Dave Foreman and the First Green Scare Case

Targeting Earth First!

by JOSHUA FRANK AND JEFFREY ST. CLAIR, Counterpunch & greenmucktaker.com

Dave Foreman, co-founder of Earth First!, awoke at five in the morning on May 30, 1989 to the sound of three FBI agents shouting his name in his Tucson, Arizona home. Foreman’s wife Nancy answered the door frantically and was shoved aside by brawny FBI agents as they raced toward their master bedroom where her husband was sound asleep, naked under the sheets, with plugs jammed in his ears to drown out the noise of their neighbor’s barking Doberman pincher. By the time Foreman came to, the agents were surrounding his bed, touting bulletproof vests and .357 Magnums.

He immediately thought of the murder of Fred Hampton in Chicago, expecting to be shot in cold blood. But as Foreman put it, “Being a nice, middle-class honky male, they can’t get away with that stuff quite as easily as they could with Fred, or with all the native people on the Pine Ridge Reservation back in the early 70s.”

So instead of firing off a few rounds, they jerked a dazed Foreman from his slumber, let him pull on a pair of shorts, and hauled him outside where they threw him in the back of an unmarked vehicle. It took over six hours before Foreman even knew why he had been accosted by Federal agents.

Foreman’s arrest was the culmination of three years and two million tax dollars spent in an attempt to frame a few Earth First! activists for conspiring to damage government and private property. The FBI infiltrated Earth First! groups in several states with informants and undercover agent-provocateurs. Over 500 hours of tape recordings of meetings, events and casual conversation had been amassed. Phones had been tapped and homes broken in to. The FBI was doing their best to intimidate radical environmentalists across the country, marking them as potential threat to national security.

It was the FBI’s first case of Green Scare.

The day before Foreman was yanked from bed and lugged in to the warm Arizona morning, two so-called co-conspirators, biologist Marc Baker and antinuclear activist Mark Davis, were arrested by some 50 agents on horseback and on foot, with a helicopter hovering above as the activists stood at the base of a power line tower in the middle of desert country in Wenden, Arizona, 200 miles northwest of Foreman’s home. The next day Peg Millet, a self-described “redneck woman for wilderness,” was arrested at a nearby Planned Parenthood where she worked. Millet earlier evaded the FBI’s dragnet.

Driven to the site by an undercover FBI agent, the entire episode, as Foreman put it, was the agent’s conception. Foreman, described by the bureau as the guru and financier of the operation, was also pegged for having thought up the whole elaborate scheme, despite the fact that their evidence was thin.

Back in the 1970s the FBI issued a memo to their field offices stating that when attempting to break up dissident groups, the most effective route was to forget about hard intelligence or annoying facts. Simply make a few arrests and hold a public press conference. Charges could later be dropped. It didn’t matter; by the time the news hit the airwaves and was printed up in the local newspapers, the damage had already been done.

It was the FBI’s assertion that the action stopped by the arrests under that Arizona power line in late May, 1989, was to be a test run for a much grander plot involving Davis, Baker, Millet, and the group’s leader, Dave Foreman. The FBI charged the four with the intent to damage electrical transmission lines that lead to the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado.

“The big lie that the FBI pushed at their press conference the day after the arrests was that we were a bunch of terrorists conspiring to cut the power lines into the Palo Verde and Diablo Canyon nuclear facilities in order to cause a nuclear meltdown and threaten public health and safety,” explained Foreman.

In the late 1980s the FBI launched operation THERMCON in response to an act of sabotage of the Arizona Snowbowl ski lift near Flagstaff, Arizona that occurred in October 1987, allegedly by Davis, Millet and Baker. Acting under the quirky name, Evan Mecham Eco-Terrorist International Conspiracy (EMETIC) — the eco-saboteurs wrecked several of the company’s ski lifts, claiming that structures were cutting in to areas of significant biological importance.

This was not the first act the group claimed responsibility for. A year prior EMETIC sent a letter declaring they were responsible for the damage at the Fairfield Snow Bowl near Flagstaff. The group’s letter also included a jovial threat to “chain the Fairfield CEO to a tree at the 10,000-foot level and feed him shrubs and roots until he understands the suicidal folly of treating the planet primarily as a tool for making money.”

The group used an acetylene torch to cut bolts from several of the lift’s support towers, making them inoperable. Upon receiving the letter, the Arizona ski resort was forced to shut down the lift in order to repair the damages, which rang up to over $50,000.

But the big allegations heaved at these eco-saboteurs wasn’t for dislodging a few bolts at a quaint ski resort in the heart of the Arizona mountains, or for inconveniencing a few ski bums from their daily excursions. No, the big charges were levied at the group for allegedly plotting to disrupt the functions of the Rocky Flats nuclear facility hundreds of miles away. Ironically, at the moment of their arrests, the FBI was simultaneously looking into public health concerns due to an illegal radioactive waste leak at the nuclear power site, which led Earth First! activist Mike Roselle to quip, “ [the FBI] would have discharged its duty better by assisting in a conspiracy to cut power to Rocky Flats, instead of trying to stop one.”

