BREAKING: Unusual Hasty Sunday Night Obama Statement

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This is, to say the least, highly unusual. From the White House:

POTUS to address the nation tonight at 10:30 PM Eastern Time

Now, I have no idea what this is about yet and, somewhat eerily, neither does Marc Ambinder, who almost always has scary good sources for this kind of stuff:

I assume the WH will give the wire services a heads up, so we’ll known by 10:25??

CNN has just announced that it is “national security related”.

Stay tuned and we will update here as it comes down.

UPDATES: It is reportedly NOT Libya. Rumor is Bin Laden.

BIN LADEN REPORTEDLY DEAD AND US HAS BODY

From CBS News:

House Intelligence committee aide confirms that Osama Bin Laden is dead. U.S. has the body.

Rumsfeld (of all people) has also said the same.

So, it is quite clear that Bin Laden is the deal and he is confirmed dead. Does that mean the was is over? Can we close Gitmo? Is the AUMF now completed and done? Well, of course not. The long war is NEVER over. This will only be an excuse to go to a higher and more scary DEFCON because of alleged feared reprisals.

From Laura Rozen:

Heard WTOP radio reports suggesting helicopter crash in pakistan and UBL (body or alive?) handed to US forces in Afghanistan

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Mr. PJ Crowley, Obama & Firedoglake

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.

As you know by now, State Department spokesman PJ Crowley was effectively given the Shirley Sherrod pull over to the side of the road and resign order by the Obama White House, and the announcement was made public this morning. As Phoenix Woman noted it was reminiscent of the Saturday Night Massacre.

Pj Crowley told the truth, and it is now pretty clear, meant it when he said the treatment being occasioned on Bradley Manning is “ridiculous, counterproductive and stupid”, and it is NOT hunky dory like Mr. Obama shamefully bleats.

But the best observation was made by Rosalind in comments noting the side splitting non-comedy of the Commander in Chief last night at the annual Gridiron Club Dinner meeting of moldy MOTUs and their press lackeys:

Obama’s whole “act” last night at the Gridiron is now up. While his minions were forcing Crowley out, he was spewing this:

But whatever challenges we face and however history unfolds, we rely on all of you — the press — to tell the story. Those of us who are fortunate enough to be in positions of power may have our gripes about how the media covers us, but that’s only because your job is to hold us accountable. And none of us would want to live in a country without that failsafe — without a free press and freedom of expression. That’s what people all around the world are fighting for as we speak. In some cases, they’re dying for those rights. And that’s what many reporters risk their lives to uphold — from Kandahar to Tripoli.

tee hee, oh my sides! s/

extra bonus: FDL got a shout-out early on:

And while I know I have my share of critics out there, I don’t focus on the negative stuff. I just don’t pay much attention to it. Most days I barely skim through the comment section of Huffington Post — Daily Kos — Fire Dog Lake — The Daily Dish — boingboing.net. (Laughter.)

Bald faced craven comedy AND a dedicated shout out to Firedoglake during our membership drive, what else could you ask for from a Torturer-in-Chief? I would like to personally thank Mr. Obama for the plug and endorsement; though, I must say, if he is reading Firedoglake daily, he sure is not learning and retaining much. Please work on that Mr. President; we know you can do better!

Now, back to Mr. Crowley. Turns out Ozzy Osbourne, of all people, presciently wrote an ode for this exact occasion. I kid you not, it is scarily spot on for for what happened to Mr. Crowley, who indeed “uncovered things that were sacred”. The video is above, the prophetic lyrics below. Come, sit with us PJ, you will find kindred spirits here at Firedoglake; you are one of us now, trying to speak truth to obstreperous power.

Mr. Crowley, what went wrong in your head?

Oh, Mr. Crowley, did you talk with the dead?

Your life style to me seemed so tragic

With the thrill of it all

You fooled all the people with magic

You waited on Satan’s call

Mr. Charming, did you think you were pure

Mr. Alarming, in nocturnal rapport

Uncovering things that were sacred manifest on this Earth

Conceived in the eye of a secret

And they scattered the afterbirth

Mr. Crowley, won’t you ride my white horse

Oh, Mr. Crowley, it’s symbolic of course

Approaching a time that is classic

I hear maidens call

Approaching a time that is drastic

Standing with their backs to the wall

Was it polemically sent

I wanna know what you meant

I wanna know

I wanna know what you meant

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Raymond Davis: Diplomatic Immunity v. US Impunity

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What happens with the Raymond Davis case, in the end, will likely not have very much to do with the Vienna Conventions. For that matter, we likely will never have enough of the unadulterated facts to know what should happen under the Vienna Conventions. But let’s suspend reality and see where an examination of the Vienna Conventions and the competing facts in the Davis case might take us.

