Click on the pic below…

I really wish that they didn’t bother with that ridiculous trial and just killed him when they found him, as they did with Uday and Qusay Hussein. And so much for those people who predicted an endless appeal process.
I do regret, however, that more information was not obtained out of Saddam Hussein. About his life, [...]

A State Security Major told me this evening that sometimes these demonstrations get violent, which explains why the park in front of Mustafa Mahmoud mosque had to be sealed off with three truckloads of riot police and a couple of gangs of stick toting beltagaya tonight. “The Muslim Brotherhood sometimes comes,” he told me and [...]

Click on the picture below (of Police Captain Islam Nabih, who tortured and sexually abused driver Emad Kabeer) to read the latest updates on the case…

Nasty weather for demonstrating tonight, but around seven o’clock this evening there were half a dozen Ayman Nour supporters stamping their feet and yelling nasty things about State Security in Midan Talat Harb. Three trucks full of soldiers watched from the other side of the street and the usual array of nice young men in [...]

Syrian Ambassador to the US Imad Mustafa has a blog. He likes Syrian contemporary painters — who are quite good. I hope he puts up some recipes, Syrian food is tasty.
(via Aqoul)

“JERUSALEM – Israel has approved a new settlement in the West Bank to house former Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip, officials said Tuesday, breaking a promise to the U.S. to halt home construction in the Palestinian territories.”

Great news! The officer who tortured and sexually abused driver Emad Kabeer will be prosecuted.
But that will not end the practice. Those are not just “few rotten apples.” Mubarak’s policing system is classist, abusive, unprofessional and repressive. Still the campaign launched by the Egyptian bloggers and the independent press was strong enough to push the [...]

“My Name is Rachel Corrie” has been cancelled in Canada. No surprises as to why:
Jack Rose, from the CanStage board — while admitting he has neither read nor seen the script — said that “my view was it would provoke a negative reaction in the Jewish community.”
And philanthropist Bluma Appel, after whom CanStage’s flagship theater [...]

The economic side of Lebanon’s current crisis is examined at the Nation:
But in most conversations with people at the sit-in and protests, economic concerns quickly emerge: Siniora’s government is corrupt, has failed to reduce Lebanon’s crippling $41 billion public debt and has done little to improve people’s lives. Shiites are especially forgotten in the country’s [...]

Frequent Arabist reader Andrew Exum has penned an interesting report for WINEP on Hizbullah’s military tactics and strategy in this summer’s war. Andrew eschews the politics of the war to focus on Hizbullah’s surprising military prowess, bringing the perspective of his experience with the US Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most military accounts of [...]

Sheikh Muhammad’s vision: can it possibly get more ridiculous and megalomaniacal?

Lucky, lucky reporter who filed this:
CAIRO (AFP) – An Egyptian sniffer dog charged with ensuring the security of an EgyptAir flight from Cairo to New York has answered a call of nature that cost the airline an estimated 10,000 dollars.
The flight had to be delayed for more than an hour when the unnamed animal did [...]

It’s not often I completely agree with a Washington Post editorial. The situation in Pakistan is ridiculous and it should be considered a strategic failure on the part of the Bush administration on a par with the Iraq war.

Also, via Kafr al-Hanadwa, Tariq Ali has a LRB piece on Musharraf.

Saree Makdisi on why Jimmy Carter is right to call Israel an apartheid state.

I don’t have time to comment but to say wow:
A secret meeting between Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora took place in Egypt last October, the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency reported.
The report quoted a “well-informed Arab source” who spoke about the meeting, which was said to take place during the [...]

Activists are holding a candle light vigil, Friday 29 December, 6pm, in front of the UNHCR office in Mohandessin, to mark the first the anniversary of the massacre of Sudanese refugees on the hands of the Egyptian Interior Ministry’s Central Security Forces.

Blogger Nora Younis witnessed the atrocity last year, and wrote her testimony here…

Nothing makes me happier than this kind of news:
TACOMA, Washington: A couple in the U.S. state of Washington has been sentenced to home confinement for forcing their immigrant niece to work long hours in their home and at the family espresso stand, and they also must pay her US$65,000 (about €50,000) for her labor.
Abdenasser “Sammy” [...]

This is the speech I mentioned a couple of days ago… It should be noted that Fatah issued a statement that the speech had “inaccuracies,” but did not elaborate further.
Also available as Word document:
haniyehspeech.DOC

I haven’t read any Thomas Friedman columns in a long time, but with yesterday’s list of rules about politics in the Middle East, the racism and condescending attitude towards Arabs that has long been implicit in his writing comes out full guns blazing. I am pasting the full thing after the jump (take that, TimesSelect!), [...]

A friend writes:
A new Pentagon report out yesterday describes the continuing disaster in Iraq. One item was on refugee flows. It says that:
“The numbers of refugees fleeing the violence are immense: 700,000 have fled to Jordan; 600,000 to Syria; 100,000 to Egypt; 40,000 to Lebanon, and 54,000 to Iran. Over 3,000 refugees per day are [...]

