That’s Hosni and his adorable wife Susan and the boys. It looks like Hosni is not taking any chances. He is either doing his best Napoleon imitation or hanging on to his Glock. In case you were starting to feel bad for the old dictator, don’t. Hosni has done all right by himself and his boys. They’re all billionaires and I don’t mean just billionaires. I mean mover over Bill Gates and Warren Buffet BILLIONAIRES: From Todays Guardian:
Mubarak family fortune could reach $70bn, say experts
Egyptian president has cash in British and Swiss banks plus UK and US property
Gamal and Hosni Mubarak are reported to have built up huge fortunes, including properties in London. Photograph: Cris Bouroncle/AFP/Getty ImagesPresident Hosni Mubarak's family fortune could be as much as $70bn (£43.5bn) according to analysis by Middle East experts, with much of his wealth in British and Swiss banks or tied up in real estate in London, New York, Los Angeles and along expensive tracts of the Red Sea coast.
After 30 years as president and many more as a senior military official, Mubarak has had access to investment deals that have generated hundreds of millions of pounds in profits. Most of those gains have been taken offshore and deposited in secret bank accounts or invested in upmarket homes and hotels.
According to a report last year in the Arabic newspaper Al Khabar, Mubarak has properties in Manhattan and exclusive Beverly Hills addresses on Rodeo Drive.
His sons, Gamal and Alaa, are also billionaires. A protest outside Gamal's ostentatious home at 28 Wilton Place in Belgravia, central London, highlighted the family's appetite for western trophy assets.
Amaney Jamal, a political science professor at Princeton University, said the estimate of $40bn-70bn was comparable with the vast wealth of leaders in other Gulf countries.
"The business ventures from his military and government service accumulated to his personal wealth," she told ABC news. "There was a lot of corruption in this regime and stifling of public resources for personal gain.
"This is the pattern of other Middle Eastern dictators so their wealth will not be taken during a transition. These leaders plan on this."
I’m sure all the boys in Langley are chain smoking and burning the midnight oil wondering where the hell are they going to be able to do their renditions if Hosni and the fam have to make a mad dash for Riyadh or Tel Aviv. Course, the dark side is that Hosni and his whiz kids might be coming home to the auld sod to roost as they have lots of property here on , namely NYC and Rodeo Drive. Don’t know how long he might last over here with every state moving to concealed carry laws. That’s the nice thing about Cairo, only his thugs have guns.
The real serious issue is of course yet another revelation of the utter failure and corruption of US Foreign policy in its decades long attempt to set up and prop up dictators friendly to US corporate interests. You can just about name any country . If we have had or have significant corporate interests, the CIA and its thugs have probably been there, done that. Think Central and South America. There’s a reason that the Latins have a long tradition of hating us. In central America the Corporation du jour was the United Fruit Company which had huge plantations all over the region. The business model was slave labor wages, corrupt politicians and monopoly. Eventually in many of the countries the natives eventually pushed back./ There are a myriad of examples but the CIA special OP PBSUCCESS, toppled the Guatemalan government when it started talking about peasant rights and expropriating property with or without compensation. This sounded like communism to Langley and in 1954, the CIA gave those socialists an attitude adjustment. Much the same thing had happened the year before over in Iran. That was the CIA’s ” Operation Ajax” :
This happened on August 19, 1953 overthrowing the democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. Mohammed with the unanimous support of the Iranian Parliament attempted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. England had other ideas and called Langley and launched AJAX which toppled Mohammed and installed the Sha of Iran who lasted until 1979. You know the rest. The problem was, this infuriated the entire coutry of Iran and in Iran, memories die hard. Ajax was a debacle of historic proportions. Iran was a highly civilized wealthy educated country with a proud cultured history, who today might have become a bulwark of stability and prosperity in the region and we and the Brits destroyed all trust and hope for the future. The United States didn’t even need the Oil as we were the WORLD’S LARGEST OIL PRODUCER. It is no wonder that the Iranian people demanded payback. The blunder continues today. Talk about reaping what you sow. We are long past the time when we could have sat down with the Iranian leaders who were not radicalized and said ”Listen Mohammed. We’re sorry. What can we do to make this right.” Frankly I still think it is not too late to sit down and try to have a conversation if it were done cleverly and diplomatically starting with an apology to the Iranian People. Instead we continue to sanction and threaten a radicalized regime which doesn’t even represent the Iranian people. These same winning CIA strategies continued in SE Asia(Think Viet Nam) Chile, Iraq and much of Central America and of course now in Iraq and Afghanistan . No empire has ever taken over Afghanistan for long and the CIA plans on trying to rectify that little quirk of history. It is depressing to think how our extra governmental agencies like the CIA and the Federal Reserve are so ineffably unaccountable and un answerable to the American People. And now we have their little water boarding torture basement in Egypt at risk of being shut down. What will be the next chapter coming out of Langley? God help the world if the dominoes in the middle east continue to topple and we get the CIA involved.The Bozos still rule.
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