An ABC report Thursday revealed that four members of a board designed to review NSA policies had spent much of their career working in presidential administrations. While at least one member of the review panel had previously criticized the NSA programs, others, including former CIA Director Michael Morrell, have long-standing ties with the intelligence community.

NSA analysts ‘willfully’ skirted policy to spy on Americans, agency admits

Published time: August 24, 2013 01:08 

Edited time: August 24, 2013 14:42

RT.com

National Security Agency intelligence analysts knowingly and purposely broke rules meant to prevent against unlawful spying on US citizens, the agency said in an admission that contradicts President Obama's claim that violations were accidental.

A report from the NSA inspector general – an internal, independent watchdog – found that analysts ignored “minimization processes” meant to curb any violations. The incidents in question are expected to fuel current conversations about bolstering oversight of the NSA’s surveillance apparatus. 

“Over the past decade, very rare instances of wilful violations of NSA’s authorities have been found,” the NSA confirmed to Bloomberg, which first published word of the inspector general report. “NSA takes very seriously any allegations of misconduct, and cooperates fully with any investigations – responding as appropriate. NSA has zero tolerance for wilful violations of the agency’s authorities.” 

Officials told The Wall Street Journal analysts have used their position to spy on lovers, although claimed such events were rare. Intelligence agents use a variety of suffixes when referring to their activity. 

Signal intelligence, for instance, is expressed by SIGINT. Analysts monitoring their lovers so often was apparently popular enough to be designated a code of its own: LOVEINT. Officials told WSJ that all employees discovered to have engaged in such activity were either reprimanded or terminated.

NSA Director General Keith Alexander told a New York conference on August 8 that “no one has wilfully or knowingly disobeyed the law or tried to invade your civil liberties or privacy.”

During an interview with CNN, Obama said he was comfortable telling Americans that the NSA surveillance has been “done the right way.” 

“Because there are no allegations, and I am very confident – knowing the NSA and how they operate – that purposefully somebody is out there trying to abuse this program or listen in on people’s email,” he said. “I think there are legitimate concerns that people have that technology is so quick that, you know, at some point, does the technology outpace the laws that are in place and the protections that are in place? Do some of these systems end up being like a loaded gun out there that somebody at some future point could abuse?” 

The administration has been under harsh scrutiny because of a series of misleading statements regarding the surveillance programs that later turned out to be false. 

An ABC report Thursday revealed that four members of a board designed to review NSA policies had spent much of their career working in presidential administrations. While at least one member of the review panel had previously criticized the NSA programs, others, including former CIA Director Michael Morrell, have long-standing ties with the intelligence community.  

“There’s a pattern of the administration making misleading statements about its surveillance activities,” Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director at the American Civil Liberties Union, told Bloomberg. “The government tells us one thing, and another thing is true.”

If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane? In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.

RACE IN AMERICA

DEAD SOULS OF A CULTURAL REVOLUTION

Pat Buchanan: 'Interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white'

 PATRICK J. BUCHANAN

WND

Last Friday, Christopher Lane, a 22-year-old Australian here on a baseball scholarship, was shot and killed while jogging in Duncan, Okla., population 23,000. He died where he fell.

Police have three suspects, two black and one white. The former said they were bored and decided to shoot Lane for “the fun of it.”

As Lane was white and the shooter black, racism has surfaced as a motive. Thursday came reports that killing a white man may have been an initiation rite for the black teens in joining some offshoot of the Crips or Bloods.

What happened in Oklahoma and the reaction, or lack of reaction to it, tells us much about America in 2013, not much of it good.

Teenagers who can shoot and kill a man out of summertime boredom are moral barbarians, dead souls.

But who created these monsters? Where did they come from? Surely one explanation lies in the fact that the old conscience-forming and character-forming institutions – home, church, school and a moral and healthy culture fortifying basic truths – have collapsed. And the community hardest hit is Black America.

Black mobs routinely terrorize cities across the country, but the media and government are silent. Read the detailed account of rampant racial crime in “White Girl Bleed a Lot: The Return of Race Riots to America”

If we go back to the end of World War II, 90 percent of black families consisted of a mother and father and children raised and disciplined by their parents. The churches to which these families went on Sundays were stronger. Black schools may have been largely segregated, but they were also the transmission belts of patriotism and traditional values rooted in biblical truths and a Christian faith.

Though such schools graduated hardworking, law-abiding and productive citizens, today they would be closed as unconstitutional.

