http://wikileaks.ch/Evidence-of-torture-…

By María Luisa Rivera, Wikileaks, 28 January 2011, 15.00 GMT

"Many well-known activists including Mohamed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace laureate, have been arrested in their homes, civilians have been wounded and even killed in clashes with Egyptian police and security forces. As an Internet blackout imposed by the state covers the country, every citizen and grassroots organization will now be exposed to arbitrary police forces. As secret documents from US prove, during the demonstrations today, authorities might use physical threats, legal threats and extraordinary laws such the Emergency Law as an excuse to persecute and prosecute activists during the pacific demonstrations taking place in Cairo and other cities.

As described by Cable 10CAIRO64 sent from the Embassy of Cairo on 12January, 2010, “Egypt’s State of Emergency, in effect almost continuously since 1967, allows for the application of the 1958 Emergency Law, which grants the GOE broad powers to arrest individuals without charge and to detain them indefinitely”. The cable also describes how “The GOE has also used the Emergency Law in some recent cases to target bloggers and labor demonstrators”.

Excessive use of force by police during the protests led to arbitrary executions and detentions in a vast array of abuses, a situation that is known and acknowledge"d in the past by U.S. diplomats based in Egypt. It is important to bear in mind the long record of police abuse and torture by Egyptian police forces."

It's teh internets.

It must be the domino effect. All that Iraqi freedom is spilling over to all the other countries. King George II was right!

Help undermine Mubarak and help the Egyptian rebellion by donating bandwidth:

https://www.accessnow.org/proxy-cloud/pa…

Quantitative easing spillover effect. High food and gas prices with high unemployment are the accelerants, the corrupt government is the perceived cause. Global elites in Davos starting to sweat?

I have to admit that Charles' sentiments echo my own. These events are a reminder that there are bigger things going on in the world than our little lives.

I was listening to an interview on CBC radio the other day, and it sounds like Al-Jazeera broadcasts definitely have had an enormous impact.

People post videos on Facebook (like when Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire and burned to death). These videos usually get deleted or blocked by the government. Before the government finds the video, Al-Jazeera downloads the information, and then broadcasts it. Many people in the middle-east get Al-Jazeera by satellite, and it's apparently hard for the government to block (one interviewee said for technical reasons, the other said for social reasons--business leaders need to be able to watch Al-Jazeera).

So, all sorts of people are finding out about protests within their country and neighbouring countries that wouldn't have necessarily found out a couple of years ago.

Fascinating.

I'm not sure what happened with my overuse of hyphens in my post. Middle East definitely doesn't need one and neither does Al Jazeera.

Everyone needs hyphens, CN.