Egyptian Military Dictatorship Convicts Journalists in “Court” of the Absurd

A so-called “court” in Egypt handed down utterly predictable and preordained guilty verdicts of “terrorism” against three Al-Jazeera journalists who have been imprisoned for six months already in one of Egypt’s hellhole jails. The “evidence” consisted of the journalists’ family photos and old news videos of horses and such. (I’m not making that up.) According to foreign journalist witnesses, literally no evidence supporting the baseless accusation was presented, leading them to pronounce themselves “shocked” by the guilty verdict. The sentences were a minimum of seven years. The three are an Egyptian, a Canadian, and an Australian. The Australian, Peter Greste, had been in Egypt for a week on temporary duty when he was seized. The Australian formerly worked for the BBC. For good measure, other Al-Jazeera journalists were “convicted” “in absentia” and “sentenced.” [1]

Their actual “crime” was reporting on Muslim Brotherhood protest rallies.

The “verdict” should have surprised no one. After all, in two recent mass “trials,” close to 2,000 people were “convicted” in a few minutes, and hundreds “sentenced” (condemned) to death, for alleged rioting and for the death of a single policeman.

Thus has Egypt under its newest military dictator, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, sunk lower than ever. Lower even than under his predecessors Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak. Thus does an authoritarian system degenerate into more and more grotesque forms of oppressiveness and detachment from reality. Lurid assertions and false consciousness replace acknowledgment of actual facts. [2]

Sisi’s pathetic, cruel farce doesn’t even rise to the level of a show trial. In Stalin’s show trials, the “defendants” read out “confessions” after they’d been tortured into submission. In Nazi political trials, “evidence” was also presented to “prove” the charges. In Sisi’s Egypt, there is no longer even a simulacrum of anything resembling an actual judicial process. There is not even a crude imitation of a trial, just a nonsensical burlesque called a “trial.”

The Sisi dictatorship can’t even be bothered to fabricate fake evidence, coach lying witnesses, or torture false confessions out of their victims. They just accuse and convict. And in a demonstration of just how complicit and supine a privately-owned media can be to state power, the Egyptian media has screamed abuse at the victims and taken their “guilt” as established fact since their arrests in December 2013. This is good enough to make the victims appear guilty for internal Egyptian purposes. Confident of continued U.S. backing for the permanent Egyptian military state, Sisi apparently has concluded that he can contemptuously dismiss international opinion. And he’s right, unfortunately. For one thing, Israel wants a military dictatorship in Egypt that will continue the policy of avoiding conflict with Israel and helping Israel oppress the Palestinians by maintaining the blockade of the Gaza Strip (which borders Egypt on the west of the Strip) to maintain the territory as the world’s largest open-air concentration camp, imprisoning over a million human beings. (Yes, Palestinians are actually human beings, not subhuman “terrorists,” as the American public has been brainwashed into feeling.) That alone would be enough to induce the U.S. to support the Sisi regime, since the U.S. is Israel’s bitch, but it is not the only U.S. “interest” driving the U.S. to back successive Egyptian military dictatorships since Sadat’s rapproachement with Israel. [3]

Because of American establishment hatred of Al-Jazeera, most of the U.S. media has covered the “verdict” very superficially or not at all. Remember, U.S. cable networks refuse to allow Al-Jazeera television to BUY access to American homes, the U.S. military has repeatedly bombed Al-Jazeera offices in Afghanistan and Iraq, murdered Al-Jazeera journalists, taken Al-Jazeera workers captive (one was held for six years in the U.S. military gulag/torture center at Guantanamo Bay on U.S.-occupied Cuban territory, where his captors tried to force him to agree to be a spy inside Al-Jazeera for them), and the U.S. government has repeatedly threatened Al-Jazeera. Al-J has been demonized as “terrorist propaganda” for refusing to be a parrot of the U.S. government and military and to act as cheerleaders for the U.S. aggression in Iraq, as the “loyal” American media did.

And still does to this day. Now the U.S. media, whitewashing history, pretends that the U.S. invaded Iraq out of altruism, not after whipping up hysteria with false claims of “weapons of mass destruction” aimed at the U.S., imminent danger of nuclear, chemical, or biological attack on the American people by terrorists armed with such weaponry. Just yesterday, on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos,” one of the Sunday morning political propaganda shows that the political elite uses for self-brainwashing, the program ended with a breathtakingly mendacious Iraq segment by Martha Raddatz, who recycled old, discredited U.S. military propaganda claiming that “Iraqis pulled down this statue of Saddam Hussein,” a U.S. military stunt thoroughly debunked, yet Raddatz ignores the facts. Even more egregiously, Raddatz erases the U.S. siege and destruction of Fallujah, substituting a fairy tale of U.S. military humanitarian care and service for the people there! Unbelievably cynical, shameless, immoral, unethical, and a textbook example of how American establishment “journalism” is propaganda.

1] In a bad sign for the Australian journalist in Sisi’s clutches, it was the “opposition” party (the bourgeois party currently out of power) in Australia, not the government, that strongly denounced the “verdict.” (Typical of “western democracies,” Australia has “legitimate” establishment parties that play a game of musical chairs called “elections” in which they compete to sit in the seats of power. But the system can never be voted out of power or changed. That is called “freedom of choice.”) The Australian Foreign Minister issued a mushy, weak, mealy-mouthed statement with the usual bromides about journalistic freedom and blah blah. Tellingly, the statement indicates that until now, the Australian government hadn’t lifted a finger to help their citizen in captivity.

