The White House position on Egypt would seem to back the transfer of some level of official power to Omar Suleiman, who Hosni Mubarak recently named vice president. Suleiman's former role as intelligence chief made him a key player in Egypt's use of torture, against Egyptian citizens and in connection with CIA-backed rendition.

That part of the story hasn't received enough media attention, but today the New York Times does a great job, splashing the story on the front page.... sorry, that's not right. It must be here somewhere.

Perhaps a stinging editorial denouncing torture... no, that's not it.

OK, here we go.

It's a letter to the editor from writer, lawyer and activist Marjorie Cohn.

To the Editor:

Re “West Backs Gradual Egyptian Transition” and “Blood on the Nile” (Week in Review, Feb. 6):

The United States government, which sends $1.5 billion annually to Egypt, refuses to learn that supporting vicious dictators is counterproductive.

Washington is backing Vice President Omar Suleiman, who is fiercely loyal to President Hosni Mubarak, to lead the transition team. But the vast majority of Egyptians who have taken to the streets to demand Mr. Mubarak’s ouster would not likely accept a Suleiman-led government.

The former intelligence chief worked with the Central Intelligence Agency when it rendered terrorism suspects to Egypt for torture. As your reporters who were interrogated by Egypt’s secret police, Souad Mekhennet and Nicholas Kulish, vividly point out, torture is commonplace in Egyptian prisons. Mr. Suleiman is closely identified with the government’s longstanding policy of torture.

What happens next in Egypt is up to the people there, not the United States government. Until we stop backing tyrants and torturers, we and our allies will suffer the consequences.

Marjorie Cohn
San Diego, Feb. 6, 2011

The writer, a law professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law, is editor of “The United States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration and Abuse.”

Start with USA Today's headline (2/3/11):

Mubarak Supporters Weigh In: Anti-Government Rallies Shaken by Rival Protesters

The forces attacking the pro-democracy demonstrators in Tahrir Square were not "rival protesters"; they were government agents, complete in many cases with police ID cards that were confiscated when violent provocateurs were apprehended by activists (Al Jazeera English, 2/2/11). As New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof (2/3/11)  put it in his firsthand report from the square:

The events were sometimes presented by the news media as "clashes" between rival factions, but that’s a bit misleading. This was an organized government crackdown, but it relied on armed hoodlums, not on police or army troops.

The USA Today piece, by Jim Michaels and Theodore May, was a prime example of the kind of deceptive coverage Kristof was talking about. In USA Today's version, the thugs bringing violence to heretofore peaceful demonstrations were civic-minded individuals "worried that groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood would take over if free elections are held" and "saving Egypt from the Islamic extremism that has infected the Middle East." The piece even quoted Egyptian state TV as explaining that the camel-riding goons running down protesters were actually "pyramid workers who were protesting the negative economic impact of the crisis."

Contrary to other eyewitness accounts, in USA Today's world both sides are equally responsible for violence, as "protesters took chunks of concrete from the street to use as ammunition and occasionally tossed Molotov cocktails at each other."

Michaels has a history of deceptive, credulous reporting from the Middle East and Afghanistan (FAIR Blog, 7/1/10, 8/6/10, 8/27/10; Extra!, 9-10/08). But this report is a poor effort even for him.

NBC Nightly News reporter Richard Engel held up a tear gas canister on the air to show that it was stamped "Made in the USA."  But something else he said on the January 28, 2011 newscast struck me:

But what's scattered on the streets of Cairo right now are these little canisters. These were the tear gas canisters that were fired by all those riot police today. And if you look at them closely, they say clearly in English, "Made in the USA." Egyptians have been picking them up, they've been looking them over. And from an Egyptian perspective, it does seem like Mubarak and the United States are working together. So the U.S. is walking a fine line here.

Strange perspective they've got over there.

An accidentally revealing moment from Rachel Maddow's interview with Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution last night (MSNBC, 1/31/11):

MADDOW: Well, let me ask you about one tactical question in this diplomatic dance, I guess. Are American officials making appearances on Arabic language TV channels at this point? Should they be prioritizing doing that right now?

