Who cares about what Obama will say or not say? I mean, why should people care about what the visiting White Man (yes, as soon as you run for the American presidency you assume the role of the White Man, regardless of the color of your skin) will preach to Egyptians and Muslims? I await that speech the way I await sequels to Rocky movies.

President Obama should not have decided to come to Egypt. The visit is a clear endorsement of President Hosni Mubarak, the ailing 81-year-old dictator who has ruled with martial law, secret police and torture chambers. No words that Mr. Obama will say can change this perception that Americans are supporting a dictator with their more than $1 billion in annual aid....

As for the other host of the president’s visit, Al Azhar University, one of its students, Kareem Amer, is languishing in prison after university officials reported his “infidel, un-Islamic” views to the government, earning him a four-year sentence in 2007. In advance of the visit, Egyptian security forces have rounded up hundreds of foreign students at Al Azhar.

We do want allies in the West, but not from inside the White House. Our real allies are the human rights groups and unions that will pressure the Obama administration to sever all ties to the Mubarak dictatorship. Their visits to Egypt are more meaningful, even if unlike Mr. Obama, they do not get a lavish reception.

Mr. Obama arrived in Cairo at 9 a.m. and was greeted by the Egyptian foreign minister, Ahmad Aboul Gheit. The streets surrounding the university and across the city were largely quiet and empty on Thursday. Many workers in the Egyptian capital had been told to stay home. The sidewalks were closed to people, but lined by hundreds of uniformed soldiers — some dressed in black, others in white — who had been standing in place for hours before Mr. Obama arrived.

A Yemeni captive died in an apparent suicide at the detention center for foreign terrorism suspects at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. naval base in Cuba, the U.S. military said on Tuesday....A military statement said 31-year-old Muhammad Ahmad Abdallah Salih, also known as Al Hanashi, "died of an apparent suicide" on Monday night, but did not say specifically how he died....

The dead man had been held without charge at Guantanamo since February 2002. He had been on hunger strikes in the past to protest his detention, but was not among the more than two dozen long-term hunger strikers currently being force-fed at the camp, a Guantanamo spokesman said....

Human Rights First condemned the death as "a stark reminder of the inhumanity of indefinite detention without charges or trial." The American Civil Liberties Union said it illustrated the need to resolve the detainees' fate in a regularly constituted court with long-established rules.

"There is no room for a system of indefinite detention without charge or trial under our Constitution," the ACLU said. "Those against whom there is no legitimate evidence must not be given a de facto life sentence by being locked up forever."

Comments (0)

Subscribe to this comment's feed