Veterans Today: The Role of Secret US Funding in Egypt’s Coup
State
Department Funnels Millions to Anti-Morsi Activists
By Dr Stuart Jeanne Bramhall
The Obama administration has come under fire for
violating Section 508 of the 1999 Foreign Assistance Act by continuing
$1.5 billion in military aid to the Egyptian generals who led the coup
against Egypt’s democratically elected president and
recently slaughtered more than 1,000 peaceful civilian protestors. The
millions of dollars of secret aid the State Department funneled to
anti-Morsi activists responsible for the mass protests preceding the
coup is also illegal. However the corporate media is silent on this
issue. It’s a non-event in the US mainstream media,
despite the July 10 Al
Jazeera expose by Emad Mekay from University of
California-Berkeley’s Investigative Reporting Program.
Mekay’s article is mainly based on Internal Revenue
and State Department documents he received via a Freedom of Information
Act request, interviews with former Egyptian police intelligence
officer Colonel Omar Afifi Soliman and Stephen McInerney, Executive
Director of the Washington-based non-profit Project on Middle East
Democracy (POMED), Egyptian court documents from Soliman’s 2011 trial in
absentia for inciting violence against the US and Saudi embassies, and
Soliman’s social media posts.
The Key State Department Front Groups
What Mekay learned was that since 2002, the State
Department has been channeling hundreds of millions of dollars to Middle
East pro-democracy activists through three State Department agencies,
the US Agency for International Development (USAID), the Bureau for
Democracy, Human Rights and Labor (DRL), and the Middle East Partnership
Initiative (MEPI), as well as the CIA-linked nonprofit foundation
National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Australian political scientist Michael
Barker and William Robinson (Promoting Polyarchy 1996)
have both written extensively about the role of NED and similar
CIA-funded foundations in promoting US friendly “revolutions” in Eastern
Europe and third world countries.
The funds are then re-routed to other
organizations, such as the International Republican Institute, the
National Democratic Institute (NDI), and Freedom House. Tax returns and
federal grant records show these groups have subsequently disbursed
these funds to Egyptian non-profit organizations run by senior members
of anti-Morsi political parties. This – funding foreign politicians and
financing subversive activities targeting democratically elected
governments – is also illegal under US law.
The NED has removed public access to Egyptian grant
recipients in 2011 and 2012 from its website. However POMED’s executive
director Stephen McInerney estimates Washington spends approximately
$390 million annually on “democracy promoting” groups in the Middle
East, with roughly $65 million going to Egypt in 2011 and $25 million in
2012. McInerney estimates anti-Morsi groups will receive comparable
funding for 2013.
Our Man in Falls Church
Mekay mainly focuses on Soliman, who began
receiving NED funds in 2008. Until 2011, Soliman’s “pro-democracy” group
targeted Mubarak’s repressive regime. More recently his social media
sites have targeted Morsi’s government. Tax returns show that NED paid
Soliman tens of thousands of dollars through an organization he created
called Huku Al-Nas (People’s Rights), based in Falls Church, Virginia.
Soliman is the only employee.
After he was awarded a NED human rights fellowship
in 2008, Soliman moved to the US. His group Ukuk Al Nas subsequently
received a $50,000 NED grant in 2009, a $60,000 grant in 2010 and a
$10,000 grant in 2011. Soliman acknowledged receiving the funding in an
interview with Mekay. It also complained it was nowhere adequate.
In 2012, an Egyptian court sentenced Soliman in
absentia for his 2011 role in inciting violence against the US and Saudi
embassies. Court documents Mekay obtained revealed Soliman used media
interviews, YouTube, and Facebook to call for the violent overthrow of
Mubarak’s government.
Court documents indicate Soliman has taken down
some of his older social media posts. However his recent Facebook posts
to his 83,000 followers are pointedly graphic. A post in late May, as
anti-Morsi opponents were in the planning stage for massive
anti-government street protests instructs protestors to “behead those
who control power, water and gas utilities.”
Then in late June, he advises his followers to
“incapacitate them by smashing their knee bones first … ake a road bump with a broken palm tree to stop
the buses going into Cairo, and drench the road around it with gas and
diesel. When the bus slows down for the bump, set it all ablaze so it
will burn down with all the passengers inside … God bless.”
On a YouTube video,
Soliman takes credit for a December attempt to storm the Egyptian
presidential palace
with handguns and Molotov cocktails.
Other Anti-Morsi Groups Funded by the State
Department
Mekay’s article goes on to detail (with dates and
amounts) other anti-Morsi groups who have received State Department
funding. These include the The
Salvation Front main opposition bloc, a key organizer of recent
protests that turned violent and Esraa Abdel-Fatah, a prominent figure
in the Egyptian Democratic Academy. Last year Abdel-Fatah called on her
followers to lay
siege to mosques that supported Egypt’s new constitution, which was
established via public referendum in December 2012. Other organizations
identified in the IRS and State Department documents include the Hand
in Hand for Egypt Association, which rallied Egypt’s Coptic Christian
minority to take to the streets on June 30, and Reform and Development
Party member Essmat al-Sadat, founder of the Sadat Association for
Social Development. Sadat was a member of the coordination
committee, the main organising body for the June 30 anti-Morsi
protest.
US Encouragement to Incite Unrest
A number of recipients of US “democracy promoting”
funding indicate that their US funders encouraged them to incite
protests to whip up public sentiment against Morsi. Mekay’s article
links to a YouTube video by anti-Morsi activist Saaddin
Ibrahim, as well as an article in Egypt’s English language Daily
News.
Mekay’s findings about the US role in fomenting
public unrest in Egypt are corroborated by French Canadian Ahmed
Bensaada’s 2011 Arabesque Americaine. The book details the role
of State Department and CIA funding in all the so-called “Arab Spring”
revolutions. I have posted an English summary of Bensaada’s key finding
at Smoking
Gun: US Role in Arab Spring.
There have been a few rather timid attacks against
Mekay’s article and Al Jazeera (for running it) at the usual “free
market” and pro Obama websites. Predictably the role State Department
funding may have played in Egypt’s recent coup has been invisible in the
corporate media. It’s an issue Washington policy makers prefer to keep
hidden from the American people.
photo credit: modenadude
via photopin
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