Indeed, all of those character- and conscience-forming institutions of yesterday are in an advanced state of decline today.

Seventy-three percent of black kids are born to single moms. Black kids who make it to 12th grade may often be found reading at seventh-, eighth- or ninth-grade levels. In some cities the black dropout rate can hit as high as 50 percent.

Drugs are readily available. And among black males ages 18 to 29, in urban areas, often a third are in prison or jail, or on probation or parole, or walking around with a criminal record.

Where do the kids get their ideas of right and wrong, good and evil? In homes where the father is absent and the TV is always on. From radios tuned in to rap and hip-hop. From films where Hollywood values prevail and the shooting never stops. From street gangs that sometimes form the only families these kids have ever known.

Still, crime has fallen since 1990, we are told.

And so it has. But that is only because the baby boomers, the largest population cohort in our history, passed out of the high-crime age group a quarter of a century ago, and because the jail and prison population in America has tripled.

What kind of leadership do we see today in Black America?

What can be said for an NAACP that was lately demanding a Justice Department investigation of a rodeo clown running around a bull ring in rural Missouri in an Obama mask, but cannot find its voice to address a black-on-white atrocity in Middle America?

When Trayvon Martin was shot to death in a murky incident in Sanford, Fla., Jesse Jackson rushed there to declare: “Blacks are under attack. … Killing us is big business.” Trayvon was “shot down in cold blood by a vigilante … murdered and martyred.”

After Chris Lane’s cold-blooded murder, Jesse tweeted: This sort of thing is to be “frowned upon.”

If I had a son, said President Obama, he would have looked like Trayvon; 35 years ago, I could have been Trayvon. Can the president not find his voice to speak to the parents of Chris Lane?

Since Lyndon Johnson took office, 50 years ago, we have spent trillions on his programs for health care, housing, education, food stamps, welfare and civil rights. Are we living in that Great Society we were promised?

In that same decade, we were told that the social, cultural and moral revolution bursting forth on the campuses would rid us of the repressive old-time morality and Old Time Religion, and lead to a more equal, just, humane and better America, a beacon to mankind.

Yet, are not the killers of Chris Lane who shot him for the fun of it the “do-your-own-thing!” children of that cultural revolution?

The death of Trayvon was said to be reflective of the real America, a country where black folks live in constant fear of white vigilantes and white racist cops. What nonsense.

In the real America, interracial violence is overwhelmingly black-on-white. Even if the media will not report it, everybody knows it.

And journalists will not dig into the numbers that prove it, for the truth would undermine their ideology and contradict the narrative that governs and gives meaning to their lives.

For liberals, America is always “Mississippi Burning.” It just has to be that way.

The White House said Wednesday that it was "deeply concerned" by reports that the Syrian government fired rockets carrying chemical weapons on rebel forces near Damascus, killing hundreds of people. White House spokesman Josh Earnest said the administration was "working urgently" to gather further information about the attack and strongly condemned any and all chemical weapons use. He also said the U.S. formally requested that the United Nations investigate the site of the alleged weapons use by Syrian President Bashar Assad's forces. "The United States urges all Syrian parties including the government and opposition, to provide immediate access to any and all sites of importance to the investigation and to ensure security for the UN investigative team," Earnest said in a statement. The White House also said that those responsible for chemical weapons use "must be held accountable."

US amiriyah shelter bombing:

Why do they hate us? The truth is partially out about US aggression and hostility towards Iran causing the wrongful deaths and suffering of the Iranian people. Why is the US government covering up this criminal act 60 years later?

LATEST UPDATE: 20/08/2013 

FRANCE 24

CIA finally admits role in Iranian coup of 1953

A previously classified CIA document that was made public on Monday confirms that the 1953 coup that toppled Iranian nationalist Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq was plotted by Washington and carried out by the US intelligence agency.

By Joseph BAMAT

The military coup that overthrew democratically-elected Iranian leader Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 was conceived by the US government and carried out by its intelligence agency, a CIA document made public this week has confirmed.

Published for the first time ever on the website of the National Security Archive –a George Washington University-based research centre– the secret document confirms the US involvement that previous news reports and memoirs revealed, but that was never fully acknowledged by the American spy agency.

“The military coup that overthrew Mosadeq [sic] and his National Front Cabinet was carried out under CIA direction as an act of US foreign policy, conceived and approved at the highest levels of government,” the document says.

