Though I don't trust ForeignPoliCIA magazine, AT ALL, it's interesting to speculate about why they disclose certain things, for instance...
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There's no doubt that the endgame for Mubarak involves many of these concerns and backroom machinations. So,
how can Mubarak protect himself if he eventually makes an escape from Cairo? He's taking the usual steps now. Start with his decision to install foreign intelligence chief and CIA confidant Omar Suleiman as vice president and constitutional successor. (Mubarak himself came to the presidency through this route; he had been Anwar Sadat's vice president.) This comes close to matching what in the Russian-speaking world is known as the "Putin option," a reference to the exit strategy adopted by a teetering Boris Yeltsin: Fearing possible retribution from opposition figures, Yeltsin opted to surrender power through a transitional period to a wily senior player in the intelligence community. In exchange, Yeltsin is said to have extracted a firm commitment from Putin that the full machinery of the Russian state would be mustered to protect him. There would be no criminal probes or inquiries, and no cooperation with foreigners who undertook the same. Yeltsin would be free to live his final days shuttling between Moscow and the French Riviera. Putin scrupulously kept his end of the bargain.
Suleiman, a close and loyal advisor to Mubarak, had of course long been expected to emerge as vice president, but his assumption of the office had been blocked by his bitter rival, Defense Minister Mohamed Hussein Tantawi.
With the forces of opposition swirling out of control, appointing a successor who was both credible and capable of protecting Mubarak in exile was a priority move, and
identifying someone with the tightest possible connections both to the United States and Israel was doubtless an added advantage.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/02/02/gimme_shelter?page=0,0(my emphasis)
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What could the CIA be up to in Egypt and the Middle East? Certainly not democracy. That's the last thing they would ever want to see. Controlling the situation, of course--that's what they do. But then, why reveal how they do it--and how they're doing it in this case? My first thought: This article is a warning to Mubarak, that there is no "safe haven" anywhere. They want something from him--probably to keep his lip zipped about something (or many things).
That's what the CIA has done re Alvaro Uribe, former Bush Junta tool in Colombia. They are cleaning his trail for him and even set him up with cushy academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard and appointment to a prestigious international legal commission (the one investigating Israel's firing on an aid boat), while they arrange asylum in Panama (and flight from justice) for the chief spying witness against him in Colombia, and have already arranged extradition to the U.S. of death squad witnesses, who have been buried in the U.S. federal prison system by complete sealing of their cases in U.S. federal court in Washington DC--both things occurring over the objections of Colombian prosecutors--with the reason very likely being that Uribe KNOWS SOMETHING about Bush Jr/Rumsfeld-Pentagon complicity in the death squad horrors or other crimes (drug trafficking?) in Colombia.
Mubarak has got to understand that he will have NO protection if he spills any U.S. torture or other kinds of beans. He may be trying to use this as a bargaining chip. They are trying to deprive him of such bargaining chips, so as to have the upper hand in setting the terms for his protection.
Uribe provides an example of how easy it is for the CIA to protect anyone it wishes to. Uribe is responsible for numerous death squad murders and other serious crimes in Colombia. He was running a criminal enterprise. More than 70 of his criminal cohorts in the government are under investigation or already in prison for ties to the death squads, bribery, vast domestic spying, drug trafficking and other crimes. Yet Uribe is "teaching" our young people at Georgetown and Harvard! Quite a trick. And there are plenty of safe places, if you have the money and power. The CIA can "launder" and "hide" them in plain view right here, in the U.S. And there are islands of U.S. immunity all over the globe. So this item in the article is actually false--that the CIA cannot give Mubarak a cushy retirement, because the courts in the EU are now pursuing money trails of ex-dictators or Latin American courts are pursuing fascist atrocities of the past. They CAN give Mubarak a cushy retirement if they want to.
