TheNakedTruthInAConfusedWorld

So what do

the controversial documents contain?

Mohamed Abdel-Baky reviews the paperwork so far

State Security Intelligence documents are suddenly everywhere. Many have yet to be verified and it is likely that a great deal of photo-shopping has taken place before the documents appear on Facebook and other web-pages. Nor is it entirely clear why so much material should be appearing now. The SSI, after all, has had since 25 January to destroy anything really incriminating. Tellingly, nothing of significance has emerged on prominent figures within the Mubarak regime, and there has been no mention of involvement with other intelligence agencies, most notable the CIA, though it is well known that Egypt was a favoured destination for the US's notorious "extraordinary renditions".

That much of the material remains of questionable authenticity has not stopped what has appeared being perused in detail. That said, for any future archivists what is left out of the first tranche of documents to be made public could well be as incriminating as what is included. Are old scores being settled? Who decided what should be destroyed and what shouldn't? The documents so far beg far more questions than they answer.

Student politics

"We have taken all necessary action to ensure our candidates win the student union elections. There is no chance for leftists or Muslim Brotherhood members," read one of the State Security Intelligence (SSI) reports that emerged this week.

The memo was part of a document, "Plan 10", detailing SSI manoeuvres to control student union elections in state universities across Egypt in 2010.

The document includes direct orders to the university officials not to allow Brotherhood and opposition members to register as candidates and to ban access to university rooms for any group criticising the regime.

Plan 10 was among thousands of secret documents reportedly seized from the SSI's headquarters in Nasr City over the weekend when protesters stormed the building.

Documents already posted on the Internet record the daily monitoring of political parties, movements, the Muslim Brotherhood, trade unions, NGOs, universities and state owned companies. There are even some reports on SSI officers.

Violent controversy

The most controversial document shows SSI involvement in the New Year Eve church bombing in Alexandria, which left 23 people dead and more than 90 wounded. The file includes three memos, the first dated 2 December 2010, from a junior SSI officer, proposing an attack on a Coptic church and suggesting that a jailed Islamist, Ahmed Khaled, be used to organise the plot aided by elements from the Gaza Strip belonging to the Army of Islam.

Other memos included a list of churches across Egypt and details of congregation members recruited by the SSI as informers.

Keeping an eye on judges

One published memo lists judges who allowed SSI officers to interfere in cases, including that of 2005 presidential candidate Ayman Nour who was subsequently jailed on charges of fraud.

Another memo claims to show that the SSI interfered in prosecutions to cover up for 24 judges who had accepted bribes in criminal cases.

"We have coordinated with the minister of justice and prosecutor-general's office to ensure the case does not become public," said the memo.

SSI officers lumped judges into three categories, independent, pro-Muslim Brotherhood and other opposition forces, and loyal. Only those in the last category were allowed to participate in the partial judicial supervision of the 2010 parliamentary elections. A memo from September asked local offices to forward the names of judges loyal to the regime and with a history of cooperation with the SSI.

Controlling elections

The number of documents relating to elections suggests that controlling political life in Egypt was the SSI's top priority. Memos reveal SSI officers clearly interfering in every kind of election, from parliament to syndicates and opposition political parties.

The 2005 parliamentary election is described in one memo as "extremely important to the regime and the National Democratic Party" (NDP). The memo includes detailed strategies, including forging voter lists to include hundreds of thousands of names of the recently deceased or of young people who had reached voting age but had failed to register and collect their voting cards from police stations.

It cited the number of public sector employees that could be bussed to polling stations on election day to vote for pro- government candidates and requests to company directors to coordinate with the SSI.

Another memo, also dating from 2005, records a meeting between Khairat El-Shater, deputy chairman of the Muslim Brotherhood, and a senior SSI officer, agreeing on a number of seats the Muslim Brotherhood would be "allowed to win" without any security interference.

At the meeting El-Shater agreed that the group will not field candidates in 10 constituencies to allow the NDP's candidates to win. In return, he was promised that there would be no security violations against the group's candidates in 51 constituencies.

NGOs seeking to monitor the 2005 poll were also subject to SSI manipulation. In one memo an SSI officer in Menoufiya governorate suggests that some local NGOs be allowed to enter poll stations and monitor the vote in order to lend the result credibility, adding that the NGOs' final report could be doctored.

