Hints surface that NSA building massive, pervasive surveillance capability

McClatchy reports: Despite U.S. intelligence officials’ repeated denials that the National Security Agency is collecting the content of domestic emails and phone calls, evidence is mounting that the agency’s vast surveillance network can and may already be preserving billions of those communications in powerful digital databases.

A McClatchy review of public records, statements by Obama administration officials and interviews with cyber and telecom security experts lends credence to assertions that the capability for such surveillance exists.

— FBI Director Robert Mueller told a Senate committee on March 30, 2011, that “technological improvements” now enable the bureau “to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.”

— The administration is building a facility in a valley south of Salt Lake City that will have the capacity to store massive amounts of records – a facility that former agency whistleblowers say has no logical purpose if it’s not going to be a vault holding years of phone and Internet data.

— Security experts, including a former AT&T engineer, say that the NSA has tapped into fiber-optic cables carrying phone and Internet data in cities across the country. [Continue reading…]

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Tahrir Square’s military coup

Wendell Steavenson writes: The crowds on the street in Egypt over the past days have been overwhelming — they have numbered in the millions. Waving flags and tooting whistles, trumpeting vuvuzelas, drumming and shouting and chanting and honking and singing — Tahrir reached such a noisy level of jubilation that people were joking, “Did Egypt win the World Cup?” Walking among them, dodging fireworks, it felt upside down: a popular protest to oust President Mohammed Morsi, the Muslim Brotherhood leader who was democratically elected, in which, since Monday, the military has taken the side of the protesters. From one perspective, what is happening in Egypt represents an extraordinary repudiation of political Islam. From another, it is an outright military coup — a repudiation of the process of politics itself. Whatever the air of joyousness, dozens of people have died across the country. The danger did not dissipate with the announcement by the military, on Wednesday night, that Morsi was not President any longer and that the Constitution had been suspended.

The crowd in Tahrir has been varied: families, including women; people with prayer calluses and Afros, some wearing plastic sandals and others Gucci sunglasses; farmers and accountants. But there’s no doubt that there are many from the middle-class “couch party”: people who were more or less O.K. with Mubarak, who tend to trust the Army, and who had not been out to protest before. Police were hoisted onto shoulders. Overhead, military helicopters dropped flags for the cheering masses. On TV — the military had taken control of state media — aerial footage of the immense throngs played on a loop to a soundtrack of martial victory music.

On Monday, Abdul-Fattah el-Sisi, the Head of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, issued an ultimatum: the two sides, government and opposition, had forty-eight hours to come up with a compromise plan or else the military would step in with its own “roadmap.” The crowds on the street went wild, taking it as a sign that they had already won. But this was also very clearly a coup. (Twitter captured the national sense of humor — only Egyptians could announce a coup forty-eight hours in advance!) As much as the generals say they are honoring the will of the people, they engineered a showdown, and got one. The Muslim Brotherhood’s supporters, if outnumbered, were also gathering in the streets. Among the anti-Morsi crowds that kept coming, to fill practically every square and intersection in the country, people seemed to think that the Army was not like it had been before, that it was not the Army of Hosni Mubarak and military trials. Sisi would not “sit on the chair” — that is, take the throne.

Morsi addressed the nation at 11:30 P.M. on Tuesday. He spoke with passion, sometimes with anger, and he was defiant. He used the word “legitimacy” so many times that it began to sound like a fist thumping on the table. He reiterated that he was democratically elected — and that was that. It was the feloul, he said, the remnants of the old régime and the deep state, who were taking advantage of the protests for their own schemes. He complained that the bad economy — a major complaint against him — was the fault of the previous government. He might have been right about all of that. But he did not directly address the public’s grievances, other than with a brief aside about a possible reconciliation committee or amendments to the Constitution and getting the youth involved. None of that was new: the opposition — itself fractious and divided — has thrown up its hands at these kind of pluralistic assurances. He did not mention the protests. It was as if he was living in a parallel universe, shut in a room where his own arguments bounced off the walls and echoed back to him. [Continue reading…]

Video, apparently showing Morsi’s arrest yesterday — this being the nature of a coup: those in high office get arrested for being in high office and then some bogus ‘crimes’ get discovered. Morsi is now being accused of having ‘insulted’ the judiciary:

Reuters reports: Egyptian judicial authorities opened an investigation on Thursday into accusations that deposed President Mohamed Mursi and 15 other Islamists had insulted the judiciary, investigating judge Tharwat Hammad said, imposing a travel ban on all of them.