As several reports have pointed out, there are numerous Vienna Conventions and the two that are likely to apply to Davis are the Vienna Convention of 1961 on Diplomatic Relations and the Vienna Convention of 1963 on Consular Relations. The VCs get wrapped in and out of discussions of passports and visa – so let’s separate and reassemble.

Diplomatic Passport. Our State Department issues passports needed for travel to other countries. Because of the State Department’s sole control over this document, it is looked at skeptically by Pakistanis in the Davis matter. The US says that, while it was not on him when he was captured and while it may have some discrepancies with other documents, Raymond Davis has a US issued diplomatic passport. Some have gone so far as to make this the equivalent of having diplomatic immunity, without anything more.

But that’s not how it works. Diplomatic immunity is derived, under VC 1961, by being validly attached to the embassy (mission) of a nation in which the “diplomat” is located. A diplomatic passport has no effect to attach someone to an embassy or mission. For example, a diplomat validly attached to the embassy in Iraq could travel to Germany on a diplomatic passport, but would not have immunity in Germany if they were not validly attached to the German embassy. So the question isn’t whether or not Davis had a diplomatic passport (or whether, if so, it was issued to an alias or issued after the fact), but whether he was validly attached to the US embassy at the time of his altercation in Pakistan.

Attachment to the US Mission/Embassy. For someone other than the head of mission, the general rule is that the sending nation (US) can “freely appoint” diplomats to its mission staff (Article 7), with a few caveats, and are then merely required to notify the receiving nation’s foreign ministry of the appointment/addition. The first caveat, also in Article 7, is that if the person being appointed is a military Read more →

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Mubarak’s Loot: $38 Million Found! Still Hidden? $69,962 Million

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The New York Times heralds that,

Swiss Locate Funds Linked to Mubarak

But what the story really reports is that the Swiss have located just “several dozen million Swiss francs,” which works out to less than $38 million of the up to $70 billion Hosni Mubarak reportedly looted from Egypt. The real headline of the story ought to be…

Former Western Allies Dragging Feet on Mubarak’s Millions

… as the important news of the story, appearing in paragraphs 11 and 12, is:

On Thursday, the United States Treasury Department advised American banks to monitor movements of funds by former senior Egyptian political figures that “could potentially represent misappropriated or diverted state assets, proceeds of bribery or other illegal payments.”

European foreign ministers are scheduled to discuss the issue at a meeting on Sunday and Monday. As of Friday, no reports had emerged that assets belonging to the Mubaraks or the five associates had been frozen in the United States or other countries in Europe.

In other words, while the Swiss have found some petty cash which might be Mubarak’s, no one in Mubarak’s former patron governments has bothered to freeze his assets (though the Treasury Department decided, a full week after Mubarak stepped down, weeks after Western intelligence services apparently listened in on urgent Mubarak family conversations about moving their loot, and almost a month since it looked like he might be forced to step down, to start monitoring funds that might be his or other former top Egyptian officials).

And it’s not like this is the first that Egyptians have asked the rest of the world to stop Mubarak from looting their country. This WikiLeaks cable, reporting a meeting with one of the leaders of Egypt’s April 6 movement (so probably someone who had a key role in the Egyptian uprising), not only dismissed the thought of overthrowing Mubarak before the 2011 elections to be “outside the mainstream” of Egyptian opposition.

XXXXXXXXXXXX offered no roadmap of concrete steps toward April 6’s highly unrealistic goal of replacing the current regime with a parliamentary democracy prior to the 2011 presidential elections. Most opposition parties and independent NGOs work toward achieving tangible, incremental reform within the current political context, even if they may be pessimistic about their chances of success. XXXXXXXXXXXX’s wholesale rejection of such an approach places him outside this mainstream of opposition politicians and activists.

But it also treated this activists’ suggestion that the U.S. freeze Mubarak’s accounts back in December 2008 with the thick disdain of scare quotes.

