By Philip Whitfield
CAIRO: Pause for a moment to wipe away a tear remembering Ben Corson and Roger Stoughton. They bring a teardrop to many an eye — the C and S in their surnames being the CS or, as the brochure puts it, the dispensing irritant agent they invented in a lab at Middlebury College in 1928.
The gas was refined by the British army in Porton Down, Wiltshire in the 1950s and 60s tested on animals and squaddies. The animals were OK due to their tiny tear ducts and furry faces. The squaddies wept buckets.
A choking Tahrir Square protester holds up the blue-banded silver tear gas cartridge, which the catalog I’m browsing identifies as the multi-5 projectile (model number 3235), which dispenses irritant agent or smoke via rapid burning.
The CS gas manufacturer’s blurb says its benefit is its effectiveness up to 73 meters. What happens if the breeze is blowing your way 200 meters downwind? You’re choked.
The catalog says firing the outdoor model (there’s an indoor version for use with the door kicker) will disperse unruly crowds during riots and civil disorder.
Fat chance here. Quite the reverse is true. Thousands are joining the Tahrir Square demos betting the wind will change with their help.
The advertising agency for Combined Systems Incorporated (CSI) the tear gas manufacturers, should be awarded this year’s top award by the American Advertising Federation, their Honor for Excellence. Their client is igniting thousands more people to come onto the streets undeterred by their rapid burning irritant agent.
Mubarak went shopping for gas grenades and launchers in 2010, sending the list to CSI Jamestown, Pennsylvania with pretty specific specifications. Mubarak wanted tens of thousands of CS gas munitions and the 37 mm TL-1 launchers with iron front post and rear groove sights to fire them.
The president signed off on the ones with break-open single frame smooth double-action barrels and trigger lock push button and hammer safeties.
Price was no object. The American congress had gifted him $1.3 billion. The only proviso was that Mubarak had to spend his cash in America. Those of the terms of America’s foreign military aid.
Mubarak would be at home in Jamestown, a family-style jeans and T-shirt small town where the population at the last count is 99.52 percent white — 636 people, 269 households, 171 families.
Joe Lunch Buckets every man Jack of them, earning an average $26,979 a year and a family income worth LE 240,000.
They spent some of their nickels and dimes at the town’s 68th annual Community Fair a few weeks back. The seven o’clock breakfast offered coffee, orange juice, pancakes, sausage gravy, sausage, bacon, toast, biscuits, scrambled eggs, home fries and canned fruit.
Four hours later lunch was chili, chicken soup, cheeseburgers, sloppy Joes, hot sausage patties with onions, chicken and egg salads, cabbage and noodles.
At 3 pm out came the pies — apple, cherry, blueberry, red raspberry, peach, blackberry, strawberry, pumpkin and elderberry. And there were pineapple, white, chocolate and angle food cakes.
Think about this.
These homey folk pay their taxes so that their government can go get customers for the products they make at the plant over the way: Weapons to slap down folks whose only dream is to enjoy the freedom, democracy and justice that allows them to elect their mayor, police chief, school board and dog-catcher.
The more CS gas rounds they stuff into boxes marked Egypt, the more blueberry pancakes and pork sausages they can stuff into their bellies.
To keep the merry-go-round whirling the makers of CS gas, rubber bullets, launchers, riot shields and protective armor need rioters. The more the merrier at Jamestown USA.
While they’re at it the CSI packing department should slip a few baloney sandwiches in the crates.
But you know what? While it’s legal to march to Tahrir Square, it is illegal to send arms from America to Egypt to bonk the protesters. America is a nation of laws. Try this one.
Under the terms of the Foreign Appropriations Act that authorizes Congress to ship arms to friendlies, there’s a stipulation, written in 2001 by Senator Patrick Leahy, the smoothie of Vermont that says none of the funds may be provided to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country if there’s credible evidence that gross violations of human rights are being conducted.
Furthermore, unless such governments are taking effective measures to bring the members of the security forces responsible to justice, America must not send them weaponry unless the secretary of state (Mrs. Hilary Clinton) waves it.
Before Egypt’s revolution, then US Ambassador in Egypt Margaret Scoby and her defense attaché Major General ‘Pink’ Williams sat down with two lobbyists paid by the Egyptian military to get their killing kit, Bob Livingston, former chairman of the House Appropriations Committee and his sidekick Bill Miner, a decorated US navy pilot.
Scobey is an expert on human rights. She headed up covert operations out of the US Embassy in Baghdad before coming to Cairo. Previously she’d done the job in Beirut.
At the Cairo pow-wow, she signed off on 30 to 50 Egyptian majors and colonels going to America for explosives training and gave them clean bills of health for specialized military training.
Tahrir Square was what it was all about. America boasts exporting freedom and democracy in public. Privately it makes its bucks in places like Jamestown packaging lethal gas.
Lethal? According to The Guardian, several incidents indicate Jamestown’s Hell’s kitchen cooks up munitions that cause injury and death.
A Palestinian, Bassem Abu Rahmah was killed two years ago when a CSI 40 mm model 4431 powder barricade penetrating tear gas grenade made in Jamestown struck him in the chest. A marine in Fallujah sued the flash-bang grenade makers of Jamestown for causing serious damage to his left hand after it exploded accidently.
Enough said. New era Egypt needs new friends who don’t take to heart Marie Antoinette’s supposed quip to the peasants protesting in the French Revolution: Let them eat cake.
What happened to her? At lunchtime on October 16, 1793 her 37-year-old head was chopped off on the guillotine.
Her last words presaged Mubarak’s defense by 218 years: ‘Pardon me sir, I meant not to do it.’
Philip Whitfield is a Cairo commentator.