An internally-written CIA document meant to recount part of the agency’s history, “The Battle for Iran” was written in the mid-1970s and partially declassified in 1981, but the section confirming the CIA’s role was excised.

The newly published document was declassified in 2011 in response a to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request made by a National Security archive research director Malcolm Byrne. However, Byrne waited until this week to make the document known to the public.

“I was hoping to get a more complete picture since there’s still so much that’s being withheld, but these things sometimes take a very long time,” Byrne told FRANCE 24 in an email on Monday. “My original [FOIA] request was from 2000, so it took 11 years to get this far. I decided not to wait any longer.”

The CIA confirmed that the codename for the CIA operation that ousted Mosaddeq and installed the exiled Shah of Iran was TPAJAX. The document was posted by the National Security Archive for the 60th anniversary of the overthrow.

The text also sheds light on the thinking of US leaders at the time, their concerns over a potential standoff between British and Russian forces, and their overriding interest to maintain access to Iranian oil.

“The execution of a US-assisted coup d’état seemed a more desirable risk than letting matters run their unpredictable course,” the document states.

British meddling?

However, the section of the document that details the planning, execution and the role of the Shah has been mostly excised by the CIA. Byrne has called for a more complete disclosure of the document and other accounts of the US-orchestrated coup.

“I have a pending request with the CIA for supplementary reviews, including of the “Zendebad, Shah!” document, but to date I have not received any further response,” Byrne told FRANCE 24.

The researcher said the document was significant because many details about the coup, such as the plotters and perpetrators, remain a subject of intense academic and political debate.

“The Iranian government, regularly invokes the coup to argue whether Iran or foreign powers are primarily responsible for the country's historical trajectory… whether Washington needs to apologise for its prior interference before better relations can occur,” Byrne noted.

And while an increasing amount of information is being shared, there's still pressure to keep the full story locked away.

On Monday the National Security Archive also released documents detailing British attempts to block American disclosure of intervention in Iran back in 1978.

At the time, Britain’s Foreign Office feared that a planned State Department publication would undermine the UK's standing in Iran.

But the National Security Archive queried Monday if current British meddling was not perhaps behind the stalled declassification of more key documents.

The Obama administration policy of support for the jihadist Libyan and Syria rebels may have already come back to haunt us in other ways. Besides questions about the arms used in the coordinated assaults against our facilities in Benghazi and the UN report on weapons proliferation, there are also claims of ties between the Benghazi attacks and a brazen assault on an Algerian gas complex where foreigners, including Americans, were employed.

Obama’s Iran-Contra: The real Benghazi scandal

4:01 PM 08/19/2013

DAILY CALLER

Aaron Klein
Author, Impeachable Offenses

One would be hard pressed to find a more significant impeachable offense than aiding and abetting the sworn enemies of the United States, especially when any such support includes sending weapons to our murderous adversaries. A crime on that scale would certainly be made all the more serious if those same enemies turned around and utilized the U.S.-provided arms to kill Americans.

We are not here referring to the so-called “Fast and Furious” scandal in which President Obama’s Justice Department purposely allowed, with deadly consequence, licensed firearms dealers to sell weapons to illegal straw buyers with the intent of tracking the guns to Mexican drug cartel leaders. Instead, we document a much less reported gun-walking scandal, one you will soon regard as the “Fast and Furious” of the Middle East, the Iran-Contra of the Obama administration. It could be the White House got away not once but twice with the same misdeed of arming our foes.

In the case presented here, the enemy consists not of drug lords but of al-Qaeda, along with a witches’ brew of anti-American jihadists. The results are not dead U.S. border agents but a murdered U.S. ambassador, along with three other diplomatic staff, in one of the most brazen assaults on an American overseas target in history. To make matters worse, we will show how our president and top administration officials deliberately and repeatedly lied to the American public while taking actions that fomented anti-American sentiment, aided an Islamist revolution currently sweeping the Middle East and North Africa, and possibly helped create, whether wittingly or not, a well-armed al-Qaeda army that is already attacking our interests and fueling conflicts worldwide.

We will also show how the Obama administration engaged in a massive cover-up of the events that transpired during the Benghazi attacks, as well as the shocking reason our ambassador was sent to Benghazi on September 11, despite the many known (and ignored) security threats to the U.S. mission there. You are about to be introduced to the real Benghazi scandal. This chapter alone should result in the immediate impeachment of Obama, as well as topple other administration officials.

