Egypt Seizes Newspapers to

Censor an Article
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICKOCT. 1, 2014

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CAIRO The Egyptian authorities on Wednesday confiscated
all the copies of one of the countrys largest private
newspapers in order to censor an article, just days after
President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi vowed in an American
television interview that there was no limitation on freedom
of expression in Egypt.
In fact, the censorship is another example of constriction of
news media freedom since the military takeover in July 2013
that brought Mr. Sisi to power. The article, in the newspaper
Al Masry Al Youm, was the latest installment in a serialized
interview conducted with a senior spy before he died.
Although all the printed copies containing the article were
seized, it was available through PressDisplay.com, an online
newsstand, which evidently archived the edition before it
could be confiscated. The headline quoted the former spy,
Refaat Jibril, declaring that Egypt had never executed a single
Israeli spy. We used to return them to Israel in the context of
deals to bring back our prisoners, he said, according to the
article, which may have undercut the intelligence agencies
hard-line image.
Records indicate that Egypt has executed defendants
convicted of spying for Israel as recently as the 1980s, with
famous cases in 1954 and 1962, said Yossi Melman, co-author
of Spies Against Armageddon, a history of the Israeli
intelligence services.

Mr. Jibril, the former spy, was also quoted describing an

expansive role for the intelligence agencies in domestic affairs,
including the economic, social and cultural. An enemy might
seek to stir up unrest and gather information, he said,
claiming that he had once apprehended two Europeans who
were working as spies for Israel by passing leaflets randomly
to people, inciting them to a revolution.
Since the military takeover, the government has shut down
the main opposition news media, the remaining private media
are almost as supportive of the president as the state-run
outlets, and the government has jailed several journalists. In
June, a court sentenced three journalists for Al Jazeeras
English-language network to at least seven years in prison on
charges of broadcasting false reports of civil unrest as part of a
so-called Islamist conspiracy.
Al Masry Al Youm, too, is broadly supportive of Mr. Sisi and
the military takeover. A senior editor responsible for the
article said Wednesday that security officials had offered no
explanation for the censorship. They just said, Remove this
article, the editor, Ahmed Ragab, said. The regime tries to
protect its story about history, and we journalists try to search
out new facts. It is the normal fight.
In a recent interview with the broadcaster Charlie Rose in
New York, Mr. Sisi insisted that the freedom of the Egyptian
news media was now absolute. There is no limitation and this
is final, he said. Anybody can be criticized in the media,
from the president to any state institution, he added, saying,
We are very keen on ensuring that.
But longstanding Egyptian law requires journalists to obtain
the permission of military intelligence before publishing any
information relating to the spy agencies.
And the authorities used the law to block publication of
certain articles in a similar fashion under Hosni Mubarak, the
former president, although this appeared to be the first
instance of such censorship since the uprising that removed
him in 2011. (Al Masry Al Youm ultimately printed and sold
Wednesdays paper omitting the article.)
Negad el-Borai, a lawyer who often represents Egyptian news
organizations, said the paper had broken the law by
publishing without prior permission.

Tamara Cofman Wittes, a researcher at the Brookings

Institution and a former United States diplomat, said the
censorship showed how little had changed after three years of
upheaval. Sisi is telling everybody in New York, We have a
free media, she said. Well, what we actually have is the
same darn system.