This is the lead of the New York Times’ article on recent events in Palestine, on the day after Hamas says it wants a truce of up to 20 years and accepts the 2002 Beirut Initiative as a general framework for negotiations:
JERUSALEM, Dec. 18 — The call for early elections by Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate [...]

Palestinian PM (for now!) Ismail Haniyeh gave an eloquent and stirring speech in which, among many, many other things, he said (again) that he was generally in favor of the 2002 Beirut peace initiative (the one that Saudi Arabia backed and Ehud Olmert recently said he was interested in) with a 10-15 year truce with [...]

December 19, 2006
So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which [...]

So that was it. The plane took off, we did the familiar stomach churning spin and I looked out and watched the airport dip in and out of view, watched Camp Victory go by, idly pointed out too myself the various Saddam palaces that have become military headquarters and tried to remember which ones I’d [...]

Two must-reads if you’re following the al-Turki / Obaid story, from the WSJ and the Washington Times.
From the first:
Despite the continuing high oil prices, for once U.S. difficulties with Saudi Arabia do not appear to be dominated by immediate energy concerns. The main challenge appears to be to steer Riyadh between a near holy confrontation [...]

Today’s demo calling for the release of detained MB member Ahmad Ezzedin wasn’t exactly hopping when I passed by around one. The usual battalion of riot police were there, though, along with a couple of truckloads of beltageya.
There’s one other shot on my flickr site.

From Debka File, so take it with a grain of salt because it might just be provocation:
DEBKAfile’s military sources reveal that last week, US and Israel transferred a quantity of automatic rifles to Abu Mazen’s Fatah forces
December 17, 2006, 8:14 AM (GMT+02:00)
The guns reached Fatah leader Mohammed Dahlan who handed them over to the faction’s [...]

If you’ve been following the renditions story at all, this is a must-read with tons of new details from testimony to an Italian court by intelligence officers. It combines the worst tradition of shadow government among Italian intelligence and security agencies with the worst you can expect from the CIA, as well as highlight the [...]

I didn’t know the founder of the legendary Atlantic Records was Turkish.

Since there’s been some interest in today’s protest to give Egyptian Bahais full recognition under the law, I am pasting below a press release from the Egyptian Initiative for Personal Rights, one of the NGOs that has campaigned on the case (they also campaign on behalf of Egyptian Shias as well as anyone else who [...]

The Guardian has an interesting backgrounder on the Saudi arms deal / Wafic Said / Maggie affair.
Update: Blair tries to explain why he is blocking the UK government’s inquiry into the BAE/Saudi scandal.
The prime minister, speaking to reporters in Brussels, said that allowing the inquiry to continue risked doing “immense damage” to UK interests. Britain [...]

Lisa Beyer of Time magazine (possibly the worst magazine on earth? I find the Egyptian Gazette more edifying) really is an idiot. She says Arabs don’t care about Palestinians and saying they do is A Bad Thing. Even if that were true, the bigger problem with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not the threat to Palestinians [...]

Utterly sordid:
RAFAH, Gaza Strip — Hamas gunmen seized control of the Gaza Strip’s border crossing with Egypt yesterday in a ferocious gunbattle with Fatah-allied border guards after Israel blocked the Hamas prime minister from crossing with tens of millions of dollars in aid.
More than two dozen people were wounded in the fighting, deepening factional violence [...]

Activists are holding a stand in front of the State Council in Dokki, Saturday 16 December, 10am, in solidarity with Egypt’s Bahaai minority, who are suffering state descrimination against them, that includes refusing to issue any official documents to them, since Mubarak’s “secular” government requires the religion of the citizen to be mentioned on his/her [...]

The word of the air strike came around mid-morning. I was actually the one to take the call from our stringer in Samarra. He said 32 people had been killed in an American air strike somewhere to the south according to local government official Amr something-or-other and he was heading towards the site, then the [...]

The sheer amount of info and updates at IraqSlogger.com, an Iraqi blog/news portal project in which Nir Rosen and Eason Jordan are involved, is staggering. Congratulations, they make it to the essentials list.

The Center for Socialist Studies is organizing a talk on “Lebanon: Between Politics and Sectarianism,” Sunday 17 December, 7pm. Speakers include:
Dr. Refa’at Seed Ahmad, Director of the Jaffa Center for Studies
Engineer Wael Khalil, Socialist activist

ندعوكم لحضور ندوة في مركز الدراسات الاشتراكية بعنوان:
لبنــــــــان بيـن السـياسة والطـائفية
يتحدث فيها
د. رفعت سيد أحمد، مدير مركز يافا للدراسات والأبحاث
وائل خليل، [...]

Deputy Supreme Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood Khairat al-Shatir, author of this surprising article about a year ago, has been arrested. (Update: better story from Reuters.) This just a few days after the release of Essam al-Erian and Muhammad Mursi from their six-months (or more) stint in jail. All of this is taking place with [...]

Moments in Egyptian history, courtesy of Sandmonkey: one and two.