Handy Guide to how Egypt's Mubarak is tied to "War On Terror" and other torture techniques

[zulchzulu]

It's been under the radar for the most part about how the United States and the UK intelligence (and others) would send their captured terror suspects to Egypt for the meekly named "renditions" for long periods of time in prisons. Since taking power in 1981, Hosni Mubarak certainly knew about and complied with those orders.

Amnesty International had filed several reports regarding specific examples regarding this issue.

The report details the case of Abu Omar, an Egyptian resident in Italy who was allegedly kidnapped by CIA agents in Italy in 2003 and handed over to the Egyptian authorities. Abu Omar was held without charge in Egyptian jails for nearly four years and in testimony given to an Italian prosecutor he has alleged that he was whipped, subjected to electric shocks and raped.

He was never successfully charged and was released in February 2007.

AI also highlights the case of Mamdouh Habib, an Australian national of Egyptian descent. He alleges that he was detained and tortured in Pakistan in 2001, handed over to US officials and then flown on to Egypt. There he was tortured, including in a "water cell" in which he had to stand on tiptoe for hours in order not to drown. Under torture, Mr Habib says, he confessed to training the 11 September 2001 hijackers in martial arts.

He was later taken to Guantanamo Bay, from which he was finally released in January 2005. He was never charged.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6544149.stm

There are many other accounts in the report, but these two examples provide the template that Egypt and Mubarak are complicit in extreme torture aligned with the US/UK coalition.

Human Rights Watch (HRW) has also filed reports about Egypt's torture techniques and imprisonment of Christians, members of the Muslim Brotherhood, rights activists, journalists, bloggers and others who dared to criticize the Mubarak regime.

Rigging elections and jailing and torturing the opposition is only part of the story:

HRW said security officers targeted bloggers and journalists who criticized government policies and exposed human rights violations, and activists supporting Mohamed ElBaradei’s campaign for change. In March, State Security Investigations (SSI) arrested Tarek Khedr, who had been gathering signatures for the ElBaradei petition, and detained him incommunicado at an unknown location for three months. In April SSI officers arrested publisher Ahmed Mehni for publishing the book, “ElBaradei and the Dream of the Green Revolution.”

(snip)

The HRW report also noted several arbitrary detention and torture cases, and said officials of SSI appear to have “disappeared” more political detainees in 2010. Security officers “disappeared” those accused of membership in Islamic groups for up to three months and also “disappeared” young political activists for several days.

(snip)

HRW also said that although Egypt’s constitution provides for equal rights without regard to religion, there is widespread discrimination against Egyptian Christians, as well as official intolerance of heterodox Muslim sects. In January gunmen shot dead six Coptic Christians as they left a Christmas Mass in Nag’ Hammadi, forcing the government to acknowledge increasing sectarian violence.

There's a lot more: http://bikyamasr.com/wordpress/?p=24629

You would think that some homophobic Christian extremist groups with leaders like Sarah Palin and others would be piping up about Egypt's torture of Christians. They would be relieved that Egypt also tortures, beats and arrests homosexuals and has done it for years. Human Rights Watch has a report about this:

Egypt is carrying out a crackdown. The professed motive is cultural authenticity coupled with moral hygiene. The means include entrapment, police harassment, and torture. The agents range from government ministers to phalanxes of police informers fanning out across Cairo. The victims are men suspected of having sex with men. The violence is aimed not only at their loves but at their lives.

Since early 2001, a growing number of men have been arrested, prosecuted, and convicted for having sexual relations with other men. Human Rights Watch knows the names of 179 men whose cases under the law against "debauchery" were brought before prosecutors since the beginning of 2001; in all probability that is only a minuscule percentage of the true total. Hundreds of others have been harassed, arrested, often tortured, but not charged.

Much more here: http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/02/29/time-torture

Egypt and Mubarak use the torture of women for various uses, but there are examples where they would torture the women linked to a terrorist suspect to make the man suspected in a crime to beg them to stop:

The government's new strategy of targeting women, officials admit privately, is an unpleasant price to be paid in the all-out war against Islamic terrorists. The deliberate degradation of women by arrest, torture and sexual abuse is intended to break the spirit of male militants seeking to overthrow the government of Hosni Mubarak.

"In our culture, the humiliation of a wife or mother or sister will break a man's back," says Dr Aida Seif al Dowla, a psychiatrist from the Cairo Centre for the Management and Rehabilitation of Victims of Violence, who confirms that women related to Islamic activists have been tortured.

Amal was arrested hours after police captured her husband, Ahmed al Sayid, who is now serving a 25-year sentence for an assassination attempt on Egypt's Minister of Information.

"In the beginning the interrogators were nice to me. They wanted me to appear on television to condemn my husband as a lunatic and wife-beater. When I refused, they turned ugly.

"First they mocked me for wearing a veil. Then they blindfolded me, stripped me down to my underwear and hung me by my hands from a hook in the ceiling. There were at least seven men in the room and some of them were telling me how much they would enjoy raping me.

"As they taunted me, they whipped me with cable wire, kicked me in the stomach and sliced open my back with razors. This lasted for more than two hours. While I was in this room, I could hear my husband screaming in pain and shouting "Ya awlad al sharameet ana marafsh aya haga. " It was obvious that they were torturing him.'

http://jummahcrew.tripod.com/rape.htm

There are a lot more links if you're interested in getting more details and evidence:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_rights_in_Egypt

[AzDar]

1. K & R

[zulchzulu]

2. I've been watching lots of US/UK coverage and it's never mentioned about...

...the alliance between the US/UK's so-called "War On Terror" torture escapades and Egypt's compliance as a secure location to torture suspected "terrorists".

Not one word... why the coverup?

Don't answer. ...We know the answer.

[kas125]

3. Somebody on CNN must've been talking about it because

my father started screaming and yelling at the tv yesterday morning and when I went in there to see what was going on he informed me, as if I wasn't already aware, that since "we don't torture" anymore, Egypt has been doing it for us. I looked at the tv and it was CNN he was watching.

[zulchzulu]

4. Kick for the cuberats n/t