Morsi ousted, constitution suspended, army in control (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

Video Source: Russia Today YouTube

http://youtu.be/fgXbq7BdKHg

News Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/news/army-egypt-roadmap-protest-633/

President Mohamed Morsi was stripped of his power and detained by the Egyptian army as the constitution has been suspended. Those gathered on Cairo’s Tahrir Square welcomed the news with cheers, although post-coup Egypt remains highly unstable.

Morsi has reportedly been detained, separated from other officials and taken to a Ministry of Defense facility, according to the Muslim Brotherhood. Arrest warrants have been issued for some 300 members of the Islamist movement. The head of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party, Saad El-Katatni, as well as Muslim Brotherhood’s deputy chief, Khairet el Shater, were arrested.

"The address of the president yesterday did not meet the demands of the masses of the people," General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi said in a statement, adding the military held talks with various groups throughout Wednesday to work out a roadmap "putting an end to the state of division."

Millions across Egypt erupted into celebrations after the announcement by the military was made, with crowds chanting pro-army slogans and setting off fireworks.

“The mood remains one of jubilance. All of this however against a backdrop of a deeply divided and dangerous Egypt,” RT’s Paula Slier reported from Tahrir Square early on Thursday morning.

Morsi had earlier stated that he does not recognize the "military coup" and called on Egyptians to stand against it.

Supporters of the ousted President clashed with the anti-government activists overnight with the death toll amounting to 32 people.

“We are being told that the army is making its way to a pro-Morsi demonstration outside Cairo University. It is trying to isolate pro-Morsi demonstrators,” Slier reported from Cairo, saying the situation their remains fluid.

Meanwhile, an Egyptian security official in the border area with Israel, speaking on condition of anonymity, has confirmed that about 50 tanks were deployed in the area overnight.

 

Protesters, who are against Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi, react in Tahrir Square in Cairo July 3, 2013 (Reuters / Suhaib Salem)

The military have taken Al-Jazeera’s Egyptian broadcast off air. Its offices in Cairo were reportedly raided and at least five members of staff arrested. All media outlets associated with the Muslim Brotherhood have gone black.

In his first decision following Morsi's ouster, Egyptian Interior Minister Mohamed Ibrahim moved to close all “religious channels,” which include the Salafi oriented Al-Nas and Al-Hafez channels, reports the Egypt Independent. However, it came to light early Thursday morning that all detained heads of religious TV channels had been released from custody.

It was further announced that Egypt's chief justice of the constitutional court, Judge Adly Mansour, is set to become the interim president

"The military's roadmap consists of dissolving the constitution and holding early presidential elections," Sisi stated. He called for a panel would review the constitution and a national reconciliation committee which would include youth movements. He said the roadmap had been approved by a range of political groups.

The time frame of the presidential and parliamentary elections will be determined by an interim administration, the spokesman told Reuters.

 

An image grab taken from Egyptian state TV shows Egyptian Defence Minister Abdelfatah al-Sissi delivering a statement on July 3, 2013 announcing the ousting of Islamist President Mohamed Morsi (AFP Photo / Egyptian TV)

Egyptian opposition leader Mohamed El-Baradei said the Arab Spring revolution has been relaunched as a result of the army-sponsored roadmap.

He added that the roadmap met demands for early presidential elections as called for by the liberal coalition. Egypt’s second largest Islamist group, the Nour Party, has also agreed to the army’s roadmap.

Egypt's Pope Tawadros, head of the Coptic Orthodox Church of Egypt, says the roadmap ensures security for all Egyptians and offers a political vision, local media reported.

World leaders urge non-violence and return to democracy

US President Barack Obama on Wednesday called for Egypt’s military to “move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government.” Obama also outlined in his statement the expectation that the military would “ensure that the rights of all Egyptian men and women are protected, including the right to peaceful assembly, due process, and free and fair trials.”

Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT), the chairman of the budget committee for the State Department and foreign assistance, slammed the ouster of Morsi in a statement, warning Egypt that US aid to the country may subsequently be cut off. The US currently provides Egypt with some $1.5 billion in annual financial assistance, most of which is in the form of military aid.

“Egypt’s military leaders say they have no intent or desire to govern, and I hope they make good on their promise. In the meantime, our law is clear: US aid is cut off when a democratically elected government is deposed by military coup or decree.”

