http://lobelog.com/trouble-brewing-in-egypt/#more-33987

Trouble Brewing in Egypt

by Paul R. Pillar 
With U.S. attention toward the Middle East being recently focused on such matters as warfare in Syria and Iraq and on the relationship with Saudi Arabia, little attention span is left over for the relationship with the most populous Arab nation. But developments in Egypt have, in multiple respects, significant capacity for creating attention-grabbing problems for Washington in addition to problems to which Egypt already is contributing in significant though less salient ways.
The regime of Abdel Fattah el-Sisi has become increasingly harsh, illiberal and downright brutal—much more so than the last previous Egyptian general-turned-president, Hosni Mubarak. The State Department’s official human rights report on Egypt says that the most significant human rights problems there have been “excessive use of force by security forces, deficiencies in due process, and the suppression of civil liberties. Excessive use of force included unlawful killings and torture. Due process problems included the excessive use of preventative custody and pretrial detention, the use of military courts to try civilians, and trials involving hundreds of defendants in which authorities did not present evidence on an individual basis. Civil liberties problems included societal and government restrictions on freedoms of expression and the press, as well as on the freedoms of assembly and association.” Nongovernmental human rights organizations have used even stronger language to describe the situation in Egypt. http://lobelog.com/trouble-brewing-in-egypt/#more-33987