***

Gerry Spence climbed into his private jet in Jackson, Wyoming estate almost immediately after he heard about the FBI arrest of Dave Foreman in Arizona. Spence had made a name for himself among environmental activists in the late-1970s for his case against energy company Kerr-McGee, when he provided legal services to the family of former employee Karen Silkwood, who died suspiciously after she challenged the company of environmental abuses at one of their most productive nuclear facilities. Silkwood, who made plutonium pellets for nuclear reactors, had been assigned by her union to investigate health and safety concerns at a Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. In her monitoring of the facility Silkwood found dozens of evident regulatory violations, including faulty respiratory equipment as well as many cases of workers being exposed to radioactive material.

Silkwood went public after the company seemingly ignored her and her union’s concerns, even going as far as to testify to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about the issues, claiming that regulations were sidestepped in an attempt to up the speed of production. She also claimed that workers had been mishandling nuclear fuel rods, but the company has covered up the incidences by falsifying inspection reports.

On the night of November 13, 1974, Silkwood left a union meeting in Crescent with documents in hand to drive to Oklahoma City where she was to meet and discuss Kerr-McGee’s alleged violations with a union official and two New York Times reporters. She never made it. Silkwood’s body was found the next day in the driver’s seat of her car on the side of the road, stuck in a culvert. She was pronounced dead on the scene and no documents were found in her car.

An independent private investigation revealed that Silkwood was in full control of her vehicle when it was struck from behind and forced off to the side of the road. According to the private investigators, the steering wheel of her car was bent in a manner that showed conclusively that Silkwood was prepared for the blow of the accident as it occurred. She had not been asleep at the wheel as investigators initially thought. The coroner concluded she had not died as a result of the accident, but possibly from suffocation.

No arrests or charges were ever made. Silkwood’s children and father filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee on behalf of her estate. Gerry Spence was their lead attorney. An autopsy of Silkwood’s body showed extremely high levels of plutonium contamination. Lawyers for Kerr-McGee argued first that the levels found were normal, but after damning evidence to the contrary, they were forced to argue that Silkwood had likely poisoned herself.

Spence had been victorious. Kerr-McGee’s defense was caught in a series of unavoidable contradictions. Silkwood’s body was laden with poison as result of her work at the nuclear facility. In her death Spence vindicated her well-documented claims. The initial jury verdict was for the company to pay $505,000 in damages and $10,000,000 in punitive damages. Kerr-McGee appealed and drastically reduced the jury’s verdict, but the initial ruling was later upheld by the Supreme Court. On the way to a retrial the company agreed to pay $1.38 million to the Silkwood estate.

Gerry Spence was not cowed by the antics of the Kerr-McGee Corporation, and when he agreed to take on Dave Foreman’s case pro-bono, justice seemed to be on the horizon for the Earth First! activists as well.

“Picture a little guy out there hacking at a dead steel pole, an inanimate object, with a blowtorch. He’s considered a criminal,” said Spence, explaining how he planned to steer the narrative of Foreman’s pending trial. “Now see the image of a beautiful, living, 400-year-old-tree, with an inanimate object hacking away at it. This non-living thing is corporate America, but the corporate executives are not considered criminals at all.”

Like so many of the FBI charges brought against radical activists throughout the years, the case against Dave Foreman was less exciting than the investigation that led up to his arrest. The bureau had done its best to make Foreman and Earth First! out to be the most threatening activists in America.

Spence was not impressed and in fact argued as much, stating the scope of the FBI’s operation THERMCON was “very similar to the procedures the FBI used during the 1960s against dissident groups.” No doubt Spence was right. Similar to the movement disruption exemplified by COINTELPRO against Martin Luther King Jr., the Black Panthers and the American Indian Movement, the FBI’s crackdown of Earth First! in the late 1980s had many alarming parallels to the agency of old.

“Essentially what we need to understand is that the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which was formed during the Palmer Raids in 1921, was set up from the very beginning to inhibit internal political dissent. They rarely go after criminals. They’re a thought police,” said Foreman of the FBI’s motives for targeting environmentalists. “Let’s face it, that’s what the whole government is. Foreman’s first law of government reads that the purpose of the state, and all its constituent elements, is the defense of an entrenched economic elite and philosophical orthodoxy. Thankfully, there’s a corollary to that law—they aren’t always very smart and competent in carrying out their plans.”

The man who was paid to infiltrate Earth First! under the guise of THERMCON was anything but competent. Special agent Michael A. Fain, stationed in the FBI’s Phoenix office, befriended Peg Millet and begun attending Earth First! meetings in the area. Fain, who went by alias, Mike Tait, posed as a Vietnam vet who dabbled in construction and gave up booze after his military service. On more than one occasion, while wearing a wire, Fain had tried to entice members of Earth First! in different acts of vandalism. They repeatedly refused.

During pre-trial evidence discovery the defense was allowed to listen to hours of Fain’s wire-tapings, when they found that the not-so-careful agent inadvertently forgot to turn off his recorder. Fain, while having a conversation with two other agents at a Burger King after a brief meeting with Foreman, spoke about the status of his investigation, exclaiming, “I don’t really look for them to be doing a lot of hurting people… [Dave Foreman] isn’t really the guy we need to pop — I mean in terms of an actual perpetrator. This is the guy we need to pop to send a message. And that’s all we’re really doing… Uh-oh! We don’t need that on tape! Hoo boy!”

Here the FBI was, acting as if these Earth First!ers were, publicly vilifying them, while privately admitting that they posed no real threat. “[The agency is acting] as if [its] dealing with the most dangerous, violent terrorists that the country’s ever known,” explained Spence at the time. “And what we are really dealing with is ordinary, decent human beings who are trying to call the attention of America to the fact that the Earth is dying.”