(C) XXXXXXXXXXXX described how he tried to convince his Washington interlocutors that the USG should pressure the GOE to implement significant reforms by threatening to reveal information about GOE officials’ alleged “illegal” off-shore bank accounts. He hoped that the U.S. and the international community would freeze these bank accounts, like the accounts of Zimbabwean President Mugabe’s confidantes. XXXXXXXXXXXX said he wants to convince the USG that Mubarak is worse than Mugabe and that the GOE will never accept democratic reform. XXXXXXXXXXXX asserted that Mubarak derives his legitimacy from U.S. support, and therefore charged the U.S. with “being responsible” for Mubarak’s “crimes.”

The diplomats who met with this activist made it clear to label the judgment that Mubarak’s looting was “illegal” as the activist’s viewpoint, not necessarily one they shared. So, too, did they mark U.S. “responsib[ility]” for Mubarak’s “crimes” with quotation marks signaling they didn’t necessarily agree.

This pisses me off all the more because — after seeing Yves Smith rave about it for weeks — I’ve been reading Nicholas Shaxson’s Treasure Islands (I’m hoping we’ll be able to arrange a book salon when the book comes out in the U.S. in April). Normally, discussions of developing nation elites looting their countries focus on the corruption of the countries themselves. But Shaxson shows how the ability to loot a country like Mubarak has depends on a whole network of secrecy jurisdictions, of which Switzerland is now just the stodgiest. Indeed, Shaxon shows that the UK and U.S. have competed since World War II to set up the most extensive secrecy jurisdictions to ensure the looted funds from the rest of the world end up driving our financialized economies.

Mubarak’s looted billions — indeed, his ability to loot billions as representatives of our government scoff at activists who call such looting illegal — plays a fundamental role in our house of cards economy. And, given that we reward obedient client dictators with permission to loot their country, it plays a fundamental role in American hegemony in this world.

Yves predicted that authorities would find a few billion, seize a few houses, and declare victory.

If the authorities nab a few billion, plus all the tangible assets like houses, they can declare victory and try to cover up the fact that a great deal was lost.

That seems to be what this NYT article serves to do: dangle the discovery of a fraction of a percent of Mubarak’s total heist as a victory, as U.S. and British authorities very deliberately stall on doing anything to stop Mubarak from hiding the rest.

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Omar Suleiman Promised the 2006 Election in Gaza Wouldn’t Take Place

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Back in 2008, David Rose had a fairly explosive article on Condi Rice and Elliot Abrams’ incompetent meddling in Gaza, which he compared to Iran-Contra. Here’s how I summarized its revelations at the time:

The story explains how the Administration pushed an election for the Palestinians, not seeing what every sane observer saw–that Hamas would win. Immediately after the election, Condi started pressuring Mahmoud Abbas to dissolve Parliament. When he refused, the Administration started backing the Fatah strongman, Mohammad Dahlan, in hopes that he could strengthen Fatah and the Palestinian Authority’s security organizations–which had been devastated by Israel during the intifada–sufficiently to overcome Hamas. This set off a civil war between Fatah and Hamas. To end the bloodshed, Saudi’s King Abdullah brokered a national unity government, without warning the US he would do so. In response to Abdullah’s unity government plan, the State Department developed its own $1.27 billion plan, what Hamas considered “a blueprint for a U.S.-backed Fatah coup.” The US handed that plan to Abbas and had him adopt it as if it were his own. Hamas responded by taking over Gaza and capturing the Egyptian weapons intended to strengthen Fatah.

Central to the whole story is how the State Department could have been so stupid as not to see that Hamas would win a democratic election in Gaza in 2006.

Elections for the Palestinian parliament, known officially as the Legislative Council, were originally set for July 2005, but later postponed by Abbas until January 2006.Dahlan says he warned his friends in the Bush administration that Fatah still wasn’t ready for elections in January. Decades of self-preservationist rule by Arafat had turned the party into a symbol of corruption and inefficiency—a perception Hamas found it easy to exploit. Splits within Fatah weakened its position further: in many places, a single Hamas candidate ran against several from Fatah.

“Everyone was against the elections,” Dahlan says. Everyone except Bush. “Bush decided, ‘I need an election. I want elections in the Palestinian Authority.’ Everyone is following him in the American administration, and everyone is nagging Abbas, telling him, ‘The president wants elections.’ Fine. For what purpose?”

The elections went forward as scheduled. On January 25, Hamas won 56 percent of the seats in the Legislative Council.

