Egypt’s opposition defies call for dialogue, marches on presidential palace

The Washington Post

By Abigail Hauslohner and Stephanie McCrummen, Updated: Friday, December 7, 7:30 PM

CAIRO — Thousands of protesters broke through barbed-wire barriers and clambered over tanks surrounding the presidential palace Friday night after opposition leaders rejected President Mohamed Morsi’s call for a national dialogue to bridge Egypt’s expanding political divide.
Chanting “Leave! Leave!” and other slogans against Morsi, the protesters pushed past a perimeter set up by the military’s elite Republican Guard but made no apparent attempt to force their way into the palace itself, news agencies reported. Witnesses said Republican Guard troops protecting the compound retreated behind the palace walls.
Thousands of Morsi supporters, for their part, marched Friday from Cairo’s al-Azhar mosque in a funeral procession for comrades killed in clashes this week with Morsi opponents. As many as seven people died in the violence, and Morsi’s Islamist supporters say six of them were from their side.
Opposition leaders rejected Morsi’s invitation to participate in a national dialogue on Saturday at the palace. An alliance of prominent opposition figures, calling itself the National Salvation Front, said in a statement Friday that the invitation failed to meet “the principles of real and serious negotiations” and displayed “complete disregard for the main demands” of the front. The group’s demands include the annulment of a decree that granted Morsi the power to legislate without oversight and cancellation of the president’s plans to hold a national referendum on a controversial draft constitution on Dec. 15.
Gamal Hishmet, a leader of Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood, said Friday night that the referendum has not been delayed.
“The referendum will not be postponed without a constitutional announcement, and the president will not agree [to do that] unless there is a dialogue between the national powers, and that is the dialogue that the president called for tomorrow,” Hishmet said.
Earlier, the head of the country’s elections committee, Ismail Hamdi, said the start of week-long early voting by Egyptians who live abroad would be postponed four days, the Associated Press reported. Hamdi said the expatriate voting on the proposed constitution, originally scheduled to start Saturday, would begin Wednesday instead.
In a televised speech Thursday night, Morsi coupled his invitation to a national dialogue with a denunciation of Wednesday night’s deadly clashes between his Islamist backers and liberal, secular and other government critics. He described the violence as the work of “infiltrators” inside the opposition who had been paid to perpetrate “thuggery” and “terrorism.”
For Morsi’s opponents, who see Egypt’s first democratically elected president as an Islamist dictator in the making, Morsi’s rhetoric was combative. They view it as fanning the flames of an increasingly polarized political crisis, now in its third week.
After the speech, anti-Morsi protesters looted and ransacked the Cairo headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, Morsi’s political base, and a smaller outlying office. And as protesters marched through the upscale Cairo neighborhood of Heliopolis on Friday afternoon, heading toward the presidential palace, many said that Morsi’s address delivered far too little, too late.
“By the time he gave the speech, people were already hitting each other,” said Mustafa Maher, a naval academy student who marched toward the palace with thousands of others after the Friday noon prayer.
“Morsi should go,” Maher added. “He hasn’t done anything for us.”
Meanwhile, the attorney general’s office said Friday that it had opened investigations into three top opposition figures. And the Muslim Brotherhood held a rival demonstration outside Cairo’s preeminent al-Azhar mosque, where thousands gathered for the funerals of their fallen partisans and to hear a sermon by the Brotherhood’s leader and supreme guide, Mohammed Badie.
The competing rhetoric and scenes of defiance as Egypt headed into its weekend underscored the extent to which the president’s Thursday night overture failed to move the country toward a political solution.
Morsi and the Islamists have squared off against a broad liberal and secular opposition over the framework of the country’s new constitution and the balance of power nearly two years after a popular uprising forced Hosni Mubarak from power, ending three decades of his autocratic rule. Politicians and analysts say a near constant stream of protest and toxic rhetoric from both sides is cementing a dangerous ideological divide that is likely to outlive the current crisis.
In a telephone call to Morsi on Thursday, President Obama expressed “deep concern’’ about the deaths and injuries of protesters and said that “all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the White House said.
In the wake of the violence, the military’s elite Republican Guard — a discrete unit charged with protecting the palace — deployed tanks and armored vehicles around the complex and ordered protesters to remain outside the perimeter.
The relatively small show of force — seven tanks, 10 armored personnel carriers and a few dozen soldiers who set out coils of barbed wire — followed a meeting early Thursday that included Morsi; his newly appointed, young and openly Islamist defense minister, Abdul Fatah Khalil al-Sisi; Maj. Gen. Mohamed Zaki, the newly appointed head of the Republican Guard, considered a Morsi loyalist; and other top security officials within his cabinet, a spokesman said.
The Republican Guard’s move came as some protesters were calling on the military — considered heroic during the revolution that ousted Mubarak — to side with them in opposing a Nov. 22 decree by Morsi that grants him near-absolute powers until the draft constitution is adopted.
By Thursday afternoon, at least six of his advisers had resigned over the decree, and Egypt’s influential al-Azhar University, a seat of moderate Islam, was calling on Morsi to rescind it.
In his telephone call to Morsi, Obama welcomed the Egyptian president’s call for a dialogue Saturday with the opposition “but stressed that such a dialogue should occur without preconditions,” the White House said.
According to a senior administration official in Washington, Morsi’s relationship with the military seems good. “We have not seen any cracks,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.


