting with the government and saying clearly these are our demands wasn't necessarily that bad of a move.
Of course, it didn't accomplish anything.
And pretty quickly, the report started coming out that Suleiman, who was the head of the government side of the negotiations, wouldn't even talk about most of the key issues.
The only issue that he really seemed to want to discuss at all was the emergency law.
And that was, he promised to remove it at some unspecified future date when the circumstances permit, which one would assume was the government's position all along, even though it had been going on for 30 years.
Right.
That's a pretty big emergency following the Americans path on that one, I guess.
All right.
Now.
So what about this, though?
It seems to me like they're not going to be any better off and they're not going to believe that they're going to be any better off with the torturer Suleiman in power instead of Mubarak.
So, you know, do you think that they'll be mollified by that, that they'll go home or they're going to continue to insist on further resignations?
Well, that remains to be seen.
If what happens is Suleiman just sort of takes over the top spot and the situation keeps running as it is, that would be a very bad thing.
And I'm sure most protesters would be pretty riled up about that.
But if there are some guarantees, and it seems like the military is getting involved, that they're going to ensure that these reforms actually come to play.
It might be enough.
What's this headline that Suleiman told Israel he would cleanse the Sinai Peninsula of Palestinians?
Oh, he was.
The Israeli government was complaining to him about smugglers getting goods into the Gaza Strip, Palestinian smugglers.
And he promised that he would go in and just completely cleanse it of all Palestinians so they wouldn't have to worry about smuggling anymore.
Oh, I see.
That was, it was an old story based on a WikiLeaks cable.
Yeah, well, you know, there was another WikiLeaks cable that had the Israelis.
It was funny because the story originally, or, you know, out of context, it sounded good.
The Israelis get along really well with this guy, and they have a hotline right to him and that kind of thing.
You know, shades of the hotline between the Kremlin and the White House, right, to try to prevent war from breaking out, that sort of thing.
And yet, this is all just apparently so they can coordinate torture, big and little, against, you know, individuals as well as the people of the Gaza Strip.
And so, you know, this hotline between the two really is his puppet string from Tel Aviv, seems like.
Right, and right now in Egypt, anyone that's got close ties to either Israel or the U.S. government is probably being greeted with a lot of suspicion.
And they're probably not having those close ties for some sort of peaceful intent, so much as for cracking down on domestic dissent.
Well, there you go.
For those just tuning in, all the sources are saying, anyway, I don't know if it's a sure thing yet, but the sources all across, everybody looks like they're celebrating in Tahrir Square in Cairo right now on the Al Jazeera feed, and Hosni Mubarak, the 30-year puppet torture dictator of the United States and Israel, is being forced to step down.
And now, you know, one thing that you've written about over the past week or two, Jason, is how in the constitution of Egypt, it's not the vice president, it's the speaker of the parliament or something who's next in line for succession.
It's the vice president only in case of temporary incapacitation or something like that.
But I guess, does that matter in this?
It's definitely going to be Omar Suleiman now, huh?
Yeah, this seems to be a special case, where I don't think what the Egyptian constitution says necessarily matters all that much, because most of it's going to be rewritten anyhow.
This is more the toppling of a regime and propping up a temporary interim government, mostly for the benefit of the U.S. and others that want to see this as some sort of orderly transition, as though that was even possible.
Well, Al Jazeera is saying that the ruling NDP and the military are saying that they have stepped in and they are going to accede to the protesters' demands.
Mubarak is to, quote, step aside, they say.
But now, what are the rest of these demands in terms of elections, the emergency law you mentioned before?
I'm not sure entirely what all their demands are, but certainly lifting the emergency law, getting rid of some of the more onerous business regulations, it's next to impossible for people who don't have contacts with the government to open a new business or anything.
So I think that was certainly one of the things that started the protest, whether that's become an official demand or not, I don't know.
I'm looking again at the Al Jazeera English live stream, that's english.aljazeera.net/watch underscore now, and people sure look excited in Tahrir Square right now, I'll tell you that, Jason.
I wonder, though, what you've heard of the revolution in Tunisia, a couple countries over from there, on the other side of Libya, from Egypt there, this is the revolution that started it all, and of course the news of Egypt quickly eclipsed the news of Tunisia, but I wonder how things are going for those people there, and did they get what they want in overthrowing their government, other than Ben Ali, who of course was forced to flee with the entire gold reserve of the country a few weeks back?
Well, unfortunately, Tunisia might stand as an example of one of these revolutions not working going forward.
They're still, they're sort of in the position that one might imagine Egypt will be in tomorrow, which is, they got rid of Ben Ali, they've got a new president, Fouad Mabaza, and the Tunisian Senate is looking to drastically increase his power now, because of the emergency of the protests.
