Tag: egypt

Monday Links

By
George Scoville
  • “Sadly, in Egypt’s case, a freely elected civilian government may prove powerless in the face of the deeply entrenched and well-organized military.”
  • “Washington politicians from both parties, and bureaucrats, have for decades successfully decreased our freedom and liberties as they have regulated more and more of our lives, including our retirement.”
  • “The Ryan proposal correctly focuses on achieving debt reduction through spending cuts, but this very gradual debt reduction schedule is a weakness that could lead to its downfall.”
  • “Nearly two years ago Sen. McCain, along with Senators Graham and Lieberman, was supping with Qaddafi in Tripoli, discussing the possibility of Washington providing military aid.”
  • Cato media fellow Radley Balko joined FOX Business Network’s Stossel recently to discuss your right to make video recordings of police, and why exercising that right frequently is vital to liberty:


Topics: 
Cato Publications

Does the Internet Cause Freedom?

By
Jim Harper

That will be the subject of a Cato on Campus session this afternoon entitled: “The Internet and Social Media: Tools of Freedom or Tools of Oppression?” Watch live online at the link starting at 3:30 p.m., or attend in person. A reception follows.

The delight that so many felt to see protesters in Iran using social media has given way to delight about the use of Facebook to organize for freedom in Egypt. But this serial enthusiasm omits that the “Twitter revolution” in Iran did not succeed. The fiercest skeptics even suggest that the tweeting during Iran’s suppressed uprising was mostly Iranian ex-pats goosing excitable westerners and not any organizing force within Iran itself. Coming to terms with the Internet, dictatorships are learning to use it for surveillance and control, possibly with help from American tech companies.

So is the cause of freedom better off with the Internet? Or is social media a shiny bauble that distracts from the long, heavy slog of liberating the people of the world?

Joining the discussion will be Chris Preble, Director of Foreign Policy Studies at Cato; Alex Howard, Government 2.0 Correspondent for O’Reilly Media; and Tim Karr, Campaign Director at Free Press. More info here.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Mubarak Steps Down … Finally

By
Christopher A. Preble

Hosni Mubarak’s decision to step down as president of Egypt is welcome news. He could have taken a cue from Tunisia’s Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, resigning quickly in the face of overwhelming popular opposition. Such a move on Mubarak’s part would have avoided much of the confusion that has gripped Egypt for more than two weeks. At least 300 people have been killed during the protests, but thankfully Mubarak’s exit was achieved without even more bloodshed.

These protests were driven by popular discontent with Mubarak, rising food prices, rampant corruption, and limited political and economic opportunity. The Obama administration generally resisted calls to place the United States in the middle of what was a purely internal matter.

Those who called for a heavy-handed U.S. role in this whole affair—many of them the same people who have called for U.S. intervention in dozens of other places over the the past few decades—have been proven wrong once again. While the ideas of liberty are universal, the spark for change, and the energy that carries it forward, must come from within. The Egyptian people started this, and the Egyptian people should finish it.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security

On Egypt’s Transition

By
Roger Pilon

Today POLITICO Arena asks:

At his press conference this afternoon, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs distanced the Obama administration from former Egypt envoy Frank Wisner’s suggestion over the weekend that Hosni Mubarak should stay in power as Egypt transitions to a new government. Was Wisner, a former U.S. ambassador to Egypt, right about that and about the potential for a power vacuum?

My response:

Wisner was half right, but on the Mubarak half he was almost certainly wrong. Transitions are messy – at best. Ask the French about theirs two centuries and more ago. Occasionally they’re done pursuant to existing constitutions. Ours from the Articles of Confederation to the Constitution wasn’t, despite which it wasn’t all that messy. We were lucky. We had a relatively healthy culture and strong leaders, even if the early years were often touch and go, as we sometimes forget.

It appears, from press accounts, that the current Egyptian constitution does not provide for the kind of transition that many would like to see. If so, then extra-constitutional measures will need to be taken, including perhaps the drafting and ratification of a new or at least an interim constitution, or more likely some less formal arrangement through which interim authority can be brought into being with a semblance of legitimacy about it – whether a new government or a new constitution and ratification process. A simple call for elections is too simple: by whom, under what procedures, to fill what offices, in what institutions?

All of this is where politics in its most elemental form comes to the fore, for better or worse, as the French saw to their horror. It’s the ultimate test of a culture. So Wisner was right about “the potential for a power vacuum” – although in Egypt the army is likely to fill that vacuum – and in recognizing that a vacuum should be avoided, if possible. But he was likely wrong to suggest that Mubarak should fill that vacuum or serve as a transitional figure since it appears that he no longer has the credibility to do so. Ideally, leaders with credibility need to emerge, and soon.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General

Is a U.S. Company Assisting Egyptian Surveillance?

By
Jim Harper

Boeing subsidiary Narus reports on its Web site that it “protects and manages” a number of worldwide networks, including that of Egypt Telecom. A recent IT World article entitled “Narus Develops a Scary Sleuth for Social Media” reported on a Narus product called Hone last year:

Hone will sift through millions of profiles searching for people with similar attributes — blogger profiles that share the same e-mail address, for example. It can look for statistically likely matches, by studying things like the gender, nationality, age, location, home and work addresses of people. Another component can trace the location of someone using a mobile device such as a laptop or phone.

