Friday 11 February 2011

Egypt


Mubarak is gone. Well done the people of Egypt. What an inspiration and what courage in the face of State terrorist tactics.

Mubarak's successor Omar Suleiman is known as the CIA's man in Cairo, and is reported to have personally tortured Mamdouh Habib an Egyptian born, Australian citizen. Habib was seized at the request of the CIA in October 2001, and while detained (for extraordinary rendition) in Pakistan, was suspended from a hook and electrocuted repeatedly before being handed over to the CIA in Egypt. 

In his memoir My Story: The Tale of A Terrorist Who Wasn't, Habib was repeatedly electrocuted, immersed in water to his nostrils and beaten. His fingers were broken and he was hung from metal hooks. At one point, his interrogator slapped him so hard his blindfold was dislodged revealing the identity of his tormentor. Omar Suleiman.

Frustrated that Habib was not providing useful information or confessing to involvement in terrorism, Suleiman ordered a guard to murder a shackled prisoner in front of Habib, which he did with a vicious karate kick. In April 2002, after five months in Egypt, Habib was rendered to American custody at Bagram prison in Afghanistan - and then transported to Guantanamo. On January 11, 2005, the day before he was scheduled to be charged, Dana Priest, the Pulitzer prize winning journalist of the Washington Post published an exposé about Habib’s torture. The US government immediately announced that he would not be charged and would be repatriated to Australia.

It was Suleiman who in 2005, vowed to stop the elections in Gaza in order to prevent Hamas from gaining control. Here he is talking to Shimon Peres of Israel.



More recently it was Suleiman who, wishing Gaza to go 'hungry' but not 'starve', blocked a final agreement for the Gaza Peace Flotilla to take sanctuary in Egyptian El-Arish. Turkish intelligence prevailed, though regrettably in vain. The IDF boarded and seized the flotilla's chance to ever take refuge 74 kilometres away.