Intelligence - OPEN SOURCE
US/121; RT/66; US/[redacted]; US/1 – MEMBER CONTRIBUTIONS [ed.note: The Pharoahs’ Game of Vanishing Musical Chairs begins yet again, in this, the year of Thoth, and the beginning of the Egyptians’ FIFTH millenium (although, technically, Thoth, the Egyptian Scribe of the Gods, dates only to the Middle Kingdom, and it is only in it’s FOURTH millenium, but who’s countinig anyway…Back in the day, Prince and Priest were one-in-the-same, making for less papyrus-work all around. Eventually, papyrus scribing gave way to paper work, and before too long the Egytian magic pyrimid escalator was headed in the worn direction—down.
By the time the Greeks, the Romans and Napolean Bonaparte got finished with the Pharoahs’ choosen people, all they were left with was a large dollop of foppish, cocktail-sipping British expats and Gamal Adul Nasser, who gave the boot to the last of Egypt’s Pharoahs, launched the Suez Canal crisis and gave rise and credence to the Moslem Brotherhood.
Five thousand years down the down escalator...
The seeming smiley-faced Islamic coat of arms is at the center of the Eagle of Saladin (a Kurd, actually) is from the Egyptian Revolution Flag, flown high from 1952 to 1958, precisely the time period of those disastrous events listed above.
That Egyptian Revolution was the last military takeover until the cash-hungry Defense Minster named Mubarak took over.
But it was not the Kurdish model they chose to follow, but rather that of the newly enterprising Pakistanis, as they came to be called after the Partition of 1947. There are literally over tens thousand ‘generals’ an ex-generals to this day in Pakistani, and perhaps as much as 60+% of Pakistan's economy is controlled by the Pakistani Armed Forces PENSION FUNDS, as compared to the estimates of Egyptian Army portion of their economy of around 40%.
As the very knowledgeable and connected Member US/[redacted] points out below, with a rising cresendo of echoes other analysts, including Member Judy Miller's report from the annual terrorism conference in Israel:
FOLLOW THE MONEY…
(Apparently apocryphal words never issued forth from the famous “DEEPGarageTHROAT,” as Washington’s reigning Thothite, Bob Woodward, has conceded and at least one claimant to that mantle-handle has also confirmed.
But sage advise, nonetheless…US/1]
I wrote this before M officially resigned [on a related, yet separate issue]. However, it notes some things that the lame brained clowns in the media do not know; the Army staged a coup, because M's son was changing the terms of the economic deal toward a real free and open economy. Oops, there goes 40% ownership in the country's economy that is the military's[…]
18 months ago, some businessmen worked to put together a group based on social account communications to push for M getting out and his son and the "reformers" getting in; they were somewhat co-opted by (1) the Army and (2)the western media and Al Jazeera--the western media because they saw away to be "on the right side of history", and Al Jazeera to get rid of M whom they disliked, and "stick it to the Jews--a radical Egypt would either force concessions out of Israel or there might be war, certainly a proxy war through Gaza and Hamas.
The Army had to put a stop to this. A lot of this was orchestrated to allow M to leave and have the crowds vent their anger at M but not the VP or the Army. Can these folks ride the tiger to a future they want? This is the story. The US media want the crazies to take over because [it's good for business in a flailing and failing industry…].[Member US/(redacted)]
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| February 12, 111 Saturday 16 AdarI 3871 22:20 IST |
| Mubarak's defiance surprised US and threatened 'chaos' |
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The scheme would unfold Thursday, with the only uncertainty being Mubarak's fate. "There were two scenarios: He would either leave office, or he would transfer power," said a US government official who was briefed on the plan. "These were not speculative scenarios. There was solid information" and a carefully crafted script.
But the Egyptian president decided at the last minute to change the ending.
"Mubarak called an audible," the official said.
The Egyptian president startled the Obama administration and many of his aides with an address in which he appeared determined to cling to office. The speech surprised and angered the White House, enraged Cairo's legions of protesters and pushed the country closer to chaos, current and former US government officials said in interviews recounting the events of the past 48 hours.
In the end, Mubarak's efforts only ensured a hasty and ignominious departure, the officials said. Within hours of the speech, Egyptian army officials confronted the discredited president with an ultimatum: Step down voluntarily or be forced out.
Mubarak's defiant speech - described by some US officials as bordering on delusional - was a final, wild plot twist in a saga that had played out in Egypt and Washington over the past 18 days. The likelihood of Mubarak's departure alternately rose and dipped as US military officers and diplomats quietly worked with their Egyptian counterparts in a search for peaceful resolution to the country's worst unrest in six decades.
By midweek, confronted with growing throngs in Cairo, labor strikes and deteriorating economic conditions, top military and civilian leaders reached an apparent agreement with Mubarak on some form of power transfer. The details of the plan - and how it unraveled Thursday - were described in interviews with six former and current US government officials who were knowledgeable about the details. Most of the sources insisted on anonymity in agreeing to talk about the administration's internal policy discussions and diplomatic exchanges with Egyptian officials.
