Outrage After Egypt Sentences Al-Jazeera Reporters To 3 Years Prison

[Purveyor]

Source: USA Today

Human rights and free speech advocates expressed outrage Saturday at the news that three Al-Jazeera English journalists were sentenced to three years in Egyptian prison.

The reporters — Canadian national Mohammed Fahmy, Australian journalist Peter Greste and Egyptian producer Baher Mohammed — were found guilty of broadcasting "false news" as well as an array of transgressions ranging from not registering with the country's journalist syndicate to bringing in broadcast equipment with approval.

Immediately following judge Hassan Farid's ruling, Fahmy and Baher were taken into custody. Greste was deported back to Australia in February. The three were originally convicted in 2014 and after a 2013 raid on Al-Jazeera's offices in Cairo. A retrial was ordered after local officials said the first trial has proceeded with a lack of evidence.

"This trial has been carried out with no evidence and has caused great pain to (the men and their) families," Sherif Mansour of the Committee to Protect Journalists said in a statement. "We call on Egyptian authorities to put an end to the abuse of the law which has made Egypt one of the riskiest countries in the world to be a journalist."

Read more: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/world/2015/08/29/al-jazeera-journalist-egypt-prison/71373818/

[Uncle Joe]

1. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread, Purveyor.

[forest444]

2. There's more:

New antiterrorism law takes Egypt into Orwellian territory.

Reporters Without Borders condemns a ban on media reports that conflict with official accounts of armed attacks and operations by Jihadi militants. The ban is part of an anti-terrorism law that President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi ratified yesterday in the absence of an elected parliament.

“Is journalism is now a crime?” Reporters Without Borders secretary-general Christophe Deloire asked. “In Egypt clearly yes, because the Sisi regime is using this new ‘anti-terrorism law’ to ban journalists from contradicting its own version of events."

“Egyptians are entering an Orwellian world in which only the government is allowed to say what is happening. Even in countries where freedom of information is highly restricted, laws rarely suppress pluralism so blatantly. Egypt is sinking ever deeper into a terrible despotism that not only wants to control information and detain journalists but also put them under even more pressure than during the Mubarak era.”

Published in the government gazette, the new law provides for fines of up to 500,000 Egyptian pounds ($63,000) for anyone disseminating “false information” about bombings or other operations by armed groups. A journalist who, for example, gave a bombing death toll at variance with the government’s, could be convicted of a criminal offence.

Ever since Field Marshall Sisi seized power, the authorities have been using the fight against terrorism as grounds for systematically persecuting journalists who do not toe the official line.

With at least 15 journalists currently detained just for doing their job, Egypt is ranked 158th out of 180 countries in the 2015 Reporters Without Borders press freedom index.

At: http://en.rsf.org/egypt-new-anti-terrorism-law-takes-egypt-17-08-2015,48233.html
___________________________________________

But the neocons are happy with Egypt, so crickets.

[thebighobgoblin]

5. Neo-con interventionism in the region triggered this

Nobody's happy with what's happening in Egypt but the alternative is an incompetent and radical Islamist government that would create a hornets nest of all kinds of thugs and disorder. I'll take a ruthless junta any day.

[forest444]

7. That's a good point actually.

What came first, after all. The chicken or the egg - and does the fox we're counting on to guard the hen house even care.

[oberliner]

3. Billions of US taxpayer dollars fund this regime

Second largest recipient of US military aid.

[thebighobgoblin]

4. And the alternative is...

...a bunch of Islamic fundamentalists who can't govern and would set the stage for an ISIS takeover.

No thanks. I'm nostalgic for dictatorships these days. Sorry, but I'm sick of the West, which created these fictitious "nations" for its own purpose and repeatedly intervened to get just the right amount of puppetry trying to tell countries like Egypt to solve its extremist problems on one hand while pressuring it to expand democracy and freedom of thought on the other.

Libertarian values such as the kind that we espouse only work when you have people who are capable of using these rights responsibly. Right now, you have a region that's desperately trying to hang on before descending into chaos. And before I get told off for being a bigot, I speak as someone who works with people from the Middle East on a daily basis. I know people from Libya who are here on government scholarships and now have had their funding shut off because of the civil war at home - that is just ONE example. All across Northern Africa, all over the Middle East, the entire region is becoming extremely unstable.

Dictatorship isn't pretty - I personally know people who've survived the worst of Saddam Hussein's massacres at Halabja. But in terms of the greater good, the reality is that dictators and military juntas know their land and their people better than any of us ever will. So stop meddling in their shit and let them fix their own problems for once.

[Joe Shlabotnik]

6. And where was Stephen Harper or the Canadian Government in all this.

Not surprisingly no-where to be found.