By the Editor.

It’s truly inspiring to see what the Egyptians have achieved.  The hard part starts now though.  Mubarak may be gone, but those who supported him for so long will be seeking to co-opt this revolution to maintain the status quo.  There are already signs of this happening, I hope that the Egyptians can keep their eyes peeled – they will need to watch the American hand like a hawk if they want to achieve true freedom.

You might have heard of a guy called Wael Ghonim, a 30 year old Egyptian who is starting to emerge as an important figure in the revolution.  Ghonim said that he was a creator of the ‘We are All Khaled Said’ Facebook page – this page was part of the social media campaign that helped to inspire the protests.  Many Egyptians are hailing Ghonim as a ‘hero’, but there are concerning things about him that suggest he might be part of US efforts to co-opt the revolution.

Ghonim currently holds a very senior position at Google – he is head of Google’s Middle East and North African marketing effort.

And for those that don’t know it, Google is in bed with the US intelligence and spying networks in a big way.

‘In-Q-Tel’ is a CIA venture capital firm that has the aim of maintaining the CIA’s intelligence capabilities. See: http://www.iqt.org/about-iqt/history.html

In-Q-Tel sold 5,636 Google shares in 2005. The stocks were a result of Google’s acquisition of Keyhole, the CIA-funded satellite mappingsoftware that we now know as Google Earth.

Earlier this year it was also reported that In-Q-Tel and Google Ventures are buying Recorded Future, a web analytics and spying outfit whose software “scours tens of thousands of Web sites, blogs and Twitter accounts to find the relationships between people, organizations, actions and incidents”.  See: http://gcn.com/articles/2010/07/29/inqtel-google-fund-web-analysis-firm.aspx

See also the Washington Post on Google’s partnership with the NSA: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/02/03/AR2010020304057.html

The use of social media by the protesters has been a pivotal part of these protests. As you can see, Google (jointly with the CIA!), is buying a company (Recorded Future) whose software has the purpose of scouring these social media sites and gathering information for intelligence reasons.  Google is essentially the public face of the US spying and intelligence networks, and yet here we have Wael Ghonim emerging as a significant figure in the democracy movement, whilst working for this very company in a high-level capacity.

Mohamed ElBaradei is another example of somebody who the Egyptians should look upon with a suspicious eye.  Up until his January 27 return to Egypt, he had been a member of the Board of Trustees of the International Crisis Group. The ICG is a right-wing (notwithstanding its euphemistic name and stated aims) American globalist think tank and imperial strategist – much like CFR and the Brookings Institute et al – which advises the US government on foreign policy and other matters.  While ElBaradei publically deplores US policy, he is fraternising with the very people who write it.

Anyway…the coming weeks and months will be very interesting indeed. Egyptians – don’t blink.