The most important "if true" story coming out of Egypt

One of the most disturbing (and under-reported) stories to come out of Egypt this weekend was the allegation from multiple news outlets that many of the looters in Cairo are in fact government plants, hired by the government to help justify a militant response to the ongoing anti-government protests. As the Naked Capitalism blog notes, several international newspapers have picked up on this possibility--if it's true, it is one of the more disgusting governmental abuses to come along in some time, and it also shows an almost unfathomable level of desperation within the maligned Egyptian government.

Al Jazeera reported today:

[Al Jazeera reporter] Ayman Mohyeldin reports that eyewitnesses have said “party thugs” associated with the Egyptian regime’s Central Security Services – in plainclothes but bearing government-issued weapons – have been looting in Cairo. Ayman says the reports started off as isolated accounts but are now growing in number.

The Telegraph reports:

“Thugs” going around on motorcycles looting shops and houses, according to Al Jazeera. They say they are getting more and more reports of looting. More worryingly, one group of looters who were captured by citizens in the upmarket Cairo district of Heliopolis turned out to have ID cards identifying them as members of the regime security forces.

Similarly, Egyptian newspaper Al MasryAlyoum provides several eyewitness accounts of agents provacateur:

Thugs looting residential neighborhoods and intimidating civilians are government-hires, say eyewitnesses.

In Nasr City, an Eastern Cairo neighborhood, residents attempting to restore security told Al-Masry Al-Youm that looters were caught yesterday.

“They were sent by the government. The government got them out of prison and told them to rob us,” says Nameer Nashaat, a resident working alongside other youths to preserve order in the district. “When we caught them, they said that the Ministry of Interior has sent them.”

In Masr al-Qadeema, another district, scrap metal dealer Khaled Barouma, confirmed the same account. “The government let loose convicts. They let them out of prisons. We all know them in this neighborhood,” he said, adding that the neighborhood’s youth is trying to put the place in order by patrolling its streets with batons.

“The government wants people to believe that this is an uprising of convicts, which is not the case. The government is the one that is a criminal,” Khalil Fathy, a local journalist covering the events closely, said.

Scary stuff. It's hard to know what to trust and what not to trust in this situation, and the shutdown of internet in Egypt only further confuses the issue. But it also shows how far those in power will go to discredit their detractors--a dynamic that we in the United States certainly should not assume is unique to Egypt. Making a bad situation worse in order to attempt a power grab is the dirtiest of dirty politics, and something that I'd like to think is not possible in our country. But I have my doubts.

[Naked Capitalism]