In US-Supported Egypt, 188 Protesters Are Sentenced To Die Days After Mubarak Is Effectively Freed

Ever since then-army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi led a coup against the country's elected president, Mohamed Morsi, the coup regime has become increasingly repressive, brutal and lawless. Despite that, or perhaps because of it, the Obama administration has become increasingly supportive of the despot in Cairo, plying his regime with massive amounts of money and weapons and praising him (in the words of John Kerry) for "restoring democracy." Following recent meetings with Sisi by Bill and Hillary Clinton and then Henry Kissinger and Madeleine Albright, Obama himself met with the dictator in late September and "touted the longstanding relationship between the United States and Egypt as a cornerstone of American security policy in the Middle East."

All of this occurs even as, in the words of a June report from Human Rights Watch, the Sisi era has included the "worst incident of mass unlawful killings in Egypt's recent history" and "judicial authorities have handed down unprecedented large-scale death sentences and security forces have carried out mass arrests and torture that harken back to the darkest days of former President Hosni Mubarak's rule." The New York Times editorialized last month that "Egypt today is in many ways more repressive than it was during the darkest periods of the reign of deposed strongman Hosni Mubarak."

As heinous as it has been, the Sisi record has worsened considerably in the last week. On Friday, an Egyptian court dismissed all charges against the previous U.S.-supported Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak stemming from the murder of 239 democracy protesters in 2011. The ruling also cleared his interior minister and six other aides. It also cleared him and his two sons of corruption charges, while upholding a corruption charge that will almost certainly entail no further prison time. The ruling was based on a mix of conspiracy theories and hyper-technical and highly dubious legal findings.

But while Mubarak and his cronies are immunized for their savage crimes, 188 members of the Muslim Brotherhood, who participated in anti-Sisi protests that led to the deaths of 11 police officers, were handed death sentences today en masse. As the New York Times notes, it was "the third such mass sentencing in less than a year," and was handed down despite "no effort to prove that any individual defendant personally killed any of the officers; that more than 100 of the defendants were not allowed to have lawyers; and that scores of defense witnesses were excluded from the courtroom." The judge ordering these mass executions was the same cretinous judicial officer who, over the summer, sentenced three Al Jazeera journalists to seven to ten years in prison.

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