US Government Enthusiastically Tweets About Arms Sales To Brutal & Autocratic Egyptian Regime

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog [6],

In case you’ve been living under a geopolitical rock for the last couple of years, you’d know that despite a brief period of time during which Egypt appeared headed toward a democratic form of government, it went from one brutal dictator to another. As was the case during Hosni Mubarak’s decades of rule, this is precisely how the U.S. government likes it. So much so, that U.S. officials are not only selling arms to the latest despot, General Abdelfattah al-Sisi, but they are actively bragging about it on Twitter.

Glenn Greenwald reports at the Intercept [7]:

The Egyptian regime run by the despotic General Abdelfattah al-Sisi is one of the world’s most brutal and repressive. Last year, Human Rights Watch documented that [8] that Egyptian “security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak’s rule.” Just two months ago, the group warned [9] that the abuses have “escalated,” and that Sisi, “governing by decree in the absence of an elected parliament, ha[s] provided near total impunity for security force abuses and issued a raft of laws that severely curtailed civil and political rights, effectively erasing the human rights gains of the 2011 uprising that ousted the longtime ruler Hosni Mubarak.”

 

Despite that repression — or, more accurately, because of it — the Obama administration has lavished the regime with aid, money and weapons, just as the U.S. government did for decades in order to prop up Hosni Mubarak. When Sisi took power in a coup, not only did the U.S. government support him but it praised him for restoring “democracy.” Since then, the U.S. has repeatedly sent arms and money to the regime as its abuses became more severe. As the New York Times delicately put it yesterday [10], “American officials . . . signaled that they would not let their concerns with human rights stand in the way of increased security cooperation with Egypt.”

 

[The U.S. media pretended to be on the side of Tahir Square democracy protesters despite decades of support from the American government for Mubarak. Recall that in 2009 Hillary Clinton pronounced [11]: “I really consider President and Mrs. Mubarak to be friends of my family.” A WikiLeaks cable [12], anticipating the first meeting between Obama and Mubarak in 2009, emphasized that “the Administration wants to restore the sense of warmth that has traditionally characterized the U.S.-Egyptian partnership” and that “the Egyptians want the visit to demonstrate that Egypt remains America’s ‘indispensible [sic] Arab ally.’” The cable noted that “[intelligence] Chief Omar Soliman and Interior Minister al-Adly keep the domestic beasts at bay, and Mubarak is not one to lose sleep over their tactics.”]

Glenn later notes the following tweet, posted by the official Twitter account of the U.S. Embassy in Cairo: