Judge Helped Egypt’s Military to Cement Power

July 3, 2012
NYT
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Even as they promised to hand authority to elected leaders, Egypt’s ruling generals were planning with one of the nation’s top judges to preserve their political power and block the rise of the Islamists, the judge said.

Tahani el-Gebali, deputy president of the Supreme Constitutional Court, said she advised the generals not to cede authority to civilians until a Constitution was written. The Supreme Court then issued a decision that allowed the military to dissolve the first fairly elected Parliament in Egypt’s history and assure that the generals could oversee drafting of a Constitution.

The behind-the-scenes discussions, never publicly disclosed, shed new light on what some have called a judicial coup. From the moment the military seized control from President Hosni Mubarak, the generals “certainly” never intended to relinquish authority before supervising a new Constitution, Judge Gebali said.

The military council’s plan to cede authority was premised on first establishing the Constitution, the judge said, so the generals “knew who they were handing power to and on what basis. That was the point.”

When the military first seized power, it positioned itself as a guardian of the peaceful revolution, a force that was aimed at helping achieve the goals of a democratic Egypt. Demonstrators in Tahrir Square chanted that the people and the military were one, and there were promises of a quick transition to civilian control.

But the evidence since then has piled up demonstrating that the military had never intended to fully submit to democratically elected authority.

Now as Egypt’s new, popularly elected president, Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood, tries to fashion a role for himself as head of state, he is facing a military council that retains virtually all executive and legislative authority. The generals have again pledged to transfer power after a new Parliament is elected and a Constitution drafted.

Some argue that this is in Egypt’s best interest.

The generals “want to make sure before they leave that the Constitution is not monopolized by any group or direction,” said Anwar el-Sadat, nephew of the former president and a member of the Parliament that was dissolved. He was referring to the Islamists, who had won control of the Parliament and went on to win the presidency.

“They would like to make sure this is a civil state,” Mr. Sadat added, as opposed to a religious one. “That is all.”

Judge Gebali said her own direct contacts with the generals began in May last year, after a demonstration by mostly liberal and secular activists demanding a Constitution or at least a bill of rights before elections. “This changed the vision of the military council,” she said. “It had thought that the only popular power in the street was the Muslim Brotherhood.”

It was also around that time, Judge Gebali said, that she began helping the military-led government draft a set of binding constitutional ground rules. The rules protected civil liberties, she said, but also explicitly granted the military autonomy from any oversight, as well as a permanent power to intervene in politics. “The military council accepted it, and agreed to issue a ‘constitutional declaration’ with it,” she said.

But as the military-led government unveiled the rules, known here as the Selmi document, the provisions about the military’s power aroused fierce opposition, culminating in a weeklong street battle with security forces near Tahrir Square that left about 45 people dead.

The planned decree “was thwarted every time by all the noise, the popular mobilization, the ‘million-man marches,’ ” Judge Gebali said, blaming the Islamists even though they were only one part of the protests.

Egyptian jurists now say that the generals effectively planted a booby trap in the parliamentary elections by leaving them vulnerable to judicial negation at any time — if the generals allowed previous precedents to apply.

The elections had “a fatal poison,” Judge Gebali said she warned at the time. “Any reader of the situation would’ve known that this appeal would be the end of the Parliament.” When the elected Parliament sought to take control of the interim government, the generals’ prime minister expressly threatened the lawmakers with judicial dissolution, the speaker of Parliament said at the time.

The decision “is in the drawers of the constitutional court, and it could be taken out at any time,” Prime Minister Kamal el-Ganzouri told Parliament’s speaker, Saad el-Katatni of the Muslim Brotherhood, as Mr. Katatni recalled in March from the floor of Parliament.

Parliament backed down, and the warning proved prescient. But Mr. Ganzouri denied making the threat.

Supporters and critics of what has emerged both agree that what the generals are doing is aiming to create a system similar to what emerged in Turkey in 1981, after a military coup. At that time in Turkey, a military-dominated National Security Council retained broad power over an elected government in the name of preserving the secular character of the state.

It was bifurcated sovereignty — a military state within a state — that ushered in 20 years of repeated coups and perpetual instability. That began to change only about 10 years ago when Turkey’s current loosely Islamic governing party began prying away control.

Egypt’s generals recently activated a dormant National Defense Council packed with military personnel that could play a similar role.

Mr. Sadat, who is close to the generals, emphasized the ultimate outcome. “Over time the generals know they are losing power and control, the same as happened in Turkey,” he said.