Ingy Hassieb and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

DeMint and Heritage: The odd couple of necessity

The Washington Post 

By Jennifer Rubin , Updated: December 7, 2012

Some are postulating that the arrival of Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) at the Heritage Foundation spells the end of think tanks. Rubbish. Both on the right and left (and in the space that is in between) the intellectual activity, literary production and policy output of organizations including the American Enterprise Institute, the Council for Foreign Relations, Brookings, the Foreign Policy Initiative, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and the Ethics and Public Policy Center( to name a few) have arguably never been greater. But DeMint’s arrival does, one can argue, spell the demise of Heritage as a think tank.
Others were more delicate than I,  but you could hardly miss the  message among conservatives who noted that DeMint’s arrival is quite possibly the end of an era. Bill Kristol told Politico: “Heritage under Jim DeMint could well be a powerful political force. But will it be a powerful think-tank, a source of new policy ideas and fresh thinking? I hope so.” Umm, ouch.
 John Podhoretz wrote: “The temptation for DeMint will be to stress the institution’s role in opposition, which is his stock in trade as a senator, and to downgrade its policy role, which has had its major ‘up’s (welfare reform) and its blind-spot ‘down’s (advocating a health-care mandate in 1994). But if ideas do not play the central role, Heritage will hollow itself out, and that would be a great shame. [Departing president] Ed Feulner stands as one of the great public-policy innovators of the 20th century; it would be thrilling if the same could be said of Jim DeMint when he passes on the mantle to his successor.”
Put differently, one might ask whether Heritage should still bother to pass itself off as a think tank. (Critics of Heritage increasingly complained that rather than engage in independent research, it too often provided fodder for the right to oppose this or that specific piece of legislation, acting as a thinly disguised research wing of the GOP.)
 The arrival of DeMint is only the capstone in a shift from intellectual workhorse to partisan  show horse. This was a long time in coming, as those who have been observing Heritage over the last couple of decades know all too well.
Let us be blunt: Look at the roster of experts there and compare it to the all-star line-ups at AEI, Hoover, FDD and other conservative think tanks. When I or dozens of others who write about conservative ideas want to get a learned opinion, with the exception of Heritage’s fine judicial scholars, Heritage is not where one looks. Heritage has not for some time now been the premier idea factory, the desired locale for the best and brightest on the right. It was in the 1980s; it is not now. When conservative all-stars sign up with think tanks these days, the prime spot is AEI or one of the boutique shops.
As was widely known, Heritage went through a lengthy search process before deciding on DeMint. Many of the names floated were scholarly figures, including conservative Hillsdale College President Larry Arnn. But neither he nor other thinker-public servants could be rounded up. DeMint’s hiring represents a sort of throwing in the towel on the effort to revive Heritage as a top-flight think tank.
 So why maintain the pretense, which complicates its activities due to status as a 501(c)(3)?  Well, a tax-exempt status helps with fundraising. And conservatives, looked down upon by liberal elites, like the prestige that comes with publishing and researching.
At some point, however, if it has not happened already, Heritage’s political arm will completely subsume the think tank, most likely when DeMint wants to bring his brand of no-holds-barred partisanship to Heritage and not be bothered with cumbersome legal restrictions.
In some ways DeMint and Heritage are like divorcees who didn’t fit in their prior relationships, but now have found each other. Heritage cannot keep up with AEI , Hoover and others on the serious scholarship, so why not get a huge fundraiser, a headline- grabber and household name? DeMint, meanwhile, can vastly increase his earnings (he is among the poorest members of the Senate), enjoy a lavish expense budget and not be bothered with the late hours and constituent complaints that make for a certain drudgery in the Senate. Moreover, he wasn’t doing anything in the Senate for years other than taunting colleagues and trying to stop legislation that failed the purity test (all of it). That in part is a function of a do-nothing Senate, but it was also DeMint’s choice to eschew lawmaking, policy enactment, bridge-building and steady but slow progress in passing a conservative agenda. Ultimately, that’s not very fulfilling, especially if you aren’t paid very well.
So, on one hand, Heritage and DeMint are an odd pairing, but on the other, it is a marriage perhaps of necessity. A scholar at another think tank (one of many with whom I spoke yesterday) was somewhat aghast at the choice Heritage made but nevertheless cautioned, “All think-tank transitions are hard. Even the successful ones.” Nevertheless, if both parties going in have the same goal — convert Heritage from a shopworn think tank into a political colossus —  it can be a win for both DeMint and Heritage. For those loyal scholars who have stuck it out at Heritage? Not so much unfortunately.