The FBI’s rationale for targeting Foreman was purely political as he was one of the most prominent and well-spoken radical environmentalists of the time. Despite their claims that they were not directly targeting Earth First! or Foreman, and were instead investigating threats of sabotage of power lines that led to a nuclear power plant — their public indictment painted quite a different story.

“Mr. Foreman is the worst of the group,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Dokken announced to the court. “He sneaks around in the background … I don’t like to use the analogy of a Mafia boss, but they never do anything either. They just sent their munchkins out to do it.”

But agent Michael Fain’s on-tape gaffes were simply too much for the prosecution to manage, and the case against Foreman, having been deferred almost seven years, was finally reduced in 1996 to a single misdemeanor and a meager $250 in fines. The $2 million the FBI wasted tracking Earth First! over the latter part of the 1980s had only been nominally successful. Yet the alleged ring-leader was still free. Unfortunately, the FBI may have gotten exactly what they wanted all along. Dave Foreman later stepped down as spokesman to Earth First! and inherited quite a different role in the environmental movement — one of invisibility and near silence.

Peg Millet, Mark Davis and Marc Baker were all sentenced separately in 1991 for their involvement in their group EMETIC’s acts of ecotage against the expansion of Arizona Snowbowl. Davis got 6 years and $19,821 in restitution. Millet only 3 years, with the same fine, while Baker only received 6 months and a $5,000 fine.

Little did these activists know that there capture and subsequent arraignments were only the beginning. THERMCON’s crackdown of Earth First! would prove to be a dry-run for the Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Joshua Frank is author of Left Out! How Liberals Helped Reelect George W. Bush (Common Courage Press, 2005), and along with Jeffrey St. Clair, the editor of Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance in the Heartland, and of Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is now available in Kindle format. He can be reached at brickburner@gmail.com.

Jeffrey St. Clair’s latest books are Born Under a Bad Sky and Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, published by AK Press. Hopeless is now available in Kindle format. He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net

Durban’s Brutal Underside

Courage From Below

Ndabo Mzimela picks up the pieces after the eThekwini land invasion unit demolished shacks at Cato Crest at the weekend. Picture: Zanele Zulu

There will be blood

by RICHARD PITHOUSE,

Durban, South Africa.

Nkosinathi Mngomezulu was shot in the stomach on Saturday morning. He was shot at the Marikana land occupation at Stop 1, Cato Crest in the city of Durban, South Africa during an eviction. He’s currently in the Intensive Care Unit of the King Edward Hospital. His comrades fear that he may be attacked in the hospital. They’ve not been allowed to post their own guard but they’re making sure that he’s always surrounded by a large group during visiting hours.

Mngomezulu’s comrades are not paranoid. He’s been threatened with death if he recovers and returns home to the occupation. On the 26^th of June Nkululeko Gwala, like Mngomezulu a member of the shack dwellers’ movement Abahlali baseMjondolo, was assassinated in Cato Crest. Just over three months earlier another activist, Thembinkosi Qumbelo was gunned down in the same area in similar circumstances.

And hospital is not necessarily a safe place for someone who has crossed the African National Congress (ANC) in Durban. On the 30th of June last year Bhekimuzi Ndlovu was shot in the Zakheleni shack settlement in Umlazi after a series of protests against the local councillor and for land and housing. The Unemployed People’s Movement reported that the next day he was visited in hospital by a delegation from the local ANC. They said that they wanted to pray for him. Shortly after they left he became violently ill. The doctor diagnosed poisoning.

Murder has been part of the repertoire of political containment in post-apartheid Durban since Michael Makhabane was shot in the chest at point blank range by a police officer on a university campus in May 2000. Political killings have been undertaken by shadowy assassins since at least April 2006 when two former South African Communist Party activists were assassinated in Umlazi after supporting an independent candidate against the ANC in the local government elections. And the armed mobilisation of ANC supporters against people organised outside of the party has been given de facto sanction from the police and senior politicians in the city and the province since at least September 2009 when Abahlali baseMjondolo were attacked in the Kennedy Road shack settlement in Clare Estate.

The attack on Abahlali baseMjondolo in 2009 was also the moment when the language of ethnicity began to be openly used by the local ANC, including senior figures in the Municipality like Nigel Gumede, to legitimate exclusion and violence. Abahlali baseMjondolo, an ethnically diverse organisation, was misrepresented as an Mpondo organisation and it was made clear that this designation rendered it illegitimate. Ethnic claims were mobilised in a similar way when people were burnt out of the kwaShembe shack settlement in Clermont in March 2010 and in the repression that followed sustained organisation by the Unemployed People’s Movement in the Zakheleni settlement in Umlazi last year.

Death threats are now a routine feature of political discourse in Durban. They are not only part of the arsenal of increasingly heavily armed local councillors and their party committees. In September 2007 politically connected businessman Ricky Govender, a man who has often been described as a gangster, was reported to have threatened to have a journalist at the Mercury, a local paper, killed. He had previously been reported to have threatened to have local Abahlali baseMjondolo activist Shamitha Naidoo killed. Nigel Gumede, who chairs the housing committee in the eThekwini Municipality, has never denied the claim that he openly threatened S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo in a meeting in the City Hall in October 2011. On a number of occasions ANC members bused in to court appearances involving independently organised activists have openly issued death threats against activists.

