More Links About Egypt

By John Ballard

Again the news is happening faster than I can blog. It's too importnat to miss and too complicated to Tweet. Besides, I may want to refere to something later. My plan is to add to this list as I read.

?Gangs Hunt Journalists and Rights Workers NY Times

?We�ve compiled a list of all the journalist who have been in some way threatened, attacked or detained while reporting in Egypt. ABC News, with plans to update as new reports are collected.

?Anderson Cooper attacked again in Egypt Daily Caller

?Will Congress Give Obama the �Mubarak Option�?

Sens. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Thomas Carper (D-Dela.) introduced legislation in the last Congress that would give the Executive Branch far-reaching authority to cut off �critical infrastructure� in times of crisis.

?Egyptian pro-democracy protesters got ran over by a police car You Tube Video

?"Things are very quiet in the square at the moment. Gonna call it a night and brace myself or tomorrow." That tweet is my signal to pause.

?Tomorrow, Friday, is the Egyptian day of prayer. Important events often commence then. I expect tomorrow's events to be as dramatic as anything seen thus far.  Commentators at Al Jazeera are saying as much and tweets all week have referred to the same theme, but with no specificity. 
We are seven hours distant, so sometime between midnight and three AM here would be a good time to check the Al Jazeera live feed. 

An old saying is "Never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel," referring to the power of newspapers to make or break one's political career.With today's world connected by an electronic news network, an up-to-date version would be "Whatever you do, don't mess with journalists." Individuals or groups who try to silence journalists are guaranteeing themselves more problems than solutions.

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Postscript regarding Yemen...

Lost in the week's reporting, with the spotlight on Egypt, are a couple of stories about other countries in the neighborhood. The place that has been mentioned most specifically has been Yemen where a "Day ofRage" was called for today. I heard on the radio that President Ali Abdullah Saleh has responded by announcing that neither he nor his son will run for president when his term is up, but it remains to be seen if this announcement will be sufficient to prevent problems tomorrow.

Something I read last week keeps ringing in my head. The absence of firearms and relatively low number of dead in Egypt is noteworthy. (For me this is testomony to the importance of a gun-free society but in our country my feelings are trumped by the Second Amendment.) If violence erupts in Yemen the consequences may be counted in bodies more than images. 

The only question late Friday was just how Egypt defined a threat to national security -- and how far the army was prepared to go to thwart it.

Yemen's military is yet another case altogether. The country's commanders are known for their rapacity and their forces for their ineptness. Yemeni troops and officers tend to sell their weapons and bullets on the black-market as soon as they are delivered. Some Yemeni commanders make a thriving business charging foreign contractors for protection, allegedly sometimes arranging attacks to convince the contractors they need protecting, a longtime analyst in Yemen told me. (He spoke on background for fear of retaliation by the government.)

As adept as the Yemeni army may be at profiting from its services, however, it is not very good at guarding against actual threats. The Yemen-Saudi branch of al Qaeda, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has killed dozens of Yemeni security forces and officials in attacks in recent months. Yemen has reported only a few AQAP casualties in return and has managed to capture none of AQAP's leaders.

Yemen's people are among the most heavily armed in the world; the majority of households stock at least one firearm. So should Yemen's protests turn violent and spread to all sectors of society, something that hasn't happened so far, it's easy to conceive of circumstances in which the public could overwhelm President Ali Abdullah Saleh's security forces, at least in the short term.

In response, there's a good chance that Yemen's counterterrorism forces, beefed up with American aid to help fight against AQAP, could use U.S.-provided arms against the public. U.S. diplomatic cables released by WikiLeaks have already confirmed that the government using U.S. military aid against northern rebels. Diverting such aid to protect the regime in the capital Sanaa wouldn't be much more of a stretch. (In both Egypt and Tunisia, protesters have said that the tear-gas canisters fired at them were stamped, "Made in the USA.")

?Addendum -- I don't know where these numbers came from but if they are close to accurate it may augur well for a less explosive uprising in Yemen.  Internet penetration in Tunisia 34.1%, Egypt 20%, Yemen 1.8%. In the monarchies Jordan 27.6 %, Morocco 32.2%, Saudi Arabia 43.5%

? In case you were wondering -- People have routed power from the street lights and are charging their cell phones in Tahriri
This also -- Ppl are sleeping curled next to each other. Heads on laps. When alarms sound they run to protect entrances. They wait patiently.