INDYK: Probably. I don't think they are doing a lot of that at the moment, partly because the Arab interviewers are likely to be a lot more pressing than polite people like you.

MADDOW: I think that is a great insult, thank you.

INDYK: No, that was meant as a compliment.

Joe Biden on Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak (PBS NewsHour, 1/27/11):

 I would not refer to him as a dictator.

 On WikiLeaks' Julian Assange (NBC's Meet the Press, 12/19/10)

 DAVID GREGORY: Mitch McConnell says he's a high-tech terrorist, others say this is akin to the Pentagon Papers. Where do you come down?

 JOE BIDEN: I would argue that it's closer to being a high-tech terrorist than the Pentagon Papers.

For the record, neither journalist pushed Biden to explain his opinions.

The New York Times:

Cables Show Delicate U.S. Dealings With Egypt's Leaders

The Guardian:

WikiLeaks Cables Show Close U.S. Relationship With Egyptian President

That reminds me of something Times executive editor wrote in a forthcoming piece on WikiLeaks, where he explains the difference between The Newspaper of Record and the Guardian in handling the Afghanistan documents:

If anyone doubted that the three publications operated independently, the articles we posted that day made it clear that we followed our separate muses. The Guardian, which is an openly left-leaning newspaper, used the first War Logs to emphasize civilian casualties in Afghanistan, claiming the documents disclosed that coalition forces killed "hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents," underscoring the cost of what the paper called a "failing war." Our reporters studied the same material but determined that all the major episodes of civilian deaths we found in the War Logs had been reported in the Times, many of them on the front page.

They are indeed different newspapers. The Guardian thinks civilian deaths should be reported, in some cases maybe more than once.

The Guardian's piece today reports:

Another cable, from March 2009, shows the U.S.'s astonishingly intimate military relationship with Egypt. Washington provides Cairo $1.3bn annually in foreign military finance (FMF) to purchase U.S. weapons and defence equipment, and the cable said. "President Mubarak and military leaders view our military assistance program as the cornerstone of our mil-mil relationship and consider the $1.3bn in annual FMF as 'untouchable compensation' for making and maintaining peace with Israel.

"The tangible benefits to our mil-mil relationship are clear: Egypt remains at peace with Israel, and the U.S. military enjoys priority access to the Suez canal and Egyptian airspace."

Presumably Keller would argue that the Times has already--somewhere, at some time--mentioned U.S. military aid to Egypt, and thus didn't need to dwell on it today.

Yesterday (FAIR Blog, 1/27/11) the Washington Post tried to argue that U.S. policy under the Obama administration has shifted to one of open support for pro-democracy movements in Egypt and Tunisia. There was little, if any, evidence to support this idea.

Today (1/28/11) the New York Times steps in with a report based largely on WikiLeaks cables that paints a rather unflattering portrait of Obama policy towards Egypt.  As the Times put it, the cables

show in detail how diplomats repeatedly raised concerns with Egyptian officials about jailed dissidents and bloggers, and kept tabs on reports of torture by the police.

But they also reveal that relations with Mr. Mubarak warmed up because President Obama played down the public "name and shame" approach of the Bush administration. A cable prepared for a visit by Gen. David H. Petraeus in 2009 said the United States, while blunt in private, now avoided "the public confrontations that had become routine over the past several years."

The Times story unfortunately buries some of the most damning details:

American diplomats also cast a wide net to gather information on police brutality, the cables show. Through contacts with human rights lawyers, the embassy follows numerous cases, and raised some with the Interior Ministry. Among the most harrowing, according to a cable, was the treatment of several members of a Hezbollah cell detained by the police in late 2008.

Lawyers representing the men said they were subjected to electric shocks and sleep deprivation, which reduced them to a "zombie state."  They said the torture was more severe than what they normally witnessed.

To the extent that Mr. Mubarak has been willing to tolerate reforms, the cable said, it has been in areas not related to public security or stability. For example, he has given his wife latitude to campaign for women's rights and against practices like female genital mutilation and child labor, which are sanctioned by some conservative Islamic groups.