Witnesses say that Mngomezulu was shot by a manager of the Land Invasions Unit, a municipal force used to crush land occupations. Cities across the country have similar units and they routinely and often violently destroy shacks in brazen violation of the law. The police are claiming that Mngomezulu was shot after he stabbed one of the unit’s members. Witnesses emphatically deny this. The police in Durban have been so habitually dishonest for so long when it comes to giving accounts of their own violence, and to violence against people organised outside of the ANC, that nothing that they say should be taken seriously in the absence of credible evidence. But even if Mngomezulu did put up some resistance to the Land Invasions Unit he would have been within his right to do so. There is a clear right, in law, to defend one’s home against illegal attack.

The land at Stop 1 in Cato Crest was occupied, and the occupation named Marikana, in March this year after a large number of people were made homeless as their shacks were destroyed to make way for a housing development. As has been typical for years shack owners were given houses but tenants were (illegally) left homeless if they couldn’t pay a bribe to get a house or didn’t have solid connections to local party structures. In this case the eviction of the tenants was also given an overt ethnic inflection with politicians from the local councillor to Nigel Gumede and the mayor, James Nxumalo, openly mobilising a discourse that presents people from the Eastern Cape province as alien intruders in Durban.

Some of the people that were illegally rendered homeless earlier this year had lived in Cato Crest since as far back at 1995. They had work in the area, their children were in local schools and Durban was where they were making their lives. The local ANC had told them to ‘go back to Lusikisiki’ – a village in the Eastern Cape Province. They decided, instead, to occupy an adjacent piece of land. Their shacks have been demolished on eight separate occasions, often violently, and they have rebuilt them each time. As I write (on Tuesday 24 September) the ninth demolition is in progress. They have been to the High Court five times to request the Court’s intervention against these patently unlawful evictions. The Municipality has brazenly violated all of the assurances it has given the court, as well as three court orders.

People who have tried to defend their homes have been beaten and shot with rubber bullets. When they have gone to the streets they have been arrested and beaten in the local police station. When the court ordered lawyers from both sides to meet at the Marikana land occupation on Tuesday last week to identify which shacks were protected by its orders local ANC members were mobilised by the local councillor to disrupt the process. Intimidation, including death threats, made the process mandated by the court impossible.

This drama is not simply about the state using violence to try and sustain the duopoly that it shares with the market with regard to the allocation of land. It’s also about protecting the interests of the ruling party. Party supporters have built shacks in the same area without consequence. These are political evictions. And politics is being openly mediated through ethnicity. Mpondo people are being presented as having no right to this city and the Zulus amongst them as disloyal. S’bu Zikode from Abahlali baseMjondolo has concluded that “To the smug politicians in their suits in the City Hall, and their thugs hunting us in the shacks, you are not a proper human being if you are not Zulu and if you are a Zulu living and organising with Mpondo people then you are not a proper Zulu”.

For Zikode “The City Hall is red with blood”. But on Monday last week Abahlali baseMjondolo brought its own tide of red shirted resolve to the City Hall in an impressive march. The movement has 1 560 members in good standing in Cato Crest and its members from across the city are holding meetings at the Marikana occupation, cooking together and rebuilding the shacks after each demolition.

Zuma’s increasingly violent and predatory state has its firmest urban base in Durban. But despite the authority that the ANC wields in this city its power is not exercised with patrician assurance. On the contrary the scale and intensity of political violence here, much of it carried out in power struggles within the party, far exceeds that of any of the other major cities. The law remains an important terrain of struggle in Durban but neither it nor the Constitution offer any guarantees. The local state and the local party are both willing to crush dissent, perfectly lawful dissent, with violence. The silence of higher authority has served to sanction this violence. Nonetheless it is here in Durban that the most sustained popular resistance to the brutality and venality that has metastasized through the ANC has been organised. There has been remarkably innovation, tenacity and courage from below. But although the future remains unwritten it seems certain that there will be blood.

Richard Pithouse teaches politics at Rhodes University in South Africa.

Source: SOUTH AFRICAN CIVIL SOCIETY INFORMATION SERVICE (SACSIS)

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The Military Turns Really Ugly in Egypt

Kirdasa: The Egyptian Hama
by MOHAMED MALIK and MOHAMAD OMAR
Giza.
This article first appeared on Counterpunch, to which we are indebted

Various reports have been floated in the media about the events at Kirdasa yesterday, such as 15 police officers were killed, which led to a full army assault with tanks and helicopters, many dead and hundreds injured. The town was surrounded as Hama, Syria, had been, during the fateful massacre of 1982 when Hafez al-Assad, Bashar’s father, decided to bludgeon the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria to death. The similarity is not superficial, for Kirdasa is indeed one of the towns that strongly supports the Muslim Brotherhood and had been the subject of a similar attack by Gamal Abdel-Nasser’s military in 1954.

Except that all the talk of 15 police officers being killed there was just Egyptian media propaganda, automatically trotted out by everybody else. Local residents talk about 1 police officer being shot by the army for not obeying orders, and the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Kirdasa has been virtually wiped out by constant and recurring arrests in view of the fact that Kirdasa has had a strong showing in the continuing national demonstrations against the coup. The army assault was in fact unprovoked and merely part of a plan to attack those towns that seemed to supply the most participants to the national demonstrations. Another such town which was subjected to a vicious assault was Delga, recently in the news.