Who had the worst week in Washington? The tea party

The Washington Post.

By Chris Cillizza, Published: December 6

The Gadsden flag is flying at half-staff this past week.
The tea party — that plucky insurgent movement that, as recently as two years ago, began trying to reshape the Republican Party and politics more generally — finds itself flailing as 2012 draws to a close, buffeted by infighting, defeats and a broad struggle to find a second act.
Consider the following:
●Tea party patron saint Jim DeMint stunned the political world by announcing that he would resign from the Senate at the end of the year to take a job as the head of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.
●FreedomWorks, a Washington-based political group that is one of the pillars of the tea party movement, has been rent by internal strife. It was announced this past week that former Texas congressman Dick Armey is leaving as head of the group, alleging mismanagement.
●Tea-party-aligned House members, including Reps. Tim Huelskamp (Kan.), Justin Amash (Mich.) and David Schweikert (Ariz.), were kicked off coveted committees after not going along with GOP leaders on several critical votes.
Couple those developments with poll results that suggest the tea party is at, or close to, its nadir in terms of public opinion, and the problem becomes evident. The movement needs to decide whether it can survive as an outside force or whether it can become more aligned with the GOP without sacrificing the principles on which it was founded.
The tea party, for watching a movement turn into a mess, you had the worst week in Washington. Congrats, or something.
Have a candidate for the Worst Week in Washington? E-mail Chris Cillizza at chris.cillizza@wpost.com.
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End the war on terror and save billions

