Sunday, January 30, 2011

WikiLeaks Egypt: paranoids see neocon conspiracy

The WikiLeaks revelations on Egypt's Hosni Mubarak regime provide an interesting political Rorschach test—viewed either as evidence that the US backs unsavory dictators or as vindicating paranoia about neocon conspiracies behind the current wave of unrest in the Arab world. In the words of The Telegraph's incredibly distorted lead Jan. 28: "Even as they were officially supporting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, American officials were secretly helping dissidents interested in using social media to overthrow his regime, a secret dispatch from the US embassy in Cairo has revealed." In fact, the Dec. 30, 2008 cable (on the Wikileaks website) only "reveals" that the US embassy helped a young activist attend an "Alliance of Youth Movements Summit" in New York, while keeping his identity secret from the Egyptian security services.

The more accurate account in the Globe & Mail quotes the cable from US Ambassador Margaret Scobey saying the dissident "offered no roadmap of concrete steps toward [the] highly unrealistic goal of replacing the current regime with a parliamentary democracy prior to the 2011 presidential elections."

Kind of like the blind men and the elephant, eh? The Guardian cites another US diplomatic cable released by WikiLeaks as documenting that the embassy knew police brutality and torture in Egypt are "routine and pervasive"—yet this never prompted the US to cut off aid (an annual $1.5 billion, exceeded only by Israel and Pakistan), much less unleash the kind of demonization campaign reserved for official enemy states (e.g. Iran).

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