Where is Obama and Hillary? Shouldn’t they be proclaiming the triumph of Democracy in Egypt? We wouldn’t be supporting the military junta that is trying to thwart the democratically elected president and legislature of Egypt. Say it ain’t so Joe. The good old US of A couldn’t hypocritically preach democracy for all and then not support a democratically elected government because they are from the Muslim Brotherhood. It’s funny how our leaders preach democracy when we don’t even have it here. Egypt should just have their oligarchs choose their president like we do here. Elections are overrated.
Egypt’s legislature convenes despite court ruling
CAIRO — Egypt’s Islamist-dominated parliament opened a new front in the country’s leadership showdowns Tuesday by meeting in defiance of orders that disbanded the chamber and brought President Mohammed Morsi in conflict with both the powerful military and the highest court.
The session was brief — lasting just five minutes — and suggested that lawmakers sought more of a symbolic stance rather than a full-scale backlash against rulings that invalidated the chamber over apparent irregularities in Egypt’s first elections since the fall of Hosni Mubarak 17 months ago.
But it further nudged Egypt deeper into a potential power struggle between Morsi and military chiefs, who have vowed to uphold the judicial ruling that led to parliament being dissolved last month.
For the moment, all sides appear to be moving with some caution in acknowledgment of Egypt’s volatile backdrop: The military with the power to clamp down on dissent but without widespread support on the streets where Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood is strong.
Security forces made no attempt to block lawmakers as they arrived at the parliament building in central Cairo. Later, thousands joined a pro-Morsi rally in Cairo’s Tahrir Square as riot police kept their distance.
In the background, meanwhile, a special panel is working on Egypt’s post-Mubarak constitution and an all-out battle between the rising Brotherhood and the country’s old guard establishment could send the entire process into a tailspin.
The crisis atmosphere has grown steadily since Morsi issued an order Sunday to reconvene the 508-seat legislature. His executive order said it was revoking the military’s June 15 order to disband the chamber based on the previous ruling by the Supreme Constitutional Court.
The court said a third of the chamber’s members were elected illegally by allowing candidates from political parties to contest seats set aside for independent candidates. The court is expected to rule on three cases questioning the legality of the president’s order. A lower court also looking into complaints against Morsi’s order postponed its decision until July 17.
Morsi’s presidential decree also called for new parliamentary elections after a new constitution is adopted, which is not expected before the end of the year. In effect, it puts the current parliament in a sort of caretaker status — raising further speculation that Morsi could be buying time with the current defiance.
The dispute over the fate of parliament has divided the nation just as Egyptians hoped for a semblance of stability after the tumult since the Arab Spring ouster of Mubarak. Egypt has seen a dramatic surge in crime, deadly street protests, a faltering economy and seemingly non-stop strikes, sit-ins and demonstrations.
The latest crisis drew a warning from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is scheduled to visit Egypt this weekend. She urged Morsi and the military to settle their differences or risk seeing their nation’s democratic transition derailed. “We strongly urge dialogue and a concerted effort on the part of all to try to deal with the problems that are understandable, but have to be resolved in order to avoid the kind of difficulties that could derail the transition that is going on,” said Clinton in Vietnam.
Parliament Speaker Saad el-Katatni told lawmakers that the legislature met to find ways to implement the court ruling rather than debate it out of respect for the principles of “the supremacy of the law and separation of authorities.”
But he put forward a plan to seek what amounts to a “second opinion” from an appeals court on the ruling. It was not immediately clear, however, whether the appeals court would accept the legislature’s request. The move, however, may have been designed as a face saving measure — defying the military’s order to disband the legislature while making a show of respect for the law.
Both Morsi and el-Katatni are longtime members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist group that has long been at odds with successive Egyptian governments.
In its only public comment on the dispute, the military Monday delivered a thinly veiled warning to Morsi, saying the armed forces sides with the “constitution, legitimacy and law” — language that means the powerful military will not stand by and watch a ruling by the country’s highest court ignored or breached.
The military handed over power to Morsi on June 30 after ruling Egypt since Mubarak’s downfall.
In the run-up to the handover, the military declared itself the country’s legislative authority in the absence of a parliament and gave itself control over the drafting of a new constitution and the national budget. The generals also stripped Morsi of significant powers.
