… are in this well-researched article by Esam al-Amin. H/t to Jonathan Wright.
Amin gives a lot of details of the plan to launch the counter-revolution, starting with a key meeting by a “small clique of officials”, held in Cairo on the afternoon of Monday, Jan.31:
- According to several sources including former intelligence officer Col. Omar Afifi, one of these officials was the new Interior minister, Police Gen. Mahmoud Wagdy, who as the former head of the prison system, is also a torture expert. He asked Hosni Mubarak, the embattled president to give him a week to take care of the demonstrators who have been occupying major squares around the country for about a week…
The meeting included many security officials including Brig. Gen. Ismail Al-Shaer, Cairo’s security chief, as well as other security officers. In addition, leaders of the National Democratic Party (NDP)- the ruling party- including its Secretary General and head of the Consultative Assembly (upper house of Parliament), Safwat El-Sherif, as well as Parliament Speaker, Fathi Sorour, were briefed and given their assignments. Similarly, the retained Minister of Information, Anas Al-Feky, was fully apprised of the plan.
Amin starts his piece with the inevitable comparison to “Operation Ajax”, the CIA op in Iran back in 1953 that, by using hired thugs, the spreading of fears about “instability”, and the distribution of large gobs of money to corrupt individuals and organizations, laid the ground for an army/shah coup against the elected government of Mohamed Mosadegh.
He also starts with this great quote from Lenin:
- There are decades when nothing happens; and there are weeks when decades happen.
Indeed. We are living through a series of such weeks right now.
There is a lot of great interest in Amin’s piece– including his reporting that the spirits of the thugocrats have been mightily fortified by the support that various Israeli and Saudi leaders have expressed for their efforts.
He also wrote this:
- The battle plan was for the baltagies [= regime-mobilized thugs] to block seven entrances of the Tahrir Square, leaving only the American Embassy entrance open for the thugs to push back the demonstrators in order for them to come so close to the Embassy that its guards surrounding it would have to shoot at them and thus instigate a confrontation with the Americans.
Instigating a clash between Egyptian nationalists and the Americans… Whose playbook does that come out of? Aha! The Lavon Affair of 1954.
This whole attempt to use brute force, disinformation, and slimy political tactics to push back Egypt’s current democratic revolution really does seem like a ham-handed– but extremely dangerous– return to the 1950s.
What if our embassy allows the demonstrators inside?
Listening, as I work, to SAFM, the South African English-language news-talk-features radio station, I hear our “Editors” being asked: “But who are the leaders of this Egyptian uprising?.” SAFM is a sub-Western station in terms of its own editorial direction.
And further, insultingly, the SAFM anchor insinuates that the demonstrators are only performing for the media.
Revolutionists exist to render a people-in-itself to a people-for-itself. Revolution happens when the people act. The self-acting people is the Revolutionary Subject of History, now as in the past.
Therefore the question: “Who are the leaders?” is a counter-revolutionary question. It is impatient for the moment when the status quo ante – of agency reserved to the ruling class – will return.
It is also a “conformist” as opposed to a “non-conformist” question.