Communication between top US and Egyptian officials had become increasingly sporadic early this week as Mubarak deputies complained publicly about US interference in Cairo's affairs. But then US intelligence and military officials began to learn details of the plan by Egyptian military leaders - something between a negotiated exit and a soft coup d’état - to relieve Mubarak of most, if not all, of his powers.
The plan went into effect Thursday with announcements in Cairo to pro-democracy demonstrators that their key demands were about to be met. A rare meeting was convened of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and afterward a military spokesman released a communique that seemed to assert the army's control over the government. The statement stressed "the responsibility of the armed forces and its commitment to protect the people and its keenness to protect the nation."
The statement prompted cheers among the hundreds of thousands of demonstrators who had gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square anticipating an announcement of Mubarak's departure.
Hours later in Washington, CIA Director Leon Panetta made a scheduled appearance before the House Intelligence Committee. Asked about Egypt, he cited reports suggesting a "strong likelihood that Mubarak may step down this evening." The CIA retreated from the assertion, saying the director was referring to news reports, but the agency's classified cables continued to point to a likely transfer of power in Egypt that day, according to two US officials familiar with the intelligence.
US President Barack Obama was en route to Marquette, Mich., for an event on wireless technology. Just before 2 p.m. Washington time, he took to the stage at Northern Michigan University to signal his approval for a transfer of power in Egypt that appeared to be only minutes away. "We are witnessing history unfold," an ebullient Obama said.
His words hinting of historic changes under way in Egypt were meant to express optimism without forecasting when Mubarak might surrender his powers, an administration official said. But the speech added to the growing anticipation about a speech by the Egyptian president set to take place two hours later.
A solemn-looking Mubarak appeared on Egypt's state television just as Obama was returning to Washington. The US president and his aides watched with increasing dismay as Mubarak criticized Western interference and ticked off a list of promises for the coming months. Although he referred vaguely to a decision to transfer "some of the power" to his newly appointed vice president, Omar Suleiman, his tone was defiant and he offered no hint of stepping down.
US officials and Middle East experts who analyzed the speech said it was a case of extraordinary miscalculation on Mubarak's part. "It was a public relations disaster," said Daniel Kurtzer, a former US ambassador to Egypt. The speech provoked roars of outrage from Tahrir Square as thousands of demonstrators began to march on the presidential palace and state TV headquarters, many of them shouting, "Leave, leave."
"Mubarak went off script," said said Scott Carpenter, a Middle East expert with the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. "But it wasn't what he said so much as it was the way he said it. He essentially agreed to say everything the army wanted him to say, but he couldn't say it the way people expected him to."
After landing in Washington, Obama assembled his national security team in the Oval Office to discuss the response. He sat down afterward to pen a first draft of his public response, choosing language that more clearly than ever put the White House on the side of the demonstrators. The final version began with this sentence: "The Egyptian people have been told that there was a transition of authority, but it is not yet clear that this transition is immediate, meaningful or sufficient."
"It unmistakably aligned us with the aspirations of the people in Tahrir Square," said a senior administration official involved in the Oval Office meeting.
It was a crucial shift for a White House that had been the scene of sometimes heated exchanges between aides who pressed for a strong message of support for democratic change in Egypt and others who worried that doing so could disrupt the traditional government-to-government relationship with a key ally.
There was a discernible change in Cairo, as well. Within hours of Mubarak's speech, "support for Mubarak from the8 military dropped precipitously," said a US government official who closely tracked the events.
"The military had been willing - with the right tone in the speech - to wait and see how it played out," the official said. "They didn't like what they saw."
Even Suleiman, Mubarak's longtime intelligence chief, joined ranks with military leaders late Thursday . "He had been trying to walk a fine line between retaining support for Mubarak while trying to infuse common sense into the equation," the US official said. "By the end of the day, it was clear the situation was no longer tenable."
Mubarak was told Friday that he must step down, and within hours, he was on his way to the Red Sea resort of Sharm e-Sheikh. It was Suleiman who announced the change in leadership. At 11 a.m. Cairo time, the vice president stood before a television camera to formally declare the end of three decades of Mubarak rule.
"[Egyptian] President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country," Suleiman said. "May God help everybody."
Herzliya Diary III
President Hosni Mubarak had not yet stepped down late Thursday night when Israel's premier national security gathering in Herzliya ended its 11th annual meetings on Israel's and the region's security. But the now departed president's muddled speech late Thursday night in which he appeared to step aside without formally stepping down was an apt coda to Israel's premier national security gathering in Herzliya this week.
The four days of meetings were an exercise in gloom, as the complexity and enormity of the threats confronting Israel became increasingly evident. Egypt's cyber-revolution—no matter how it turned out, several analysts suggested—could clearly threaten Israel's three-decade-old peace with Egypt. Rather than a quasi-credible Jeffersonian democracy, warned Shlomo Avineri, a former director general of the foreign affairs ministry now teaching at Hebrew University, history taught us that a military dictatorship, or chaos, or a government dominated by the anti-Israeli Muslim Brotherhood, or a "combination" thereof were far more likely alternatives.