Few inside the U.S. administration had predicted the result, and there was no contingency plan to deal with it. “I’ve asked why nobody saw it coming,” Condoleezza Rice told reporters. “I don’t know anyone who wasn’t caught off guard by Hamas’s strong showing.”

“Everyone blamed everyone else,” says an official with the Department of Defense. “We sat there in the Pentagon and said, ‘Who the fuck recommended this?’”

But a Wikileaks cable released by Aftenposten may explain why State was taken by surprised.

They may have thought the election itself wouldn’t happen.

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Hillary Can’t Decide Whether to Impose Democracy or Not

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On Saturday, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told attendees at a security conference that our torturer, Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman, should manage the transition to democracy in Egypt.

She backed off that stance yesterday.

CBS White House Correspondent Mark Knoller:

On flight home from Germany, Secy of State Clinton says “we cannot and would not try to dictate any outcome” in Egypt.

Clinton says “I am no expert on the Egyptian constitution,” but if Mubarak resigns, presidential elections would have to be held in 60 days.

State Department Spokesperson PJ Crowley:

#SecClinton today: The transition to #democracy (in #Egypt and elsewhere) will only work if it is deliberate, inclusive and transparent.

Secretary #Clinton today: There needs to be an orderly, expeditious transition. The people of #Egypt will be the arbiters of this process.

Meanwhile, Robert Fisk lays out in detail the same thing I raised to explain Frank Wisner’s apparent flip-flop on whether Mubarak should go or not. Here’s what I said:

Wisner is a lobbyist for Patton Boggs, representing the Government of Egypt.

PJ [Crowley] would have been better served to say somsething like, “having utterly failed in his mission for his country, Wisner has gone back to his day job pushing whatever policy his clients think, regardless of its benefit to America.”

Here’s Fisk’s explanation.

The US State Department and Mr Wisner himself have now both claimed that his remarks were made in a “personal capacity”. But there is nothing “personal” about Mr Wisner’s connections with the litigation firm Patton Boggs, which openly boasts that it advises “the Egyptian military, the Egyptian Economic Development Agency, and has handled arbitrations and litigation on the [Mubarak] government’s behalf in Europe and the US”. Oddly, not a single journalist raised this extraordinary connection with US government officials – nor the blatant conflict of interest it appears to represent.

[snip]

Patton Boggs states that its attorneys “represent some of the leading Egyptian commercial families and their companies” and “have been involved in oil and gas and telecommunications infrastructure projects on their behalf”. One of its partners served as chairman of the US-Egyptian Chamber of Commerce promoting foreign investment in the Egyptian economy. The company has also managed contractor disputes in military-sales agreements arising under the US Foreign Military Sales Act. Washington gives around $1.3bn (£800m) a year to the Egyptian military.

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Claiming Consensus, Omar Suleiman Promises to Hold Protesters Accountable

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The key to understanding Omar Suleiman’s statement claiming there is “consensus” in how to move forward in Egypt is to see how he redefines the crisis from being caused by legitimate grievances voiced by the “youth” involved in protests into a lack of security caused by the protests.

All participants of the dialogue arrived at a consensus to express their appreciation and respect for the 25 January movement and on the need to deal seriously, expeditiously and honestly with the current crisis that the nation is facing, the legitimate demands of the youth of 25 January and society’s political forces, with full consideration and a commitment to constitutional legitimacy in confronting the challenges and dangers faced by Egypt as result of this crisis, including: The lack of security for the populace; disturbances to daily life; the paralysis of by public services; the suspension of education at universities and schools; the logistical delays in the delivery of essential goods to the population; the damages to and losses of the Egyptian economy; the attempts at foreign intervention into purely Egyptian affairs and breaches of security by foreign elements working to undermine stability in implementation of their plots, while recognizing that the 25 January movement is a honorable and patriotic movement. [my emphasis]

This paragraph starts out by hailing the January 25 movement, but then says there is consensus that Egypt must both deal with the “legitimate” demands of the movement and “confront[] the challenges and dangers faced by Egypt as result of this crisis.” Fully half the paragraph lists the perceived threats to security “caused” by the uprising. Predictably, Suleiman doesn’t include police attacks on unarmed citizens among those threats to security.

In other words, Suleiman is saying, “The January 25 movement is honorable, but they have hurt the security of the nation, so the solution largely consists of responding to the threat to security they represent.”

This allows Suleiman to promise that no one will be persecuted for political activities–indeed, “prisoners of conscience” will be released.