For the second consecutive day, Morsi attended a military graduation ceremony, apparently in a bid to ease the perception of a growing showdown with the country’s powerful generals. Also present in Tuesday’s ceremony in a Nile Delta air base was Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, the country’s top soldier, and his Chief-of-Staff Sami Anan.
Morsi is Egypt’s first democratically elected president. Unlike his four predecessors, he does not have a military background and is not the supreme commander of the armed forces. Under a “constitutional declaration” issued by the military on June 17, Morsi cannot declare war or order troops on the streets in the case of a domestic crisis without prior agreement from the military
flash says:
Hag Hillary wildly exclaims Mubarack was unpoplar with the people , therefore he must go.Gaddafi was unpopular, so he had to go.
Now it’s Assad who’s landed on the Hag’s unpopular with his people list and the Hag says he must go.
Well guess who else is unpopular with his people? If you guessed Obamney, go to the front of the short bus….sic ‘em Hag.
Leon Paneta, Hillary Linton and Barack Obama leading a nation of 310 million souls.My God is this the best we can do.
We are indeed a nation of blood thirsty morons pretending to be an advanced civilized society.
I know it’s just a ride, but regardless, it’s an extremely nauseating ride.
A Night at Ford’s Theatre
by John M. Peters
http://www.lewrockwell.com/peters/peters28.1.html
I pointed out to Ford and Peters that there was no constitutional authority for their personal campaign of regime change in another country. I asked them why Bashar Assad could not make the same argument for the Obama Administration in light of Obama’s low approval rating, the pathetic economic condition the nation was in and the degradation of rights and liberties. I asked Ford and Peters how the Obama administration would react if other countries were funneling weapons into the US to be used by revolutionary groups to set off car bombs in the nation’s capital or assassinate public officials. In response to their argument that Assad is killing his own people, I pointed out that Lincoln was responsible for the deaths of 600,000 Americans, yet we have built a memorial to him in our nation’s capital, placed him on our currency and dedicated a national holiday to the man.
My question prompted an angry uproar from the partisan crowd complete with shout downs and threats. The moderator implored the angry gathering to demonstrate democratic principles by allowing me to be heard “even if his questions are stupid.” I awaited Ford’s response as the stirring crowd settled. Predictably, Ford ignored the issue of constitutional authority and justified administration actions based upon “international law.”
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10th July 2012 at 2:55 pm
UPDATE: EGYPT ABOUT TO GO BOOM!!! « The Burning Platform « Regional Wars! says:
[...] the article here: EGYPT ABOUT TO GO BOOM!!! « The Burning Platform July 10th, 2012 | Tags: Cairo, country, disbanded-the-chamber, islamist-dominated, morsi, [...]
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10th July 2012 at 2:58 pm
flash says:
no truer words…
“A thousand ploughmen consume fully as much corn and cloth in the course of a year as a regiment of soldiers. But the difference between the kinds of consumption is immense. The labour of the ploughman has, during the year, served to call into existence a quantity of property, which not only repays the corn and cloth which he has consumed, but repays it with a profit. The soldier on the other hand produces nothing. What he has consumed is gone, and its place is left absolutely vacant. The country is the poorer for his consumption, to the full amount of what he has consumed. It is not the poorer, but the richer for what the ploughman has consumed, because, during the time he was consuming it, he has reproduced what does more than replace it. ”
— James Mill in Commerce Defended (1808).
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10th July 2012 at 3:16 pm
Hope@ZeroKelvin says:
Egypt is the keystone of the ME. What we are looking at is a dissolution of this nation into a civil war with the Islamists on one side and those whos support the military on the other.
The vast majority of the Egyptian population exists on $2/day and is 1 meal away from starvation.
Yeah, that’s gonna end well.
You are not seeing “democracy” in Egypt. You are seeing the rise of the MB, which is a violent organization dedicated to the destruction of the West, and of course Israel, since about the 1920s. The MB was the ONLY group that had the cojenes to survive under Mubarak’s regime so these are pretty tough SOBs.
Hillary’s top aide has close ties to the MB and Obama has invited Morsi to the WH. Plus I think we are giving them 1.5 BILLION dollars, mostly in military aid. What a great idea **cue eyeball rolling****.