Plus, whether or not the Muslim Brotherhood eventually came to power as a result of Egypt's uncertain political transition, several experts argued, any more "democratic" Egyptian government that more closely reflected the views of Egyptians would inevitably be much less friendly toward the Jewish state. It would also most probably be more supportive of Hamas and of Palestinian aspirations in general, less sympathetic toward the American-brokered peace process, and perhaps more reticent about challenging Iran.
While Egypt was the Arab state of most immediate concern, the gathering saw events in Tahrir Square as but a reflection of what analysts here spoke of as an underlying "virus"—the potentially destabilizing yearning for greater freedom in the Arab world, respect for human rights, and tolerance of dissenting views and ethnicities. Only at a gathering of proudly hard-nosed defense experts would such political goals be likened to a dreaded disease.
One of the less gloomy assessments involved Iran, the topic that had deeply depressed and divided last year's gathering. Recent American and Israeli intelligence assessments were suggesting that a combination of tougher sanctions and covert action—the assassination of Iranian scientists; the sabotaging of sophisticated parts and equipment; and Stuxnet, the "virus" that most Herzliya participants seemed to love and for which they privately claimed some pride of ownership—had delayed Iran's nuclear weapons ambition by two to four years. Dov Zakheim, a former American under-secretary of Defense, told the Jerusalem Post and conference participants that Israel did not have to attack Iran to stop its nuclear program. Thanks to its deployment of the Arrow 2 ballistic missile defense system, which relies on U.S. Navy Aegis missile defense ships in the Mediterranean, he said, there was now "less than a one percent chance that an Iranian missile would get through these defenses."
The newly bolstered confidence, however, did not prompt Israelis to stop blaming the Obama Administration for having "wasted" a year, as one Israeli defense analyst put it, by trying to engage and coax Tehran into suspending or stopping its enrichment program and other activities consistent with weapons-making efforts.
The experts also continued blasting the Obama Administration for pressuring Israel to return to the peace table by insisting that Netanyahu freeze all settlement expansion activity, a demand that had forced the Palestinian Authority to adopt the same position.
While several Israelis seemed, if not content, at least willing to tolerate the lack of progress toward renewing peace talks with the Palestinians and Israel's other foes—the status quo was the "worst alternative, except for all the others," asserted Martin Kramer, of the Shalem Center—others warned that the perpetuation of the status quo was unacceptably dangerous for Israel. Those who blamed Israel for failure to make progress on the peace front would use the stalled process as yet another justification for delegitimizing Israel.
One indication of the sorry state of the on-again, mostly off-again, process was the no-show by Yasser Abed Rabbo, the secretary general of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the only senior Palestinian official who was scheduled to speak at the conference.
His was not the only empty chair, however. Defense Secretary Ehud Barak, who had recently quit the Labor Party to form a new center-Zionist faction called Independence in order to keep his thankless Defense post, flew to Washington to brief senior American officials on the Mubarak mess. Nor did Bibi Netanyahu attend—the first time in the conference's 11-year history that an Israeli prime minister has not addressed the gathering. Israelis grumbled that Bibi felt that too many of the conference sponsors were hostile to him and his political agenda.
Senior officials who did attend were virtually unanimous in denouncing the Israeli government, arguing that Israel's political system had become utterly dysfunctional. Weakness, selfishness, and greed jeopardized the state itself, warned Tzipi Livni, chairperson of the Kadima party, the former minister of foreign affairs, and the head of the not-so-loyal opposition.
Much of the conference gossip focused on Israel's inability to take tough decisions given its corruption and increasingly bitter partisan divisions, a failure that has rarely been bandied about quite so openly.
At the session's end, Uriel Reichman, the president of the IDC Herzliya, lamented the tragic deaths of three IDC graduates. Yossi Dahan had volunteered to serve in the paratroopers, where he was a first lieutenant. He helped support his family by working as a night watchman at a house in Kfar Shmaryahu. One night two motorcyclists drove by the house and sprayed it with bullets, killing Dahan. His killers were never caught. He was a victim of organized crime, Reichman charged, crime that had penetrated even high levels of government. He named no names; he didn't have to.
The second victim, Roi Assaf, was on summer break in Sinai when he was killed by Muslim terrorists. He was 28 years old. He had done volunteer work in his hometown of Kfar Saba.
Nir Katz, 26, was a computer science major. He was killed in 2009 at the gay community center in Tel Aviv where he did volunteer work. His crime was being gay, Reichman said.
All three of these young men, Reichman said, embodied the spirit of Israel and had been killed for naught. Violence, he said, had become part of Israeli life. Israel needed not only a new system of government, one that was not paralyzed by religious and ideological divisions. It also needed a less violent, more moral and caring society.
It needed to rein in its own "fundamentalism," he said, by refusing to permit groups who cared little for Israeli values to control the country's education system and live off of tax-payer financial support. It needed citizens who would fight for their path and for a just state. It needed to recapture its vision.
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