Of our original group demonstrating at Nahda square in Giza, we reported the death of Mohamed Osman after the military assault on our protest camp, after we left to join a demonstration at Mohamed Mahmoud square in Mohandseen on 14th August. At the same time we reported that Muhannad Ramadan survived a shot to the head, but lost sight in both eyes. Muhannad unfortunately had just died from his wounds. Hosam al-Zomoor who had been arrested on the 16th August ‘Day of Rage’, and who endured the travails of Egyptian police cells ever since, was finally released two days ago with serious injuries suffered during his captivity into hospital care.

Egypt, a normally vibrant country, despite its poverty is sinking into despair and oblivion. Demonstrations continue every day despite the continuing arrests. Civil disobedience in the form of refusing to pay bills and withdrawing money from the banks has put pressure on the banks and the utilities, with widespread blackouts now beginning to affect commercial activity. The 22nd September is now announced as a day of inducing major disruptions to road and rail traffic.

But the military is unrepentant and appears to want to continually up the ante. Just as the demonstrations will not stop, Sissi, the leader of Egypt’s junta, who has recently been compared with Pinochet of Chile, will never give in of his own volition. More and more news keeps on emerging about the bad faith in which the army dealt with all the new political parties ever since the 25th revolution. While demonstrators have kept their demonstrations and their acts of civil disobedience entirely peaceful, Sissi’s policy is to continuously goad them into violent responses. Having begun to stage such violent acts in the name of the opposition, but having failed to convince the public that they are genuine, as in the case of the bombing that was announced before it happened, the stakes seem to be rising all the time. This headlong rush towards the total destruction of the country has added a new rumour mill about what the military will do next that makes it impossible to resume any kind of normal life.

[pullquote] It would seem that the mainstream media generally is buying the story spun by Egyptian state media and the satellite stations owned by the Egyptian oligarchs, whilst the blocking of pro-democracy TV coverage, and the regular arrest of reporters, goes on completely unreported and uncommented. (Such conditions of blatant media manipulation are fairly familiar to discerning Americans.)[/pullquote]

Lamis Hadidi, the Islamophobic talk show hostess of al-Misri al-Yawm on billionaire Mohamed al-Amin’s CBC Channel, once a spokeswoman for Mubarak’s 2005 re-election campaign, who since the days of Mubarak has been calling for the strengthening of the siege against Gaza, and has continued to do so ever since, is now calling for a major assault on Muslim populations in general. For this reason, few people are sending their children back to school for fear of thugs being sent to attack the schools, in order to once again to lay the blame at the door of the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’, and set the stage for yet more assaults.

The BBC in Cairo is also astonishingly joining the ‘reds under the beds’ campaign of the Egyptian media over the Muslim Brotherhood, with a broadcaster accusing the Nobel Prize winning Yemeni activist Tawakkol Kirman of being a member of the Muslim Brotherhood for supporting the recent demonstrations, and she, outraged at the accusations, defending the support as being the normal reaction of someone who wants democracy.

It would seem that the mainstream media generally is buying the story spun by Egyptian state media and the satellite stations owned by the Egyptian oligarchs, whilst the blocking of pro-democracy TV coverage, and the regular arrest of reporters, goes on completely unreported and uncommented. Those TV stations still covering the demonstrations (al-Hiwar, al-Quds, and al-Jazeera Mubashir) are reduced to airing footage uploaded from mobile phones, but although those stations are extremely busy and active in their phone-ins and discussions, from the perspective of the BBC, and even newspapers such as the Guardian and the Independent in London which are noted for their more open-minded approach, they might as well be on a different planet.

Does this mean that if the rumour mills are true and schools are going to be attacked, that once again the ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ are going to be automatically blamed by the Egyptian media, and local communities then be ravaged by the unrelenting Egyptian military, without even the slightest doubts gracing the lines of subsequent reports in the international media?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mohamed Malik (weaver) can be reached at malektex@hotmail.com.
Mohamad Omar (surgeon), can be reached at m.omar84@yahoo.com).

Also contributing to this report: Badr Mohamad Badr (teacher), Yasser Mahran (lawyer), Ahmad Abdel-Ghafar (businessman), Sayed Khamis (teacher), Mohamad Gheith (pharmacist),others whom we thank have helped in the redaction of this article

_________________________________

ADDENDUM
The report below, from another credible source, confirms and amplifies the above.
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Eleven policemen allegedly killed by the Muslim Brotherhood in Kirdasa
By Lamees El Sharqawy

Brigadier Mohammed Gaber, supposedly killed by Muslim Brotherhood militants.

Egyptian activists are circulating a video that shows 11 officers and conscripts who were killed during their work in Kirdasa police station (see video above), allegedly by Muslim Brotherhood supporters.
An eyewitness police assistant said the Brotherhood raided and occupied the police station, and assaulted the officers present at the time, dragging and slaughtering them. They left Kirdasa station in rubble, according to the eyewitness.

Victims were taken to Al Agouza hospital on Wednesday night and Thursday morning.

A Facebook statement on the page “We are sorry, President” (launched in 2011 in support of ex-President Mubarak) published a photo of one of the officers, Brigadier Mohammed Gaber (pictured above) before and after his death in Kirdasa Station.

Egypt was gripped by violence yesterday as police brutally cleared the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins, while Morsi supporters responded in kind.

The casualty figures are widely disputed. The Ministry of Health mentions at least 525 killed and 3717 wounded in the clashes that took place in the clear on Wednesday. The Muslim Brotherhood say that the death toll reached 2000, with many more injured.