The true nature of the ‘consulate’

Information surrounding the September 11 attacks against the U.S. mission in Benghazi has been so distorted by the Obama administration and so misreported by the news media that many Americans still don’t have the most basic of facts straight.

Let’s start with the true nature of the Benghazi facilities. For months after the attacks, the vast majority of all news media coverage worldwide referred to the U.S. facility that was attacked as a “consulate,” even though the government itself has been careful to call it a “mission.” A consulate typically refers to the building that officially houses a consul, or an official representative of the government of one state in the territory of another. Consulates at times function as junior embassies, providing services related to visas, passports, and citizen information.

On August 26, about two weeks before he was killed, Ambassador Stevens attended a ceremony marking the opening of consular services at the American embassy in Tripoli, meaning the functioning U.S. consulate  was working out of Tripoli. The new U.S. consul in Libya, Jenny Cordell, was stationed at the embassy in Tripoli. A search of the State Department website could find no consulate listed in Benghazi.

The main role of a consulate is to foster trade with the host govern­ment and care for its own citizens who are traveling or living in the host nation. Diplomatic missions, on the other hand, maintain a more generalized role. A diplomatic mission is simply a group of people from one state or an international intergovernmental organization present in another state to represent matters of the sending state or organization in the receiving state.

However, according to a State Department investigative report on the attacks, the U.S. facility in Benghazi did not fit the profile of a diplomatic mission either. The results of the Accountability Review Board (ARB) probe, which we have read carefully, contain information indicating the U.S. mission in Libya was involved in activities outside the diplomatic realm. The thirty-nine-page document uses phraseology and descriptions not previously utilized to describe the facility and the role it may have played in Benghazi. The report, based on an investigation led by former U.S. diplomat Thomas Pickering, calls the facility a “U.S. Special Mis­sion.” Again, until the report’s release, government descriptions routinely referred to the facility as a “mission,” while the news media largely and wrongly labeled the building a “consulate.”

The report divulges how the mission’s special “non-status” made providing security to the facility difficult. “Special Mission Benghazi’s uncertain future after 2012 and its ‘non-status’ as a temporary, residential facility made allocation of resources for security and personnel more difficult,” it said.

The report contains information that clearly contradicts any claim that the special mission was to serve as a liaison office to the local government. It documents how the local Libyan government was not even informed of the existence of the mission.

To the keen observer, the State Department report raises major unanswered questions about what was going on at the Libyan mission. Specifically, one glaring question is why the host government was not informed of the facility’s existence. Was the facility being used for secretive purposes? What was happening there?

Arms to Jihadis, White House lies

On multiple occasions, Middle Eastern security sources have provided this writer with information indicating that both the U.S. mis­sion and the nearby CIA annex in Benghazi served as an intelligence and planning center for U.S. aid to rebels in the Middle East, particularly those fighting the regime of Bashar al-Assad of Syria. Prior to the establishment of the Libyan mission, the United States also coordinated aid to the rebels who eventually toppled Libya’s Gaddafi. That aid, the sources stated, included weapons shipments coordinated with Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar. The sources described how the weapons were carefully purchased with Arab and Turkish funds to skirt laws about the accountability of U.S. funding for CIA and other intelligence operations.

Days after the Benghazi attacks, I broke the story that Stevens himself played a central role in recruiting jihadists to fight Assad’s regime in Syria, according to Egyptian and other Middle Eastern security officials. Stevens served as a key contact with the Saudis to coordinate their recruit­ment of Islamic fighters from Libya and other parts of North Africa. The jihadists were sent to Syria via Turkey to attack Assad’s forces, said the security officials.

The officials also said Stevens worked with the Saudis to send names of potential jihadi recruits to U.S. security organizations for review. Names found to be directly involved in previous attacks against the United States, including in Iraq and Afghanistan, were ultimately not recruited by the Saudis to fight in Syria, said the officials. (Take note of that detail, since it will become relevant again in a few paragraphs.)

Until April 2013, the White House has repeatedly denied it was involved in helping to arm the rebels. Such action at the time was considered highly controversial because of the inclusion of jihadists, including al-Qaeda members, among the ranks of the Free Syrian Army and other Syrian opposition groups. Besides White House denials, other top U.S. officials and former officials, including Hillary Clinton, have implied in congressional testimony that they didn’t know about any U.S. involvement in procuring weapons for the rebels.

