WikiLeaks Cables: FBI trained Egypt’s state security ‘torturers’
'Thousands' of protesters may have been tortured: report Egypt's secret police, long accused of torturing suspects and intimidating political opponents of President Hosni Mubarak, received training at the FBI's facility in Quantico, Virginia, even as US diplomats compiled allegations of brutality against them, according to US State Department cables released by WikiLeaks. One cable, dated November 2007 and published by the Telegraph, describes a meeting between the head of the SSIS, Egypt's secret police, and FBI deputy director John Pistole, in which the secret police chief praises Pistole for the "excellent and strong" cooperation between the two agencies. (Pistole has since been appointed head of the TSA.)
SSIS chief Abdul Rahman said the FBI's training sessions at Quantico were of "great benefit" to his agency. The cables did not address what sort of training Egyptian secret police received at Quantico, or how many officers were trained there. In another cable, dated October 2009, a US diplomat reported on allegations from "credible human rights lawyers" that the SSIS was behind the torture of terrorism suspects held in Egyptian jails.
The Independent: US envoy Frank Wisner's business link to Egypt Frank Wisner, President Barack Obama's envoy to Cairo who infuriated the White House this weekend by urging Hosni Mubarak to remain President of Egypt, works for a New York and Washington law firm which works for the dictator's own Egyptian government. [...] The US State Department and Mr Wisner himself have now both claimed that his remarks were made in a "personal capacity". But there is nothing "personal" about Mr Wisner's connections with the litigation firm Patton Boggs, which openly boasts that it advises "the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government's behalf in Europe and the US".
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