2. The Government announces the establishment of a bureau to receive complaints regarding, and commits to immediately release, prisoners of conscience of all persuasions. The Government commits itself to not pursuing them or limiting their ability to engage in political activity.

Which would seem to be an attempt to convince protesters they won’t be prosecuted if they demobilize.

Except that Suleiman makes four different promises to investigate and prosecute those responsible for the alleged breakdown of national security (as defined by Suleiman, not by the protesters):

6. Pursuit of corruption, and an investigation into those behind the breakdown of security in line with the law

7. Restoring the security and stability of the nation, and tasking the police forces to resume their role in serving and protecting the people.

[snip]

4. Supervisory and judiciary agencies will be tasked with continuing to pursue persons implicated in corruption, as well as pursuing and holding accountable persons responsible for the recent breakdown in security.

5. The state of emergency will be lifted based on the security situation and an end to the threats to the security of society

Along with an implicit promise to use the military to crack down on those who threaten national security.

In addition, all participants in the dialogue saluted the patriotic and loyal role played by our Armed Forces at this sensitive time, and affirmed their aspirations for a continuation of that role to restore of calm, security and stability, and to guarantee the implementation and of the consensus and understandings that result from the meetings of the national dialogue.

The key in all of this is bullet 5 quoted above: the “state of emergency” (and with it the emergency law that limits freedom of assembly and provides alternative legal processes) will only be lifted after “threats to the security of society” have ended. This is contrary to some of the reports that Suleiman had agreed to lift the emergency law that have come out of these meetings. Suleiman has described the protests as being part of the problem, and agreed to lift the emergency only after that problem has been investigated and held accountable. The one exception–his promise to liberalize the media–is limited by his depiction of foreign interference in Egyptian affairs, seeing to suggest foreign media will still be targeted.

In other words, having redefined the protests as the direct cause of the breakdown in security (even quoting Hosni Mubarak’s February 1 speech that did the same), Suleiman has all but promised to use the emergency law to prosecute those who caused that breakdown in security.

I guess that’s just about what we should expect from our torturer.

Update: Mohamed el Baradei has released a statement in response. He is not impressed.

Egyptian opposition figure Mohamed ElBaradei slammed fledgling negotiations on Egypt’s future on Sunday and said he was not invited to the talks.

The Nobel Peace laureate said weekend talks with Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman were managed by the same people who had ruled the country for 30 years and lack credibility. He said the negotiations were not a step toward the change protesters have demanded in 12 days of demonstrations calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak.

“The process is opaque. Nobody knows who is talking to whom at this stage,” ElBaradei, the former head of the UN nuclear watchdog, said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

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Hillary’s Tortured Democracy and the Suleiman “Assassination Attempt”

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At a security conference in Munich today, Hillary Clinton announced that America’s torturer, Omar Suleiman, must be in charge of Egypt’s “transition” to “democracy.”

The US secretary of state Hillary Clinton today signalled how far the US has swung its support behind vice-president Omar Suleiman and the transition process he is leading in Egypt.

Clinton was speaking at a security conference in Munich today, where the watchword on Egypt was the need for orderly transition.

In her most striking remarks, the US secretary of state said: “There are forces at work in any society, particularly one that is facing these kind of challenges, that will try to derail or overtake the process to pursue their own agenda, which is why I think it’s important to follow the transition process announced by the Egyptian government, actually headed by vice-president Omar Suleiman.”

This, just hours after Obama reiterated that “it’s not up to us” to determine the future of Egypt.

See the FT for an even more detailed description of Hillary’s address.

Meanwhile, our government appears to be the only entity–aside from Fox News–pushing a totally unconfirmed report that Hillary’s choice to lead Egypt’s “democracy” survived an assassination attempt the other day.

I first learned about the rumor when David Corn reacted on Twitter to a Fox reporter asking about it.

Q: Do you know anything about assassination attempt on #Egypt VP? G: I’m not going to get into that question.//Huh?

I found Robert Gibbs’ response (at least as Corn captured it–the WH has not released a transcript) fascinating. You would think if Gibbs knew the allegation was false, he’d say so in no uncertain terms. If he didn’t know about it, he’d tell reporters he’d get back to them on it. But instead, “I’m not going to get into that question.”

Which is not dissimilar from the way Hillary used this alleged assassination attempt in Munich. In spite of the fact that only Fox has reported it in the US, the German diplomat who at one point seemed to confirm subsequently retracted it, and an Egyptian official has denied it, Hillary used the alleged assassination to support her case that stability is key in the transition to Egyptian “democracy.”

