CAIRO — Not even Egypt’s interim military rulers know when they plan to relinquish power to a new civilian government, the United States ambassador to Egypt, Anne W. Patterson, said Tuesday. Speaking at a news conference here with Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta after he met with the Egyptian military leaders, Ms. Patterson offered an unusually candid assessment of the haze over Egypt’s path toward democracy after the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak eight months ago.
Asked if American officials knew whether the Egyptian military council intended to turn over power at the seating of a newly elected Parliament in March, or the planned adoption of a new constitution later in 2012, or the election of a president some months beyond that, Ms. Patterson said, “I don’t think, frankly, the military knows or anyone else knows.”
“This process has really been fraught with uncertainty from the very beginning and decisions are often made on a day-to-day basis, so I would expect that to continue for a while,” she added.
Fraught with American-directed counterrevolution is more like it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/05/world/middleeast/not-clear-when-egyptian-military-will-relinquish-power-americans-say.html?_r=1
The propaganda is being spread pretty thick:
88 percent of Egyptians trust the military council.
The poll is clearly a joke as less than 3,000 people participated. More lurid details of this rigged poll can be found here.
The poll was conducted by the Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo which is headed by a man with deep ties to the Egyptian military and intelligence services. The Center is a part of the Al Ahram Foundation which was launched by the government in the 60s. The Foundation publishes the Arab language's biggest newspaper of the same name. The government, nowadays the military council, SCAF, owns a controlling share of the paper and funds the Foundation.
If one wants a favorable poll result, own the pollster.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al-Ahram
By far the worst though is the new electoral reform announced by the junta after Panetta's visit.
Military Council announces new punitive election laws
“We have a penal law that exists already to punish these things. It is strange that they have reemphasized these crimes because the penalties already exist,” Mohamed Zaree, a human rights lawyer at the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies told Bikyamasr.com.
“This could be used as a weapon against even honest candidates, because it is unclear how they will apply these laws. We have no criteria for what “fake information” is, for instance,” he went on.
“Someone could state that elections were not free and fair, and face up to six months in jail, according to these laws,” he said.
http://bikyamasr.com/45146/egypt-military-council-announces-new-punitive-election-laws/
SCAF amends Egypt political participation law, cancels controversial Article 5
Article 5, which stipulated that two thirds of parliament would be elected through an electoral list system and one third filled by individuals, has been cancelled.
The anticipated parliamentary elections start in late November.
Below are the amended articles of the law:
Article 1: Articles 40, 43, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, and 50 of the political participation law will be replaced by the following:
Article 40: Those who refuse to vote despite being registered on the database of voters will be fined up to LE500.
Article 49: The following infringements will result in prison time:
- Participation in elections or polls while having no right to do so.
- Impersonating another voter.
- Voting more than once in polls or elections. In this case, the Supreme Electoral Committee head has the right to declare the vote void.
The list system means one votes for a party and the winnirs thereafter determine which individuals will take seats. Two-thirds were to be allocated this way with the remainder going to individual candidates. Now the last third will be contested by both "lists" and specific candidates. Clearly whoever controls these parties will control the government. And the SCAF has announced it will provide funding for the parties.
This is a thinly veiled attempt to subvert the election and people the government with loyalists.
http://news.egypt.com/english/permalink/53970.html
And the Ministry of the Interior has opened a new school for snipers, just in case something goes awry and the wrong people get into office.
We found out in the official website of ministry of interior , in the section of police academy that the training center of Central Security Forces includes a courses for Snipers unit.
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/10/sniper-over-our-rooftop-snipers-over.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EgyptianChronicles+%28Egyptian+chronicles%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail
And what better way to subvert an election than by censoring the press.
The media censorship ghost is back again
Last Wednesday 4 famous Egyptian columnists left their columns blank in Tahrir Daily Newspaper objecting the return of press censorship once again. In less than a month three newspapers were censored because of the articles related to the intelligence and the army. “ Sawt Al Oma and Rosa Al Youssef spoke about the intelligence while Al Fajr Newspaper published big headlines criticizing SCAF in the frontline but the inside the topics were Pro-SCAF actually” .
Columnists Belal Fadl , Omar Taher , Tarek Al Shanawy and Naglaa Badir left their daily columns blank on last Wednesday in Tahrir Newspaper. Three of them wrote the following online :
I refrain from writing today because I protest the ban , confiscation and the return of military censorship on press
http://egyptianchronicles.blogspot.com/2011/10/media-censorship-ghost-is-back-again.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+EgyptianChronicles+%28Egyptian+chronicles%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail
Fearmongering is also an essential part of criminal statecraft:
Christians fear Islamist pressure in Egypt
These conflicts have been are psy-ops orchestrated by Western intelligence and are getting lots of attention in the press. The riots not onoy terrorize but provide a pretext for intervention.
On her first day to school, 15-year-old Christian student Ferial Habib was stopped at the doorstep of her new high school with clear instructions: either put on a headscarf or no school this year.
Habib refused. While most Muslim women in Egypt wear the headscarf, Christians do not, and the move by administrators to force a Christian student to don it was unprecedented. For the next two weeks, Habib reported to school in the southern Egyptian village of Sheik Fadl every day in her uniform, without the head covering, only to be turned back by teachers.
One day, Habib heard the school loudspeakers echoing her name and teachers with megaphones leading a number of students in chants of "We don't want Ferial here," the teenager told The Associated Press.
Stories like this are expected to provoke an emotional response in the West which will help manufacture support for a military intervention if the SCAF fails to prevent a democratic takeover of government.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/10/08/ap/middleeast/main20117666.shtml
And as always capital's major propaganda outlets are trying to convince everybody that the revolution was a success and is over now.:
Egypt News — Revolution and Aftermath
The New York Crimes has used the "revolution and aftermath" phrase more than once.
Egypt, the most populous country in the Arab world, erupted in mass protests in January 2011, as the revolution in Tunisia inflamed decades worth of smoldering grievances against the heavy-handed rule of President Hosni Mubarak.
After 18 days of angry protests and after losing the support of the military and the United States, Mr. Mubarak resigned on Feb. 11, ending 30 years of autocratic rule. The military stepped forward and took power. It quickly suspended unpopular provisions of the constitution, even while cracking down on continuing demonstrations.
Which unpopular provisions were those exactly? Certainly the people executed Mubarak's ouster are still protesting. They have not been satisfied. The SCAF hasn't rescinded the much-hated Emergency Law.
The Western press, particularly those with deep ties of longstanding with Western intelligence services like the NYT are an essential part of the counterrevolution in Egypt and elsewhere. And will be as lonmg as capitalism survives.