The Washington Post

By Fareed Zakaria, Published: December 6

As we debate whether the two parties can ever come together and get things done, here’s something President Obama could probably do by himself that would be a signal accomplishment of his presidency: End the war on terror. Or, more realistically, start planning and preparing the country for phasing it out.
For 11 years, the United States has been operating under emergency wartime powers granted under the 2001 “Authorization for Use of Military Force.” That is a longer period than the country spent fighting the Civil War, World War I and World War II combined. It grants the president and the federal government extraordinary authorities at home and abroad, effectively suspends civil liberties for anyone the government deems an enemy and keeps us on a permanent war footing in all kinds of ways.
Now, for the first time since Sept. 11, 2001, an administration official has sketched a possible endpoint.
In a thoughtful speech at the Oxford Union last week, Jeh Johnson, the outgoing general counsel for the Pentagon, recognized that “we cannot and should not expect al-Qaeda and its associated forces to all surrender, all lay down their weapons in an open field, or to sign a peace treaty with us. They are terrorist organizations. Nor can we capture or kill every last terrorist who claims an affiliation with al-Qaeda.”
But, he argued, “There will come a tipping point . . . at which so many of the leaders and operatives of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have been killed or captured, and the group is no longer able to attempt or launch a strategic attack against the United States, such that al-Qaeda as we know it, the organization that our Congress authorized the military to pursue in 2001, has been effectively destroyed.” At that point, “our efforts should no longer be considered an armed conflict.”
Phasing out or modifying these emergency powers should be something that would appeal to both left and right. James Madison, father of the Constitution, was clear on the topic. “Of all the enemies to public liberty,” he wrote, “war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes. . . . No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.”
If you want to know why we’re in such a deep budgetary hole, one large piece of it is that we have spent around $2 trillion on foreign wars in the past decade. Not coincidentally, we have had the largest expansion of the federal government since World War II. The Post’s Dana Priest and William Arkin have described how the U.S. government has built 33 new complexes for the intelligence bureaucracies alone. The Department of Homeland Security employs 230,000 people.
A new Global Terrorism Index this week showed that terrorism went up from 2002 to 2007 – largely because of the conflicts in Afghanistan/Pakistan and Iraq — but has declined ever since. And the part of the world with the fewest incidents is North America. It could be our vigilance that is keeping terror attacks at bay. But it is also worth noting, as we observe the vast apparatus of searches and screening, that the Transportation Security Administration’s assistant administrator for global strategies has admitted that those expensive and cumbersome whole-body scanners have not resulted in the arrest of a single suspected terrorist. Not one.
Of course there are real threats out there, from sources including new branches of al-Qaeda and other such groups. And of course they will have to be battled, and those terrorists should be captured or killed. But we have done this before, and we can do so in the future under more normal circumstances. It will mean that the administration will have to be more careful — and perhaps have more congressional involvement — for certain actions, such as drone strikes. It might mean it will have to charge some of the people held at Guantanamo and try them in military or civilian courts.
In any event, it is a good idea that the United States find a way to conduct its anti-terrorism campaigns within a more normal legal framework, rather than rely on blanket wartime authority granted in a panic after Sept. 11.
No president wants to give up power. But this one is uniquely positioned to begin a serious conversation about a path out of permanent war.
comments@fareedzakaria.com
Read more from The Washington Post: Michael Gerson: Obama lacks leadership in the war on terror The Post’s View: Drone war demands accountability Charles Krauthammer: Barack Obama — drone warrior

Egypt’s Morsi, looking to army for support, pushes charter that enshrines military’s power

