Mubarak Downfall: Linked to Foreign Intelligence Agencies?

This material was posted by me in a thread focusing on what happened to Lara Logan in Cairo, but I thought it deserved a thread of its own.

The sexual assault on Lara Logan in Cairo has brought to light a hitherto unreported phenomenon connecting sexual harassment to the fall of the Mubarak regime and pointing to possible involvement of intelligence agencies in that ouster.

The relevant information came from a website designed by Egyptian women to protect themselves from sexual harassment in the streets of Cairo. The site, www.harassmap.org features a map showing the frequency of sexual harassment in neighborhoods of Cairo. Starting in November of 2010 there was a dramatic upsuge of complaints registered by the website.

www.harassmap.org...

[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/05aef4fbd975.jpg[/atsimg]

Seeing this graph, I began to wonder if there is another phenomenon shown here.

Could it be that politically motivated fake thugs went on a harassment campaign in Cairo, preliminary to the demonstrations against Mubarak, in order to increase the level of emotional upset preparatory to taking to the streets? I wouldn't doubt it.

If this is what happened, it would be reasonable to suspect that these complaint statistics show the tracks of intelligence agencies at work.

It's the kind of thing, sneaky, dirty, that one would expect from some of our favorite three letter agencies, who have whole departments of well trained hooligans thinking of such pranks and tactics.

One feature of the harassmap.org map is that one can call up the numbers of complaints for each month going back to 2004.

Here are the numbers from July 2010 to February 2011;

2010 July 5 complaints
August 7
Sept. 10
October 12
November 72
December 156
January 210
February (to date) 219 !!!

I was thinking this might be a seasonal phenomenon in Cairo, but I checked the number for January 2010, a year ago, and it was only 4 complaints.

This phenomenon of a surge of harassment complaints must be connected to this political event. The worst of it is that for every complaint, there are probably twenty incidents not reported.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt once wrote words to the effect that you can bet that if something happens in politics, it was planned. This kind of tactic, if that's what it is and it certainly looks that way, is the sort of thing one would expect from someone like Kermit Roosevelt, who organized phony demonstrations against Mossadegh in Iran, prior to the overthrow of his elected government and prior to the assumption of power in Iran of the US puppet, Reza Shah Pahlavi.

If harassmap.org received 429 complaints to date from the beginning of January, that means that the actual number of incidents is far higher.

Multiply January 2010's total of 4 complaints by 20, for example, to allow for a 20 to 1 incident to complaint ratio and you come up with 80 incidents. Then multiply the total number of complaints from November 2010 to February 2011 by 20, which would be 657 X 20 = 13,140 "likely incidents" of harassment of women in the period immediately prior to the overthrow of Mubarak and up to 2 or 3 days following his resignation.

That's a veritable seige on the women of Cairo.

This sexual harassment surge is too "cute" to be unplanned. Who pulls these kinds of stunts? MI6, MOSSAD, the CIA.

I believe, in this instance, it's them damn rapists!

this IS strange, considering it's difficult for women in egypt to report sexual harassment in the first place, although that link does also give a different story regarding 2008 assaults. the sudden surge is indeed odd. does harassmap just count reports to law enforcement, or is the report given directly to the site?

Another possible reason could be that women actually feel like they can speak up now. Anytime you have a big group of people you're going to have the crazies come out of the wood work just because they enjoy destruction and mayhem. I would be interested to see what our incidents of sexual abuse in any of our large cities during peace time. Then you can imagine what things would be like during something that Egypt went through. Don't see any conspiracy here just thugs taking advantage of the situation. Hopefully this ends soon, and these "men" can be dealt with appropriately.

I don't fully understand how this would have anything to do with the revolution. Could you please be more specific on your main point?

reply to post by ReVoLuTiOn76

There is no doubt that the statistics reported by harassmap.org should be viewed with caution. I think I have done that. I don't know much about the group that put the website together. They seem to be a grassroots women's group who just want to assist other Egyptian women in avoiding sexual harassment.

It is important to note that the dramatic increase in sexual harassment shown in their statistics began in November 2010 long before anyone thought that the Mubarak regime was in serious difficulties. That points to advanced inauguration of the harassment campaign, prior to an awareness among the general public that there was to be an uprising in the country.