Media advocate Tim Karr reports that “Narus provides Egypt Telecom with Deep Packet Inspection equipment (DPI), a content-filtering technology that allows network managers to inspect, track and target content from users of the Internet and mobile phones, as it passes through routers on the information superhighway.”

It’s very hard to know how Narus’s technology was used in Egypt before the country pulled the plug on its Internet connectivity, or how it’s being used now. Narus is declining comment.

So what’s to be done?

Narus and its parent, the Boeing Company, have no right to their business with the U.S. government. On our behalf, Congress is entitled to ask about Narus’s/Boeing’s assistance to the Mubarak regime in Egypt. If contractors were required to refrain from assisting authoritarian governments’ surveillance as a condition of doing business with the U.S. government, that seems like the most direct way to dissuade them from providing top-notch technology capabilities to regimes on the wrong side of history.

Of course, decades of U.S. entanglement in the Middle East have created the circumstance where an authoritarian government has been an official “friend.” Until a few weeks ago, U.S. unity with the Mubarak regime probably had our government indulging Egypt’s characterization of political opponents as “terrorists and criminals.” It shouldn’t be in retrospect that we learn how costly these entangling alliances really are.

Chris Preble made a similar point ably on the National Interest blog last week:

We should step back and consider that our close relationship with Mubarak over the years created a vicious cycle, one that inclined us to cling tighter and tighter to him as opposition to him grew. And as the relationship deepened, U.S. policy seems to have become nearly paralyzed by the fear that the building anger at Mubarak’s regime would inevitably be directed at us.

We can’t undo our past policies of cozying up to foreign autocrats (the problem extends well beyond Egypt) over the years. And we won’t make things right by simply shifting — or doubling or tripling — U.S. foreign aid to a new leader. We should instead be open to the idea that an arms-length relationship might be the best one of all.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, Telecom, Internet & Information Policy

Should Washington Pick Egypt’s Next Leader?

By
Christopher A. Preble

The turmoil in Egypt, specifically in Cairo, turned violent in the past 36 hours as anti-government protesters clashed with pro-Mubarak groups.  During this period, and specifically today, the government crackdown widened to targeting foreign media.  Journalists and their crews were arrested, prevented from reporting, and beaten.  The anti-government protesters are pointing to Friday as a possible climax in what they are calling the “Friday of departure.”

President Mubarak, in an interview with ABC, said he would like to relinquish power now, but claims chaos will erupt if he did.  If he were to step down, or if he follows through on his promise not to run in the presidential election, the million dollar question in Washington becomes: who would the United States like to see as the new leader of Egypt?  And should Washington act to influence the outcome?

Over at The Skeptics, I address this by asking: Might it be better if the United States were to avoid micromanaging Egyptian politics altogether?  Whenever a crisis erupts in the world, policymakers usually approach the problem with the premise that Washington has to “do something.”  But must that include anointing another leader?

…Washington’s “do something” impulse seems to be overpowering common sense. Having backed the wrong person for too long, there is now a countervailing urge to correct our past error by backing the “right” person this time around.

I have a different idea. We should step back and consider that our close relationship with Mubarak over the years created a vicious cycle, one that inclined us to cling tighter and tighter to him as opposition to him grew. And as the relationship deepened, U.S. policy seems to have become nearly paralyzed by the fear that the building anger at Mubarak’s regime would inevitably be directed at us.

We can’t undo our past policies of cozying up to foreign autocrats (the problem extends well beyond Egypt) over the years. And we won’t make things right by simply shifting – or doubling or tripling – U.S. foreign aid to a new leader. We should instead be open to the idea that an arms-length relationship might be the best one of all.

Click here to read the entire post.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General

Egypt’s Iraq Connection

By
Malou Innocent

Overall, President Obama was right to applaud the Egyptian military for defending (at least for now) rather than killing Egyptian civilians, potentially avoiding  the Arab world’s Tienanmen Square. Whether Obama’s rhetoric could have been more supportive, as we saw with Tunisia, is up for debate. But it appears that Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s attempt to shape an orderly transition is running into trouble.

The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports that Mubarak’s recently appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, was “the C.I.A.’s point man in Egypt for renditions—the covert program in which the C.I.A. snatched terror suspects from around the world and returned them to Egypt and elsewhere for interrogation, often under brutal circumstances.” Suleiman used to be head of the Intelligence Services (al-mukhabarat).

According to U.C.S.B. Professor Paul Amar, the mukhabarat, which detains and tortures foreigners more than Egyptians, is less hated than the Interior Ministry’s State Security Investigations (SSI) (mabahith amn al-dawla), and different than the Central Security Services (Amn al-Markazi), “the black uniformed, helmeted men that the media refer to as ‘the police.’” Mayer reports that Suleiman Suleiman was also the C.I.A.’s liaison for the rendition of al Qaeda suspect Ibn Sheikh al-Libi. “The Libi case,” Mayer reports, “is particularly controversial, in large part because it played a role in the building of the case for the American invasion of Iraq.”

How ironic that America’s attempt to export democracy to Iraq was aided by a repressive government like Egypt’s.

Topics: 
Foreign Policy and National Security, General

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