Egypt: Cue the Dirty Tricks, False Flags To Discredit Pro-Democracy Movement

by Finian Cunningham

Global Research, January 30, 2011

The looting of Cairo’s world-famous Egyptian Museum over the weekend seems to have engendered the desired news headlines.

‘Looters smash ancient treasures’, ‘Looters decapitate mummies’, ‘Looters rip off heads of artifacts’ etc., read a rash of headlines, following the apparent breaking into the country’s national museum, which is said to house the world’s biggest of Pharaonic antiquities.

However, it has since emerged, although with much less headline coverage, that some of the would-be looters apprehended by protesters outside the museum were identified as working for the state’s interior ministry.

Also, tellingly, Zahi Hawass, the Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, told Al Jazeera news service that protesters had actually tried to stop the alleged looters from entering the museum, but that the attackers managed to enter the building from the roof. Given that there was no apparent attempt to steal the priceless artifacts, it seems a strange expenditure of effort on the part of the culprits just to go on a wrecking spree for the sake of it.

The incident may be just a foretaste of a wider range of propaganda stunts or false flags, including atrocities and fatalities, that the Mubarak regime will enact in order to discredit the protest movement sweeping that nation, and to serve as a pretext for intensifying the crackdown by security forces, which has already left over 100 dead and 2,000 injured.

No doubt the US-backed Mubarak regime is struggling to contain widespread chaos rocking the country, with tens of thousands of people taking to the streets of major cities in defiance of curfews. And no doubt there are countless incidents of looting by people pent up by decades of poverty and unemployment.

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Days of Rage, Oil Prices, and the Suez Canal

Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
February 3, 2011

Bloomberg warns today that an act of sabotage or a decision by a new regime – possibly headed up by the Muslim Brotherhood – to close the canal and its oil pipeline to punish supporters of Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak could send oil prices through the stratosphere.

Egyptian troops currently guard the canal and its adjacent Suez-Mediterranean oil pipeline but that does not mean the flow of oil – more than 1.7 millions barrels per day – cannot be shut down.



About 2.5 percent of global oil production moves through Egypt via the Suez Canal and the Suez-Mediterranean Pipeline, according to Goldman Sachs.

From 1967 until 1975, Egypt kept the canal closed in response to Israel’s seizure of Arab territory, forcing tankers to travel around the Cape of Good Hope.

Earlier today, investors increased bets that oil prices will likely increase as much as $250 a barrel on concern the unrest in Egypt will shut down the flow of oil through the Suez Canal and spread to Saudi Arabia.




Lindsey Williams and Bob Chapman on the Alex Jones Show, January 28, 2011.

In December, Williams told Jones that his insider connections said the price of oil will soon skyrocket to between $150-200 per barrel and this price increase will result in gasoline in the range of $4-5 per gallon.
Williams became a friend and trusted confidant of oil industry executives while serving as chaplain for them and their construction crews building the Alaska pipeline in the 1970s.

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Obama Egypt Plan Includes Role for Muslim Brotherhood

Newsmax.com

Thursday, 03 Feb 2011 08:48 PM

The Obama administration is secretly crafting a plan for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave office immediately – a plan that includes a place for the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood to be in an interim government, The New York Times reported Thursday night.

The paper detailed a process in which administration officials are discussing with Egyptian officials the exit strategy. A transitional government would be headed by Vice President Omar Suleiman with the support of the Egyptian military, administration officials and Arab diplomats told the Times Thursday.

But so far Mubarak has balked. Still, officials are pushing the plan in discussions with Suleiman, backed by Sami Enan, chief of the Egyptian armed forces, and Field Marshal Mohamed Tantawi, the Defense Minister.

More importantly, though, the proposal calls for the transitional government to invite members from the banned Muslim Brotherhood to begin work to open up the country’s electoral system in an effort to bring about free and fair elections in September, the officials told the Times.

That plan apparently is one of several options under discussion with high-level Egyptian officials around Mubarak, though not him directly, in an effort to convince him to step down now.

Administration officials cautioned that the outcome depended on “several factors, not least of all the mood of the protesters on the streets of Cairo and other Egyptian cities and the dynamics within the Egyptian government,” the Times story said.



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You Might Be a Terrorist, Too

Radley Balko
Reason
February 2, 2011

Cato’s David Rittgers rounds up cases of terrorist “fusion centers” erring on the side of labeling, well, pretty much everyone, a potential terrorist.