Now, a starkly different picture is emerging, one that threatens the longstanding White House narrative that claims the Obama administration has only supplied nonlethal aid to the Syrian rebels. My reporting on U.S. coordinating arms shipments to the rebels has been confirmed by several major news agencies, including the New York Times and Reuters.

Created al-Qaida army?

The possibly illegal transfer of weapons and aid to Middle East rebels is clearly resulting in a newly emboldened al-Qaeda. Even the United Nations is warning that weapons delivered to Libya during the uprising there are being used to fuel conflicts in Mali, Syria, Gaza, and elsewhere.

That Obama administration policy of support for the jihadist Libyan and Syria rebels may have already come back to haunt us in other ways. Besides questions about the arms used in the coordinated assaults against our facilities in Benghazi and the UN report on weapons proliferation, there are also claims of ties between the Benghazi attacks and a brazen assault on an Algerian gas complex where foreigners, including Americans, were employed.

Editor’s Note: The above is an excerpt from Impeachable Offenses: The Case for Removing Barack Obama from Office, by Aaron Klein and Brenda J. Elliott.

Are the interests of the state apparatus and the country indistinguishable? (You know my answer)

Are Manning and Snowden patriots? That depends on what we do next.

By Andrew J. Bacevich, Published: August 16 E-mail the writer

Washington Post   

Andrew J. Bacevich is a professor of history and international relations at Boston University. He is the author of “Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed Their Soldiers and Their Country.”

Are Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden traitors or patriots? With Manning in jail and Snowden the subject of a global APB, the Obama administraYet for the rest of us, the question presumes a prior one: To whom do Army privates and intelligence contractors owe their loyalty? To state or to country? To the national security apparatus that employs them or to the people that apparatus is said to protect?

Those who speak for that apparatus, preeminently the president, assert that the interests of the state and the interests of the country are indistinguishable. Agencies charged with keeping Americans safe are focused on doing just that. Those who leak sensitive information undermine that effort and therefore deserve to feel the full force of law.

But what if the interests of the state do not automatically align with those of the country? In that event, protecting “the homeland” serves as something of a smokescreen. Behind it, the state pursues its own agenda. In doing so, it stealthily but inexorably accumulates power, privilege and prerogatives.

Wars — either actual hostilities or crises fostering the perception of imminent danger — facilitate this process. War exalts, elevates and sanctifies the state. Writing almost a century ago, journalist Randolph Bourne put the matter succinctly: “War is the health of the state.” Among citizens, war induces herd-like subservience. “A people at war,” Bourne wrote, “become in the most literal sense obedient, respectful, trustful children again, full of that naive faith in the all-wisdom and all-power of the adult who takes care of them.”

Bourne’s observation captures an essential theme of recent U.S. history. Before the Good War gave way to the Cold War and then to the open-ended Global War on Terror, the nation’s capital was a third-rate Southern city charged with printing currency and issuing Social Security checks. Several decades of war and quasi-war transformed it into today’s center of the universe. Washington demanded deference, and Americans fell into the habit of offering it. In matters of national security, they became if not obedient, at least compliant, taking cues from authorities who operated behind a wall of secrecy and claimed expertise in anticipating and deflecting threats.

Popular deference allowed those authorities to get away with murder, real and metaphorical. Benefits accruing to the country proved mixed at best, and the expertise claimed by those inside the Beltway did not automatically translate into competence. If doubts on that score persisted, the events of Sept. 11, 2001, and the mismanaged wars that followed ought to have demolished them.

Yet in Washington such setbacks, however costly or catastrophic, make little impression. The national security state has a formidable capacity to absorb, forget and carry on as if nothing untoward had transpired. The already forgotten Iraq war provides only the latest example.

Critics and outsiders are not privy to the state’s superior knowledge; they are incapable of evaluating alleged threats. Here is the mechanism that confers status on insiders: the control of secrets. Their ownership of secrets puts them in the know. It also insulates them from accountability and renders them impervious to criticism.

In such a mechanism, Bourne observed, “dissent is like sand in the bearings.” The metaphor is singularly apt. In the realm of national security, dissent matters only when it penetrates the machine’s interior. Only then does the state deem it worthy of notice.

To understand this is to appreciate the importance of what Manning and Snowden have done and why their actions have produced panic in Washington. Here is irrefutable evidence of dissent penetrating the machine’s deepest recesses. Thanks to a couple of tech-savvy malcontents, anyone with access to the Internet now knows what only insiders were supposed to know.