The Washington Post

By Stephanie McCrummen and Abigail Hauslohner, 

Published: December 6

CAIRO — With tanks and barbed wire ringing the presidential palace, Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi on Thursday called for a “national dialogue” but remained determined to press forward with a controversial referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution that has plunged this nation into a political crisis.
In a televised speech, Morsi called Wednesday night’s clashes between his Islamist backers and liberal, secular and other opponents the work of “infiltrators” inside the opposition. He said some protesters had been paid and armed to perpetrate “thuggery” and “terrorism,” harsh rhetoric that is sure to rally his Muslim Brotherhood supporters and inflame opponents, who see Egypt’s first democratically elected president as an Islamist dictator in the making.
But if Morsi appeared emboldened, it may have had less to do with his support from the Muslim Brotherhood than with his newfound friendship with Egypt’s vaunted, wealthy, U.S.-supplied military, which deployed tanks and armored trucks in defense of the presidential palace early Thursday.
That pointed display by the Republican Guard — a discrete military unit charged with protecting the palace — followed a night of clashes that left seven people dead and more than 700 wounded. And it reflected a closeness between Morsi and the military sealed for now by the draft constitution, which he is so insistently advocating and which enshrines the military’s vast powers and autonomy to an unprecedented degree.
In a telephone call to Morsi later Thursday, President Obama expressed “deep concern’’ about the deaths and injuries of protesters and said that “all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the White House said.
The relatively small show of force by Egypt’s military — seven tanks, 10 armored trucks and a few dozen soldiers who set out coils of barbed wire — followed a meeting early Thursday that included Morsi; his newly appointed, young and openly Islamist defense minister, Abdul Fatah Khalil al-Sisi; Gen. Hamid Zaki, the newly appointed head of the Republican Guard, considered a Morsi loyalist; and other officials, a spokesman said.
Although the move Thursday by the Republican Guard by no means indicates that Morsi has deep or widespread support in the military, which is as divided and complex as Egypt itself, it suggested that the army remains the ultimate arbiter of power in post-revolutionary Egypt, just as it has been for decades. And it marked another political rearrangement in a turbulent transition that has seen many of them — in this case, a turnaround in the relationship between the two most powerful institutions in the country, after decades in which Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood supporters were repressed with the backing of the military.
Although some observers cautioned against reading too much into Thursday’s tank deployments, other analysts considered it a significant moment for Morsi.
“The most plausible interpretation is indeed that al-Sisi and the incumbent high command are standing firmly by Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood,” said Robert Springborg, an expert on the Egyptian army at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “They chose essentially to stand with him, clearing the area of protesters.”
The Republican Guard’s move came as some protesters were calling on the military — considered a hero during the revolution that ousted autocrat Hosni Mubarak about two years ago — to side with them in opposing a Nov. 22 decree by Morsi that grants him near-absolute powers until the draft constitution is adopted. By Thursday afternoon, at least six of his advisers had resigned over the decree, and Egypt’s influential al-Azhar University, a seat of moderate Islam, was calling on Morsi to rescind it.
In his telephone call to Morsi, Obama welcomed the Egyptian president’s call for a dialogue Saturday with the opposition “but stressed that such a dialogue should occur without preconditions,” the White House said.
According to a senior administration official in Washington, Morsi’s relationship with the military seems solid. “We have not seen any cracks,” said the official, who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Winning military’s trust
Morsi seems to have won the military’s loyalties after an Islamist-dominated constitution-writing panel approved a draft charter that enshrines the armed forces’ sweeping powers to a degree not seen even during Mubarak’s rule.
According to analysts who have studied it, the centerpiece of the charter is the creation of a 15-member national defense council — including eight military appointees — that is essentially an autonomous overseer of military affairs.
Critically, the council has the power to approve declarations of war, a provision that analysts cast as a kind of safety valve for the United States, which remains wary of an Islamist government with ties to the Palestinian militant group Hamas that might jeopardize the 1979 peace treaty between Egypt and Israel.
The council would handle military trials, which also are allowed for Egyptian civilians who are deemed a threat to the military. Although parliament must approve the overall budget figure, the council would handle all of its details, which are not required to be made public.
And in a provision that challenges any pretense of civilian oversight of the military, the draft charter requires that the president appoint the defense minister from among the ranks of the military.
“I think the military could not have asked for a better outcome” in a draft charter, said Tom Ginsburg, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School who focuses on comparative and international law. “It is hard to imagine a civilian-drafted document giving them any more autonomy.”
Viewed through the lens of the draft constitution that codifies such extraordinary powers to the military, Springborg said, Egypt’s political crisis appears to be a battle over the leftover crumbs, one in which Morsi will continue to have the upper hand.
“The real struggle for power in Egypt has to do with the military,” he said. “And as long as the Muslim Brotherhood is protecting that in exchange for the military defending it, you will get no progress. And Egypt will continue to be a military state.”
Retired Gen. Sameh Saif el-Yazl, a military analyst, called the relationship between Morsi and the military “just super.”
“And in the last few weeks, it is still improving.”
Troops vs. protesters
But the same cannot be said for relations between protesters and the security forces sent to protect the presidential palace Thursday.
“Who are you protecting?” a man shouted at soldiers through the barbed wire Thursday afternoon.
“You!” a commander yelled back.
“How are you protecting us? Where were you yesterday when they were hitting us?” the man screamed.
“You’re doing a good job,” shouted Mohamed Adel, a cashier, over the heckler. “Everyone needs to calm down.”


Ingy Hassieb and Sharaf al-Hourani in Cairo and Karen DeYoung in Washington contributed to this report.

Morsi Defends Wide Authority as Turmoil Rises in Egypt

December 6, 2012

NYT

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

CAIRO — Egypt descended deeper into political turmoil on Thursday as the embattled president, Mohamed Morsi, blamed an outbreak of violence on a “fifth column” and vowed to proceed with a referendum on an Islamist-backed constitution that has prompted deadly street battles between his supporters and their opponents.

As the tanks and armored vehicles of the elite presidential guard ringed the palace, Mr. Morsi gave a nationally televised address offering only a hint of compromise, while standing firmly by his plan for a Dec. 15 constitutional referendum. His opponents quickly rejected, even mocked, his speech and called for new protests on Friday.

Many said the speech had echoes of his predecessor, Hosni Mubarak, who always saw “hidden hands” behind public unrest. Mr. Morsi said that corrupt beneficiaries of Mr. Mubarak’s autocracy had been “hiring thugs and giving out firearms, and the time has come for them to be punished and penalized by the law.” He added, “It is my duty to defend the homeland.”

Mr. Morsi, a former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, spoke a day after the growing antagonism between his supporters and the secular opposition had spilled out into the worst outbreak of violence between political factions here since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s coup six decades ago. By the time the fighting ended, six people were dead and hundreds were wounded.

The violence also led to resignations that rocked the government, as advisers, party members and the head of the commission overseeing the planned vote on a new constitution stepped down, citing the bloodshed.