The writer mentions Latin America in this paragraph, and I'm also struck by one particular sentence (bold faced):
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"Then there's the criminal side of the ledger: a more perilous matter, especially to the dictator with blood on his hands. The days when head-of-state immunity was a show-stopper are now long past. Sixty-nine current and former heads of state have been successfully prosecuted for international crimes since 1990, and the trend has been moving steadily towards more prosecutions. The turning point came in Latin America, where courts and prosecutors gradually overcame the grants of amnesty and statutes of limitation that had previously hamstrung investigations into the brutal regimes of the 1970s and 1980s, essentially arguing that no legal immunity could be granted for certain gross human rights violations. Mubarak's regime, with its well-documented record of torture and brutal methods of repression, is a prime candidate. His government provided a key spoke in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program, which squarely falls within the international crime of "disappearing" -- a program that was run, incidentally, by Omar Suleiman." --from the OP (my emphasis)
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"The days when head-of-state immunity was a show-stopper are now long past."
This entirely depends on how powerful they are (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, et al; Blair, et al), on what they know (Uribe, Mubarak) and/or on other connections (CIA, Uribe, drug trafficking). None of the world's really big criminals can be gotten. A billion dollars (at least) got 'disappeared' in Iraq--the reconstruction money. All told--no bid contracts, banksterism, etc.--the theft of the U.S. treasury is probably in the trillions. And the carnage is epic-scale--about a million people slaughtered in Iraq alone. Only the relatively petty dictators are gotten--those who wouldn't play ball in some way.
Much as I cheer on EU and Latin American prosecutors, the really big perps remain immune.
The key here, to why this magazine may be issuing a warning to Mubarak is found in the above paragraph--the last sentence:
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"His government provided a key spoke in the CIA's extraordinary renditions program, which squarely falls within the international crime of "disappearing" -- a program that was run, incidentally, by Omar Suleiman." --from the OP
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He probably has names, dates and documents. That is what is being negotiated. The CIA wants those items so that it will only be his word against a tribunal. But if he gives them up, he's lost his leverage. The article says that HE could be liable. If he gets into that pressured situation, he might say what he knows. The CIA doesn't want to let him get into that pressured situation (similar to Uribe), but if he does, they don't want him to have proof.
I have the feeling that there may be some contrary tides flowing through the U.S. security establishment, but because everything is so well-hidden from the American people and the world at large, it's very difficult to pin it down, to define it, to say what it's about, exactly. Sometimes it has felt like a CIA vs Pentagon war (mostly under Rumsfeld but with residues of that war still around), an internal CIA war (old CIA vs Bushwhack CIA), a CIA vs FBI war and some kind of internal FBI/DOJ struggle. Leon Panetta (old CIA, associate of Bush Sr) was brought in to straighten all this out--to get everybody on the same page again. Cheney and Rumsfeld unsettled some people (including military brass who didn't want to nuke Iran). But it's hard to see clearly how these internal conflicts may be playing out in specific situations.
The CIA, for instance, ousted Uribe in Colombia, and his successor (his former Defense Minister) immediately made peace with Venezuela. Is that part of a cleverer strategy to ultimately topple the Chavez government (cleverer because leaders like Lula da Silva refused to cooperate with "divide and conquer"), or is it evidence that the U.S.--or at least Panetta and Obama/Clinton--actually are pursuing a somewhat better policy? Honduras points to the former (continued U.S. bad intentions) but that happened so early in Obama's and Panetta's tenure, it's hard to know for sure how complicit they were in the coup. Jim De Mint (SC-Diebold) seemed to be running U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. (They certainly didn't undo it, though--they (Hillary) just put democracy cosmetics over it.)
The Scumbag Congress--put in place by Diebold/ES&S--are already trying to scuttle anything that might be considered "better" than Bushwhack bloodshed and mayhem in Latin America, so who knows how long this "better" policy might last (or what it's true intention is)? But it provides an example of the possible contrary tides. Maybe it's just that one side (call it the Obama side) wants democracy cosmetics and the other side (Bushwhacks) doesn't give a shit. They want their raw power to be EVIDENT.
But IF there are wars and struggles going on within these U.S. security agencies, understanding a situation like Egypt/Mubarak becomes all the trickier. What if, for instance--just as a theoretical example--one faction within the CIA
wants the pro-torture faction purged, i.e., doesn't want Mubarak to evade prosecution for the rendition program, or, at least, wants the pro-torture faction to feel some heat for it, but, at the same time, wants to keep a grip on Egypt as a U.S. ally? Above, I discuss the CIA as if it were a monolith. But maybe it isn't.
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