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Fran Fragos Townsend Admits We Render to Torture in Egypt

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Well, perhaps not quite. When Mona Eltahawy explicitly described what many of us learned from Jane Mayer–Hosni Mubarak’s appointed Vice President, Omar Suleiman, has a long history of cooperating with us in accepting and torturing people rendered to Egypt–and when Wolf asks whether this went on in the Bush Administration (it dates back to the Clinton Administration), Townsend explains the best known example is that of Maher Arar. Wolf corrects her that that involved Syria.

Perhaps Townsend was thinking of that other best known rendition, when we sent Ibn Sheikh al-Libi to Egypt to be tortured so he would tell his torturers–presumably people working for Suleiman–what they wanted to hear: that there were ties between al Qaeda and Iraq.

You gotta wonder whether the US would take some comfort in having the guy we outsourced torture to running Egypt.

Robert Gibbs: Basket of Individual Freedoms Includes Freedom to Access the Internet

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In a press briefing on the situation in Egypt (and probably his last briefing ever), Robert Gibbs made a stunning, but important statement.

We believe in the basket of individual freedoms includes the freedom to access the Internet and the freedom to use social networking sites.

Gibbs did not say (and none of the reporters asked) whether this includes access to the Wikileaks site. Or whether it includes access to the Internet at broadband speeds.