It was second formal order banning Mursi from leaving the country since the military removed the Muslim Brotherhood politician from power on Wednesday.

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Where does the Muslim Brotherhood go from here?

Nathan Brown writes: The final, desperate hours of Mohamed Morsi, the Egyptian president ousted by the military on Wednesday, were in one sense merciful, but also pathetic. After a brief feint that called to mind the image of Salvadore Allende picking up a gun to defend his presidency, Morsi resorted instead to a series of increasingly desperate verbal signals, including ineffectual crises about his own legitimacy and attempts to grasp expired offers of compromise. The result made him seem less like a martyr than a property owner waving his deed at a wrecking-ball operator who has already destroyed his home.

Waving that deed—or, less metaphorically, attempting to fall back on constitutional text and electoral legitimacy—would have much to persuade a neutral observer if any such creature still exists. Yes, it is true that the Brotherhood did well in elections; that it was not able to govern fully but still saddled with responsibility for Egypt’s insurmountable problems; that important state actors never accepted its authority; that its opposition was unified only by a desire to make the Brotherhood fail; and that Egypt’s rumor mill transformed preposterous rumor into established fact with breathtaking speed.

But it is also undeniable that Morsi and the Brotherhood made almost every conceivable mistake—including some (such as reaching too quickly for political power or failing to build coalitions with others) that they had vowed they knew enough to avoid. They alienated potential allies, ignored rising discontent, focused more on consolidating their rule than on using what tools they did have, used rhetoric that was tone deaf at best and threatening at worst. Had they hired a consultant from the Nixon White House, they would have done a more credible job, at least by being efficient.

The Morsi presidency is without a doubt one of the most colossal failures in the Brotherhood’s history. What lesson will the movement learn from it, if any?

In studying Islamist movements over the last decade, I generally found that the most rewarding time to speak to leaders was about a year or so after an election. During the heat of the political battle, they made decisions like most politicians do (on the fly, often overreacting to yesterday’s headlines) and spoke like most politicians do (providing glib spin than reflective analysis). But at calmer moments, they spoke less like politicians and more openly. And there was a reason why: The movements prided themselves (justifiably) on an ability to learn. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. declines to criticize Egypt’s military as it ousts Morsi

Reuters reports: The United States declined on Wednesday to criticize Egypt’s military, even as it was ousting Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi from power.

Minutes before Egypt’s army commander announced that Mursi, the country’s first democratically elected president, had been deposed and the constitution suspended, the U.S. State Department criticized Mursi, but gave no public signal it was opposed to the army’s action.

Asked whether the Egyptian army had the legitimacy to remove Mursi from power, State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said, “We’re not taking sides in this.”

The muted U.S. response – at least thus far – to the dramatic events in Cairo suggested that Washington may be willing to accept the military’s move as a way of ending a political crisis that has paralyzed Egypt, a long-time U.S. ally.

Still, the distant attitude toward Mursi, who has come under U.S. criticism in recent days, could open up President Barack Obama to complaints he has not supported democracy in the Arab world.

There was no immediate reaction from the White House or the State Department to the military’s announcement that it was installing a technocratic government to eventually be followed by new elections.

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Egypt: Top Morsi aide says coup is under way

The New York Times reports: A top adviser to President Mohamed Morsi issued an open letter Wednesday afternoon lamenting what he called the imminent takeover of Egypt’s first freely elected government.

“As I write these lines I am fully aware that these may be the last lines I get to post on this page,” the adviser, Essam el-Haddad, wrote on his Facebook page. “For the sake of Egypt and for historical accuracy, let’s call what is happening by its real name: Military coup.”

Mr. Haddad and his family went to the streets two years ago to help oust former President Hosni Mubarak, he wrote. “We stood, and we still stand, for a very simple idea: given freedom, we Egyptians can build institutions that allow us to promote and choose among all the different visions for the country. We quickly discovered that almost none of the other actors were willing to extend that idea to include us,” he wrote, charging that the opposition and bureaucracy had refused to collaborate with elected leaders from the Muslim Brotherhood.

“Today only one thing matters,” he wrote. “In this day and age no military coup can succeed in the face of sizable popular force without considerable bloodshed. Who among you is ready to shoulder that blame?”