By taking technology that the state employs to manufacture secrets and using it to make state secrecy impossible, they put the machine itself at risk. Forget al-Qaeda. Forget Iran’s nuclear program. Forget the rise of China. Manning and Snowden confront Washington with something far more worrisome. They threaten the power the state had carefully accrued amid recurring wars and the incessant preparation for war. In effect, they place in jeopardy the state’s very authority — while inviting the American people to consider the possibility that less militaristic and more democratic approaches to national security might exist.

In the eyes of the state, Manning and Snowden — and others who may carry on their work — can never be other than traitors. Whether the country eventually views them as patriots depends on what Americans do with the opportunity these two men have handed us.

At Coptic church destroyed by mob, uncertainty about Egypt's future

Father Boutros Samy, 46, heads the Coptic church of St. Mark in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His place of worship was full of people on Sunday. Any attacks on Christians are carried out by a tiny percentage of the population, he said, and that most Egyptians want to find a quick and peaceful resolution to the current crisis.

"The Egyptian people themselves, they are not fanatic," Samy said. “ they are not the ones who believe in the fanatic thinking, those are a minority.”

By Ayman Mohyeldin and Charlene Gubash, NBC News

KERDASA, Egypt – Guards stood inside the scorched and ransacked interior of a decades-old church Sunday in the village of Kerdasa, not far from the pyramids at Giza, the sanctuary's altar destroyed and charred fragments of scripture scattered on the floor.

The Archangel Michael Church about 16 miles from Cairo this week became another victim of the violence sweeping Egypt, the guards said. The attack came after supporters of deposed Egyptian president Mohamed Morsi were driven from opposition camps in Cairo by security forces on Wednesday, setting off a wave of violence that has claimed more than 800 lives.

The Christian house of worship, which is located in a poor and mostly agrarian area on the outskirts of Cairo, was vandalized and burned by a crowd on Wednesday, church guards said.

A chandelier, various holy texts, and pictures of Jesus were among the debris left scattered in the church complex's courtyard.

"We were about six people here, and they attacked us, about 1,000 people. There were a lot of them and they were very fierce. They had Molotovs [gas bombs] and knives," church guard Rida Gaballah told NBC News.

"There were so many and they were very fierce. We couldn't stand in front of them, they had Molotovs and swords and knives," Gaballah said. "We ran off. Some of us got hurt from them throwing stones."

In the past, there would often be a policeman outside the church, Gaballah said, but on the day of the attack the police station had been set on fire, and no officers responded when the church was vandalized.

Graffiti sprayed on the walls of the church built in the 1940s read "Allah u Akbar" ["God is Great"], "Egypt is Islamic," and "Sisi is a Murderer," referring to army chief Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

The church is the only one in the surrounding area, Gaballah said.

Members of the minority faith and their Muslim neighbors have existed peacefully side by side in the area for years, Gaballah said, but that changed after the July ouster of Morsi amidst widespread popular protests.

"Historically the relations were fine between Muslims and Christians in this area, it only got turned upside down when Morsi left power," Gaballah said. "When they cleared Rabaa and Nahda, they destroyed this church and the whole country."

While Gaballah said he could forgive the crowd that allegedly ransacked the church, another guard said the community was terrified by the incident.

"We are living in fear, God protect us," said church guard Abdel Munim Bishoi. "Imagine the people that did this to the church – they could do the same to anyone or anywhere else."

"We are still afraid and we are afraid for our children," Bishoi said.

The Freedom and Justice Party, the political wing of the Muslim Brotherhood, vehemently denied on Friday that their members were involved in attacks on churches in the country where Coptic Christians make up about 10 percent of the population.

A spokesman for the party, Dr. Morad Ali, said on Friday that web pages purporting to have a connection to the party were fakes.

"[The party] stands firmly against any attack — even verbal — against churches," Ali said in a statement. "Our revolution is peaceful."

Father Boutros Samy, 46, heads the Coptic church of St. Mark in the Cairo suburb of Maadi. His place of worship was full of people on Sunday. Any attacks on Christians are carried out by a tiny percentage of the population, he said, and that most Egyptians want to find a quick and peaceful resolution to the current crisis.

"The Egyptian people themselves, they are not fanatic," Samy said. “ hey are not the ones who believe in the fanatic thinking, those are a minority."

