Alright, y'all, we're back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Our first guest on the show today is Stephen Webster, editor over at RossStory.com.
Welcome back to the show.
Stephen, how are you doing?
I'm doing great, Scott.
How's it going?
It's going really good.
I appreciate you joining us this morning.
I wish I was in Austin, too, but I'm not.
I'll tell you, though, it's kind of nice just dialing the 512 area code, though.
It makes me homesick.
It's about 21 degrees here, so I'd say it's about right.
My mom says it's supposed to snow today.
Yeah, although you're out there on the west coast, I hear it's kind of nice.
Yeah, it's beautiful outside.
I'd rather be in Austin, where it's going to snow.
It never snows in Austin.
Then it does snow in Austin, and I'm far away.
What the hell?
Thousands.
Yeah, well, it's nice to have some form of winter, anyway.
Yeah, well, it rains here sometimes.
I don't know.
Occasionally.
All right, well, so let's talk about all the bad news.
I read this right, that the protests have lost strength massively, and that once the thugs rode in, the secret police, so-called pro-government protesters, yesterday, that this Egyptian revolution seems to have been short-circuited.
Yeah, that is correct, but there's still a hardcore of protesters who are holding that square in Cairo.
They're still there.
They've managed to kick a lot of the pro-government protesters out of the square in a rather surprising show of force last night, and they're still holding that big public area.
It depends upon how ironed the will of their people are.
If they can stay there, they might be able to swell up the crowds again.
They might attract even more people there.
Well, it seems like the real difference was the military.
Some general went on TV and said, all right, everybody, major point, go home.
We're not here to be your friends anymore like we were the day before yesterday, and that was really what people went, oh, if the army's not going to stand between us and the cops, then forget it.
Right, well, and the army has been intervening between the pro- and anti-government protesters.
They have.
A lot of these pro-Mubarak mobs, though, have been targeting journalists.
Rawstory.com was reporting on that earlier this morning, but yeah, the army may have been on the side of the regime all along is the point to be taken away here.
Yeah, well, you know, that's interesting because there was a thing in the New York Times, I guess, late last week that said, oh, Mubarak's strategy is the same as always.
People want to protest, fine, let them protest until they get tired and go home, and then at the end he'll still be the dictator.
That's how he's always done it, basically.
That's right.
So that would make sense with what you just said about, you know, the military was never really going to let this happen.
Yeah, yeah, and I'm sure he'll want to have some sort of successor.
This is definitely the end of his career coming up here soon, and I guess it's just a question of whether he can actually outlast his citizens until the end of his term or whether they're actually just going to come and throw his ass out.
Well, but so for right now, you're saying that Tahir Square, which is this important public space in Cairo, in downtown Cairo, that the anti-Mubarak forces last night won a battle and forced the, I won't even call them pro-government forces, pro-government protesters, it's the secret police thugs, obviously trying to keep their jobs, but you're saying they were run out of the place or what?
Yeah, by and large, that's what I'm reading this morning.
I mean, I got the Al Jazeera live stream here, but with the volume down, and it sure seems like the population there is pretty sparse.
Yeah, well, I mean, obviously, with all the violence yesterday, I mean, people were throwing firebombs.
It got pretty intense.
It really did.
There was a lot of instances of gunfire.
You could hear explosions in the audio from Al Jazeera's broadcast.
It got pretty intense.
So yeah, obviously, a lot of people will have left, but there's still, you know, those people who are totally, totally committed, and they're just going to stay there.
All right.
Now, what's the story at rawstory.com here?
Oh, it's a link to a Politico piece.
Hosni Mubarak splits Israel from neocon supporters.
Oh, yeah.
Well, there's been a lot of division on the conservative side as to how Obama is handling the situation.
From what I understand, he was spearheading a diplomatic effort to convince Egypt's military not to use violence against the protesters, and he was also behind an effort to convince Mubarak that it is time he transitioned out of power.
It is time he needs to step aside.
You know, they need to have a proper democracy, all that.
That's really, really upset Israel, and neocons are, yeah, largely split on this issue.
Some say it's good to be on the side of public opinion, but others believe that we had more of an interest in keeping this dictator in power, which, you know, the U.S. has supported dictators across the Middle East and South America and other places around the world for years.
Now, it's been, you know, pretty clear that the news coming out of Israel is that they're extremely worried about what the people of Egypt might have their government do, were they to hold elections that actually, you know, influence the government's positions on these things, but are they complaining out loud about their own neocon buddies here in the United States refusing to toe the line?
I don't think so.
I just believe there's a division of opinion, although I haven't actually read that political piece.
Yeah, I'm looking through it now, and it doesn't, I don't see any, like, quotes here necessarily, but I, it was apparent from the very beginning that, I think, Justin Raimondo quoted Daniel Pletka over at, Danielle Pletka over at the antiwar.com blog, saying, you know, oh my god, me and her on the same page, saying cut off all aid to Mubarak.