And he warned with new force that the president’s Islamist supporters would not go quietly. “Hundreds of thousands of them have gathered in support of democracy and the Presidency,” he wrote. “And they will not leave in the face of this attack. To move them, there will have to be violence. It will either come from the army, the police, or the hired mercenaries. Either way there will be considerable bloodshed.” [Continue reading…]

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Clapper lies to Congress about lying to Congress

On March 12 when Sen Ron Wyden questioned Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, who was testifying in the Senate under oath, the senator, like any good lawyer, knew exactly what he was asking and chose his words carefully.

“Does the NSA collect any type of data at all on millions or hundreds of millions of Americans?” Wyden asked. He didn’t ask whether the NSA is reading our emails or listening to our phone calls. He used the all-inclusive “any type of data at all” and he was questioning the chief intelligence officer of the United States — and man who is perfectly aware of the breadth and nuance that attaches to the term “data.” Clapper doesn’t need a staff member to tutor him on the meaning of metadata — that is, to explain that this too is a form of data.

In a letter to Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein, Clapper now claims that when he denied the NSA is collecting data on million of Americans, “my answer focused on the collection of the content of communications.”

He could have said: “I gave an answer to a question I hadn’t been asked.”

He now says: “My response was clearly erroneous — for which I apologize.”

To call it erroneous is to imply that he made a mistake rather than that he was intentionally deceptive. That admission would be a confession to breaking the law. At this point, Clapper seems to think he can brush aside accusations that he committed perjury.

Several senators are clearly unimpressed by Clapper’s explanation.

“It now appears clear that the director of national intelligence, James Clapper, lied under oath to Congress and the American people,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) tweeted.

“Perjury is a serious crime … [and] Clapper should resign immediately,” he said.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) said that Clapper had broken the law, comparing him to NSA leaker Edward Snowden, who has been charged with espionage.

“Mr. Clapper lied in Congress in defiance of the law in the name of security,” Paul said on CNN last month. “Mr. Snowden told the truth in the name of privacy. So, I think there will be a judgment, because both of them broke the law, and history will have to determine.”

Wyden, who knew about the NSA programs when he pressed Clapper on them, said that Clapper was preventing Congress from conducting oversight.

“This job cannot be done responsibly if Senators aren’t getting straight answers to direct questions,” Wyden said in a statement last month.

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In Egypt, all eyes are on the army

Magdi Abdelhadi writes: There was no way this could end well. Mohamed Morsi and his supporters thought God was on their side, and their opponents concluded that they were up against religious fascists who would turn Egypt into another Taliban-ruled Afghanistan. The hyperbole reflects an intensely polarised society and highly charged political atmosphere, where the voice of reason and moderation has been drowned out by the clamour for jihad on one side and for the military to rescue the country on the other.

Morsi clearly thought his speech last night (most probably his last) would be perceived as a heroic stand for democracy. Instead, it was seen by the people he most needed to persuade of his sincerity as a coded message to his most militant followers to unleash war on their fellow Egyptians, viewed as “enemies of the true faith”.

Reactions on social media were almost instantaneous as he delivered his speech on state television, word by word and gesture by gesture. Many were angry that the army had not prevented this man from delivering a speech that in their eyes amounted to incitement to violence. His readiness to die in defence of legitimacy (a word he uttered nearly 200 times) was interpreted as the code word for action by Muslim Brotherhood activists against their political enemies. Instead, it was his supporters near Cairo university who came under attack, and 16 were killed overnight. [Continue reading…]

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Egypt army plan would scrap constitution, parliament

Reuters reports: Egypt’s armed forces would suspend the constitution and dissolve an Islamist-dominated parliament under a draft political roadmap to be pursued if Islamist President Mohamed Mursi and his opponents fail to reach a power-sharing agreement by Wednesday, military sources said.

The sources told Reuters the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) was still discussing details of the plan, intended to resolve a political crisis that has brought millions of protesters into the streets. The roadmap could be changed based on political developments and consultations.

Chief-of-staff General Abdel Fattah El-Sisi called in a statement on Monday for Mursi to agree within 48 hours on power-sharing with other political forces, saying the military would otherwise set out its own roadmap for the country’s future.

MENA reports: Diplomats and their families are leaving Cairo as the grace period the army gave to political powers to resolve the current impasse draws to a close, state-run news agency MENA reports.

Flights to and from Cairo have also decreased.

Diplomatic staff left the country on civilian flights or private jets dispatched by their home countries, while security intensified in departure and arrival halls.

