Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Russell Lee Young flood refugee in schoolhouse, Sikeston, Missouri January 1937
Can you see what’s wrong with this picture? Over the weekend, the US released $572 million in ‘military aid’ to Egypt, at the same time that an Egyptian court confirmed the death sentences for 183 Muslim Brotherhood members/supporters, a Canadian and an Australian journalist were sentenced to 7-10 years maximum security prison for a conspiracy “to tarnish Egypt’s reputation and aiding the Muslim Brotherhood”, while 15 others, including two British and one Dutch journalists, got 10 years each in absentia on similar charges.
And “we” are handing them tanks and Apache helicopters? At the very moment journalists from fellow NATO member countries are being thrown in jail on opaque and convoluted charges? Excuse me? Ever heard of timing everything?
John Kerry Voices Strong Support for Egyptian President Sisi
Secretary of State John Kerry voiced strong U.S. support for Egypt’s new president and signaled that Washington will continue the flow of military aid in an American welcome of the post-coup government. Mr. Kerry is the most senior Obama administration official to meet Abdel Fattah Al Sisi, the former commander of the Egyptian armed forces, since his inauguration as president earlier this month. The American diplomat stressed that Washington was eager to kick-start its strategic relationship with Cairo anew. Mr. Kerry said that the U.S. had recently released $575 million in assistance for Egypt’s military and that he was confident 10 Apache helicopters would be delivered to Egypt soon. [..]
Note that Morsy (or Morsi, Mursi), about whom I have no opinion to express, was an elected president. “We” don’t seem to like those much lately, do we? Here’s some factoids, starting with the Wall Street Journal:
Egypt Court Upholds 183 Death Sentences
An Egyptian court upheld the death sentences against Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Badie and 182 of the group’s supporters Saturday. They were among hundreds of people found guilty in April of taking part in a deadly attack on a police station last year. The incident occurred after sit-ins supporting deposed President Mohamed Morsy at squares in Cairo were broken up. “Of 683 defendants in the case, 183 were sentenced to death, four were sentenced to life imprisonment and 496 defendants were acquitted,” at Minya Criminal Court, state-run Ahram Online reported.
183 death sentences shirks eerily close to organized genocide. And I know the US is the only “civilized” nation that still has enthusiasm for executing its citizens, but 183 is a crazy number that reeks of political games far more than criminal activity. But of course we could claim that’s an internal Egyptian affair to decide. A claim we can’t make when it comes to our own journalists. Or are Australia, Canada, Britain and Holland perhaps not “our own” enough? Would Obama have refused the mass arms shipments to today’s flavor in power in Egypt if American journalists were involved?
Egypt Court Jails Al Jazeera Journalists For 7-10 Years
An Egyptian judge sentenced three Al Jazeera journalists on Monday to seven years in jail after finding them guilty on charges including helping a “terrorist organisation” by publishing lies. The three include Australian Peter Greste, Al Jazeera’s Kenya-based correspondent, and Canadian-Egyptian national Mohamed Fahmy, bureau chief of Al Jazeera English. A third defendant, Egyptian producer Baher Mohamed, received an additional three-year jail sentence on a separate charge involving possession of weapons. Another 11 defendants were sentenced in absentia to 10 years.
Canada’s Globe and Mail published this on the trial recently, before the sentences were delivered:
“They hand-picked only one side of the story,” Mr. Fahmy’s brother, Adel Fahmy, said in a telephone interview from Cairo after the Thursday hearing ended. The clips that were displayed to the judge, he said, were selected to include interviews with people who support the Muslim Brotherhood and footage of protests against former army chief Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, the front-runner in next week’s presidential election. But prosecutors left out interviews that the Al Jazeera team had conducted with people who are supportive of the existing regime, said Adel Fahmy.
Much of the evidence presented was “ridiculous,” said Adel Fahmy. It included, without explanation, a grainy recording of the hit song Somebody That I Used to Know by the Australian musician Gotye, as well as audioclips of people telling jokes, videos of sheep, footage from other correspondents, and a documentary about football in Egypt that Mr. Greste told the judge demonstrates the journalists’ willingness to portray the country as being stable under the current military rulers. [..] U.S. President Barack Obama and other world leaders demanded the release of the journalists.
And it’s not as if the White House didn’t know. From the WSJ article quoted above:
On Saturday, an Egyptian court sentenced to death more than 180 members of the Brotherhood for allegedly attacking a police headquarters in southern Egypt and killing an officer and a civilian. The Egyptian government is also trying three journalists from the Qatar-based Al Jazeera television network and 17 co-defendants for allegedly conspiring with the Muslim Brotherhood to destabilize the Egyptian state. A verdict in the case is expected on Monday.
Mr. Kerry said that he raised these issues with Mr. Sisi during a nearly two-hour session in the presidential palace in Cairo. The U.S. diplomat stressed that Mr. Sisi needed more time to address U.S. and international concerns about these cases. “He gave me a very strong sense of his commitment to make certain that the process he has put in place, a re-evaluation of human-rights legislation, a re-evaluation of the judicial process, and other choices that are available are very much on his mind,” Mr. Kerry said.
That last paragraph is a great depiction of what “we” have become. The US doesn’t stand for anything anymore, including the protection of its own people (and I do count journalists from NATO countries as our own people). But it’s not just the US. This is from an AP piece after the journalists’ verdicts:
Western governments and rights groups have voiced concern over freedom of expression in Egypt since Mursi’s ouster and the crackdown has raised questions about Egypt’s democratic credentials three years after an uprising toppled Hosni Mubarak after 30 years in power and raised hopes of greater freedoms. “This is a deeply disappointing result. The Egyptian people have expressed over the past three years their wish for Egypt to be a democracy. Without freedom of the press there is no foundation for democracy” Britain’s ambassador to Egypt, James Watt, told Reuters after the verdict. Australia’s ambassador Ralph King also said his prime minister would make his disappointment clear after entreaties made by his government in recent days appeared to make little difference.
Instead of Britain and Australia expressing outrage over both the sentences AND Obama’s decision to hand $570 million worth of weapons to the regime that delivers the sentences, both say they’re “disappointed”. Woe be the Brits or Aussies who find themselves on the wrong side of a line their government arbitrarily draw at any given point in time that’s entirely at their discretion. You’re on your own, guys.
And I know that violent movements are once again rising in Iraq and elsewhere, and I’ve seen Obama and Kerry and Bush and Cheney and Blair’s inane claims that they never had nothing to do with none of the unrest. But even then, refusing to stand up for your own people crosses a line that frankly disgusts me.
How hard would it have been for Kerry to tell, what’s his face, Sisi, that he can can have his guns and helicopters, and support “our” cause, but only after he releases at least all westerners involved in that grotesque Al Jazeera court case? Not hard at all. So what’s going on? Does the White House maybe hate Al Jazeera as much as Egypt does? Or is this about all journalists in general who don’t toe the party line? And of course there’ll be voices who say that it’s all difficult, and diplomacy is hard etc., but it’s really not. All Obama needs to do is say give me my people back or I’ll take those $572 million worth of guns and point them at you.
We know that the truth vanished from Washington long ago. Now we find that the last scrap of morality did too.
Oh, and the world of finance today? Stocks are held up by behemoth buybacks in the US and Japan, while the latter also moves record amounts of pension funds into the stock market. The most striking line today came in a Bloomberg article on Yellen controlling bond markets, and said: “Bond Vigilantes Have All Been Quieted”. They won’t be quiet forever, promise, unless they keep being fed free money forever. Fed by the Fed.