Maybe, maybe, you know, it's just PR.
Maybe some of these neocons actually believe in this democratic revolution they're always using as an excuse to start wars, you think?
Well, yes, or maybe they see other interests that we're just not aware of yet, but I do think it is important for the United States to try and be on the right side of history, as the the catchphrase has gone.
It's, obviously, Mubarak is done.
The protests were just that overwhelming, and, you know, if he does something so provocative that it causes this to happen again, they might just go to wherever he is and light the place on fire, and that's pretty much exactly what they did at the party headquarters.
That's exactly what they did to the television station when they heard that Mubarak was going to be there to give a speech.
So, I mean, how powerful is this regime?
It's powerful enough to thin out a crowd, but it's probably not powerful enough to shut it down if the people really decided that they're done.
Yeah, all right.
Well, let's talk about some of these other countries in the Middle East.
This seems to, you know, started in Tunisia, and it's just an idea spread by way of satellite TV and Facebook messages, right?
Hey, we can do this.
Everybody go outside and yell about how much you hate the state, and this is spreading to Syria, Sudan, Jordan, Yemen, and Kuwait, and where else, you know?
Well, it started in Tunisia, like you said, Algeria, Egypt, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait.
Have there been protests in Saudi Arabia?
Yeah, there have been protests in Saudi Arabia.
Oh, I completely missed that.
Well, it's not, there's not really a whole lot to say there yet.
Just today, though, today was Yemen's day of rage, and over 20,000 people turned up in one of their largest cities.
Now, they didn't do it Egypt style.
They didn't completely push for an overthrow.
The crowds thinned out after several hours, but it was the biggest protest they had ever seen, and now they now they know the power that the people actually hold.
Now they have a real sense of it.
So, what happens there is going to be interesting.
The president there in Yemen, who, his government had been lying to their people, saying that they were behind a series of bombing campaigns against Islamic fundamentalists, when in fact it was U.S. drones dropping bombs on them.
Right.
All right.
Now, hold it right there, because there's more to talk about Yemen, and I want to ask you about some of the rest of these countries where the intifada is starting to take off as well.
Follow the Empire?
Anti-war radio has got Stephen Webster from Raw Story.
We'll be right back.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Therefore, I am Scott Horton, and we're on Liberty Radio Network, as well as Chaos Radio Austin, which is where my guest Stephen Webster from Raw Story is hanging on the line with us here.
And I see here a piece in the Tehran Times.
Stephen, over hundreds detained in Saudi Arabia over protests, and apparently the message to protest, everyone gather together and let's protest.
In this case, it's about some flooding.
But then again, there are some indications of some broader sort of problems going on here.
But it all went out over the Blackberry, and there was one of those flash mob type things.
And of course, it says here the cops cracked down pretty hard.
But boy, you can't stop the signal, huh?
It's an idea.
It's an idea.
What's a dictator to do when his population figures, hey, wait, we can do it.
That's right.
And it's really amazing to see how not just Freedom of Information, but Wikileaks and Cyber Protest Group Anonymous played such a big role in starting all of this.
Well, tell me more about that.
You know, it should be mentioned that the April 6th movement in Egypt is a Facebook group.
They don't even have their own separate website, I don't think.
It's just a Facebook group.
So that's one big thing.
But tell me more about what Anonymous did here.
Well, access to communication services and basic social networking is at the root of all of this.
That sort of technology is revolutionary, especially in places where people are so shut down and isolated from the rest of their society.
You know, giving them access to that, they're able to see that others agree with them.
But Wikileaks and Anonymous, well, it all started with a leaked table from Wikileaks that described how Tunisia's economy functioned and how Ben Ali, the president, the dictator there, and his family had kind of set up a bribery scheme at the center of the economy.
A 26-year-old merchant, a 26-year-old kid by the name of Mohamed Bouazizi, I might be not pronouncing that correctly, is a college graduate, a street vendor.
He had his business basically confiscated from him, from a government official.
And when Wikileaks dropped this table showing how their economy functioned, Anonymous went on a blitz trying to get this information into Tunisia.
Well, the Tunisian government started attacking Wikileaks, blocked Wikileaks in the country, then launched a series of cyber attacks against some of their most prominent critics.
As it turned out, and I don't know whether this kid, this 26-year-old guy, Bouazizi, had read the Wikileaks or not, but he went out and lit himself on fire and committed suicide, political suicide.
And at least a dozen or more others followed, and not just in Tunisia, all across North Africa, in Yemen, in Cairo, people were lighting themselves on fire to spark a protest, and boy, did they ever.
So yeah, once these secrets about how these governments or our clients, the US, started coming out, that's when it really hit the fan, so to speak.
