Tom Eley
WSWS

"The cables demonstrate the courage of the Egyptian demonstrators in the face of the brutality of the Mubarak regime."

On Friday, WikiLeaks released dozens of diplomatic cables that together reveal the US has long been aware of the criminality of the Mubarak regime in Egypt and its savage abuses, including torture, random arrest, and extra-judicial killings. The documents also reveal that plans for the military-supervised transfer of power from Hosni Mubarak to his son, Gamal, were presented to Washington.

The document release, which coincided with mass demonstrations and clashes with police in Cairo, Suez, and other cities, will only serve to further discredit Mubarak, and is a major embarrassment to the Obama administration, whose leading representatives, including President Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, have continued to insist that the Mubarak regime is not a dictatorship, while hypocritically calling for “restraint.”

The documents, diplomatic cables from the US embassy in Cairo from 2009 and 2010, make clear that the Obama administration was well aware that the Mubarak regime held onto power by terrorizing the population. But Washington tacitly supported the dictatorship and its crimes because Egypt is considered the most important component to US strategy for a wide region encompassing the Middle East, the Maghreb, and the Horn of Africa.

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Stephen Lendman

Democratic Middle East birth pangs may have legs enough to spread regionally, including in Occupied Palestine.

Officially launched in Cairo in 1959, the General Union of Palestinian Students (GUPS) offers hope, driven by a commitment for Palestinian liberation. With more than 100 chapters and over 100,000 members, it's organized rallies, political debates, cultural programs, and other initiatives to spread truths about the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.

Perhaps inspired by events across the region, on January 27, its press release headlined, "Palestinian students claim right to participate in shaping our destiny," saying:

"....(I)n order to reassert our inalienable rights, (we) claim our right to democratically participate in the shaping of our destiny. We begin a national initiative to campaign for direct elections to the Palestinian National Council (the PLO's legislative body) on the clear understanding that only a reformed national representative institution, that includes all Palestinians, those struggling in the homeland and those struggling in exile, can create a representative Palestinian platform, and restore the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people."

If popular uprisings offer democratic hope in Tunisia, Algeria, Jordan, Yemen and Egypt, why not Palestine freed from occupation!

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Peter Symonds
WSWS

The US commander in Afghanistan, General David Petraeus, this week characterised the US surge as a success, but other military figures and officials were far more pessimistic about the military situation and the popular opposition generated by the carnage and destruction of the US-led war.

In a letter to his subordinates on Tuesday, Petraeus offered an upbeat assessment of the US-led occupation. Foreign troops and Afghan government forces, he wrote, had “inflicted enormous losses” on mid-level insurgents over the past year and had taken away “some of their most important safe havens”.

Petraeus claimed that the Taliban was on the defensive. “Now, in fact, the insurgents are increasingly responding to our operations rather than vice versa, and there are numerous reports of unprecedented discord among the member of the Quetta Shura, the Taliban senior leadership body,” he wrote.

The letter was pitched at justifying the Obama administration’s build-up of troops in Afghanistan last year, which has taken a terrible human toll—both of Afghans and foreign troops alike. Despite its claims to be winning “hearts and minds,” the American military’s murderous offensives—particularly in the southern province of Kandahar—have only intensified the intense public hostility to the neo-colonial occupation.

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