Minister of Interior Mohammed Ibrahim announced in a press conference last night that 43 policemen were killed in clearing the Rabaa and Nahda sit-ins.

A month-long curfew has been imposed between 7:00pm and 6:00am in Cairo and 13 other governorates, as part of the general state of emergency.

Lamees El Sharqawy is a member of Hoqook News Network. The Hoqook News Network is an Egyptian independent media organisation with a social aim, including a special focus on issues related to human rights, dialogue, democratisation and responsible media practices. It was established in 2010.

Gangster State US/UK

» Gangster State US/UK — Paul Craig Roberts

On July 23 I wrote about how the US reversed roles with the USSR and became the tyrant that terrifies the world. We have now had further confirmation of that fact. It comes from two extraordinary actions by Washington’s British puppet state.

David Miranda, the Brazilian partner of Glenn Greenwald, who is reporting on the illegal and unconstitutional spying by the National Stasi Agency, was seized, no doubt on Washington’s orders, by the puppet British government from the international transit zone of a London airport. Miranda had not entered the UK, but he was seized by UK authorities. http://rt.com/op-edge/uk-gay-greenwald-freedom-police-679/

Washington’s UK puppets simply kidnapped him, threatened him for nine hours, and stole his computer, phones, and all his electronic equipment. As a smug US official told the media, “the purpose was to send a message.”

You might remember that Edward Snowden was stuck for some weeks in the international transit zone of the Moscow airport. The Obama tyrant repeatedly browbeat Russia’s President Putin to violate the law and kidnap Snowden for Obama. Unlike the once proud and law-abiding British, Putin refused to place Washington’s desires above law and human rights.

The second extraordinary violation occurred almost simultaneously with UK authorities appearing at the Guardian newspaper and illegally destroying the hard drives on the newspaper’s computers with the vain intention of preventing the newspaper from reporting further Snowden revelations of US/UK high criminality.

[pullquote] The question is: are there sufficient brainwashed people in both countries to sustain the US/UK myth that “freedom and democracy” are attained via war crimes? [/pullquote]

It is fashionable in the US and UK governments and among their sycophants to speak of “gangster state Russia.” But we all know who the gangsters are. The worst criminals of our time are the US and UK governments. Both are devoid of all integrity, all honor, all mercy, all humanity. Many members of both governments would have made perfect functionaries in Stalinist Russia or Nazi Germany.

This is extraordinary. It was the English who originated liberty. True, in 1215 it was the freedom of the barons’ rights from the king’s infringement, not the freedom of the commoner. But once the principle was established it spread into the entire society. By 1680 the legal revolution was complete. The king and the government were subject to law. The king and his government were no longer the law and above the law.

In the 13 colonies the Englishmen who populated them inherited this English achievement. When King George’s government refused the colonies the Rights of Englishmen, the colonists revolted, and the United States was born.

The descendants of these colonists now live in an America where their Constitutional protections have been overthrown by a tyrannical government that claims it is above the law. This raw fact has not stopped the US government or its puppets from continuing to cloak the war crime of military aggression in the faux language of “bringing freedom and democracy.” If the Obama and Cameron governments were in the dock at Nuremberg, the entirety of both governments would be convicted.

The question is: are there sufficient brainwashed people in both countries to sustain the US/UK myth that “freedom and democracy” are attained via war crimes?

There is no shortage of brainwashed Americans who love to be told that they are “indispensable” and “exceptional,” and therefore entitled to work their will on the world. It is difficult to discern in these clueless Americans much hope for the revival of liberty. But there is some indication that the British, who did not inherit liberty but had to fight for it for five centuries, might be more determined.

[pullquote] Washington’s UK puppets simply kidnapped him, threatened him for nine hours, and stole his computer, phones, and all his electronic equipment. As a smug US official told the media, “the purpose was to send a message.” [/pullquote]

The British Home Affairs Committee, chaired by Keith Vaz, is demanding an explanation from Obama’s lap dog, the British prime minister. Also, Britain’s watchman over anti-terrorism enforcement, David Anderson, is demanding that the UK Home Office and police explain the illegal use of anti-terrorism laws against Miranda, who is not a terrorist or connected to terrorism in any way.

Brazil’s foreign minister has joined the fray, demanding that London explain why the UK violated its own law and abused a Brazilian citizen.

Of course, everyone knows that Washington forced its UK puppet to violate law in order to serve Washington. One wonders if the British will ever decide that they would be better off as a sovereign country.

The White House denied involvement in Miranda’s kidnapping, but refused to condemn the illegal action of its puppet.

As for the UK’s destruction of press freedom, the White House supports that, too. It is already happening here.

Meanwhile, get accustomed to the police state: http://www.wnd.com/2013/03/now-big-brother-targets-your-fedex-ups-packages/

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paul Craig Roberts is a former distinguished establishmentarian, onetime cabinet member in the Reagan administration, academic, and contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal. Today, his voice is one of the most clear and eloquent against the same establishment.

The Political Future of the Muslim Brotherhood

Excluding the Exclusionary?