So when Anonymous altered their game plan from attacking MasterCard to, let's just grab these Wikileaks and let's target carefully our spam on who needs to see this stuff, and we'll just bum-rush information systems with the stories that we think need highlighting, that kind of thing, that's what they were doing here.
They said, look at these memos about Tunisia, and then they blasted them to Tunisia and got them through the firewall there.
Well, I wouldn't say that they've altered their tactics.
They've actually been talking about this Operation Leaks since the leaks started coming out.
They've been looking for ways, they've at any given time, they've got dozens of ongoing operations.
I mean, really, it's such a disparate group that everybody's just doing something else, and it's like whatever interests their members, that's what they participate in.
So for instance, in Egypt, when all the internet went down and all the cell phones went down, you know what Anonymous did?
They realized that some of the landlines were still working, and some of those landlines were plugged into fax machines.
So they started spamming Wikileaks cables regarding Egypt and government onto all of these lines, and all of a sudden, fax machines all over Egypt started spitting out confidential U.S. government secrets.
No way.
Yes way.
That is so cool.
That's the new nature of warfare, and this group Anonymous, based in the U.S. and Europe and all over the world, are really making a difference, really, tangibly making a difference.
Yeah, that is really amazing.
All right, so let's get back to Yemen for a second here.
The dictator there said he was going to run again and make himself president for life just two weeks ago, right?
And now he's saying what?
Now he's afraid.
Now he is petrified, especially now that a lot of his people know that they lied and that the bombs that have been dropping on their heads were from the U.S. and not from, you know, Yemen's military or whatever.
Yeah, well, and in fact, I'd like to encourage people to look at Amnesty International and their report about the massacre of a house full of children.
I don't know if it was a daycare or everybody just ran there for shelter or what, but 20-something kids killed, I think, in a drone attack there in December 2010.
And, of course, that was in the weeks leading up to, in the end of November and beginning of December of 2009, I meant to say, that was leading up to the Christmas Day attempted attack by Abdu'l-Mutlab, these strikes in Yemen.
And then they pretended that, you know, geez, these people must really believe in Islamic extremism a lot or else why would they do something like this?
But, in fact, the American robot cluster bombs have been falling out of the sky onto their houses.
Yeah.
You know, just in the weeks leading up to that thing.
For every action, there's a reaction.
That's just the law.
You'd think that people would get that, but no.
In fact, I just read a piece about how four-year college graduates can't get the cause and effect going on.
They just answer the multiple choice with, I guess everything happens for a reason or something.
They don't even understand, you know, whether the nail going down into the board is what causes the hammer to swing or what.
So, anyway, and that's your four-year college graduates in America right now.
Sorry for that tangent, but it's so important to me how stupid everyone is.
All right.
So, you guys have a lot more news at Raw Story, Stephen, that I don't mean to neglect here.
Can you talk to me about the persecution of journalists inside Egypt?
I know Al Jazeera had some of their guys nabbed and were they sent out of the country or just taken to jail?
I don't believe that the Al Jazeera journalists, I believe they were released, but it's just part of a broader pattern of going after journalists, and even some U.S. journalists have been experiencing this lately.
Christiane Amanpour, her motorcade or her vehicle was attacked and they had their windshield broken.
Anderson Cooper and his group, they were surrounded, well, maybe not surrounded, but they were confronted by a group of pro-Mubarak protesters and Anderson Cooper was punched in the head repeatedly.
Yeah, there's a lot.
And this is the pro-Mubarak people doing this to the American reporters?
Yes, that is correct.
The cops.
It's not just American reporters.
I mean, a lot of these pro-Mubarak mobs have been chanting against Al Jazeera, which I just want to say has been doing an absolutely phenomenal job, and if any Americans listening to this want to get a sense of what real television journalism looks like, they need to turn on Al Jazeera because it's something that has been lost in the U.S., has long since been lost.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's really fun to compare, isn't it?
To watch real news and think, my God, I've got to sit here and watch Wolf Blitzer?
I can't even get CNN International, you know?
All I can get is the Wolf Blitzer kind.
It's horrible.
Bill O'Reilly, just the other night, he was doing his best to take up for Fox News against Al Jazeera, accusing them of all sorts of insane anti-Americanism, but really he was just quoting people who they had spoken with.
You want to get a picture of a region's politics, you're going to speak with prominent voices, and sometimes you don't agree with those.
Now, obviously, you know, they're going to talk to some pretty virulently anti-American folks, being, you know, an Arabic news agency, but, hey, that's journalism.
That doesn't mean the network itself is anti-American.
Man, I'm watching Al Jazeera's live stream, firebombs being thrown hither and yon across the barricades.
Oh, man.
All right, thanks, Stephen.
Everybody, that's Stephen Webster from Raw Story.
That's rawstory.com.
Really appreciate it, man.
Solidarity.
We'll be right back, y'all.