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said at the conference that the news of the assassination attempt reflects the challenges of restoring stability in Egypt.

While I haven’t found a direct transcription of this yet, it appears that, like Gibbs, Hillary acknowledged the existence of an “assassination plot” that only Fox seems to know exists, without directly confirming it, and then used it to emphasize how the danger of such things demonstrates the need for our torturer to oversee a stable transition in Egypt.

I’m having a bit of deja vu this morning. Last time I remember these kinds of linguistic tricks, Dick Cheney and George Bush were using them to convince us to forcibly impose democracy on Iraq in 2002-2003.

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Our Diplomats Need to Spend More Time Surfing the Toobz!

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As I noted in my last post, DiFi is accusing the intelligence community of having missed the potential volatility of Middle Eastern unrest because they’ve been paying too little attention to social media.

So I decided to check the WikiLeaks State cables to see whether DiFi’s complaint bears out.

Obviously, this is a totally insufficient test. Not only is State not the primary member of the intelligence community that should be tracking these things, we have no idea how representative the cables are of all State communication. (Though there are obviously intelligence community members working under official cover at the Embassy, and one would hope a good deal of our specialists on any particular country’s dialects are stationed in that country.) Nevertheless, it gives an idea of how attentively our Embassies track opposition viewpoints expressed in social media, and how they view social media as a source of information.

And DiFi may well be right.

There are just 14 WikiLeak cables in this database mentioning both Egypt and bloggers (out of 325 that mention Egypt) but just one–dated March 30, 2009–that talks in detail about the actual content of blogs rather than Mubarak’s persecution of them as a human rights issue. (This cable notes that bloggers and other journalists cover torture complaints and a few others refer to specific types of bloggers being persecuted.) The March 30 cable assesses,

KEY POINTS —

(C) Egypt’s bloggers are playing an increasingly important role in broadening the scope of acceptable political and social discourse, and self-expression. —

(C) Bloggers’ discussions of sensitive issues, such as sexual harassment, sectarian tension and the military, represent a significant change from five years ago, and have influenced society and the media. —

(C) The role of bloggers as a cohesive activist movement has largely disappeared, due to a more restrictive political climate, GOE counter-measures, and tensions among bloggers. —

(C) However, individual bloggers have continued to work to expose problems such as police brutality and corporate malfeasance.

[snip]

(C) Egypt has an estimated 160,000 bloggers who write in Arabic, and sometimes in English, about a wide variety of topics, from social life to politics to literature. One can view posts ranging from videos of alleged police brutality (ref B), to comments about the GOE’s foreign policy, to complaints about separate lines for men and women in government offices distributing drivers’ licenses. One NGO contact estimated for us that a solid majority of bloggers are between 20 and 35 years old, and that about 30 percent of blogs focus on politics. Blogs have spread throughout the population to become vehicles for a wide range of activists, students, journalists and ordinary citizens to express their views on almost any issue they choose. As such, the blogs have significantly broadened the range of topics that Egyptians are able to discuss publicly.

It’s not clear whether anyone at the Embassy made an independent assessment of the blogs themselves; the cable is heavily reliant on the viewpoints of at least three different sources, as well as the comments of “two young upper middle-class bloggers” and one female political blogger not identified demographically.

Meanwhile, just 5 cables mention both Facebook and Egypt (two cables appear in both searches). Two of these cables simply count the growing number of Mohamed el Baradei Facebook fans. One of them–an April 16, 2008 cable titled, “Mahalla Riots: Isolated Incident or Tip of an Iceberg?” and reviewing the April 6, 2008 events–probably should have alerted US authorities to track Facebook more closely.

(C) April 6 brought together disparate opposition forces together with numerous non-activist Egyptians, with the Facebook calls for a strike attracting 70,000 people on-line, and garnering widespread national attention. The nexus of the upper and middle-class Facebook users, and their poorer counterparts in the factories of Mahalla, craeated a new dynamic. One senior insider mused, “Who could have imagined that a few kids on the internet could foment a buzz that the entire country noticed? I wish we could do that in the National Democratic Party.”

Though the reference to the “senior insider” complaining that Egypt’s NDP couldn’t foment as much buzz as “a few kids on the internet” suggests the assessment of the importance of Facebook to the movement may have come from Egyptians, not from any analysis conducted in the Embassy itself.