So a key U.S. ally is run by a torturing, election-rigging authoritarian who the U.S. mostly refrains from criticizing in public. "Cables Show Delicate U.S. Dealings With Egypt's Leaders" would seem to be a rather gentle way of putting it. Scanning coverage of the protests in Egypt overall, it seems like long-standing U.S. support (including billions in military aid) receives scant attention.

But U.S. policymakers are being asked the tough questions, right? Not exactly. Here's Jim Lehrer at the PBS NewsHour (1/27/11) in an exclusive sit-down with Joe Biden:

LEHRER: The word to describe the leadership of Mubarak and Egypt and also in Tunisia before was dictator. Should Mubarak be seen as a dictator?

BIDEN: Look, Mubarak has been an ally of ours in a number of things and he's been very responsible on, relative to geopolitical interests in the region: Middle East peace efforts, the actions Egypt has taken relative to normalizing the relationship with Israel.  And I think that it would be--I would not refer to him as a dictator.

Lehrer has long viewed his job as not pushing his powerful guests too hard. "My part of journalism is to present what various people say," as he once put it . "I'm not in the judgment part of journalism." That's a good thing for Biden.

Now this is a head scratcher. "As Arabs Protest, U.S. Speaks Up" is the headline today over a story by Scott Wilson and Joby Warrick in the Washington Post. The story attempts to argue that the Obama administration is backing protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Lebanon--in the first two cases, regimes backed strongly by the United States (Egypt to the tune of more than $1 billion in annual military aid).

As the lead puts it:

The Obama administration is openly supporting the anti-government demonstrations shaking the Arab Middle East, a stance that is far less tempered than the one the president has taken during past unrest in the region.

The Post adds that the White House has "thrown U.S. support clearly behind the protesters, speaking daily in favor of free speech and assembly even when the protests target longtime U.S. allies such as Egypt."

The support for demonstrations against Hezbollah, which the U.S. government deems a terrorist organization, is to be expected. In Tunisia, though, the White House approach seemed quite "tempered," in fact. As NYU's Mohamad Bazzi wrote:

As the uprising spread in Tunisia, the administration of President Barack Obama stayed largely silent until the day Mr. Ben Ali fled. That was when Mr. Obama issued a statement condemning the use of violence against peaceful protesters and applauding "the courage and dignity" of Tunisians. By then, it was too late: The U.S.-backed dictator was gone, and the Arab world chalked up another example of how Washington favors stability over democracy.

So where is the evidence that the Obama White House is openly supporting democratic protests? Here is what the Post offers:

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Wednesday that "the Egyptian government has an important opportunity ... to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the Egyptian people." She urged "the Egyptian authorities not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including on social media sites."

Well, that's rather mild. Since the Egyptian government would seem to be continuing precisely what Clinton "urged" them not to do, what's been the official response?  The Post also has this:

Asked whether the administration supports Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs replied only: "Egypt is a strong ally."

But the most revealing example might be this (emphasis added):

"Some of the confidence and assertiveness comes from having spent time in government, and now we've identified ways where we want to make our push," said a senior administration official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss White House thinking on the Middle East developments.

And later, presumably from the same "senior official":

"Democracy had been characterized in some quarters as the United States seeking to control countries," said the senior official. "What we've made clear in the last few years is that democracy is important to the United States because of who we are, but not as a means of controlling governments. Quite the contrary, we're supporting a process in Tunisia now that we do not know how it will end or who will emerge as leader."

It's hard to take the premise of the article seriously when the most definitive statements of support for democracy come from anonymous government officials.

In a previous post "showing Fox News' tendency to mislabel badly behaving Republicans as Democrats," one of Canadian blogger Joey deVilla's commenters has pointed out "this map of the Middle East shown on a Fox News in segment where Neil Cavuto interviewed John Bolton."

Noting a problem with the country marked "Egypt"--"that’s not Egypt, that's Iraq!"--deVilla provides (Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century, 7/28/09) a helpfully "real map of the Middle East," and puts it pretty mildly when stating that "you'd think that with their obsessions with terror, Muslims and safeguarding the nation, not to mention the presence of a former representative to the U.N. present, they'd know where Iraq was."