The generals’ focus on securing their permanent autonomy and influence has been an unstated theme of why they came to power. Their intentions were made clear with a recently issued decree that gave them control of legislation and the budget until the election of a new Parliament. It also handed the Mubarak-appointees on the Supreme Constitutional Court jurisdiction to strike down provisions of the next Constitution.

Nathan J. Brown, a legal scholar at George Washington University, called the provision to give the holdover court such unrestricted power “a constitutional obscenity.”

Egyptians voted soon after Mr. Mubarak’s ouster to approve a transition plan that appeared to put the ratification of a Constitution well after the military turned over power to elected civilians — by design, its chief author, Judge Tarek el-Bishry, has said. The plan made no mention of the generals, who were promising a transfer in six months.

Then the generals unilaterally overruled the referendum and issued a decree stipulating that the ruling military council, not the elected Parliament, would call a constitutional assembly — the first clue of their intentions.

“I knew the elections would bring a majority from the movements of political Islam,” Judge Gebali said last week.

She said she sent the ruling generals a memo urging them to put off any votes. “Democracy isn’t only about casting votes; it’s about building a democratic infrastructure. We put the cart in front of the horse,” she said.

“But there was severe pressure for the Islamic movements,” she added, including the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s largest political force. “The military is the hard power in society, and it was in the Islamists’ interest not to set the Constitution while this hard force was in power.”

Later, she said, the generals acknowledged to her that they had made a mistake by going ahead with the parliamentary vote. “The apology was clear: ‘You were right,’ ” she said.

تهاني الجبالي تصف التصريحات المنسوبة لها بـ"نيويورك تايمز" بـ"الحقيرة".. وتؤكد: سأطالب بتعويض 10 مليون دولار

Thu, 07/05/2012 - 01:06

الجبالي: التصريحات محض كذب.. والصحيفة "معادية لمصر" وما نشر تجرؤ واستهداف لي شخصيا

كتب:

مرفت جمعة

أنكرت المستشارة تهاني الجبالي نائب رئيس المحكمة الدستورية العليا كل التصريحات التي نسبت إليها وتداولتها العديد من المواقع الالكترونية نقلا عن جريدة "نيويورك تايمز" والتي قالت فيها إن المؤسسة العسكرية في مصر ربما تسعى لتكرار التجربة التركية التي أرساها الجيش في تركيا للاحتفاظ بسلطات واسعة فى مواجهة الحكومة المنتخبة هناك.

وقالت فى مداخلة هاتفية مع برنامج "بلدنا بالمصري" إن هذه التصريحات "حقيرة" ومحض كذب وانحراف عن الحقيقة ووصفت الجريدة الأمريكية بأنها معادية لمصر ورموزها، وأن هذه التصريحات تجرؤ منها على شخصي واستهداف لي شخصيا، مضيفة أن الصحيفة تسعى الى بث أراء مختلقة بهدف بناء رأى عام في اتجاه معين معادى لمصر ورموز القضاء.

وأضافت الجبالى أنها لن تتنازل عن مقاضاة الصحيفة بمبلغ 10 مليون دولار تعويض وسوف تقوم بتقديمها هدية إلى شهداء ثورة 25 يناير .

كانت العديد من المواقع الالكترونية قد تناقلت اليوم حوارا نشرته الصحيفة الأمريكية مع الجبالي نسبت فيه قولها " إنه بالرغم من الوعود الذى قطعها القادة العسكريون حول تسليم السلطة للسلطة المدنية المنتخبة فى البلاد، إلا أن المجلس العسكرى الحاكم فى مصر كان يخطط، منذ اللحظة الأولى، للاحتفاظ بالسلطة ومنع صعود التيار الإسلامى ليقود البلاد خلال المرحلة المقبلة، حتى الانتهاء من صياغة الدستور الجديد.

كما ذكرت الصحيفة ان الجبالى قد طالبت المجلس الأعلى للقوات المسلحة بعدم تسليم البلاد إلى السلطة المدنية دون الانتهاء من صياغة الدستور الجديد الذى سيحكم البلاد خلال المرحلة المقبلة، موضحة أن الحكم الذى أصدرته المحكمة الدستورية العليا بحل البرلمان المصرى المنتخب لأول مرة منذ قيام الثورة المصرية، قد فتح الباب أمام الجنرالات للإشراف على صياغة الدستور الجديد.

