The Mubarak verdict

An abridged version of the Mubarak verdict (still hundreds of pages long) was released earlier this week and according to this press report, the judge includes the following "historical context" for the benefit of "future generations," based on the testimony of former Field Marshall Tantawi (President Sisi's mentor), general Sami Anani, former intelligence chief Omar Suleyman and others. These leaders explained in their depositions how the United States, Israel, Iran, Turkey and Qatar all collaborated to implement the American Greater Middle East initiative, a plan to fragment and weaken the Arab world that started with the invasion of Iraq. Because of the costliness of that operation, the foreign conspirators then turned to "fourth generation warfare" (a term that has become integral to Egypt's most popular conspiracy theories) and began "training a small group of young people to protest and strike and engage in civil disobedience and demonstrate, to bring their countries to a halt." The former intelligence officer Amr Afifi supposedly directed the Egyptian demonstrators from abroad.

The demonstrators themselves were criminals, poor people and misguided youth; they were infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood, who shot both protesters and police.  And of course , the judge writes that "The United States funded the Muslim Brotherhood from abroad, to enflame the country whenever the situation was calming down." 

As human rights activist Hossam Baghat put it on Democracy Now recently: 

Initially, the charge was that [Mubarak] had ordered or failed to stop the killing of protesters. The judge decided to throw out that charge on a technicality, saying that prosecutors did not follow the right procedure in adding him to that ongoing case in 2011. But really, what’s truly astonishing about this decision is that after the judge is done exonerating everyone and addressing every charge, for about eight pages then, the judge goes into what he calls, literally, the historical context of this verdict. He says, again literally he says, so, I’m not going to rule on the merits of these charges because of these procedural errors, but let me tell you what really happened in 2011. And then he goes on to repeat everything that the propaganda machine of Sisi and the current regime and the Mubarak people have been advancing about a global conspiracy.