Just wait until some Egyptian tanks cross the Sinai (again). Just wait until the Suez gets closed. Just wait until some of that military aid gets pointed our way thanks to our totally wide open southern border.
The Obama foreign policy is an even greater FAIL than the Bush foreign policy – and I didn’t think that such a thing was possible.
What do we hear from the MSM/Fox?
Crickets.
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10th July 2012 at 4:44 pm
Zarathustra says:
Calls to Destroy Eqypt’s Great Pyramids Begin
According to several reports in the Arabic media, prominent Muslim clerics have begun to call for the demolition of Egypt’s Great Pyramids—or, in the words of Saudi Sheikh Ali bin Said al-Rabi‘i, those “symbols of paganism,” which Egypt’s Salafi party has long planned to cover with wax. Most recently, Bahrain’s “Sheikh of Sunni Sheikhs” and President of National Unity, Abd al-Latif al-Mahmoud, called on Egypt’s new president, Muhammad Morsi, to “destroy the Pyramids and accomplish what the Sahabi Amr bin al-As could not.”
This is a reference to the Muslim Prophet Muhammad’s companion, Amr bin al-As and his Arabian tribesmen, who invaded and conquered Egypt circa 641. Under al-As and subsequent Muslim rule, many Egyptian antiquities were destroyed as relics of infidelity. While most Western academics argue otherwise, according to early Muslim writers, the great Library of Alexandria itself—deemed a repository of pagan knowledge contradicting the Koran—was destroyed under bin al-As’s reign and in compliance with Caliph Omar’s command.
However, while book-burning was an easy activity in the 7th century, destroying the mountain-like pyramids and their guardian Sphinx was not—even if Egypt’s Medieval Mamluk rulers “de-nosed” the latter during target practice (though popular legend still attributes it to a Westerner, Napoleon).
http://frontpagemag.com/2012/raymond-ibrahim/muslim-brotherhood-destroy-the-pyramids/
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10th July 2012 at 5:22 pm
Persnickety says:
It is not without irony that the very cradles of human civilization – Egypt, Turkey, Mesopotamia (Iraq and Iran), and Pakistan, collectively hold such a large proportion of the risks to continued human civilization, into which the Anglo-American alliance pours tons and tons of fuel, angst, hatred and weaponry.
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10th July 2012 at 5:27 pm
flash says:
Persnickety
+10 …but alas Word Press prevents nary a one.
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10th July 2012 at 5:59 pm
Thinker says:
Zara, it’s already begun happening elsewhere:
Islamists attack Timbuktu’s world heritage site shrines
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10th July 2012 at 6:13 pm
Stan says:
Well actually the Muslim brotherhood is in power here in the USA.
So. Go Egypt !!! Join the club!
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10th July 2012 at 6:28 pm
flash says:
They hate US because of our freedom…yeah, that’s the ticket!
The Collapsing US Economy and the ‘End of the World’
by Paul Craig Roberts
Recently by Paul Craig Roberts: Can Americans Escape the Deception?
My German publisher has rights for all European languages and for a Russian edition, which he says he intends to publish.
I hear that the Chinese are interested in publishing my book. Most likely, South America will follow. Strange, isn’t it, that no serious work that diverges from the US propaganda line can be published in the United States, the country of “freedom and democracy.” What a joke!
In my lifetime, especially the 21st century, the US has become the country of thought control and oppression. The USA today bears no resemblance whatsoever to the country I grew up in. I feel like I am living in a foreign 20th century police state. I have told Press TV (Tehran) and the BBC World Service (London) not to call me any more about controversial issues as, if I speak the truth, it could result in my arrest. Free speech is no longer an American right.
I haven’t been able to tell RT this yet, because the female hosts are so beautiful and most of the interviews are from RT’s Washington, D.C., studio and not from Moscow. I figure that as long as our overlords in Washington permit RT broadcasts from Washington, DC, they can’t arrest me for aiding and abetting “enemies.” I mean, it is our overlords’ fault, right, that “enemies” call me for interviews from Washington DC The overlords could shut down the “enemies” on their home turf, but as long as they haven’t I should be free to speak to RT Washington. Perhaps this is naive, but it seems legally coherent, not that that any longer means anything. Probably RT will quit calling me in order to avoid being shut down by the “freedom and democracy” US government. The “freedom and democracy” government in the UK shut down Press TV, no longer permitted to broadcast to British subjects.