وأضافت الصحيفة أن المجلس العسكرى عندما تولى مقاليد السلطة فى البلاد، نصب ذاته كحارس للثورة المصرية السلمية، والتى كانت تهدف إلى تحويل مصر إلى طريق الديمقراطية، موضحة أن الجنرالات كثيراً ما وعدوا فى تلك الفترة بتسليم السلطة فى أسرع وقت للحكومة المدنية المنتخبة، إلا أن الأدلة بعد ذلك لم تظهر سوى أن المجلس العسكرى لم يكن ينتوى من البداية تسليم السلطة بشكل كامل للحكومة المنتخبة ديمقراطياً.

كما نسبت الجريدة لها ايضا ان د. محمد مرسى، والذى ينتمى إلى جماعة الإخوان المسلمين، يسعى لرسم دور واضح لنفسه كرئيس للدولة المصرية، فى مواجهة الجنرالات الذين مازالوا يحتفظون بالسلطتين التنفيذية والتشريعية، على الرغم من أن مرسى قد وصل إلى منصبه من خلال انتخابات رئاسية حرة ونزيهة.

وأنها طالبت المجلس العسكرى بضرورة صياغة الدستور أو على الأقل وضع مجموعة من المبادئ الملزمة التى لا ينبغى أن يتعداها الدستور الجديد للبلاد منذ شهر مايو من العام الماضى.

President Morsi, a rigged ballot and a fox's tale that has all of Cairo abuzz

The Long View: The army intelligence service is said to want a mini-revolution to get rid of corrupt officers

Robert Fisk
The Independent
Monday, 2 July 2012

There is a fox in Tahrir Square. Bushy tailed and thickly furred, he claims to hear everything. And this is what he says: that 50.7 per cent of Egyptian voters cast their ballot for Mubarak's former Prime Minister, Ahmed Shafiq, in last month's elections; that only 49.3 per cent voted for Mohamed Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood's Freedom and Justice party; but that the military were so fearful of the hundreds of thousands of Brotherhood supporters who would gather in Tahrir Square they gave the victory to Morsi.

Now foxes can be deceitful. But this is a well-connected fox and he claims that Morsi actually met four leading members of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf) in Egypt four days before the election results were proclaimed and that he agreed to accept his presidency before the constitutional court rather than the newly dissolved parliament – which is exactly what he did on Saturday. He says there will be another election in a year's time, although I have my doubts.

Now behind this piece of Reynard-gossip is a further piece of information – shattering if true – that the Egyptian army's intelligence service is outraged by the behaviour of some members of the Scaf (in particular, the four who supposedly met Morsi) and wants a mini-revolution to get rid of officers whom it believes to be corrupt. These young soldiers call themselves the New Liberal Officers – a different version of the Free Officers Movement which overthrew the corrupt King Farouk way back in 1952.

Many of the present young intelligence officers were very sympathetic to the Egyptian revolution last year – and several of them were shot dead by government snipers long after Mubarak's departure during a Tahrir Square demonstration. They admire the current head of military intelligence, soon to retire and to be replaced, so it is said, by another respected military officer with the unfortunate name of Ahmed Mosad.

I have to say that all Cairo is abuzz with "the deal", and almost every newspaper has a version of how Morsi got to be President – though I must also add that none have gone as far as the fox. He says, for example, that the military intelligence services – like some of the Scaf officers – want a thorough clean out of generals who control a third of the Egyptian economy in lucrative scams that include shopping malls, banks and vast amounts of property. Where does Morsi stand in relation to this? Even the fox doesn't know.

Nor is there any plausible explanation as to why Shafiq set off to the United Arab Emirates the day after the election results were announced, reportedly to perform the "umra" pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia. There is much talk of a court case against Shafiq going back to Mubarak's era.

One man who was not present at the Morsi-Scaf meeting, says the fox, is Mohamed el-Baradei, but he may well be asked to be Morsi's Prime Minister. The Nobel prize-winner and former nuclear "watchdog" has expressed a profound lack of interest in such a role. Baradei's appointment would help Morsi keep the streets calm and allow Egypt to come up with an economic plan to persuade the International Monetary Fund to loan the country the money it needs to survive. There is also talk of great tensions between the military intelligence and the staff of the interior ministry, some of whom are fearful that another mini-revolution will have them in court for committing crimes against Egyptian civilians during the anti-Mubarak revolution.

There are persistent rumours that the plain-clothes "baltagi" thugs who were used to beat protesters last year were employed to prevent Christians voting in some Egyptian villages. Interestingly, when Sultan Faruq ran through election irregularities before announcing the presidential winner eight days ago, he said he didn't know who prevented the village voters getting to the polling station.