Police at the al-Fath mosque in Cairo – scene of firefight between security forces and what they claim was a gunman from the Muslim Brotherhood. Photograph: Muhammad Hamed/Reuters (Guardian, UK)

by MICHAEL GASPER and MOHAMED YOUSRY, Counterpunch
In the immediate aftermath of the coup that deposed president Muhammad Morsi on July 3, 2013, it looked as though the Muslim Brothers had decided to embrace all options including violence. In the heat of the moment, some members of the Muslim Brothers and a number of their supporters waved flags associated with militant Islamist groups, such as al-Qaeda, and issued rampant threats against the deposed president’s opponents. After a quick recalibration however, the Muslim Brothers wrapped themselves in Egyptian flags and brought women and children with them to demonstrations proclaiming that their resistance to the military backed government would be non-violent.

To many, this seemed to be a welcome departure for the Muslim Brothers who had not shied away from espousing violence to achieve their ends through much of their history. However, a closer look at the Brothers’ strategy offers insight into the extent that the group’s past continues to weigh heavily on its decision making in the present. The group’s history is a burden that severely handicaps their ability to reach a political settlement that would secure a legal place for the movement in Egypt’s political future.

Indeed, the parallels between the past and the present are striking. For example, just as they have always done, the Brothers fundamentally overestimated their support among the general population while underestimating the strength of their opponents. In 1953, Muslim Brothers’ luminaries Sayyed Qutb and Hassan al-Hudaybi confidently declared that the Brothers would destroy their opponents (the Free Officers, the military régime that had ousted the monarchy in 1952). There are echoes of that now as many leaders of today’s Brothers confidently declared their ability to defeat the opposition and to reinstate Morsi within a few short days. In both instances the Brothers seem oblivious to the range of forces allayed in support of the new régime.

This inability to grasp the political significance of the moment might be traced to a second factor that has marked the Brothers self-perception since they became a significant player in Egyptian Politics in 1930s. The group continues to represent its discourse as synonymous with Islam and as such distances themselves from any other political movement or trend. Indeed, the Brothers continue to portray their political struggle not as competition for political power but as martyrdom in the path of God. This is not new, in 1965, Qutb and those in his immediate circle (these include the current leader of the Brothers, Muhammad Badie’) declared themselves al-‘Usba al-Mu’minah (Faithful Core). That was enough to justify their view of the 1960s as a battle against the “infidel” régime of president Nasser whom they saw as a lackey of the West conspiring with the Jews and the Soviet Union to destroy Islam. Similarly, we now hear echoes of this dusty rhetoric from many Brothers who stridently assert that their group represents the only vision of Islam and that their struggle is not so much about the future of Egypt, but the future of Islam writ large. To them, their enemies are criminals determined to extinguish God’s light on earth.

Third, as in the past, the Brothers continue to depict themselves as victims protected by angels facing off against non-believers. Long time Brotherhood activist, Zayneb al-Ghazali claimed that while imprisoned in the 1960s, God’s angels appeared in her cell to feed, clothe and protect her. Then over the past weeks, a number of Brotherhood speakers claimed to have seen the angel Gabriel at their on-going encampment in Rab’a al-‘Adawiyya that was so brutally attacked on the morning of August 14, 2013. Among them are some that have gone so far as to claim that they have received divine visions claiming that the Prophet of Islam requested that president Morsi lead him in prayers. In fact, even during Morsi’s presidency, Fahmy Howeidy, the Islamist writer, characterized Morsi’s opponents as Pharaohs and non-believers and the Brothers and president Morsi as Moses and his Godly people.

And finally, the Muslim Brothers continue to do what it does best, muddy the facts. For example, ‘Umar al-Tilmissani (a former head of the Brothers) declared that the movement’s founder, Hassan al-Banna, was the true initiator and the real architect of the 1952 coup that toppled Egypt’s monarchy and brought Nasser to power. This complete rewriting of reality is parallel in the way the current leadership claims that not only did Morsi challenge American/Israeli hegemony in the region (a powerful populist position that is not supported by facts) but also that he had agreed to hold early presidential elections after the military’s ultimatum of June 30, 2013. Again this is not supported by facts. Moreover, the Brothers also continue to argue that the deposed president included the opposition in all his decision-making processes. Regardless of one’s view of the military intervention on July 3, 2013, no serious observer could reasonably assert that Morsi’s government was inclusive.

If history is any indication, the current strategies like those the Brothers adopted during previous moments of political upheaval will fail to achieve the movement’s goals. One need look no further than their 1954 misreading of the political situation that caused their defeat as Nasser detained thousands of Brotherhood members. Eventually, more than 1500 hundred were sentenced to long prison terms and six were hanged.This inability to fully grasp the ramifications of their actions greatly weakened the movement at a time when it was facing increasing repression from the Egyptian state. Was the historical analog to this lesson the frightful violence perpetrated by the security forces against the two encampments of Morsi supporters this week?

With all of this in their history it is perplexing that the current leadership has not learned from the past. Even more inextricable is that despite the caution from a prominent and ardent supporter, Hazem Salah Abu Ismael, a Salafi preacher, many weeks ago on June 27, 2013, that the Brothers had lost much of their ability to mobilize the masses, they still don’t have a realistic view of the present. Indeed it is quite clear that their support, even among Islamists, is dwindling and their popularity among ordinary citizens is very low. This explains at least in part the so far muted response among Egyptians about the violence of August 14.

