More evidence that Democrats are the ones who can really stick it to the poor.

Frank Wisner was the emissary sent by president Obama to Hosni Mubarak to, we were told, encourage him to leave office quickly. He was supposedly chosen because he had a personal relationship with him developed while earlier serving in Egypt as US ambassador. But Wisner seems to have gone rogue, saying publicly that Mubarak should not leave immediately. The administration has tried to distance themselves from those remarks but suspicions exist that (surprise!) the US government is not being honest in what it tells us and is trying to have it both ways in Egypt, trying to appease its long-standing ally Mubarak and the pro-democracy protesters.
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Some tea party Republicans shocked their party leadership by joining with many Democrats to deny the 2/3 vote necessary to pass an extension of some parts of the odious USA PATRIOT Act that violates many of our privacy rights.

The Patriot Act measure would have extended through the end of the year three provisions that are set to expire Feb. 28. One authorizes the FBI to use roving wiretaps on surveillance targets; the second allows the government to access “any tangible items,” such as library records, in the course of surveillance; and the third allows for the surveillance of targets who are not connected to an identified terrorist group.

These measures will undoubtedly pass later under different rules that require only a simple majority, but this is the kind of issue-focused coalition that I was urging that we need to work towards.

You may be familiar with the story about Raymond Davis who is being held on a murder charge in Lahore, Pakistan after shooting dead two people in a crowded part of the city. From the very beginning there was something very fishy about his story that the two people he killed were robbers and he acted in self-defense. The story had a lot of inconsistencies and made no sense and the US government kept changing it.

David Lindorff ‘s investigation turns up very different facts from what the US government is asserting. The mainstream US media is seemingly not interested in investigating this further beyond reporting what the US government says and the political implications of the case, which is always their preferred option.

Lindorff’s article is a fascinating read.

UPDATE: It looks like the US government is raising the stakes in its efforts to get Davis out of Pakistan.

I have written before about how the US government uses the secrecy of the no-fly list to put people into involuntary exile as a form of punishment and coercion.

Now a UK security official has used it to solve a personal problem, such as freeing himself of the presence of his troublesome wife for three years by secretly inserting her name on the list while she was visiting her relatives overseas. As is the case, airline and immigration officers refused to tell her why she could not travel back to England.

He got caught when he applied for a promotion that required a new security check that unearthed the fact that his wife was on a terrorist watch list.

Apart from his legal troubles, he now also has to face his wife…

… with assistance from all the telephone and internet companies, such as ISPs, search engines, and social networks. The basic message from Christopher Soghoian is: You have no privacy on the web, especially from the government.

The talk is a bit long and gets a bit technical at times but is fascinating and depressing at the same time.

At the end, he reveals which cell-phone carrier is best for privacy and why. (Spoiler alert: it is T-mobile.)

(Thanks to Jonathan)

Despite Mubarak being a strong ally of the US that has propped him up for three decades with money and weapons, there are no indications that the US government is planning to intervene militarily to support him. That is a good sign. It is annoying to hear the US government tell the people of Egypt what it would like to see happen there but that kind of patronizing interference is the norm these days and is on the scale of things a minor irritation. (You can imagine the outrage if the roles were reversed and the leader of some other country presumed to lecture the American people on what kind of government they should put in place.)

What is interesting to observe is to what extent these mass uprisings will spread to other countries. The president of Yemen, in response to planned protests against his three-decades long rule, has already said that he will not run for re-election in 2013 and will not pass on the leadership to his son. This practice of creating hereditary dictatorships is reprehensible and this move is to be welcomed though it is not clear if it will satisfy the anti-government demonstrators.

Meanwhile Jordan’s king has fired his cabinet in response to protests there.

But these are relatively unimportant countries from the point of view of US strategic interests. The real question is Saudi Arabia. If that long-time, oil-rich ally of the US, the key to its middle eastern strategy, becomes destabilized and its despotic regime of dynastic rulers is threatened, there is a real danger that the US will be tempted to prop it up militarily or support a pro-US military coup.

What is true about elite attitudes to WikiLeaks also applies to religion and censorship. I am pretty confident that many of the elites in society are convinced that there is no god and that religious books like the Bible are fiction. As James Mill said to his son John Stuart Mill, “There is no God, but it’s a family secret.” But they do not share this fact with ordinary people either because they think they cannot handle the truth or they think that religious belief is a good mechanism for social control.

Steven Pinker in The Blank Slate (2002, p. 131) quotes neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol on this firm belief amongst the elites that people should be shielded from the truth. Kristol said in an interview:

“There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn’t work.”

In an interview with Humanist Network News (HNN), Pinker says that Kristol thought that atheism is true but should be kept a secret, reserved for just a few. These people even advocated ‘intelligent design’ as a strategy for keeping the atheistic implications evolution by natural selection at bay, even though they realized that it lacked any evidence in support.
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Mubarak has just finished speaking to the nation and said that he will not run again for president but is not going to leave immediately. He tried to appease the protestors by saying that their genuine concerns had been exploited by criminal elements taking advantage of the situation. He was somewhat self-pitying, talking about how he had suffered to serve the country and had not sought power (Ha!).

The millions-strong crowds seem to have not been satisfied by the speech and the live Al Jazeera stream reports that the crowd heckled him and are now chanting “Leave! Leave!”

Like most people else, I have been observing events in Egypt and also Yemen with some interest, but since I have been traveling with sporadic internet access, I have not been able to follow it as closely as I would have liked.

Not that it makes much difference since I do not have an informed opinion to give. When events are unfolding rapidly and one has a massive uprising, it is hard enough for knowledgeable people within the country itself to know what is going on. Most observers in other countries will likely be clueless unless they have detailed knowledge based on long study of that region. This rules out almost all commentators in the mainstream media whose main focus (as always) is on whether these developments are good/bad for Obama/the US/Israel, as opposed to whether it is good or bad for the people of those countries.

Despite my ignorance about situation there, I must admit that I am glad to see brutal dictators like Mubarak in trouble. The US once again finds itself trying to distance itself from a brutal dictator that it coddled and supported for many years. Mubarak is following in the lines of Marcos in the Philippines, Suharto in Indonesia, Duvalier in Haiti, Pahlavi in Iran, Pinochet in Chile, Ben Ali in Tunisia, and countless other dictators in Central and South America. It does not help that Mubarak’s newly appointed vice-president Omar Suleiman has colluded with the US in torturing people.

The live stream from Al Jazeera seems to be the best source for news and it is reporting that Mubarak is due to make a statement shortly.

What one hopes for is that whatever government emerges in Egypt is one that seeks democratic rights and the welfare of its people and is not controlled by religious extremists. So far, things look hopeful on that front. The fear mongering about the Muslim Brotherhood, both in terms of its strength and its extremism, seems to be overstated.