All of which is quite a story. Not the kind that can confirmed – but Egypt is not a country which lends itself to hard facts when the Egyptian press (a mercifully wonderful institution after the dog-day years of Mubarak's newspapers) makes so much up. But one fact cannot be denied. When he wanted to show that he was a revolutionary animal, the fox held out his back paw. And there was a very severe year-old bullet wound in it.

Why your hamburger hates America

By Tracie McMillan, Published: June 29 2012
The Washington Post

I dare you to celebrate the Fourth of July without a hamburger. What food better conveys the values of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than an all-American beef patty, grilled in the sunny confines of a grassy back yard?

A burger on the grill says: I have the day off to celebrate this great country, and I am going to relish it.

Independence Day is a time to celebrate American values — those the founders laid out all those July 4ths ago and the ones we’ve come to embrace today. The importance of fairness. Of a free market. Of America as a land of opportunity.

They are values well worth celebrating. But a hamburger is a terrible way to do it. Because the way that burger, bun, lettuce, tomato and all the other fixings got to your paper plate flies in the face of the values we cherish.

Herewith, to borrow a phrase from Thomas Jefferson, “let facts be submitted to a candid world” about what a simple hamburger says about our nation’s ideals of freedom and enterprise.

The beef and our right to free enterprise

You won’t find the word “capitalism” in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, but a free and open market economy is at the heart of both.

And the U.S. beef industry is a clear example of a restricted, tightly controlled market — with the control coming not from the government, but, as in the time of the Boston Tea Party, from private industry’s largest players. Every American-raised burger (or steak) comes from cattle on one of about 742,000 ranches across the country. Yet 85 percent of them will be slaughtered by one of just four companies.

This concentration is a problem for animals, whose chances of a humane slaughter diminish substantially as they crowd into increasingly mammoth facilities, and it is a problem for workers, who are forced to pick up the pace. It is risky for human health, since centralized processing makes it easy for meat contamination to spread far and wide.

And it is a serious problem for small ranchers. The livelihood of those who raise herds of less than 100 cattle — they constitute more than 90 percent of cattle ranchers — depends on slaughtering their stock within two weeks of the animals reaching prime weight. Yet access to slaughter and sale is tightly controlled by the meatpackers, whose market share is so large that they can dictate prices to ranchers, says Bill Bullard, chief executive of R-CALF, an advocacy group for cattle ranchers.

“Competition in the industry is almost nonexistent,” Bullard says. “The economics is forcing people out of business.” Since 1980, 42 percent of ranchers have called it quits.

Concentration is also bad for shoppers. The retail price of beef has been inching up since the 1990s, but “the inflation-adjusted price farmers receive has been going down,” says Robert Taylor, an Auburn University expert on the beef industry. “In a competitive market, [that] would translate into retail food prices going down . . . and that has not happened.”

Indeed, the share going to ranchers has dropped by about 10 percent, according to an analysis by Taylor of U.S. Agriculture Department data.

Consider how the beef industry echoes the causes of the Boston Tea Party, which rose up to protest not merely new taxes in the Tea Act but also the monopoly the law gave to a private corporation, the British East India Company. Burgers’ dominance of our celebratory cookout menus is not a problem, but the monopoly enjoyed by just four companies in selling them is.

The bun and a fair price

It’s a safe bet that at least one in four hamburger buns doled out at holiday barbecues this summer will come from Wal-Mart. The discounter-turned-grocery-behemoth controls at least a quarter of food sales nationwide, according to an analysis of USDA and Wal-Mart data. In 29 metropolitan areas, it controls more than 50 percent, say analysts at the United Food and Commercial Workers union, which represents supermarket workers. Wal-Mart has won that rank through low prices, with at least one unintended and deeply un-American effect: It has helped put smaller farmers out of business, in part by manufacturing food products — including burger buns.

Wal-Mart doesn’t make its buns itself but contracts with big food companies such as ConAgra to bake them. The baker (or bakery division) needs 10 times the amount of flour it used to need for smaller demand, and so it requires a mill that can refine 10 times as much grain.

That grain mill, in turn, has two choices. It can buy grain from 10 times as many small wheat farmers or streamline the process and find one, giant farmer that can meet the entire order, probably at a lower cost. The more market share Wal-Mart attains, the more buns are bought from giant bakers — and fewer from small-scale ones.

And by cutting out the middle man — think Sara Lee or Wonder Bread — Wal-Mart’s prices on its house brands are phenomenally competitive.