His church did not need more protection from the police or military Samy said – and if it was damaged, he said the community that worships there would carry on.

"I don't think that we really need a big staff of military people surrounding the church, because at the end of the day, I am telling you the Egyptians will not allow the minority to do these harmful attacks to our churches," Samy said. "We have faith in the country, I have faith in the people. I believe in the people, Christians or Muslims.

NBC News' Matthew DeLuca and Henry Austin contributed to this report.

Sister Manal is the principal of the Franciscan school in Bani Suef. She was having breakfast with two visiting nuns when news broke of the clearance of the two sit-in camps by police, killing hundreds. In an ordeal that lasted about six hours, she, sisters Abeer and Demiana and a handful of school employees saw a mob break into the school through the wall and windows, loot its contents, knock off the cross on the street gate and replace it with a black banner resembling the flag of al-Qaida.

Here is Kerry imploring Mubarak to step aside  for The Muslim Brotherhood:

Here is Clinton imploring Mubarak to step aside  for The Muslim Brotherhood:



Here is genius Obama imploring Mubarak to step aside  for The Muslim Brotherhood:


 
Here is what Mubarak told Obama about what would happen if he steps aside  and what will happenwith The Muslim Brotherhood:

Egypt's Islamists target Christian churches, schools in backlash as chaos spreads

Published August 18, 2013
Associated Press

CAIRO –  After torching a Franciscan school, Islamists paraded three nuns on the streets like "prisoners of war" before a Muslim woman offered them refuge. Two other women working at the school were sexually harassed and abused as they fought their way through a mob.

In the four days since security forces cleared two sit-in camps by supporters of Egypt's ousted president, Islamists have attacked dozens of Coptic churches along with homes and businesses owned by the Christian minority. The campaign of intimidation appears to be a warning to Christians outside Cairo to stand down from political activism.

Christians have long suffered from discrimination and violence in Muslim majority Egypt, where they make up 10 percent of the population of 90 million. Attacks increased after the Islamists rose to power in the wake of the 2011 Arab Spring uprising that drove Hosni Mubarak from power, emboldening extremists. But Christians have come further under fire since President Mohammed Morsi was ousted on July 3, sparking a wave of Islamist anger led by Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.

Nearly 40 churches have been looted and torched, while 23 others have been attacked and heavily damaged since Wednesday, when chaos erupted after Egypt's military-backed interim administration moved in to clear two camps packed with protesters calling for Morsi's reinstatement, killing scores of protesters and sparking deadly clashes nationwide.

One of the world's oldest Christian communities has generally kept a low-profile, but has become more politically active since Mubarak was ousted and Christians sought to ensure fair treatment in the aftermath.

Many Morsi supporters say Christians played a disproportionately large role in the days of mass rallies, with millions demanding that he step down ahead of the coup.

Despite the violence, Egypt’s Coptic Christian church renewed its commitment to the new political order Friday, saying in a statement that it stood by the army and the police in their fight against "the armed violent groups and black terrorism."

While the Christians of Egypt have endured attacks by extremists, they have drawn closer to moderate Muslims in some places, in a rare show of solidarity.

Hundreds from both communities thronged two monasteries in the province of Bani Suef south of Cairo to thwart what they had expected to be imminent attacks on Saturday, local activist Girgis Waheeb said. Activists reported similar examples elsewhere in regions south of Cairo, but not enough to provide effective protection of churches and monasteries.

Waheeb, other activists and victims of the latest wave of attacks blame the police as much as hard-line Islamists for what happened. The attacks, they said, coincided with assaults on police stations in provinces like Bani Suef and Minya, leaving most police pinned down to defend their stations or reinforcing others rather than rushing to the rescue of Christians under attack.

Another Christian activist, Ezzat Ibrahim of Minya, a province also south of Cairo where Christians make up around 35 percent of the population, said police have melted away from seven of the region’s nine districts, leaving the extremists to act with near impunity.

Two Christians have been killed since Wednesday, including a taxi driver who strayed into a protest by Morsi supporters in Alexandria and another man who was shot to death by Islamists in the southern province of Sohag, according to security officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to release the information.

The attacks served as a reminder that Islamists, while on the defensive in Cairo, maintain influence and the ability to stage violence in provincial strongholds with a large minority of Christians.

Gamaa Islamiya, the hard-line Islamist group that wields considerable influence in provinces south of Cairo, denied any link to the attacks. The Muslim Brotherhood, which has led the defiant protest against Morsi's ouster, has condemned the attacks, spokesman Mourad Ali said.