 

An Egyptian family on motorcycle celebrates in Cairo on July 3, 2013 after a broadcast confirming that the army will temporarily be taking over from the country's first democratically elected president Mohammed Morsi (AFP Photo / Khaled Desouki)

Senator Leahy has authored the most recent stipulations on US military aid to Egypt, which were enacted last year. Though, as Leahy’s own website notes, former secretary of state Hillary Clinton and her incumbent John Kerry had previously “used their authority to waive the Leahy conditions.”

By contrast, President Obama’s statements on the Egyptian military’s actions also mentioned aid, but were more general in nature. The president said his administration was "concerned," and that there would be a review of aid given to the country.

The US ordered a mandatory evacuation of its embassy on Wednesday, and announced a travel advisory for all citizens.

The European Union has urged Egypt to return to civilian rule and the restrain from the use of force.

“I urge all sides to rapidly return to the democratic process, including the holding of free and fair presidential and parliamentary elections and the approval of a constitution,” EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton said in a statement. “I strongly condemn all violent acts, offer my condolences to the families of the victims, and urge the security forces to do everything in their power to protect the lives and well-being of Egyptian citizens,” she added.

 

Fireworks light up the sky as Hundreds of thousands of Egyptians celebrate after Egytptian Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's speech announcing The Egyptian army toppling Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in Egypt's landmark Tahrir square on July 3, 2013 in Cairo, Egypt AFP Photo / Khaled Desouki)

UN chief Ban Ki-Moon urged non-violence in Egypt and called on the people to stay calm and show restraint, also urging dialogue between the country's political factions.

Gulf nations welcomed the ouster of Morsi. Saudi Arabian King Abdullah sent a message of congratulations to the head of the Egyptian Constitutional Court, Adli Mansour, who had been appointed as interim head of state.

"In my own name and on behalf of the people of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, I congratulate you on assuming the leadership of Egypt at this critical point of its history," the message cited by SPA state news agency reads.

The United Arab Emirates have expressed their satisfaction with the developments in Egypt, according to the WAM state news agency which cited the country’s Foreign Minister Abdullah bin Zayed al-Nahayan as saying that “the great Egyptian army was able to prove again that they are the fence of Egypt and that they are the protector and strong shield that guarantee Egypt will remain a state of institutions and law."

 

 

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100 members of Egypts assembly quit

Source: Press TV

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/2012/11/19/273188/100-members-of-egypts-assembly-quit/

Despite a road map that sets December as the deadline for the constituent assembly to be finished with Egypt's new constitution, it seems the 100 man assembly is quickly crumbling away.

Various significant withdrawals have been taking place from the assembly including Representatives of Egypt's 3 churches and AL Wafd, Egypt's oldest liberal party.

After the presser, Amr Moussa, Former Presidential candidate explained to Press TV their reasons of withdrawal from the assembly.

The withdrawals are happening after months of anger and dismay with the make up of the assembly, sidelining some political affiliations as well as minorities.

Politicians said that the draft document is catastrophic and more limiting to personal freedoms in comparison to the previous constitution written in 1971, what they believe is totally against the aspirations of the January 25 uprising

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US Congress approves extension of secret surveillance under FISA

 

U.S. Capitol.(AFP Photo / Win McNamee)

Source: Russia Today

http://rt.com/usa/news/congress-surveillance-act-fisa-980/

The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to extend the government’s power to warrantlessly wiretap Americans for another five years by reauthorizing the 2008 amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Lawmakers in the House agreed from Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act’s Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a polarizing legislation that has been challenged by privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations alike around the country. The extension was approved by a vote of 301 to 118.

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was first signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter, but amendments added two decades later under the George W Bush administration provide for the government to conduct widespread and blanketing snooping of emails and phone calls of Americans. The FISA Amendments added in 2008, specifically section 702, specify that the government can eavesdrop on emails and phone calls sent from US citizens to persons reasonably suspected to be located abroad without ever requiring intelligence officials to receive a court order.

If the US Senate echoes the House’s extension of the act, the FAA will carry through for another five years until 2017, ensuring the federal intelligence community that they will be able to conduct surveillance on the correspondence of the country’s own citizens well into the future. If no action is taken, the FAA is slated to expire at the end of 2012.

