Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
January 28, 2011
In an interview with NPR, Joe Biden stumbles his way through soft ball questions about Egypt and the dictator Hosni Mubarak, who Biden identifies as a personal friend. In the process, Biden reveals the U.S. attitude toward dictators and client states.
“Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things,” said Biden. “And he’s been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interest in the region, the Middle East
Remarkably, Biden is considered the go-to man in the Obama administration on foreign policy. “The vice president has been famously and consistently called a foreign policy expert by the Washington establishment,” writes Richard Grenell. “In fact, President Obama admitted during his campaign for president that he relied on Biden’s foreign policy advice while both men were in the Senate.”
Mubarak’s knuckle-dragging dictatorship is so crucial to the foreign policy of the United States, it is the number two recipient of money (it receives around $2 billion per year). Only Israel receives more.
“Egypt under Mubarak uses its billions in U.S. military aid to detain, beat and torture dissenters, opposition politicians and journalists; many have died in custody,” writes Mark Zepezauer. “Thousands of political prisoners and pro-democracy activists are held in overcrowded, disease-ridden prisons, without charges or trials. Press restrictions, including newspaper shutdowns, are widespread.”
“Nobody in Egypt will be imprisoned again for their opinions,” Egyptian press syndicate chairman Galal Aref declared in 2004. But in April of that year Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the independent weekly Al Dustour, and his colleague Sahar Zaki were sentenced to one year in prison for an article that described a lawsuit against Mubarak and his family. The lawyer who filed the lawsuit, Saied Abdallah, received an identical sentence and was fined.
This sort of behavior is not the exception but the rule. Egypt has faced repeated criticism from human rights activists and others for decades.
Biden told NPR the U.S. government encourages Egypt to embrace democracy, but this is at best a sick joke.
In 2005, after similar gentle nudging from the Bush administration, Mubarak allowed opposition candidates to run against him, including Ayman Nour. After Nour won a paltry 7 percent of the vote (according to the Egyptian government), he was arrested on politically motivated charges of forgery and sentenced him to five years in prison, thus sending a strong message to anybody who would dare challenge Mubarak.
As noted by the Committee to Protect Journalists, the Mubarak regime was quick to target journalists after hundreds of thousands of Egyptians took to the street this week.
“Since Tuesday, Egypt has witnessed widespread protests against poverty and corruption, and calls for democratic changes. Authorities suspended Internet and mobile phone service, according to news reports and mobile operators, in an attempt to block media coverage and communications between protesters. Security forces today continued violent physical attacks on journalists,” the organization reports today.
Mubarak’s thugs have targeted the BBC, Al-Jazeera, CNN, and French journalists working for Le Figaro, Journal du Dimanche, Sipa Photo Agency, and Paris Match.
Beating up journalists and confiscating their equipment, however, will not prevent the regime’s collapse, which now appears imminent.
Even the globalists gathered in Davos, Switzerland, are issuing hollow calls for Egypt to guarantee the freedoms of its residents and eschew violence in order to avoid the fall of Biden’s friend in Cairo.
“I believe that one of the ground principles of democracy should be to protect the freedom of speech of the people,” said U.N. boss Ban Ki-moon.
Prior to the threat posed against Mubarak’s authoritarian rule financed by the largess of the U.S. tax payer, Ban Ki-moon and the globalists did not complain much about the despot’s treatment of journalists and the political opposition in his country. Now that the linchpin of globalist control in the Middle East is about the fall, they are calling for reform.
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Even Secretary of State Clinton was obliged to offer mild rebuke of Mubarak and his thugs. She suggested Mubarak open “a dialogue between the government and people of Egypt.”
Mubarak’s dialogue was heard this evening in Cairo. He did not answer with words, but with bullets.
Sources:
Obama-Biden Support Mubarak, the Dictator, Richard Grenell, The Huffington Post, January 28, 2011.
Mark Zepezauer, Boomerang: How our covert wars have created enemies
across the Middle East and brought terror to America, Common Courage Press, 2003, p. 67.
Our Man (and Son) in Egypt, Joseph Mayton, The Progressive, March, 2007.
Despots Masquerading as Democrats, Kenneth Roth, Human Rights Watch World Report 2008.
Egypt instigates media blackout, police target journalists, Committee to Protect Journalists, January 28, 2011.
At Davos, calls for Egypt to guarantee freedoms, Matt Moore and Frank Jordans, Associated Press, January 28, 2011.
Clinton Calls for ‘Restraint’ and ‘Reform’, Mark Landler, The New York Times, January 28, 2011.
Reports of military gunfire in Cairo, Monsters & Critics, January 28, 2011.