Sister Manal is the principal of the Franciscan school in Bani Suef. She was having breakfast with two visiting nuns when news broke of the clearance of the two sit-in camps by police, killing hundreds. In an ordeal that lasted about six hours, she, sisters Abeer and Demiana and a handful of school employees saw a mob break into the school through the wall and windows, loot its contents, knock off the cross on the street gate and replace it with a black banner resembling the flag of al-Qaida.

By the time the Islamists ordered them out, fire was raging at every corner of the 115-year-old main building and two recent additions. Money saved for a new school was gone, said Manal, and every computer, projector, desk and chair was hauled away. Frantic SOS calls to the police, including senior officers with children at the school, produced promises of quick response but no one came.

The Islamists gave her just enough time to grab some clothes.

In an hourlong telephone interview with The Associated Press, Manal, 47, recounted her ordeal while trapped at the school with others as the fire raged in the ground floor and a battle between police and Islamists went on out on the street. At times she was overwhelmed by the toxic fumes from the fire in the library or the whiffs of tears gas used by the police outside.

Sister Manal recalled being told a week earlier by the policeman father of one pupil that her school was targeted by hard-line Islamists convinced that it was giving an inappropriate education to Muslim children. She paid no attention, comfortable in the belief that a school that had an equal number of Muslim and Christian pupils could not be targeted by Muslim extremists. She was wrong.

The school has a high-profile location. It is across the road from the main railway station and adjacent to a busy bus terminal that in recent weeks attracted a large number of Islamists headed to Cairo to join the larger of two sit-in camps by Morsi's supporters. The area of the school is also in one of Bani Suef's main bastions of Islamists from Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and ultraconservative Salafis.

"We are nuns. We rely on God and the angels to protect us," she said. "At the end, they paraded us like prisoners of war and hurled abuse at us as they led us from one alley to another without telling us where they were taking us," she said. A Muslim woman who once taught at the school spotted Manal and the two other nuns as they walked past her home, attracting a crowd of curious onlookers.

"I remembered her, her name is Saadiyah. She offered to take us in and said she can protect us since her son-in-law was a policeman. We accepted her offer," she said. Two Christian women employed by the school, siblings Wardah and Bedour, had to fight their way out of the mob, while groped, hit and insulted by the extremists. "I looked at that and it was very nasty," said Manal.

The incident at the Franciscan school was repeated at Minya where a Catholic school was razed to the ground by an arson attack and a Christian orphanage was also torched.

"I am terrified and unable to focus," said Boulos Fahmy, the pastor of a Catholic church a short distance away from Manal's school. "I am expecting an attack on my church any time now," he said Saturday.

Bishoy Alfons Naguib, a 33-year-old businessman from Minya, has a similarly harrowing story.

His home supplies store on a main commercial street in the provincial capital, also called Minya, was torched this week and the flames consumed everything inside.
"A neighbor called me and said the store was on fire. When I arrived, three extremists with knifes approached me menacingly when they realized I was the owner," recounted Naguib. His father and brother pleaded with the men to spare him. Luckily, he said, someone shouted that a Christian boy was filming the proceedings using his cell phone, so the crowd rushed toward the boy shouting "Nusrani, Nusrani," the Quranic word for Christians which has become a derogatory way of referring to them in today's Egypt.
Naguib ran up a nearby building where he has an apartment and locked himself in. After waiting there for a while, he left the apartment, ran up to the roof and jumped to the next door building, then exited at a safe distance from the crowd.

"On our Mustafa Fahmy street, the Islamists had earlier painted a red X on Muslim stores and a black X on Christian stores," he said. "You can be sure that the ones with a red X are intact."

In Fayoum, an oasis province southwest of Cairo, Islamists looted and torched five churches, according to Bishop Ibram, the local head of the Coptic Orthodox church, by far the largest of Egypt's Christian denominations. He said he had instructed Christians and clerics alike not to try to resist the mobs of Islamists, fearing any loss of life.
"The looters were so diligent that they came back to one of the five churches they had ransacked to see if they can get more," he told the AP. "They were loading our chairs and benches on trucks and when they had no space for more, they destroyed them."

Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2013/08/18/egypt-islamists-target-christian-churches-schools-in-backlash-as-chaos-spreads/#ixzz2cJ8I51AN