Mr. Morsi also received a phone call from President Obama, who expressed his “deep concern” about the deaths and injuries overnight, the White House said in a statement.

“The president emphasized that all political leaders in Egypt should make clear to their supporters that violence is unacceptable,” the statement said, chastising both Mr. Morsi and the opposition leaders for failing to urge their supporters to pull back during the fight.

Prospects of a political solution also seemed a casualty, as both sides effectively refused to back down on core demands.

The opposition leadership refused to negotiate until Mr. Morsi withdrew a decree that put his judgments beyond judicial review until the referendum — which he refused to do. And it demanded that the referendum be canceled, which he also refused.

The hostilities have threatened to undermine the legitimacy of the constitutional referendum with concerns about political coercion. The feasibility of holding the vote also appears uncertain amid attacks on Brotherhood offices around the country and open street fighting in the shadow of the presidential palace.

Though Mr. Morsi spoke of opening a door for dialogue and compromise, leaders of the political opposition and the thousands of protesters surrounding his palace dismissed his conspiratorial saber rattling as an echo of Mr. Mubarak. And his tone, after a night many here view as a national tragedy, seemed only to widen the gulf between his Islamist supporters and their secular opponents over his efforts to push through the referendum on an Islamist-backed charter approved over the objections of other factions and the Coptic Christian church.

Outside the palace, demonstrators huddled around car radios to listen to Mr. Morsi’s words and mocked his attempts to blame outside infiltrators for the violence, which began when thousands of his Islamist supporters rousted an opposition sit-in.

“So we are the ones who attacked him, the ones who attacked the sit-in?” one protester asked sarcastically. “So we are the ones with the swords and weapons and money?” asked another.

Some left for the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood, where a mob had broken in, looted offices, and made a bonfire out of the belongings of the group’s spiritual leader — until riot police officers chased them away with tear gas.

“I never thought I would say this, but even Mubarak was more savvy when he spoke in a time of crisis,” said Hossam Bahgat, executive director of the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights.

The director of state broadcasting resigned Thursday, as did Rafik Habib, a Christian who was the vice president of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the party’s favorite example of its commitment to tolerance and pluralism. Their departures followed an announcement Wednesday by Zaghloul el-Balshi, the new general secretary of the commission overseeing the planned constitutional referendum, that he was quitting. “I will not participate in a referendum that spills Egyptian blood,” Mr. Balshi said.

Mr. Morsi’s speech, previously set for 6 p.m. here and delayed for several hours, was his first attempt to address both the night of deadly violence and the underlying crisis set off by his Nov. 22 decree putting his own edicts above the review of any court until the ratification of a new constitution. He had said he needed those powers to protect the constitutional assembly and planned referendum. He has also said he wanted to head off interference by a counterrevolutionary conspiracy of corrupt businessmen and foreign enemies, cynical opposition leaders willing to derail democracy rather than let Islamists win elections, and the Mubarak-appointed judges who had already dissolved an earlier assembly and the democratically elected Parliament.

Each side of the political battle is now convinced that it faces an imminent coup. Secular groups believe Mr. Morsi is forcing through a constitution that will ultimately allow Islamist groups and religious leaders to wield new power. And the demands to stop the referendum have convinced Islamists that their secular opponents seek to abort the new democracy.

Advisers to Mr. Morsi say he has sought for days to find a way to reach out to his critics and resolve the building tension. In his speech, he offered to withdraw an article of his recent decree whose Orwellian language giving him ill-defined powers to protect the revolution had unnerved his opponents. He invited opposition and youth leaders to join him for a meeting at his palace at 12:30 p.m. on Saturday to try to hammer out some compromise, suggesting certain elements of the draft charter might be revised. And he declared that even if the constitution failed he would relinquish his emergency powers at the referendum on Dec. 15.

But opposition leaders dismissed his offers as all but meaningless. Their main objection to Mr. Morsi’s decree is the more essential article removing the judicial check on his power. They said that his proposed dialogue would take place on the first day of overseas voting on the new constitution, giving the meeting little chance of changing the text or the schedule. And the text of the draft constitution, if approved as expected, would already end his emergency powers.

Mohamed ElBaradei, the former diplomat now acting as coordinator of the secular opposition, said Mr. Morsi’s refusal to postpone the referendum until there was consensus on a new constitution had “closed the door to any dialogue.” He argued that the Morsi government’s failure to stop the previous night’s bloodshed had “made the authority lose its legitimacy.”