Earlier this year, a plea from two US senators to see how many times the FAA has been used was refused by the National Security Administration. Last month, San Francisco’s Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against the US Justice Department for failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act requests for documents pertaining to the program.

“The FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explained in an official statement made after the suit was filed. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions unconstitutional.”

Sen. Wyden, a Democratic lawmaker from Oregon who has also sit on the Senate intelligence committee for several years, originally asked for Senate to place a hold on the vote this past June. This week, Sen. Wyden tells Reuters, "My hold is on and it will stay on," although that plea does not apply to the House, however, where lawmakers appeared eager on Wednesday to power through the vote.

So determined were some lawmakers to proceed, in fact, that the rules of the debates preceding Wednesday’s vote called for no more than one hour of discussion before ballots were cast. Several congressmen, including lawmakers that planned to vote yes on the FAA extension regardless, proposed a two year extension as a compromise, but no new amendments were allowed to be tacked on before Wednesday’s vote.

Despite opposition on and off the Hill, the FAA has received praise from some of Washington’s most elite members of the government, including Attorney General Eric Holder and long-standing lawmaker Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the FAA renewal who also infamously urged Congress to approve the since-defeated Stop Online Piracy Act, or SOPA, a broad and dangerous Internet legislation that threatened to reshape the Web as we know it.

In his address at Northwestern University School of Law this past March, Mr. Holder said section 702 of the FAA “ensures that the government has the flexibility and agility it needs to identify and to respond to terrorist and other foreign threats to our security,” but emphasized the fact that only persons thought to be outside the US — not Americans — can be targeted. When Sens. Wyden and Udall asked to know how often that snooping involved Americans at all, however, they were told by the NSA’s Inspector General that a “review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of US persons.”

On his part, Sen. Wyden has written, “that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act . . . Then it is possible that this number could be quite large.”

“Since all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting surveillance of that American,” the lawmaker wrote in an official press release earlier this year.

Rep. Smith, the sponsor of both this bill and SOPA, has said, “We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country.”

On Thursday, Rep. Smith claimed, “Foreign nations continue to spy on America to plot cyber-attacks and attempt to steal sensitive information from our military and private sector industries,” and that Congress has “a solemn responsibility to ensure that the intelligence community can gather the information” necessary to hinder these attempts.

Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California) added on Wednesday from the Hill that reauthorizing the FAA is “critical to the protection of the American people,” claiming that the United States, “as a nation had not done enough to connect the dots to warn us sufficiently to protect” against another terrorist attack on par with the ones that devastated America on September 11, 2001.

Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican congressman from South Carolina, also used the attack on the Twin Towers to justify the necessity of extending the FAA.

“If we could come together to remember 9/11, surely we can come together to prevent another one,”

said Rep. Gowdy.

Opponents of the act, however, say that the attempts to do as such come at a cost too great for civil liberties.

“We’ve been told that we can’t even tell how many people are being subjected to this process located in the United States, and that we don’t know and they can’t tell us,” Rep. John Conyers (D-Michigan ) pleaded earlier this year in opposition to the act. “I think we can get a little bit closer. There can be some reasonableness. It’s this kind of vagueness that creates in those of us in the Congress, suspicions that are negative rather than suspicions that are positive.”

“Why can't we know how many people are affected by FISA amendment act in the US?” Rep Conyers asked. “This kind of vagueness creates suspicions.”

Former Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said on his own part that those suspicions are even more validated since the Justice Department has declined to adhere to a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the FAA, explaining on Wednesday, “Everyone becomes suspect when big brother is listening.”

Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) also threw his weight behind efforts to reject the act on Wednesday, saying it the FISA amendments allow for “illegal surveillance of an untold number of American citizens” with absolutely no oversight.

“Not even the NSA knows the extent to which FISA amendment acts have potentially been approved,” Rep Earl Blumenhauser (D-Oregon) added from the House floor before the vote.

The American Civil Liberties Union reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, “that’s equivalent to 138 million books, every 24 hours.”

“After four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t,” says Michelle Richardson, a counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Only a small handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.Sen. Ron Wyden — who has been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have had their communications intercepted under the FAA.”

“Can you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without this basic information?” she asks.

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