It’s not just prices for the buns, but also for the ketchup, mustard, relish and whatever else you set out on your picnic table. As Wal-Mart rapidly expanded its grocery business in the 1990s, it set off a wave of consolidation in food retail. Big agricultural operations now dominate the U.S. food supply, with farms that average 2,200 acres providing most of our food. That puts American agriculture on a scale in dramatic excess of what Jefferson probably admired when he observed in a 1785 letter to James Madison that “the small landholders are the most precious part of a state” — and well beyond the 160 acres that President Abraham Lincoln gave to the homesteaders who settled the Great Plains.

Tomatoes, onions and the land of opportunity

No burger is complete without the fixings: tomatoes and onions. (More on lettuce later.) Yet the farmworkers who pick those vegetables toil in a world that lacks something at the root of the founders’ focus on free enterprise: fairness, a reward for hard work and the corresponding opportunity to improve one’s lot.

Nearly every piece of produce that makes it to a grocery store shelf is picked by hand, and it is almost always picked by immigrants earning paltry wages. Nearly three-quarters of them come from Mexico, according to an analysis of federal data by the National Center for Farmworker Health, and they typically earn between $10,000 and $13,000 a year.

Every year, farmworkers across the country file suits against farmers and labor contractors for wage theft, chemical exposure, dangerous work conditions and injury, among other things. This spring, for example, onion harvesters in Californiasued several labor contractors and the farm, Calandri SonRise, for which they picked, alleging that they did not pay minimum wage. Workers there made as little as $80 for a shift that lasted at least 15 hours — about $5.33 an hour, or about $2.50 less than the hourly minimum wage in California.

I saw this treatment firsthand when I worked in garlic fields in California while researching a book on the U.S. food industry. There, I earned as little as $2 an hour in the four weeks I managed to work before getting injured. My co-workers — who, as experienced pickers, earned more than me but still less than minimum wage — believed that America was the land of opportunity, but they weren’t so naiive as to think our working conditions were fair. One colleague asked me if I would go on television and talk about what life was like in the fields. “They’ll listen to you,” he said. “They won’t listen to me.”

Tomato workers, however, have generally had it the worst. In North Carolina, tomato harvesters have been exposed to pesticides so virulent that women have borne children without arms and legs. And in the fields of southern Florida, the center of America’s tomato industry in the winter, more than 1,000 workers have been freed from modern slavery rings, resulting in a raft of convictions in seven cases but not, prosectors say, an eradication of the problem.

This contradicts not just American notions of fairness but our industrial economic logic, too. Henry Ford was often exalted for his innovation of paying workers enough that they could afford to buy his products. But farmworkers are frequently unable to buy the food they pick once it reaches a store. Paying them better would not typically result in much higher retail prices for produce; a 40 percent increase in farmworker wages would probably cost each American household an additional $16 a year.

Lettuce and equality

The founding fathers understood food’s central importance in building a nation that lived up to its ideals. In 1782, describing his state of Virginia, Jefferson noted a divide between the diets of the poor and the wealthy. The wealthy ate vegetables, but the poor did not — a problem, since “the climate require[d] indispensably a free use of vegetable food, for health as well as comfort.” He called this state of affairs “inexcusable.”

And yet, 230 years later, it persists — as both myth and fact. As a cultural myth, the class connotations of food are stark: Fresh, healthy food has come to be identified as the preferred fare of the affluent, while processed food is the stuff of the masses. Eating well is the province of the elite, and everyone else just has to get by.

Factually, 13.6 million Americans, many of them low-income, live in communities with limited access to supermarkets and the fresh food, such as lettuce, they can provide. What’s more, the food supply most readily available to all of us is heavy on junk that our agricultural policies have made cheaper per bite (and calorie) than healthy, whole ingredients.

This is inequity at its most fundamental. A good diet is as integral to life and liberty as is clean water, and yet we accept as a matter of course that it is more difficult for the poor to eat well than the rich. We shouldn’t accept it for a very profound, very American and very good reason: It is not fair to build a society in which only some people have access to resources that are required for life. Especially not in a country where, our Declaration of Independence states, all men are created equal.

This Fourth of July, I’ll wonder what the founders might think of the meal we use to celebrate the ideals they bequeathed to us — whether they’d condone a system that is dominated by giant corporations, that does not pay fair wages, that feeds the wealthy well and the poor poorly. But really, that’s missing the point. The question isn’t whether the founders would have approved of this; it’s whether we, the Americans of today, do.

Tracie McMillan is the author of “The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table” and a senior fellow at the Schuster Institute for Investigative Journalism at Brandeis University.