Just as tellingly, most of the 7 cables on Egypt and April 6 are among those that discuss social media (that is, State knew or should have known that social media was an important tool for the April 6 movement).

Meanwhile, it’s even worse for Tunisia. Just one cable (out of 81) mentions Tunisia and either blogger or Facebook–and that’s a report on the Embassy’s own use of Facebook!

At least in the case of Egypt, the Embassy had both warning that Mubarak’s government considers bloggers enough of a threat to persecute, as well as some sense that social media has served an organizing function.

Yet even with that warning, Embassy staffers don’t appear to have spent much time learning from social media.

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“Did Anyone Know a Fruit Vendor in Tunisia Was Going to Light Himself on Fire?”

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That’s the question NSC spokesperson Tommy Vietor used yesterday to deflect Senate Intelligence Committee concerns that the Administration was taken by surprise by the events in Egypt.

Did anyone in the world know in advance that a fruit vendor in Tunisia was going to light himself on fire and start a revolution? No. But for decades, the intelligence community and diplomats have been reporting on unrest in the region that was a result of economic, demographic and political conditions.

That’s pretty much the answer Stephanie O’Sullivan gave to the committee as they grilled her yesterday (though without the snide reference to Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian whose self-immolation sparked the uprising there).

“We warned of instability,” said Stephanie O’Sullivan, who has been nominated to become the nation’s No. 2 intelligence official. The hearing was on her nomination to be principal deputy director of the Office of Director of National Intelligence. But, she added, “we didn’t know what the triggering mechanism would be.”

It’s also what Paul Pillar told Spencer about warnings of the Egyptian uprising.

“The ingredients of upheaval were there for a long time,” says Paul Pillar, who was the intelligence community’s top Mideast analyst from 2000 to 2005, “but it was impossible to predict in advance what particular catalyzing events would set stuff off.”

But that response doesn’t address three issues.

First, there’s DiFi’s complaint that the intelligence community was not monitoring open source resources to track the Egyptian opposition.

Feinstein set a skeptical tone at the opening of the hearing, saying Obama and other policymakers deserved timely intelligence on major world events. Referring to Egypt, she said, “I have doubts whether the intelligence community lived up to its obligations in this area.”

After the hearing, Feinstein said she was particularly concerned that the CIA and other agencies had ignored open-source intelligence on the protests, a reference to posts on Facebook and other publicly accessible Web sites used by organizers of the protests against the Mubarak government.

Speaking more broadly about intelligence on turmoil in the Middle East, Feinstein said, “I’ve looked at some intelligence in this area.” She described it as “lacking . . . on collection.”

Our intelligence community makes a great deal of effort to track the public internet communications of Islamic extremists. But DiFi suggests they’re not doing the same to track potential sources of instability around the world. In my next post, I’ll show that she may have a point.

In addition, the response that the intelligence community can’t predict when a fruit vendor will self-immolate and with it light up the whole Middle East ignores a point that Pillar admitted.

At the same time, the CIA is really, really close to its Egyptian counterparts. It relied on Egypt’s spymaster, now Mubarak’s vice president, to carry out a torture program against terrorist suspects. But Pillar denies that closeness led the CIA to rely on rosy pictures of a stable country provided by Egypt’s spies.“They take with grain of salt what [Egyptian spies] have to say,” Pillar says. “Anybody in the State Department or intelligence community following a country like Egypt is highly conscious of that as an occupational hazard. That doesn’t mean necessarily that they have great sources inside an opposition movement, but they’re aware of this as a potential shortcoming.” [my emphasis]

Pillar admits that we didn’t necessarily have great sources within the opposition movement. And he may be suggesting that that is because of our particularly close ties to Egypt’s intelligence services and thugs like Omar Suleiman. Particularly if DiFi’s complaint about not tracking social media is correct, that’s sort of going to make it hard to predict a revolution.

Finally (and this is a point as salient for the complaining Senators as for the intelligence community), what if we did know people were talking about a revolution? What would we have done?

Given the Administration’s caution about dispensing of its ally Mubarak (something I’m not terribly surprised about), what do the Senators really think we would have done, as a country, had we thought Mubarak’s rule was unstable? Egypt has been such a cornerstone of our foreign policy for so long, I highly doubt it would have changed our policy of gently trying to nudge Mubarak to reform without trying to offend him.

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