"We have assigned personnel to make calls to the operation room of the NGOs to report violations in some poll stations," said the memo.

Identifying dissidents

Monitoring public figures critical of the regime appears to have increased in the last two years.

Mohamed El-Baradei, ex director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, was of particular interest to the SSI. A document from SSI headquarters in Cairo appears to show El-Baradei and his family was kept under 24-hour surveillance. Phones and e-mails were tapped.

One memo includes a transcript of a personal e-mail from Ali El-Baradei, El Baradei's brother alongside a second e-mail from Wael Ghoneim, Google marketing executive, offering his services to El-Baradei to help set up an interactive website to reach more people in Egypt and convince them of the necessity of reform.

Torture

Little evidence of the routine use of torture has come to light though in one memo from 2008, a senior officer wrote that detainees who had suffered "injuries" in SSI detention have their interrogation delayed until their injuries had healed.

Controlling the media

Several memos relate to SSI control of the media. They detail the ways in which independent TV channels were "dissuaded" from hosting prominent opposition figures like Ayman Nour, and a 2006 campaign to discredit Noaman Gomaa, former chairman of the Wafd Party.

The campaign included editorials from well-known writers and talk show programmes with guests critical of Gomaa selected by the SSI.

An SSI file on Dream Satellite included details of its statues and the travel record of its owner, Ahmed Bahgat.

Posted by Aadel M Al-Mahdy at 2:04 PM

River to Sea

Uprooted Palestinian

TheNakedTruthInAConfusedWorld

Amira Howeidy

was among the protesters who entered the State Security Intelligence headquarters in Nasr City and laid a collective nightmare to rest

There's nothing easy about being an Egyptian journalist these days. The amazing speed of events leaves you swamped with stories as well as emotions. The mood swings are frantic: jubilation, fear, worry, optimism, pessimism, anxiety, hope, relief, sadness and the opposite, over and over again.

Sometimes there are no words to describe how you feel. Such has been my experience twice this year. The first was just before 6pm on 11 February when I saw Al-Jazeera flash breaking news in huge red letters that read: Mubarak steps down. I was in a state of disbelief and had to scream the words "he stepped down" over and over to myself to digest their meaning. Not even at the peak of the revolution, when I was in Tahrir Square alongside tens of thousands of others demanding the end of the regime, did I actually believe it was going to happen.

The second time was just before 7pm on 5 March, when I passed though the gates of the State Security Intelligence (SSI) headquarters in Nasr City and entered one of the most notorious complexes in Mubarak's Egypt. Suddenly I was in our Bastille, the scene of our nightmare.

I had known since noon of the same day that there were plans to demonstrate in front of the building and perhaps even storm it, just as happened 24 hours earlier in Alexandria when protesters entered the city's own SSI headquarters. They had been provoked to do so after seeing smoke coming out of the building. They surmised correctly that police officers inside were burning thousands of files. When people first tried to storm the place they were met with live ammunition and Molotov cocktails. Despite the violent response the crowd expanded and the military police stepped in to control the situation. The demonstrators finally succeeded in entering the building after the police were evacuated.

The news was heartening. I woke on Saturday with a realisation that the brutal, vicious, monstrous SSI apparatus was falling part at the seams. The police state was being dismembered and I wanted to see it with my own eyes.

By 5pm hundreds of people had begun to gather in front of the SSI Nasr City headquarters and the thought of forcing entry suddenly became a possibility. I imagined myself walking through its corridors, going through its secret files, finding perhaps mine, or my father's, or files on others I knew. By 6pm I had joined the growing crowd that was chanting, urging on the military police that had sealed the entrances of the vast fortress with tanks and armoured vehicles. They wouldn't move. The massive SSI stronghold with its high gates and towering buildings seemed impossible to conquer. I was starting to lose any hope of setting foot inside the place when we heard that police trucks packed with shredded SSI files were attempting to leave the building from the back gates.

The protesters shouted " batel !" (fraud or wrong). A female voice screamed "there's someone inside!" and her words were immediately taken up as a chant. The chants grew louder and stronger at which point the military police opened the gates to let us in.

I ran with the crowd towards the gate. When I crossed inside to the SSI headquarters I looked at my watch. It was almost 7pm. I texted friends, "I'm inside!", and for a moment feared that we had all walked into a trap and the shooting would begin. It didn't. The entire place was empty.

