A week after the Egyptian Army deposed President Mohamed Morsi, supporters of the ousted leader were massacred yesterday during a sit-in protest at an “elite army base” in Cairo. So far over 50 have been reported dead, with hundreds injured. The Muslim Brotherhood is blaming the Egyptian army and police, but a military spokesman has said a “terrorist group” was responsible.
“We have people hit in the head, we have bullets that exploded as they entered the body, cluttering organs and body parts” said Gehad Haddad, a spokesman for Muslim Brotherhood.
Adamant that the role of police and army is to “safeguard the people’s revolution”, no matter their particular political affiliation, military spokesman Ahmed Ali said security forces acted “in self-defence against armed men attacking them from various locations, including rooftops.”
No one disputes that there were clashes between Morsi supporters – at least some of whom also appeared to be armed and intent on violence – and the security forces sent in to remove them, but it’s unclear who the gunmen were:
Witnesses, including Brotherhood supporters at the scene, said the army fired only tear gas and warning shots and that “thugs” in civilian clothes had carried out the deadly shooting.
This bloodbath comes on the heels of arguably the largest mass demonstrations in modern history, and is almost certainly going to spiral out of control and plunge Egypt into chaos.
This is not the first time ‘mystery gunmen’ have begun shooting people in the head since the uprising began in 2011. In March 2013, a Morsi government inquiry into the deaths of nearly 900 protesters in Egypt at the end of Mubarak’s reign concluded that, “police were behind nearly all the killings and used snipers on rooftops overlooking Cairo’s Tahrir Square to shoot into the huge crowds.”
Police officials told the commission that snipers’ equipment of the kind used during the uprising could only be found with members of an elite counterterrorism unit that worked under Mubarak’s pervasive state security agency and took orders directly from the interior minister.
Most the victims were shot in the head or chest, suggesting the use of snipers, and bystanders were also killed or wounded as they watched the clashes from their homes, the report said.
So, Mubarak ordered teams of snipers to shoot protesters in the head in order to justify widespread repression of the uprising in a last-ditch effort to maintain power.
Case closed?
Not quite. Sniper attacks continued during Morsi’s brief reign, with more ‘mystery’ snipers picking people off in Port Said as recently as January this year.
Since his removal from power and subsequent death in 2012, Mubarak can’t of course be blamed for the recent coordinated efforts to generate chaos.
The gunmen’s identities may forever remain unknown, but the modus operandi is the same as ever. We saw it in Tunisia in 2011; we saw it Iran in 2009; we saw it in Venezuela in 2002; we see it in Syria to this day. Protesters are always shot randomly – usually in the head – to maximise mass panic and stimulate in-fighting.
The people behind this understand that ‘régime change’ – perhaps more accurately termed ‘régime management’ in Egypt’s case – depends on instability. The media always report its effects in general terms, lamenting the ‘tragic escalation of violence’, but never homes in on the clear and deliberate efforts of parties unknown to instigate bloody mayhem.
Thanks to the CIA concept of ‘plausible deniability’, Obama can sit back, enjoy a round of golf, and say with a straight face that the U.S. is “not getting involved by backing any particular Egyptian party or group.”
But what does that mean coming from the leader of a country that has effectively ruled Egypt for decades, at arm’s length, through massive military ‘aid’?
It means that, like the Lavon Affair…
The Lavon Affair refers to a failed Israeli covert operation, code named Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the Summer of 1954. As part of the false flag operation, a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence for plans to plant bombs inside Egyptian, American and British-owned civilian targets, cinema, library and American educational center. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian Communists, “unspecified malcontents” or “local nationalists” with the aim of creating a climate of sufficient violence and instability to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in Egypt’s Suez Canal zone.
…these sniper massacres serve one goal: to create a “climate of sufficient violence and instability” that enables the ruling elite in Egypt and their brethren in the U.S. and Israel to subvert, at all costs, the dreams held by ordinary Egyptians of realising self-government by, for and of the people.