Reporters Without Borders condemns blogger Ahmed Hassan Basiouny's trial by court martial, and calls for the immediate withdrawal of the charges against him. He is the second blogger to face a court martial in Egypt.
Basiouny is being prosecuted for creating a Facebook page that offered advice and information to young people thinking of enlisting in the Egyptian army. He is charged under articles 80 1/2 and 85/3 of the criminal code and article 5/B of the military justice code with disseminating defence secrets online and disclosing information about the Egyptian armed forces.
Basiouny was a recent guest on Youth Panorama, a program broadcast live by the state-owned radio station Al-Shabah Wal-Reyada (Youth and Sport). He was asked to talk about the Facebook group he had created and was described by the station as a good model for Egyptian youth.
It was a few days after his appearance on the programme that he was summoned for questioning by the military police bureau of investigation. He was then briefly detained until a decision was taken to try him before a military court.
The first blogger to appear before a court martial was the young student Ahmed Abdel Fattah Mustafa. That was on 1 March, after he had been held incommunicado for several days for posting an article about a case of favouritism in a military academy on his blog Maza Asabak ya Watan "What has happened to my country".
Charged with defaming the Egyptian armed forces, trying to undermine the public's confidence in the armed forces and publishing false information, he was release on 7 March after posting an apology on his blog.
Reporters Without Borders has included Egypt on its list of Enemies of the Internet above all because of the way it harasses and prosecutes bloggers.
When the blogger Kareem Amer was released earlier this week, Reporters Without Borders urged the government to use the occasion to restart its relations with the country's netizen community. The Basiouny case is a new test for online free expression in Egypt.
Netizens cannot live properly when they are harassed by kleptocrats and cybercops. On October 18, 2010, a violent gang of six Greek police thugs broke into the home of a heroic dissident, confiscated his computer, and locked him in jail for a day! There were no toilet facilities in his jail cell; instead, the 65-year-old dissident was provided with a small empty bottle of water to urinate in during the night. There was neither mattress nor pillow. There were wild screams of prisoners during the whole night, while the guards were watching TV in their office, pretending they were deaf!
The Ministry of Truth or Minitrue in Newspeak was how George Orwell described the mechanism used by government to control information in his seminal novel of 1984. Now, governments have been rocked by the power of the internet and are seeking to gain control of it so that they will have a virtual monopoly on information that the public is able to access. But there is no way Minitrue can gag the internet. Even mainstream media, Fourth Estate, have praised bloggers as the Fifth Estate. Clergy is the First Estate, nobility is the Second Estate, and commoners are the Third Estate. Nevertheless, the Greek government is a major bully of the internet, confiscating the computers of dissident bloggers and locking them in jail.
Graecokleptocrats, the most corrupt politicians on Earth, are trying to gag dissident bloggers, manipulating an infamous gang of cybercops. Graecokleptocrats have discovered this gang is the best political tool, able and willing to destroy their opponents. That's why an influential dissident blogger would normally wait for cybercops to eventually confiscate his computer before he buys a new model!
In a society governed by laws, no one should be above the law. This includes the Greek police. Police brutality is real. Real people really do die unjustly at the hands of criminal police. Greek police must be held accountable for its actions and we must demand prosecution of police who brutalize people, especially cybercops who terrorize bloggers.
The cradle of democracy has become the cradle of kleptocracy. Since democracy has deteriorated to kleptocracy, especially in Greece, the most corrupt country on Earth, citizens now consider anarchy. Murray Rothbard defines the state as that institution which possesses one of the following properties: it acquires its income by the physical coercion known as taxation; and it asserts and usually obtains a coerced monopoly of the provision of defense service over a given territorial area.
Anarchist society is one where there is no legal possibility for coercive aggression against the person or property of an individual. Anarchists oppose the state because it has its very being in such aggression, namely, the expropriation of private property through taxation, the coercive exclusion of other providers of defense service from its territory, and all of the other depredations and coercions that are built upon these twin foci of invasions of individual rights.
An anarchist system for settling disputes would be both viable and self-subsistent: that once adopted, it could work and continue indefinitely. How to arrive at that system is of course a very different problem, but certainly at the very least it will not likely come about unless people are convinced of its workability, are convinced, in short, that the state is not a necessary evil.
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