The first thing I saw on walking into the compound were three large black plastic bags packed with the shredded remains of documents. There were also some undamaged files. One of them was titled "Islamic groups -- 11/2/2010 to 30/6/ 2010".

I stood there not knowing what to do. A young man shouted at me: "Don't give anything to the army. We'll only hand things to the prosecutors." I had no objections, but there was no one else except us, the demonstrators, around.

With hundreds of others I tried going through files that were still in one piece. Then suddenly everyone was running in and out of the complex. Some peered through the windows of the second and third floors cheering and making V- signs, others walked around displaying improbable "souvenirs", brand new police helmets, batons and video tapes tucked in their clothes. Most people, however, were carrying files. Some surfaced from the main building with long wooden boards containing stacks of index cards. The SSI's archive. Or to be more accurate our archives, details of our lives, secrets, relationships, phone calls, networks, interests, movements, compiled by the massive spy networks maintained by Mubarak's police state.

As the files began piling up instructions were shouted: "Protect the files, don't take anything!" Someone called out that they had found a document titled "Security cooperation with the United States on Islamists". Others simply chanted Allah Akbar.

Hundreds of young people, men and women, were running aimlessly, carrying whatever they could get their hands on and piling it next to the three black garbage plastic bags packed with shredded files in what had become the "safety" zone. A young man walked around throwing copies of a business card which read "Hisham Abu Ghida, assistant to the Minister of Interior -- State Security Investigation". I was showered with the cards. "Habib El-Adli's men! Huh!" the man shouted hysterically.

I walked into the main building, through a hall that led to other halls, all as shiny as a five-star hotel. I ended up in a large, state of the art space containing cubicles each equipped with a flat-screen computer and white telephone. There was a large, oval-shaped conference table surrounded by leather chairs, each place provided with a thin microphone. There was no indication what the large chamber was used for. It could have been the Internet Surveillance Department which spied on people online.

Some people in the room were taking pictures. Others disconnected the hard drives of the computers and piled them in a corner to hand over to the prosecutors.

"Where are the underground prisoners?"

Suddenly the question that had been at the back of everyone's minds was raised. We were, after all, in the place where thousands of people had been sent for "interrogation", for which read torture. There are thousands of accounts of former detainees held blindfolded in this very complex before being systematically abused by State Security investigators.

We looked everywhere, discovering nothing, no secret passages or doors and certainly not any prisoners, until someone came across an underground tunnel that resembled a garage across the narrow street from the main building. It led to the infamous prison cells.

The entrance consisted of a narrow corridor with several small offices off to the right. They quickly filled with demonstrators who began to go through the files contained in the rooms. There were piles of paper, clothes, shoes: evidence of life before those who worked in the place were hastily evacuated. Pressed into a corner of one of the rooms I examined the files nearest to hand. They were all on Christian missionary activity in Egypt.

I attempted to enter the prison cells at the end of the corridor but a military policeman was protecting them and wouldn't allow any one to pass. Metal bars separated us from the cells which were visible and clearly empty. The metal door of each cell was wide open. They were 24.

The shower area on the left side of the corridor was dirty. Remains of faeces were clearly visible on shower floor's white ceramic tiles.

Outside the tunnel and back in the garbage-area turned into an improvised repository of files half a dozen military police had surrounded our finds.

I saw hundreds of files, detailing the monitoring of the media, Arab affairs, communists, the Muslim Brotherhood, Palestine and Zionism, student activism, informants, Euro- Mediterranean affairs and Islamism. Amid the chaos I stumbled on three documents on my father, a paper on a journalist who happened to be standing next to me, a report on a phone call by political activist Gamila Ismail and a memo on the Cairo Peace Society, formed by 30 Egyptian personalities after Hamas came to power in 2006 with the aim of "spreading the culture of peace through their workplaces".

After poring over the documents for two hours I left. My bag was searched four times by volunteers to make sure I was not taking anything with me. I did, however, see dozens of people fold documents into their pockets and smuggle them out.

Outside, a man and his wife approached me, both grinning.

"How do we get in?" the man asked. I told him. I didn't need to inquire why they were smiling so broadly. It was the night the SSI fell.