Over 200 American families from the embassy’s staff left Cairo on more than 15 flights.

Among them, the husband of the US ambassador, the wife of the Turkish ambassador and his two sons, and 22 of the embassy’s staff who headed to Istanbul.

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The U.S. communications hegemony

The Associated Press reports: The saga of Edward Snowden and the NSA makes one thing clear: The United States’ central role in developing the Internet and hosting its most powerful players has made it the global leader in the surveillance game.

Other countries, from dictatorships to democracies, are also avid snoopers, tapping into the high-capacity fiber optic cables to intercept Internet traffic, scooping their citizens’ data off domestic servers, and even launching cyberattacks to win access to foreign networks.

But experts in the field say that Silicon Valley has made America a surveillance superpower, allowing its spies access to massive mountains of data being collected by the world’s leading communications, social media, and online storage companies. That’s on top of the United States’ fiber optic infrastructure — responsible for just under a third of the world’s international Internet capacity, according to telecom research firm TeleGeography — which allows it to act as a global postmaster, complete with the ability to peek at a big chunk of the world’s messages in transit.

“The sheer power of the U.S. infrastructure is that quite often data would be routed though the U.S. even if it didn’t make geographical sense,” Joss Wright, a researcher with the Oxford Internet Institute, said in a telephone interview. “The current status quo is a huge benefit to the U.S.” [Continue reading…]

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Snowden case: Bolivia condemns jet ‘aggression’

BBC News reports: Bolivia has accused European countries of an “act of aggression” for refusing to allow its presidential jet into their airspace, amid suggestions US fugitive Edward Snowden was on board.

Bolivia said France, Portugal, Spain and Italy had blocked the plane from flying over their territory.

President Evo Morales was flying back to Bolivia from Moscow when the plane was diverted to Vienna.

The jet was reportedly searched for Mr Snowden, wanted for leaking US secrets.

He was apparently not on board and is still believed to be in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport, from where he is seeking asylum in Bolivia and several other countries.

Bolivia’s UN envoy Sacha Llorenti told reporters in Geneva that he would complain to the UN about the European countries’ actions.

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Obama owes Germans an explanation

Gregor Peter Schmitz writes: Mick Jagger, 69, might be a father of seven and a grandfather of four, but he can still pull off the role of the eternally youthful rebel. The Rolling Stones recently gave a concert in Washington, just a few kilometers away from the White House. “I don’t think President Obama is here, but I’m sure he’s listening in,” the Stones frontman quipped.

The audience laughed out loud because Barack Obama — the man who carried so much hope and was long believed to be a very European US president — has become the butt of jokes. Some view him as the embodiment of the very “Big Brother” once sketched by George Orwell, the dictator who spies on, monitors and controls every citizen without any scruples.

But how much of that is a cliché, and how much truth is there to it? Given the revelations published by SPIEGEL in recent days showing evidence of a US spying program that is directed at European Union institutions, and monitoring an almost inconceivable number of communications connections — 500 million a month in Germany alone — you can’t blame a person for thinking the worst. Even if Obama has explicitly ensured that Americans needn’t fear some kind of “Big Brother,” the “3rd Party Partners,” as Germany was categorized in top secret NSA documents, are now asking if the same applies to Europeans. [Continue reading…]

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Rethinking surveillance

Kenneth Roth writes: As a federal prosecutor in the 1980s, I used to think nothing of scooping up the phone numbers that a suspect called. I viewed that surveillance as no big deal because the Supreme Court had ruled in Smith v. Maryland (1979) that we have no reasonable expectation of privacy in the phone numbers we dial, as opposed to the content of the calls. And in any event, I had limited time or practical ability to follow up on those numbers.

Today, by contrast, when I look at the government’s large-scale electronic surveillance of private communications, I see an urgent need to rethink the rationale — and legal limits — for such intrusion. The government now has the technology to collect, store, and analyze information about our communications cheaply and quickly. It can assemble a picture of everyone we call or email — essentially our entire personal and professional lives — with a few computer commands. In addition, given the pervasive presence of geo-locators on our smart phones, the government is able to electronically monitor and reconstruct virtually every place we visit — a capacity that will only increase with the growing practice of photographing our license plates and the rapid improvement of facial-recognition software in combination with proliferating video cameras.