So he can crack down on the protesters, and they're telling the protesters that they're going to have to be patient about any reforms that they actually want, and it sort of remains to be seen if those reforms will ever get done.
Yeah, that's really too bad, you know, I try to, I'm thinking of like the other color-coded revolutions we've seen over the years, especially of course the CIA puppet-type ones, but like I guess you look at Ukraine, it really matters who the president is, whereas in these Middle Eastern countries, it only matters who's running the military, and if you get rid of the top guys, that doesn't change.
Right, and Tunisia certainly looks like it's, it certainly looks like that's their goal right now, is to keep the Ben Ali regime as intact as possible, without Ben Ali himself.
And there have been some talks of, you know, legalizing all the banned political opposition parties and things like that, but they haven't really gone forward with them in any sort of urgent way, and it seems like their more urgent interest is in chasing the protesters off the streets.
Yeah, well, and I think you told me that in Tunisia, the biggest labor union, after the president left, they called off their participation in the protests, and apparently that dealt a pretty significant blow to the movement, huh?
Right, and exactly why they did that isn't clear.
At first it sounded like they were given some guarantees about the reforms, but now it's starting to look like that may not have been the case, and they might have made some sort of back-office deal with the regime.
Well, you know, despite all my pessimism, I'm trying to just live in the moment on this for right now, looking at these pictures coming in from Tahrir Square in Cairo, and the uncounted thousands of people waving their flags and cheering and celebrating their victory, and this is exactly what a revolution should look like, is, you know, just basically general strike, you know, we're not quitting, we demand you leave.
Apparently they didn't just grab a weapon and go to war, they've used a little bit of violence and self-defense from the secret police there, but pretty much this is, you know, Martin Luther King's speech on the mall kind of event up there, you know, a Gandhi-esque kind of overthrow of at least part of the state, and it really is something to see, you know?
Right, and the number of protesters and how well-organized they've been is so overwhelming that they can certainly stick it out and make sure that their demands are met, unlike the ones in Tunisia, which sort of petered out after Ben Ali was gone.
So there is some hope that Egypt won't turn out the same way, but it certainly seems like that's where the Suleiman and everyone are taking it right now.
Now, what's the story with this Google executive that everybody's making such a big deal about?
Well, he's sort of an interesting story.
He apparently was one of the people that put up the Facebook page that got the initial protest started before the Muslim Brotherhood took over on Friday and got involved, and before everything really started swelling out of control, and he just sort of went missing off the streets of Cairo during one of the first days of the protest.
He re-emerged and had apparently just been in military custody for almost two weeks without charges, and they finally just let him go, and now he's back out there telling them, you know, well, I was held blindfolded in solitary confinement for almost two weeks, and now that he's out, he's helping to organize the protests again.
Now, I'm pretty sure everybody remembers back in 2009, during the attempted revolution in Iran, the shooting of this woman, Netta, became this kind of unifying thing among the protesters.
It was commonly believed, and I guess nobody ever proved otherwise, that she was killed by the secret police, and she kind of became a symbol, at least in the international media.
I don't know, I wasn't in Iran at the time, but no, I guess Reese Ehrlich said it became a real big deal for the people, and he was in Iran during that, at least the beginning of that attempted revolution, and I was reading a piece just the other day that there was a story like that here in Egypt, too, where this young man was, I don't know if he was tortured to death or beaten to death by the police on the street or something like that at the beginning of this protest, and this didn't get a whole lot of play in the western media, but apparently this was a real galvanizing thing, the death of this young man at the hands of the Egyptian state just here in the last couple of weeks.
Well, I hadn't heard of that, but it certainly is possible.
It seems like the average person involved in the protest getting just brutally slain on the streets is always something that the protesters can relate to, because of course most of them are just average people on the streets.
Yeah, well, and in the case of Egypt, most of them, if it's not themselves personally, they've had a brother or a cousin or an uncle or somebody who's been tortured by the secret police there, so everybody's got their own at least somewhat personal story to tell about that level of oppression, too.
Oh, absolutely.
Torture's been a routine part of Egyptian life for 30 years now.
Yeah, well, and of course the Human Rights Watch has a brand new report all about that, work on him until he confesses, it's called.
And, you know, this is something that I always learned about the Iranian revolution, was that everybody had at least a relative who'd been tortured by the Saavik, and guess what?
People eventually start to really resent that kind of thing, and of course that's the same thing we have in Egypt.
Right, they don't seem to realize that sooner or later it's going to come back and get them.
Yeah, well, I don't know if they ever will realize it, but thanks very much for your time, as always, Jason, I really appreciate it.
Sure, thanks for having me.
Everybody, that's Jason Ditz, news.antiwar.com.
We're covering the revolution in Egypt.
Hosni Mubarak's about to make a speech.
He's being driven from power, successfully, apparently.