Nadine Sherif of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies said in a statement: “President Morsi had a choice to either bring the country together or tear it apart. Today it seems clear that he has made his decision and civil war seems looming.”

In its own statement on the night’s clashes, the Muslim Brotherhood said its members had demonstrated peacefully but had come under attack by “crowds of thugs, armed with all kinds of firearms, knives, Molotov cocktails, tear gas, rocks, as well as a sniper in the area.”

The group named five of its own members who it said had been killed in the fighting. The health ministry put the total death toll at six, suggesting that according to the Brotherhood’s calculations it sustained far more casualties than its opponents.

“The zenith of the conspiracy was the attempt to storm the presidential palace and occupy it, bringing down the system and its legitimacy,” the group said, an attack thwarted only by the sacrifice of the five Brotherhood members “who gave their lives and their blood to protect the revolution and the popular will.”

Two employees of The New York Times contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: December 7, 2012

U.S.-Approved Arms for Libya Rebels Fell Into Jihadis’ Hands

December 5, 2012

NYT

By JAMES RISEN, MARK MAZZETTI and MICHAEL S. SCHMIDT

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration secretly gave its blessing to arms shipments to Libyan rebels from Qatar last year, but American officials later grew alarmed as evidence grew that Qatar was turning some of the weapons over to Islamic militants, according to United States officials and foreign diplomats.

No evidence has emerged linking the weapons provided by the Qataris during the uprising against Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi to the attack that killed four Americans at the United States diplomatic compound in Benghazi, Libya, in September.

But in the months before, the Obama administration clearly was worried about the consequences of its hidden hand in helping arm Libyan militants, concerns that have not previously been reported. The weapons and money from Qatar strengthened militant groups in Libya, allowing them to become a destabilizing force since the fall of the Qaddafi government.

The experience in Libya has taken on new urgency as the administration considers whether to play a direct role in arming rebels in Syria, where weapons are flowing in from Qatar and other countries.

The Obama administration did not initially raise objections when Qatar began shipping arms to opposition groups in Syria, even if it did not offer encouragement, according to current and former administration officials. But they said the United States has growing concerns that, just as in Libya, the Qataris are equipping some of the wrong militants.

The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar’s plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were “more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam” than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.

The Qatari assistance to fighters viewed as hostile by the United States demonstrates the Obama administration’s continuing struggles in dealing with the Arab Spring uprisings, as it tries to support popular protest movements while avoiding American military entanglements. Relying on surrogates allows the United States to keep its fingerprints off operations, but also means they may play out in ways that conflict with American interests.

“To do this right, you have to have on-the-ground intelligence and you have to have experience,” said Vali Nasr, a former State Department adviser who is now dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, part of Johns Hopkins University. “If you rely on a country that doesn’t have those things, you are really flying blind. When you have an intermediary, you are going to lose control.”

He said that Qatar would not have gone through with the arms shipments if the United States had resisted them, but other current and former administration officials said Washington had little leverage at times over Qatari officials. “They march to their own drummer,” said a former senior State Department official. The White House and State Department declined to comment.

During the frantic early months of the Libyan rebellion, various players motivated by politics or profit — including an American arms dealer who proposed weapons transfers in an e-mail exchange with a United States emissary later killed in Benghazi — sought to aid those trying to oust Colonel Qaddafi.

But after the White House decided to encourage Qatar — and on a smaller scale, the United Arab Emirates — to ship arms to the Libyans, President Obama complained in April 2011 to the emir of Qatar that his country was not coordinating its actions in Libya with the United States, the American officials said. “The president made the point to the emir that we needed transparency about what Qatar was doing in Libya,” said a former senior administration official who had been briefed on the matter.

About that same time, Mahmoud Jibril, then the prime minister of the Libyan transitional government, expressed frustration to administration officials that the United States was allowing Qatar to arm extremist groups opposed to the new leadership, according to several American officials. They, like nearly a dozen current and former White House, diplomatic, intelligence, military and foreign officials, would speak only on the condition of anonymity for this article.