The government claims this enhanced capacity to monitor our metadata has helped to foil terrorist plots. But officials have been hard-pressed to identify cases in which broad, unfocused electronic surveillance has made a decisive difference. Meanwhile, US law has not kept up with the dramatic new intrusions on our privacy made possible by current technology. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. drone strikes more deadly to Afghan civilians than manned aircraft

The Guardian reports: A study conducted by a US military adviser has found that drone strikes in Afghanistan during a year of the protracted conflict caused 10 times more civilian casualties than strikes by manned fighter aircraft.

The new study, referred to in an official US military journal, contradicts claims by US officials that the robotic planes are more precise than their manned counterparts.

It appears to undermine the claim made by President Obama in a May speech that “conventional airpower or missiles are far less precise than drones, and likely to cause more civilian casualties and local outrage”.

Drone strikes in Afghanistan, the study found, according to its unclassified executive summary, were “an order of magnitude more likely to result in civilian casualties per engagement.”

Larry Lewis, a principal research scientist at the Center for Naval Analyses, a research group with close ties to the US military, studied air strikes in Afghanistan from mid-2010 to mid-2011, using classified military data on the strikes and the civilian casualties they caused. Lewis told the Guardian he found that the missile strikes conducted by remotely piloted aircraft, commonly known as drones, were 10 times more deadly to Afghan civilians than those performed by fighter jets. [Continue reading…]

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A map of non-violent activism in Syria

Kristyan Benedict writes: Non violent resistance in Syria? Don’t make me laugh. Those trying to topple Assad are all cannibals and head choppers….or so the likes of the academic “Angry Arab”, Asad Abu Khalil would, it would seem at times, try to convince you.

The reality is Syrians in their tens of thousands continue to resist the Assad regimes brutality (and sometimes resist certain armed opposition groups) through non-violent methods of staggering diversity and creativity. The extremely grim and brutal reality which regime apologists and quite often the mainstream media present is but one, extremely narrow perspective of what is going on in Syria. It is far from the whole truth.

A Syrian activist friend of mine, Omar al Assil, has recently produced a beautiful, interactive map of non-violent resistance in Syria. It was created with his colleagues in the Syrian Non Violence Movement including their members inside Syria.

I mention Abu Khalil as he was the first to respond to the map when the social commentator, Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi posted it on his Facebook wall on June 21. Abu Khalil responded smugly: “Very convincing. Is there a special color for beheadings?”.

Pulse Media’s Muhammad Idrees Ahmad responded eloquently in the same thread to Abu Khalil’s customary inelegance: “He wants you to make blanket generalisations; to make no distinction between the Syrian majority who oppose the regime peacefully, the minority who defend themselves with arms, or the few who commit unpardonable crimes. They must all be judged by the standard of the lowest among them. Find the most criminal action, and extrapolate it onto the whole opposition.”

That extrapolation is a common reaction by many who only want to amplify the negatives of those opposed to the Assad regime. [Continue reading…]

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Turkey: AKP may have gotten message from Gezi Park

Mustafa Akyol writes: It has now been a month from the beginning of the Gezi Park crisis and the subsequent anti-government protests that shook Turkey. Most observers, including myself, have concluded that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) government led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan have both misunderstood and mismanaged the crisis. However, I also think that the AKP elites have learned some lessons and are willing to take some helpful steps.

For sure, the misunderstanding still goes on, and at its heart lies the AKP propaganda, if not self-delusion, that all the protests were orchestrated by “dark powers” which wanted to sabotage Turkey’s glorious progress. A film prepared by the AKP public-relations department lays out this scheme very clearly, by explaining how Erdogan’s success provoked a long list of conspirators, ranging from the interest-rate lobby to foreign companies and their domestic “spies.” Uncritically pro-Erdogan commentators in the media take these conspiracy theories to new heights every day, blaming almost every political actor in the world except the AKP itself. According to one popular theory, for example, one of the conspirators was the German Lufthansa, which wanted to take on revenge Turkey for the success of Turkish Airlines and the construction of Istanbul’s third airport, which promises to be Europe’s largest.

There are also worrying signs of a probable witchhunt against the protesters. In fact, we should grant that some of them — especially those who come from the far left — were inexcusably violent as they tried to storm the prime minister’s office or set AKP buildings on fire. In other words, the police is justified in investigating such criminals. But other steps by the authorities, such as the government’s demand from public offices the lists of public servants who joined the protests, are concerning. Similarly worrying are Erdogan’s public threats against businessmen who supported the protests. The government has to understand that while vandalism is a crime, peaceful protests are perfectly legitimate and no one can be tried for joining them. [Continue reading…]

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Morsi clings to legitimacy

The New York Times reports: Brushing aside a military ultimatum and his deepening isolation, President Mohamed Morsi of Egypt declared on Tuesday that he was the legitimate leader of the country and blamed the spiraling and violent national crisis on what he repeatedly called the corrupt “remnants of the former regime” overthrown in the 2011 revolution.