“...we will now initiate contact at the highest levels in the new Egyptian government to see whether we can gain some kind of intervention from the new government and find out whether intervention is indeed possible at this stage.” (My emphasis.) They’re just NOW initiating contact with Sisi over this?? Amazing.*

Australia has an ugly history of abandoning Australian journalists. When the horrible Indonesian military dictatorship of Suharto invaded East Timor back in the 1970s, after getting the green light to do so from U.S. president (and Warren Commissioner cover-up conspirator) Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger in person (the two visited Suharto in Jakarta just before the invasion), among the ultimately hundreds of thousands of East Timorese slaughtered by the Indonesian army was an Australian TV crew, who were murdered by the Indonesians to block their reporting on the crimes of the Indonesians. The Australian government at the time, headed by Malcolm Frasier, helpfully looked the other way, ignoring the overwhelming evidence of the blatant murders of Australian citizens. Oh yes, and U.S. weapons and munitions were used, in violation of U.S. law, in this act of aggression, and in the years of brutal occupation and mass murder that followed. So what? Israel does it all the time. And so do the various terror regimes armed by the U.S., which use U.S. weapons to murder their own citizens, whereas U.S. law requires they be used only in defense from foreign aggression. American law in this case is just for show. Such laws are in fact acts of propaganda, and nothing more. The other main use of U.S. law is to oppress people.

2] Sisi, the latest military dictator, is a former field marshal and head of the Egyptian military. Trained, mentored, and groomed for years in American military “schools,” as is typical of military tyrants and criminals in U.S.-backed regimes, he has long ties with the U.S. military hierarchy. “Officially,” Sisi is a “president,” since he doffed his uniform for a business suit (the uniform of political bosses these days) and staged an “election” (uncontested) in which he “won” 97%. He’s no more a “democratically elected president” than these farcical “trials” he stages are actual trials or these “courts” are really courts. They’re Theaters of the Absurd, political demonstrations of raw power designed to terrorize people into submission to an utterly oppressive reign.

The only reason for a six month delay between “arrest” and “conviction” was so the Egyptian propaganda system (a privately-owned media that has behaved exactly as a military-controlled media would) could firmly brainwash the Egyptian populace in the idea that the journalists are guilty of “terrorism” merely by repeating the lie over and over, repetition being a standard propaganda technique. Thus the dictatorship would in fact have put itself in a bind if it had ultimately acquitted the journalists, since it had already worked so assiduously to create the “fact” of their “guilt.”

Yet another journalist was released after a year in prison with his arm permanently disabled thanks to the brutality and deliberate medical neglect of Sisi’s goons. The same goons who were Mubarak’s goons. The same goons who subject female protesters to “virginity tests,” manual rapes by male military “doctors” while other goons stand around and mock the victims.

Egypt! It’s a great tourist destination! Come see the pyramids! So much local color. Here, take a brochure.

3] In a serendipitous coincidence, after I wrote this this morning, the U.S. government radio propaganda network NPR put on Israeli prime minister Binyamin Netanyahu, the remorseless, brutal promoter of Israeli expansionism, to propagandize at length on the danger of Islamic extremists getting nuclear weapons, etc. The NPR propagandist Steve Inskeep, co-host of NPR’s morning “news” program “Morning Edition,” performed the usual dutiful fawning, as is customary and required for US "journalists" to do with Israeli power personages if they want to keep their jobs, and sat at the feet of the Great One as he spewed his hawkish agitprop. Netanyahu was also on U.S. TV yesterday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” one of the self-brainwashing shows of the U.S. political elite, where he attacked the vote of the American Presbyterian Church to sell stock in three criminal U.S. corporations that supply the means of Israeli repression: Caterpillar, Motorola “Solutions” (to the “problem” of political opposition) and Hewlett-Packard. Caterpillar is probably the most notorious of the three. It provides the armored bulldozers that the Israelis have used to demolish tens of thousands of Palestinian homes, and uproot thousands of Palestinian orchard trees. Oh, and one was used to murder American Rachel Corrie. Netanyahu sickeningly couched his mendacious propaganda in terms of morality.

In a last ditch attempt to quash the Presbyterians’ divestment vote, American Zionist agents offered the Presbyterians a meeting with Netanyahu in return for canceling the vote. How’s that for arrogance? Like meeting with Netanyahu to be browbeaten by him and subjected to his agitprop is such a great privilege, a gift, a huge favor! Come, sell out your moral and humanitarian principles for the privilege of being allowed in Netanyahu’s presence. I’m sure the Israelites and their American fifth columnists don’t have the slightest inkling of what a crass insult that was. (The Presbyterians may not have been quite as clueless. The New York Times quoted one of their officials gently saying the “offer” probably had the reverse effect of what the Israelites intended. Gee, I wonder why.)

* Here’s the full statement of Australian FM JULIE BISHOP:

“Peter Greste is a well-respected Australian journalist. He was in Egypt to report on the political situation. He was not there to support the Muslim Brotherhood. We respect the outcome of the recent elections in Egypt, and we will now initiate contact at the highest levels in the new Egyptian government to see whether we can gain some kind of intervention from the new government and find out whether intervention is indeed possible at this stage. I have spoken at length with Peter Greste’s parents. They are considering their legal options, including appeal options. We do not know how long an appeal process would take. But in the meantime, we will provide whatever consular assistance we can to Mr. Greste and, of course, to his family.

“We understand that Egypt has been through some very difficult times and there has been a great deal of turmoil in Egypt, but this kind of verdict does nothing to support Egypt’s claim to be on a transition to democracy, and the Australian government urges the new government of Egypt to reflect on what message is being sent to the world about the situation in Egypt. Freedom and freedom of the press is fundamental to a democracy. And we are deeply concerned that this verdict is part of a broader attempt to muzzle the media freedom that upholds democracies around the world.”