The North Texas Fusion System labeled Muslim lobbyists as a potential threat; a DHS analyst in Wisconsin thought both pro- and anti-abortion activists were worrisome; a Pennsylvania homeland security contractor watched environmental activists, Tea Party groups, and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland State Police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in a federal terrorism database; a fusion center in Missouri thought that all third-party voters and Ron Paul supporters were a threat; and the Department of Homeland Security described half of the American political spectrum as “right wing extremists.”
The ACLU fusion center report and update lay out some good background on these issues, and the Spyfiles report describes how monitoring lawful dissent has become routine for police departments around the nation.

I believe this is the part where right wingers justify including anti-war and environmental groups on these lists, and left wingers justify including Tea Partiers, anti-abortion activists, and Second Amendment advocates.

Codex Alimentarius Loves Toxic Fluoride, Part 1

Brandon Turbeville
Infowars.com
February 4, 2011
In the previous article, I wrote about the global implications of Codex Alimentarius.  I discussed in some detail the oppressive standards recommended by BfR, which have largely been included in the Codex Guidelines for Vitamin and Mineral Food Supplements. However, there is one more provision included in the risk assessment process that even many critics of Codex are unaware of. This is the goal to not only treat nutrients as toxins, but treat toxins as nutrients.
At first, this is not readily apparent. A closer look at the risk assessment provided by BfR provides one with a glimmer of what might one day be a completely Orwellian policy toward vitamins, minerals, and toxins.
The fact that researchers have the audacity to claim that vital minerals like Iron should not be consumed in measurements above 0 mg is disturbing enough. However, there is one more substance added to the findings and, more alarmingly, listed as a mineral that should be just as frightening. That substance is the very toxic chemical known as fluoride.[1]
This chemical poison is listed only in the “moderately high-risk” level of risk categories.[2]  Yet the reality is that fluoride is a very dangerous chemical with serious risks of harm to both health and the environment. In truth, there are actually two different forms of what is called fluoride – calcium fluoride and sodium fluoride.

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Full repeal of health care law fails in Senate

JENNIFER HABERKORN
Politico
February 2, 2011
Efforts to repeal President Barack Obama’s health care law died a quick death in the Senate Wednesday, but the GOP got a consolation prize — a bipartisan fix to a tax-reporting requirement in the law that was widely panned by businesses.

A Democratic amendment to repeal the law’s new tax-reporting requirements passed, 81-17, with broad bipartisan support. A Republican amendment to repeal the entire health reform law, meanwhile, fell along party lines, 47-51, in a procedural vote.
Senate Republicans pledge that their first crack at repealing the health care overhaul won’t be their last.
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Muslim Brotherhood: With Israel, no agreement is eternal

By MELANIE LIDMAN,  JERUSALEM POST CORRESPONDENT 
02/04/2011 02:44

Moderate Egyptians say group less powerful than media thinks; conspiracy theorists blame Brotherhood for violence that's beset Cairo.

 

CAIRO – There are flecks of blood on Muhammad H’s blue dress shirt, remnants of last night’s battle.

Like almost every man lounging in Tahrir Square on Thursday morning, the morning after a fierce 16-hour battle with stones and clubs, he has a bloodied bandage on his head from where he was hit by a rock. He’s visibly exhausted. He hasn’t left the square since Saturday.

“They used knives, horses and camels. Our protests here were totally peaceful; we had no weapons, so we used stones, but what happened yesterday was the last card,” said Muhammad, a member of the Muslim Brotherhood, as he sat on a traffic divider along with two friends.

Last Friday, the police used the most powerful weapons they could use. They were shooting us while we were praying. After that, they used criminals to shoot us. They know we’re peaceful, and they press on that.”

The Muslim Brotherhood’s power, or lack thereof, is one of the most discussed undercurrents of the January 25 revolution among media pundits and international leaders. For years, Hosni Mubarak has held onto his international support by stating firmly: It’s me, or it’s them.

Now that Mubarak will be out of the picture in the near future, Israel and the United States are worried about a government controlled by the Muslim Brotherhood.

“All of us hate Israel,” said Muhammad, who is a lecture assistant in the engineering faculty at a government university in Cairo. “Israel is the best friend for Mubarak, they said clearly that he’s strategic for them.”

But he cautioned that Egypt needed to concentrate on its internal politics before dealing with the problem of Israel.

“Regarding Israel, Egypt has a peace agreement with Israel and any new government should respect that agreement,” Muhammad said. “However, if the government wanted to change that agreement, it has the right after taking the opinion of the people. No agreement is eternal.”

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