In an emotional and rambling speech broadcast live on state television that extended past midnight into Wednesday morning, Mr. Morsi called on both his supporters and opponents to put aside their disagreements and unite behind him, and and hinted strongly that the country could fall into chaos if they did not.

“I am the president of Egypt,” Mr. Morsi said, invoking again and again what he called his constitutional mandate to remain in power.

“The remnants of the former regime, they are fighting against our democracy,” he said, referring to the toppled government of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak. “If they come back to the people they will be rejected. They are accustomed to corruption, rigging elections sucking dry the blood of the people.” He added: “They cannot thrive in democracy.”

It was Mr. Morsi’s most extensive rebuttal to the growing calls on him to resign from an ever-widening spectrum of the Egyptian population after a year-long tenure that has been riven with turmoil and growing disenchantment with him and his Islamist supporters.

Mr. Morsi also demanded that the Egyptian military rescind its ultimatum against him, which his supporters have described as the prelude to a military coup.

Mr. Morsi’s defiant message came amid a new outbreak of armed and lethal political violence as protesters massed to call for his ouster. As the clock ticked on the military’s two-day ultimatum for the president to ease the crisis, high-ranking aides abandoned him and dozens of his s supporters were hit by birdshot. At least seven people were reported killed. [Continue reading…]

Laura Rozen reports: The White House on Tuesday pushed back on a report that American officials are urging Egyptian President Mohammad Morsi to call early elections, in response to the largest anti-government demonstrations Egypt has ever witnessed. The comments seem intended to reduce any perception that Washington is trying to dictate any particular course of action to the Egyptian leadership.

“It is not accurate that the United States is ‘urging’ President Morsy to call early elections,” National Security Council spokeswoman Bernadette Meehan said in an e-mail Tuesday to Al-Monitor.

“President Obama has encouraged President Morsy to take steps to show that he is responsive to the concerns of the Egyptian people and underscored that the current crisis can only be resolved through a political process,” Meehan continued. “As the President has made clear since the revolution, only Egyptians can make the decisions that will determine their future.”

The White House comment, responding to a CNN report Tuesday, didn’t seem to rule out that US officials may be discussing the option of early elections with Egyptian officials behind closed doors.

“We are saying to him, ‘Figure out a way to go for new elections,’” a senior US official told CNN. “That may be the only way that this confrontation can be resolved.”

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The Muslim Brotherhood fights for its legacy, not for Morsi

Al-Monitor reports: As millions of protesters converged on the streets of Egypt on June 30 to peacefully yet boisterously demand the downfall of Egypt’s first elected president, Mohammed Morsi, deadly clashes broke out in several spots across the volatile nation. Around midnight, the Muslim Brotherhood’s international headquarters, located in Cairo’s upscale Moqattam district, was in flames.

The six-story building declared as the Muslim Brotherhood General Center in 2011 — after decades of underground operations and being hunted down by Hosni Mubarak, Anwar Sadat, and Gamal Abdel Nasser’s security — was attacked by dozens of rock- and Molotov cocktail-hurling protesters. The attacks ensued despite the obvious security precautions taken by the Brotherhood youth over the past week: they covered the building’s windows with street-war like sandbags, chain-locked the gates, wielded their weapons and bunkered inside.

As massive clouds of smoke blew out of the iconic Guidance Bureau of the worldwide organization, the movement’s disciplined, listen-and-obey youth continued to fire live ammunition at the assaulters. No more Brotherhood reinforcements arrived at the burning headquarters, and armored vehicles of the Interior Ministry stood watching from a distance, a clear message that the police would no longer protect the ruling clique.

Eight anti-Morsi protesters were killed by live bullets, mostly to the head and neck, and more than 35 were wounded by live rounds and birdshot. Calls for blood donations to the battle-neighboring hospital continued to circulate social media websites for hours. How the Muslim Brotherhood fighters evacuated their positions remains unknown, but one of them was caught by protesters trying to escape and was brutally stripped naked and stabbed before reaching the police station in critical condition. [Continue reading…]

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