Mubarak Still Denies Reality, Hillary Not Helping, Bank of Kabul

Mansoura Ez-Eldin

"We will accept no change other than Mubarak's departure," - an anonymous protester

"We want a complete change of government, with a civilian authority."

Hosni Mubarak swore in his brand new cabinet this morning, thinking that the change should be enough for the protesters. Almost all of the new guys are from the security side of government, including one who used to be in charge of prisons. He might as well have surrounded himself with an armed militia while telling the television cameras "Come and get me, suckas!" It's not just that Mubarak is older than dirt, but having ruled for over 30 years without hearing any criticism, because the critics end up in jail, he tends to see the world through a distorted lense. He thinks that his decisions bear wisdom and that they are right for his country. If he receives affection from a family member, then everyone else loves him, too. His befriending the Americans and taking their money, has kept them from meddling in other Islamic countries...

OOPS US President Barack Obama, who in private has assured Mubarak that we are on your side, made a public statement about supporting a democratic government that can hold free elections, while Hillary Clinton is going on about there should be a clear, non-violent transition of governments. Political gobbledegook, speak indistinctly while carrying a big spear for stabbing in the back... Well, Hoss, looks like you may be on your own... Mubarak will not flee the country like his son Gamal has done, quickly flying to London to view the riots from a flat-screen at the bar. The opposition leader Mohamed El Baradei has flown in to Cairo from his home in Vienna, I wonder if they got to wave at each other as their paths crossed in the air... Mubarak feels that if he keeps making these false promises, the people's rage will die down, which means that he hasn't been out walking through the poorer neighborhoods in over 40 years or so. Again, a lot of the protests are about human dignity, where a fruit vendor can be daily harassed by the police, have his cart upended by the police, his fruit stolen by the police, and beaten up by the police when he doesn't pay them bribes for protection. Multiply by 365 days over 20 years by god know how many other vendors are out there trying to make a living, and you get an idea why people want Mubarak, or at least his police, to go.

To show how other world leaders are also out of touch, Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu tried to tie everything together with Iran, his largest imaginary foe. He warned that an outcome in Egypt could be an Islamic republic like Iran. He really was hoping for an excuse to invade and liberate, to restore the kind of order where Egypt has been such a good friend to Israel over the years. He can't see that this protest has nothing to do with Israel, just as it has nothing to do with the US, and nothing to do with Iran, China, Russia, Brazil, or India. It might have something to do with Syria and Algeria, and is the region's biggest antidote to al Qaeda style extremism, something that the rich power brokers in Saudi Arabia should have been backing instead...

After the Day of Rage has cleansed everyone of bad karma, tomorrow's protests are being called the Million's March. Hosni's best crony, the new, vie-president, has said that he has permission to talk to the opposition, so get your decoder rings and have them handy...

So far, there have been about 1200 of the 25000 files released to the public from the latest wikileak dump, and some of the cables gave us interesting background that set the stage in Tunisia and Egypt. Cables about the Afghanistan National Bank showed how a few shareholders were using it as their personal piggybank, taking money out in loans as fast as money for payrolls could pour in. As a result, the NY Times reported that there is still over $900 million missing with little chance to recover it. Well, they could. One of the scams uncovered is that a wealthy person who wanted a multi-million dollar loan would go to his gardener and get him to sign for the loan. When investigators went to the gardener's home they would find a poor man living in a poor house, with barely over $100 in assets, which made the investigators throw their hands up in frustration and walk away. Never bothered to ask the gardener who he signed the loan for...

Wikileak cables say that NATO and IMF bank monitors knew of this corruption for years but trurned a blind eye because they were more interested in learning how terrorists were being funded. Now, bank officers are fleeing the country as new investigations are being made public, and the bank is about to fail. This story first hit last Fall, and a new president of the bank was put in place. He hasn't recovered one penny to date, and the person he replaced caused a branch in Kandahar to close after he took out $1.3 million in cash..."So far it is only Kabul Bank — where what amounts to an enormous fraud scheme was conducted over a period of years — whose troubles are sending tremors through the Afghan business community and worrying Western donors.

Deloitte, a top United States accounting firm that had staffers in the Central Bank under a United States government contract over the last several years, either did not know or did not mention to American authorities that it had any inkling of serious irregularities at Kabul Bank." Every international monitoring system has known about this problem for years, the US has known about it but chose not to care, and the only time an investigation is launched is after the story goes public and everyone is publicly humiliated?

Perhaps we should start checking the personal bank accounts of every company that has been contracted for work in Afghanistan if we want to get all of the money back... Along with every military general and colonel and every Afghani government official who has their family squirreled away in a house in Dubai... Except most of this money went into people's pockets as cash, not electronic transfers. Maybe we need to send Rep Henry Waxman over there to conduct a few hearings, although admittedly he didn't get much out of L Paul Bremer when he asked him what happened to the $1 billion in cash that was sent on a jet to Iraq for Bremer to use as bribery... Bremer said he was so gosh darned busy at that time he couldn't remember a thing. Makes you wish that we could send a few Americans to Guantanamo, the new place for white collar crime...

I'm beginning to wonder if the unreleased stuff is any good, or if they're going to see if the US is successful in putting Assange in jail for some trumped up fictional charges. If it were myself, I'd release everything because I'm an old guy in pain every day, don't care as much if I live or die these days, and I sure don't have any kind of public image. The only satisfaction I get nowadays is seeing some analysis I posted come back a few days later in a story in the Times or Washington Post, or even Arabic News... It's the nature of journalists and pundits to act even worse than magicians and comics and steal material wherever they can. It's enough to make me listen to my old Mort Sahl records for solace, pretend that its myself walking on Ed Sullivan's stage with a copy of today's newspaper and a silly grin...