At the same time, no one can question the fact that the Brothers enjoy enthusiastic support from among their followers and that they are a disciplined and organized force. But, facts on the ground indicate that the movement’s current strategy, its attempt to mobilize the “street” against the military-backed government, has not worked. The Brothers have failed to attract support from outside their ranks. In fact the movement had been reduced to what might be called a “Hail Mary” strategy. Every three or so days, the Brothers organized small marches in an effort to attract others to join them. The strategy produced the opposite effect. Ordinary citizens seemed to grow impatient towards what they saw as disruptive tactics. Indeed, so far, despite a large number of fatalities of Brothers’ supporters, there seems to be scant evidence of sympathy for the Brotherhood. One could see this in especially sharp relief among the residents of the Rab’a vicinity who made no secret of their desire for the Brothers to end their encampment and depart their neighborhood. It is possible the events of Wednesday August 14th may change that, but it seems unlikely.

One incident sums up much of the sentiment on the street. On July 9, 2013, under the leadership of long time Brotherhood activist Mohammed Abdel Qudus, a handful of Brothers attempted to organize a protest against the death of the Brother’s photographer (who was killed during the first massacre perpetrated by the Egyptian army in the wake of the July 3rd Coup). Almost instantaneously, dozens of ordinary Egyptians harangued them, calling them traitors and in turn blaming the Brothers for the events at the Republican Guards Club that resulted in the death of 51 people. One wonders if the same will now happen on an even larger scale after the violence of August 14, 2013.

This decline in the movement’s popularity is due to several factors. While some of this may be inherited from the era of the deposed president Hosni Mubarak, much of the anti-Brotherhood sentiment can be traced to their use of divisive and doctrinaire tactics during the movement’s unsuccessful one-year in power. Upon taking the reins of government after the elections of 2012, instead of offering immediate plans to ease the sufferings of Egypt’s poor or its struggling middle class, the Brothers engaged in what many believed to be avoidable battles with Egypt’s entrenched institutions (such as the judiciary or the media) and with secular forces and minorities. While the Brothers claimed these battles were aimed at fighting corruption, many ordinary Egyptians perceived them as an effort of “Brotherization,” a process to assure the Brothers’ control over every aspect of state and society.

The massive anti-Brotherhood demonstrations of June 30 and July 26 give some indication that many Egyptians pin the Brotherhood’s failure on its archaic ideology, outdated policies and its seeming lack of interest in social and economic justice. To further complicate this, after a particularly virulent anti-Brothers media campaign many Egyptians are now questioning the group’s loyalty to Egypt. According to this view, the Brothers only consider control of Egypt as a stepping-stone towards the establishment of a new Muslim Caliphate.

That brings us back to the present moment. Now, the leaders of the Muslim Brothers have a choice, either to continue on the same path as they have throughout their history or to initiate painful but necessary reforms in order to begin a new future within Egypt’s diverse political landscape. Unfortunately, early indications are that powerful voices of the Brothers’ past (like that of shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the influential Qatar-based Egyptian cleric, who recently called on Muslims from every part of the Arab and Muslim World to join the struggle of the Muslim Brothers in Egypt in order to obtain martyrdom) will prevail.

What might reforms look like? There may already be some indications. Many young Brothers’ recently formed three separate trends within the movement, Ikhwan Bila ‘Unf (Brothers Without Violence), Shabab al-Ikhwan (Youth of The Brotherhood) and Ahrar al-Ikhwan (The Free Brothers) and are calling for a comprehensive review of the movement’s ideas and practices. These young activists appear to have realized that the Brothers old strategies are outmoded and belong to a different era. This is happening at the same time that some leftist and liberal activists are also calling upon the Brothers leadership to join with their younger members and to abandon the discordant ways of their violent past in order to secure a place in Egypt’s future.

What is clear is that the Brothers must recognize that their old ideas are not suitable for today’s diverse political landscape. They must acknowledge and put into practice the idea that for any Islamist (or indeed any political) project to succeed it must be inclusive, Christians, Jews, Shi’a and other minorities must be treated equally under the law. The movement must abandon the notion that it represents God’s faithful core; abandon secrecy, deception and violence. It must also entertain the possibility that the Muslim Brothers were banned and imprisoned precisely because of their intolerance and their tendency to express this intolerance with acts of violence against those who oppose their maximalist vision of an Islamist Egypt.

Sadly however, even if the movement adapts all of these changes it still might not be enough to include the Brothers as a legal political force in Egypt’s future. Many liberal and leftist activists are demanding the dismantling of the Brothers’ Freedom and Justice party (and all other religious party for that matter). Their argument is simple. They argue that those whose foundational beliefs and practices are built on excluding the others cannot be included in a reconciliatory political process. It is hard to tell, but it seems as if this argument is gaining popular momentum.

To avoid further marginalization, the Brothers’ leaders must stop looking backward. They must make a courageous decision and agree to join the current political process or risk returning to the margins as an underground group. Most importantly, if the Brothers think that this crisis is similar to others in their troubled history, they are badly mistaken. This time is different. The movement is not only facing the wrath of a military régime; it is also facing the anger and distrust of a large segment of the population. For the Brothers to have any voice in Egypt’s political future, the movement must abandon their past and look for a new path forward before its too late.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Michael Gasper is Assistant Professor of Middle Eastern History at Occidental College in Los Angeles CA, and is author of The Power of Representation: Peasants, Publics and Islam in Egypt.

Mohamed Yousry is a former expert witness and interpreter for shaykh ‘Umar Abdel Rahman’s defense team. Currently a PhD candidate in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University and is writing his dissertation on the Islamist politics in Egypt from the 1950s to the present.