Free Republic

I never give time frames, because you never know where you'll have sufficient evidence to go public with a prosecution, " Mueller said.

The race for the Egyptian presidency took a dramatic turn on Saturday when the authorities disqualified front-runners including Hosni Mubarak's spy chief, a Muslim Brotherhood candidate and a Salafi preacher whose lawyer warned that "a major crisis" was looming. The presidential election is the climax of a transition to civilian rule being led by the military council that assumed power from Mubarak on February 11, 2011 at the height of the uprising against his three decades in power. The generals are due to hand power to the elected president on July 1. The disqualifications add to the drama of a...

“Why such inaction in the Senate? Why do the Senators sit and pass no laws? “Because the barbarians are to arrive today. What laws can the Senators pass any more? When the barbarians come they will make the laws…. Why don’t the worthy orators come as always to make their speeches, to have their say? “Because the barbarians are to arrive today; and they get bored with eloquence and orations.” – -Constantine P. Cavafy, “Waiting for the Barbarians.” (1904) Who better to sum up the situation than the great Greek poet of Egypt who wrote of the Christian decline there....

Much of the mass media seems to be saying, to paraphrase John Lennon and Yoko Ono, “All we are saying is give the Muslim Brotherhood a chance.” There are three arguments supporting this policy that are worth discussing in large part because the Muslim Brotherhood’s advocates don’t have any others. The first, which one hears everywhere, is that the Muslim Brotherhood is full of factions that are moderate and hip young people who want real democracy. If this were true it should be easy to prove. Here are some of the ways to do that: Who are the leaders of...

El Baradei and Chairman of Iranian Parliament, Ali Larijani Source: Al Youm Al SabehSeptember 6, 2010The Egyptian Newspaper Al Youm Al Sabeh reports: In a communication to the Attorney General of Egypt, Dr. Yasser Najib Abdel Mabboud, has accused Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, former Director General of International Atomic Energy Agency and a candidate in the Egyptian presidential elections, of receiving funds exceeding $7 million (US) from Iran’s leadership as support for ‘political reform in Egypt’.Abdul Mabboud , a candidate of the National Party and who like El Baradei is also running for the Egyptian Presidential election, was informed of the...

CAIRO – Egypt’s first contested presidential election on Wednesday brought few surprises. President Hosni Mubarak won 88.6 percent of the vote, giving him a fifth six-year term in office. This was no surprise. But I did not return home expecting a surprising result. Instead, I came back to enjoy the surprises that have surrounded the elections – the first in which Egyptians could choose between more than one candidate. When I left Egypt for the United States in 2000, I had reported on my country for 10 years. The story was getting stale and there was no sign that it...

By President Hosni Mubarak’s decision, Egypt is holding its first multi-candidate presidential election on September 7. Barely any attention is being paid to this incredible change in the West, and those who are watching are unreasonably pessimistic. Sure the election is hardly competitive, and Mubarak is guaranteed to win. He is receiving most of the state-controlled television coverage and has granted very short campaigning time for his opponents to gain popularity (19 days). There are plenty of other reasons to doubt the legitimacy of this outcome: few voters know the voting procedures, no public debates will take place among the...

BEIRUT AND CAIRO - When Egyptians head to the polls later this year to elect a president, they will face something they have never seen before on the ballots: options. In a surprise announcement Saturday, Egypt's long-ruling president, Hosni Mubarak, ordered constitutional changes that would open the door for the first-ever multiparty presidential elections in the world's most populous Arab country. The move is the latest indication of a cautious democratic shift under way in the Arab world. Since the beginning of the year, the region has seen national elections in Iraq and the Palestinian territories, landmark municipal elections in...