I believe that this organized effort to harass the women of Cairo was done to increase the anger level in the city of Cairo. With that pot added to other pots already simmering on the political stove, a broad spectrum application of pressure was brought to bear on the city.

This would have a big effect in the community in increasing discontent, so that when the time came for the hardline political activists to mobilize forces, there would be a broad spectrum response to their appeals.

These harassments of women in Cairo were probably mostly just hooliganism, groping and that sort of thing. I doubt if rape was in the arsenal. This is just the sort of thing that would appeal to the boys in the dirty tricks department of Richard Nixon's election campaigns. They wouldn't go this route in the US, but the harassmap.org ladies in Cairo gave the tricksters a golden opportunity to make a real issue 50 times worse than it was in order to get a bigger mob into the streets at the right time.

Originally posted by WilliamRikeronaSegway
. . . does harassmap just count reports to law enforcement, or is the report given directly to the site?

I believe the complaints are made directly to the site. They are really accounts of incidents and warnings of harassing activity made to the site so that other Egyptian women, connecting through the internet and Twitter will know what areas to avoid in Cairo on any given day.

They do a breakdown of the sorts of incidents. If you visit the website, you can see how they handle it, with color codes and a scaleable map, a la Google Maps.

The fact is that it doesn't matter if these actually are serious assaults or not.

The fact that the women reporting them think that they are serious is what counts. They are the ones being irritated. The intelligence agencies would not be interested in inflicting real damage. Their concern would be simply to increase the irritation level among the women. Mubarak's police department was already beating people to death and had been doing so for thirty years.

People who support the CIA and other allied intelligence agencies would find it hard, justifiably so, to imagine CIA assets embarking on a campaign of rape as was done in Bosnia.

It's not a far stretch at all, though, to imagine those clean cut young scamps fanning out across Cairo to raise hell with ladies in burqas, all in good . . . sleazy fun, of course. Plus you topple a dictator.

This is a very perplexing situation, this surge in sexual harassment leading up to Mubarak's fall. Judging from the traffic in this thread, it perplexes only a few, maybe only me. Who could be responsible for this?

Israelis of various stripes have already expressed alarm at the fall of Mubarak. They don't regard it as necessarily a good thing. They fear the devil they don't know, undoubtedly with good reason. Any sort of "power to the people" movement in the middle east is unlikely to favor Israel.

That makes MOSSAD an unlikely candidate for prankster in this instance, though it doesn't exclude the possibility that forces involved in Egyptian politics might attempt to pin the blame for the harassment of Egyptian women on MOSSAD. They make a convenient, easily villified, scapegoat that would divert attention from the real culprits.

But who are the real culprits?

The planners of this harassment caper, if that is in fact the real reason for the surge in complaints to harassmap.org, are careful strategists. It speaks of meticulous planning, which implies a big organization staffed by smart, serious people. Who are these people? Are they British, American, Iranian, Russian or Egyptians themselves?

It's too early to tell, but when we finally see the face of the new power, I think we will be looking at someone connected to this strange manouver, the targeting of the women of Cairo.

The origin of this thread was a column I read in the Toronto Star by one of its wonderful journalists who happens to be a woman, Heather Mallick. Reading her column on Lara Logan's sexual assault got me over to the harassmap.org website, where I noticed the incriminating statistics.

The Star carries material by other great female writers, such as that relentless teller of truth in politics, national and international, Linda Mc Quaig and also the feisty, redoubtable Rosie Di Manno, a lady who makes Don Quixote look like a slacker.

We are blessed in our city with wonderful women in journalism. I can't refer to this subject without mentioning the great Sue Anne Levy of the Toronto Sun, who has Toronto civic politicians' feet permanently clamped to the fire on financial issues.

Why I am throwing in this tribute to Toronto's outstanding ladies of journalism is that a society that downgrades, ignores, subjugates and relegates its women to the periphery of social and political affairs, does so at its peril.

In Cairo a humble little women's group got so fed up with being harassed in the streets and so fed up with being ignored by the police that they started their own citizen's warning network to protect themselves, harassmap.org.

In Toronto, the metropolitan police department would lick their chops at a website like that and scoot right over to the trouble spots to start shooting fish in a barrel. Not in Cairo.

Imagine if they had. Imagine if the police department in Cairo had seen the oddities being recorded by harassmap.org. Imagine if their blood had started boiling at the thought of a mass victimization of the women of Cairo. Most North American or European police departments would immediately go to battle stations if something like that happened on their turf.