Human Rights attorneys tell me that as the US Constitution is no longer observed by the executive branch, that I can’t speak freely according to my Constitutional rights, the First Amendment and all, without running the risk of being arrested.
They tell me that Bradley Manning has been arrested, tortured, and is currently being framed in a phony prosecution for doing his duty according to the US Military Code and revealing massive US war crimes. The dumbshit American population is unable to accept that they and “their” government are responsible for war crimes. After all, we are “the indispensable people,” second only to god’s chosen people, the Israelis.
Human rights attorneys also tell me that Julian Assange of WikiLeaks has been targeted for his journalistic revelations, protected by the First Amendment, of information leaked to him. Nevertheless, despite his legal protections, he is targeted by Washington for imprisonment, torture, and most likely death.
To comprehend the USA’s rapid descent into police state tyranny, compare Daniel Ellsberg’s leak of the Pentagon Papers to Assange’s publication of US documents leaked to him by a third party. Unlike Ellsberg, Assange himself did not leak the documents. WikiLeaks is in the role of the New York Times, which published the leak from Ellsberg. Neither Ellsberg nor the New York Times were indicted or prosecuted although they were threatened. Yet, Assange, who is in the secondary role as the publisher, not the leaker, faces indefinite detention and torture if Washington can get its hands on him through the corrupt Swedish prosecutor who has “reopened” without evidence the closed Swedish case against Assange.
When you think about how distant Americans are from the events overwhelming them, light years really, it is very difficult to see any hope. Americans are simply not up to the challenge. Americans are mentally and emotionally too weak, and their ignorance is vast, a totally uninformed people. They have no idea of what is happening to them and to the rest of the world as a result of “their” government’s immorality and evil and incessant lies.
Several years ago I had a telephone call from a professor and former dean of a university in Boston. He said that he had been in Washington, D. C., the previous week and had had lunch with some of my former colleagues. He said that when he asked about me, the response was, “poor Craig, if he hadn’t turned critic, he would be worth tens of millions of dollars like us.” Upon hearing this, my acquaintance said that he stood up and announced that he did not realize he was having lunch with a bunch of whores and departed the lunch.
Obviously, my acquaintance did not need anything from my still-well-connected former colleagues. I replied to him that I was pleased that my former colleagues agreed that my integrity was worth more to me than tens of millions of dollars.
The telephone call confirmed my prior decision to leave Washington and confirmed my conclusion that everyone there was bought and paid for by some interest group. A more corrupt place has never existed on earth. The stench of Washington’s corruption and evil even wafts down far into the South, although few of the Republican lemmings can smell it.
That is our government today. It belongs to those who purchase it, courtesy of the Republican US Supreme Court, not to those voters whom the government allegedly represents.
The baldfaced truth is that in America the people have no rights and no representation. The American people are a nonentity. Far from being indispensable, they are totally dispensable, just like the thousands of Arab women and children whose murders are dismissed as “collateral damage” in the hoax war on terror. Washington has taken a page from Mao, “democracy issues forth from the barrel of a gun.”
July 11, 2012
Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the US Treasury and former associate editor of the Wall Street Journal, has been reporting shocking cases of prosecutorial abuse for two decades. A new edition of his book, The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, a documented account of how americans lost the protection of law, has been released by Random House. Visit his website.
Copyright © 2012 Paul Craig Roberts
The Best of Paul Craig Roberts
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10th July 2012 at 5:39 am
flash says:
They hate US for our freedom and other cliches.
‘After 9/11 NSA had secret deal with White House’
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMy2ZbPkyvw
RT talks to Andrew Drake, a former National Security Agency senior executive in the United States who sacrificed his career to blow the whistle on criminal wrong-doings inside the NSA. When asked why he became a whistle blower Drake replied: “You can’t put a price on freedom. My oath was to the Constitution. That took primacy to everything else.”
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10th July 2012 at 6:22 am