OK, if you are only watching CNN/FOX/ABC/NBC/MSNBC, you probably think you know what is going on in Egypt. Right?
Wrong. Al Jazeera English was the place to get the information, except since cable operators are largely boycotting the channel in the US, you would have to be one of approximately 1 million folks who were glued to Al Jazeera's live stream.
Tin pot dictator, Hosni Mubarak decided to follow the US playbook in Iraq. After occupying Baghdad, the US occupation decided to let chaos reign, hardened criminals set free from prisons, social services suspended, museums looted all the while controlling the information landscape. This "chaos strategy" involves creating a crisis then to be followed by the "solution" of order. Iraq still has not found that order years after the fall of Saddam. But that is a different story.
In a key component of this chaos strategy, Mubarak had police in plain clothes start looting. This fact you would not hear from US media outlets, or Al Arabiya, the Saudi-owned channel. (King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia is a staunch supporter of Mubarak). The Egyptian people outwitted and largely foiled the regime and its plan. People quickly created neighborhood watch groups and protected antiquities, properties and each other.
When the initial chaos strategy failed due to citizen activism, thousands of police donned plain clothes and mounted a counter protest. They began attacking anti-government protesters with Molotov cocktails, gunfire, rocks, knives, etc.
Al Jazeera had its license revoked because it dared to expose the agent provocateurs. Mubarak's government tried to suppress this and other news by denying 22 million internet users access to online information (out of 85 million total population). This was as much an attempt to control information from getting out as it was an attempt to stop protesters from communicating and coordinating with each other.
Al Jazeera had six on-the-ground correspondents arrested, but continued to broadcast images from an undisclosed location. They continued to interview people though land line communications and satellite phones as the cell phone industry closed down by government edict.
To keep the outside world abreast of what was going on, proxy tweeters relayed information called in. Dial up accounts in France were set up since land lines had not been cut. Twitter was used as a broadcast medium as an army of worldwide sympathizers retweeted news. Al Jazeera through Creative Commons made much of its footage available for uploading.
YouTube and RT videos provided brutal images and were shared worldwide. Hundreds of citizen journalists communicated with the outside world in 140 character bursts. New "networks" were seemingly created over night. Audio feeds from on-the-ground protesters and citizen journalists somehow made their way from "Liberation Square" and Alexandria to websites. The URL was tweeted around the world.
Mubarak was not going to give up power easily. He decided to name a VP, Omar Suleiman. This former intelligence thug was in charge of torture and the US rendition program. Again, a piece of news you would not hear on ANY US mainstream media outlet until days later. Instead, our media gave us a steady attempt to bolster Muhammad El Baredei as a possible successor to Mubarak. El Baredei was one of the key folks who was part of the WMD charade in Iraq and was in Vienna when the revolution broke out.
The real story of the Internet and Egyptian revolution is that it was largely irrelevant to the events on-the-ground. The digital revolution helped us outside Egypt stay informed but the people on-the-ground had the best social media at their disposal; word of mouth. But I will suggest that there was one tremendous benefit of Mubarak's inability to block the flow of information; the world had a window to what was really going on. The Whitehouse was actually monitoring Twitter feeds of #Egypt.
Jaffer Ali is the CEO of Vidsense and PulseTV.com. You can reach him at j.ali (at) Vidsense.com.
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