The administration has never determined where all of the weapons, paid for by Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, went inside Libya, officials said. Qatar is believed to have shipped by air and sea small arms, including machine guns, automatic rifles, and ammunition, for which it has demanded reimbursement from Libya’s new government. Some of the arms since have been moved from Libya to militants with ties to Al Qaeda in Mali, where radical jihadi factions have imposed Shariah law in the northern part of the country, the former Defense Department official said. Others have gone to Syria, according to several American and foreign officials and arms traders.

Although NATO provided air support that proved critical for the Libyan rebels, the Obama administration wanted to avoid getting immersed in a ground war, which officials feared could lead the United States into another quagmire in the Middle East.

As a result, the White House largely relied on Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, two small Persian Gulf states and frequent allies of the United States. Qatar, a tiny nation whose natural gas reserves have made it enormously wealthy, for years has tried to expand its influence in the Arab world. Since 2011, with dictatorships in the Middle East and North Africa coming under siege, Qatar has given arms and money to various opposition and militant groups, chiefly Sunni Islamists, in hopes of cementing alliances with the new governments. Officials from Qatar and the emirates would not comment.

After discussions among members of the National Security Council, the Obama administration backed the arms shipments from both countries, according to two former administration officials briefed on the talks.

American officials say that the United Arab Emirates first approached the Obama administration during the early months of the Libyan uprising, asking for permission to ship American-built weapons that the United States had supplied for the emirates’ use. The administration rejected that request, but instead urged the emirates to ship weapons to Libya that could not be traced to the United States.

“The U.A.E. was asking for clearance to send U.S. weapons,” said one former official. “We told them it’s O.K. to ship other weapons.”

For its part, Qatar supplied weapons made outside the United States, including French- and Russian-designed arms, according to people familiar with the shipments.

But the American support for the arms shipments from Qatar and the emirates could not be completely hidden. NATO air and sea forces around Libya had to be alerted not to interdict the cargo planes and freighters transporting the arms into Libya from Qatar and the emirates, American officials said.

Concerns in Washington soon rose about the groups Qatar was supporting, officials said. A debate over what to do about the weapons shipments dominated at least one meeting of the so-called Deputies Committee, the interagency panel consisting of the second-highest ranking officials in major agencies involved in national security. “There was a lot of concern that the Qatar weapons were going to Islamist groups,” one official recalled.

The Qataris provided weapons, money and training to various rebel groups in Libya. One militia that received aid was controlled by Adel Hakim Belhaj, then leader of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, who was held by the C.I.A. in 2004 and is now considered a moderate politician in Libya. It is unclear which other militants received the aid.

“Nobody knew exactly who they were,” said the former defense official. The Qataris, the official added, are “supposedly good allies, but the Islamists they support are not in our interest.”

No evidence has surfaced that any weapons went to Ansar al-Shariah, an extremist group blamed for the Benghazi attack.

The case of Marc Turi, the American arms merchant who had sought to provide weapons to Libya, demonstrates other challenges the United States faced in dealing with Libya. A dealer who lives in both Arizona and Abu Dhabi in the United Arab Emirates, Mr. Turi sells small arms to buyers in the Middle East and Africa, relying primarily on suppliers of Russian-designed weapons in Eastern Europe.

In March 2011, just as the Libyan civil war was intensifying, Mr. Turi realized that Libya could be a lucrative new market, and applied to the State Department for a license to provide weapons to the rebels there, according to e-mails and other documents he has provided. (American citizens are required to obtain United States approval for any international arms sales.)

He also e-mailed J. Christopher Stevens, then the special representative to the Libyan rebel alliance. The diplomat said he would “share” Mr. Turi’s proposal with colleagues in Washington, according to e-mails provided by Mr. Turi. Mr. Stevens, who became the United States ambassador to Libya, was one of the four Americans killed in the Benghazi attack on Sept. 11.

Mr. Turi’s application for a license was rejected in late March 2011. Undeterred, he applied again, this time stating only that he planned to ship arms worth more than $200 million to Qatar. In May 2011, his application was approved. Mr. Turi, in an interview, said that his intent was to get weapons to Qatar and that what “the U.S. government and Qatar allowed from there was between them.”

Two months later, though, his home near Phoenix was raided by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Administration officials say he remains under investigation in connection with his arms dealings. The Justice Department would not comment.

Mr. Turi said he believed that United States officials had shut down his proposed arms pipeline because he was getting in the way of the Obama administration’s dealings with Qatar. The Qataris, he complained, imposed no controls on who got the weapons. “They just handed them out like candy,” he said.

David D. Kirkpatrick and Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from Cairo.