They would have started dragging the perps into holding cells and questioning them. They might well have caught scent of "politics" in the process. The security services in Egypt might have been brought into the picture. They might have tumbled to the plot and taken measures to avoid political disaster.

The status of the women in their society would have functioned like the status of the canary in a coal mine. Most days the canary is insignificant, but on the day of great danger, the humble canary is the most important individual in the mine.

A statement by Mubarak, revealing to the public the existence of an organized campaign against Egyptian women coupled with stepped up police protection for women in Cairo, might have altered public opinion of his regime and rallied support for his administration.

But that would be a different Mubarak, a different society, a different Egypt. One can only hope that that society, the one alert to the welfare of all its citizens, emerges from the wreckage of the Mubarak regime.

It is interesting to revisit this thread after some of the dust has settled in Egypt. It looks like the Egyptian army is in control of the country now.

That being the case and in light of what is written above, it seems certain that the Egyptian army or the nation's secret intelligence service was behind the harrassment campaign in Cairo.

This thread sheds a revealing light on what happened in Egypt at the time of Mubarak's downfall and reveals who was likely pulling the strings to make it happen.

If one were to view the whole process as one desired by top ranking military officers and engineered by them, it becomes appallingly obvious how every significant turning point in the Egyptian revolution could be easily stage managed and choreographed by them.

Churchill said that politics was the art of the skilful use of a blunt instrument.

A young blogger was beaten to death. Easy to arrange by the oppressor. Angry groups gathered. Easy to arrange by an oppressor. Confrontations with the police ensued. Easy to arrange by an oppressor. Firebombs were thrown. Easy to arrange by an oppressor. Large crowds gather. Easy to arrange by an oppressor, especially when you have been harrassing thousands of wives in the street for weeks. The Army (the "good guys") steps in betwen the police and the crowds to prevent serious bloodshed. Easy to arrange by the oppressors who control both forces. Consultations between a comittee of the Army and selected demonstrators takes place. Again, easy to arrange for the oppressor.

Net result. One awkward Egyptian head of state removed. A new collection of probable stooges put in place. "Revolution" complete.

To my knowledge not one news outlet, with the exception of ATS has made the connection between sexual harassment in the streets of Cairo and the fall of Mubarak.

Bismarck once said that people who like politics and sausages shouldn't go to see how either is made. It looks like the "Lucy in the sky with diamonds" mainstream press is following that advice in this case.

The Egyptian people have realized, of course, that the Army is not their friend. They still want their revolution and are now going after the Army chief, but they are also now protesting the rough treatment given to women protesters by the Army.

This ties in with the origin of this thread, which was a suspicion that whoever was behind the overthrow of Mubarak was also behind the astronomical (eighty-fold) increase in sexual harassment incidents against the women of Cairo in the three months leading up to Mubarak's ouster.

This video shows an outrageous assault on a helpless woman by army thugs in Cairo.



The rights of women is an issue within an issue in the Egyptian situation. May they and all Egyptians achieve peace and dignity.

Ipsed,

Great work, I had to stop by to star and flag.

Upon refelction, your findings shed quite a bit of light upon the Arab Spring.
Very unique information, I am suprised this did not garner more attention,
even I missed this.

When its all added up, it sure looks as if the entire Middle East was played
like a fiddle.

Again, great work!
bts

MSNBC has an article on sexual harassment going on in the current turbulence in Cairo. The article is interesting in that they make the claim that the harassment was going on well before the ouster of Mubarak, but the graph on the harassmap.org site would not seem to bear that out.

worldnews.nbcnews.com...

Public violence against women was rampant well before the movement that unseated Mubarak in 2011. According to a 2008 study by an Egyptian NGO, 83 percent of women have been victims of harassment.

All you have to do is look at the harassmap graph to see that this claim by MSNBC is highly unlikely and that the suspicions voiced in this thread, originally about the situation in 2010, aren't wiped away that easily.

Is this deja vu all over again, only this time with Morsi?

harassmap.org...



We haven't seen the crescendo of hooliganism that came just bfore Mubarak's ouster, but maybe it is on its way. Has someone, some mischievous outsider, besides the Egyptian people decided that Morsi is not the right man, or is this just the work of a bad element among the "Springtime for Allah" crowd. Time will tell.