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Comment by cma | Hacker News Reader

The vice president that will take over was trained in Fort Bragg, NC. He has been the head of the Egyptian side of the "extraordinary rendition" joint-US torture program.

If you want some scale for the corruption going on in Egypt, look into why Mubarak is wealthier than Bill Gates.

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For the curious, it's been estimated that Mubarak's wealth stands between 40 - 70 billion dollars. This number seems shaky to me, but according to US officials he's worth at least 2 billion. No one knows for sure, and he has distributed it amongst his family, but it is all but certain he's keeping that money.

How did he get so rich? Well if you have a major business and you would like to expand into Egypt, the law requires 51% Egyptian ownership. I'm not privy to the investment ownership of companies based in Egypt, but its a pretty good bet that Mubarak enforced a pay to play scheme to major and minor corporations.

We shouldn't draw some arbitrary border around Egypt's corruption. Our governments directly benefited from it; we're all implicit in it. Western support of regimes like this /has/ to end.

I am aware and I agree; I wasn't drawing a border.

I guess I was just responding to "the corruption going on in Egypt". I didn't mean to indicate you in particular, apologies if it comes across that way.

complicit

Egypt is a military ally of the US and it sends its generals for training there. Other allies of the US do so as well (for example: Israel's prime minister and minister of defence have also studied in America). Suleiman was the head of intelligence, and thus responsible for all intelligence programs that Egypt had with America. Why would you single out the rendition program?

For some reason, you're pulling two questionably relevant facts from his biography and present them with a conspiratorial tone.

>his biography

I was talking about two different people in my comment.

Managing intelligence programs isn't necessarily a problem. The real issue is that Sulemain was actively involved in torturing people for the US government. This isn't some nutty conspiracy: it has been reported extensively. For example, see Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side (Mayer is a journalist at the New Yorker and before that the Wall Street Journal). The fact that Sulemain has been so deeply complicit in torture for the US government suggests that he's likely to keep power and US backing.

The fact that Mubarak's hand picked replacement is directly responsible for torturing many people on behalf of the US government seems pretty damn relevant to just about everything.

The 70 billion dollar figure was based on pure speculation.

FWIW, US gov is estimating closer to 2 billion http://worldblog.msnbc.msn.com/_news/2011/02/10/6024993-muba...

The number isn't too important past a certain point. He's going to live a comfortable life wherever he goes.

From a material point of view.

...assuming he makes it out.

From consultancy payments from US defense suppliers?

This is interesting if true, from the BBC liveblog:

Sources close to the army tell the BBC’s Christian Fraser in Cairo that the military stepped in to stop the president handing power to his second in command Omar Suleiman.

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