“The news is more evidence of the close ties between Israel, the United States and Mr Suleiman, who is tipped to replace Hosni Mubarak as Egypt’s president”, writes Christopher Hope in a February 09 article in the UK Telegraph, who explains his sourcing as “The close relationship has emerged from American diplomatic cables leaked to the WikiLeaks website and passed to The Daily Telegraph.”

Mr Suleiman is Israel’s preferred candidate to replace 82-year-old Mr Mubarak. A secret hotline between Mr Suleiman and the Israelis was said to be “in daily use”, according to US diplomatic cables.

[…]

Mr Suleiman worked hard to position himself as the main Egyptian link with Israel. According to the cable, he was blocking attempts by the Israelis to form links with other members of the Cairo government.

This was, according to Mr Diskin, because of Mr Suleiman’s “desire to remain the sole point of contact for foreign intelligence”.

The efforts paid off. In 2008, Mr Suleiman was named as Israel’s preferred successor to Mr Mubarak and the new secret direct hotline was in daily use. By early 2009, Dan Harel, deputy chief of staff at the Israel Defence Staff, was reporting that “on the intelligence side under Suleiman co-operation is good”.

[snip]

Mr Suleiman has already won the backing of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to lead the “transition” to democracy after nearly three weeks of demonstrations calling for Mr Mubarak to resign.

As far as I know now, even after the military takover of Egypt this morning by Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, the head of the High Military Council that took control of Egypt on Friday, Omar Suleiman remains Egypt’s Vice President, presumably having taken over the duties and the powers of the President after Hosni Mubarak resigned this morning. This is an assumption I’m making here – if anyone has differing information about Suleiman’s role now, please let me know.

……….

Professor Gilbert Achcar of the School of Oriental and African Studies, London, grew up in Lebanon, and is currently Professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) of the University of London. His books include The Clash of Barbarisms: The Making of the New World Disorder, published in 13 languages, Perilous Power: The Middle East and U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with Noam Chomsky, and most recently the critically acclaimed The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives.

In this interview from Feb. 08, 2011 Achcar talks with The Real News Network’s Paul Jay about the Egyptian protest movement, about the Egyptian Army, and about the illusions that many harbored and still harbor about the role and intentions of the Egyptian military in the sweeping revolutionary movement that developed over so many years of oppression of ordinary Egyptians and flowered into the mass movement we’ve all been watching the past couple of weeks:

After a day of up and down rumors Thursday beginning with widespread anticipation  in Egypt and around the world that Mubarak would step down, followed by a defiant speech Thursday evening in which he flatly refused the demands of protesters and said he would stay on as president of Egypt until his term ends in September, it now appears that Mubarak has indeed finally bowed to pressure and resigned.

UPDATE #1: The Austin, Texas based “global intelligence company” Strategic Forecasting, Inc. – STRATFOR – issued a short emailed “Red Alert: Mubarak Resigns, Military is in Charge” Friday morning, hinting they have intelligence of a military coup in Egypt…

Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman delivered the following statement Feb. 11: “In the name of God the merciful, the compassionate, citizens, during these very difficult circumstances Egypt is going through, President Hosni Mubarak has decided to step down from the office of president of the republic and has charged the high council of the armed forces to administer the affairs of the country. May God help everybody.”

Suleiman’s statement is the clearest indication thus far that the military has carried out a coup led by Defense Minister Field Marshal Mohammed Hussein Tantawi. It is not clear whether Suleiman will remain as the civilian head of the army-led government. Egypt is returning to the 1952 model of ruling the state via a council of army officers. The question now is to what extent the military elite will share power with its civilian counterparts.

Update: So not the speech you were looking for.  Mubarak defiant.  Will not step down.  Giving some powers to torturer Suleiman.  Protesters outraged. – ek

2nd Update: Suleiman speaks- tells people to go home and back to work.  Yup, that will do the trick.  Protesters marching on the Presidential Palace.- ek

UN Wire reports this morning:

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak will announce today that he is leaving office, sources told NBC News. Vice President Omar Suleiman reportedly is to take his place.

The army leadership is sending signals to demonstrators in Cairo’s Tahrir Square that it was planning to step in to “safeguard” Egypt during the transition. Mubarak is expected to address Egyptians via state-run TV tonight.

Hat tip to Jeralyn at TalkLeft

The end of George Bush. The end of the Democrats. The end of Obama. The end of home ownership. The end of Hosni Mubarak. The end of the Amazon. The end of US agriculture. The end of the world food supply. The end of sanity. And the end of Advanced Civilization.

The Kinks. The end of Justice. And everything you always wished you never knew. It’s all here. 😉

Democracy Now! Reports Live from Downtown Cairo:

Reporting that “Violent clashes continue in Egypt. The most recent reports out of Cairo show that seven demonstrators have been killed and more than a thousand injured. Many of the pro-Mubarak agitators have been shown to be undercover security forces. In Tahrir Square, the epicenter of the uprising, thousands of Egyptians remain peaceful and defiant. We get a live report from Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, who is on a rooftop near the 6th October Bridge, and from Mona El Seif, an activist who has remained in Tahrir Square since yesterday.“, Amy Goodman and Juan Gonzalez of DemocracyNow.org talk today by telephone with Democracy Now! Senior Producer reporting from Cairo Sharif Abdel Kouddous, and with Egyptian pro-democracy activist Mona El Seif, live from Cairo, Egypt, who describe violent attacks on “a couple of hundred thousand” peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square by Mubarak faction thugs on camels and on horses, using knives and guns.

Amy also talks with “Sandmonkey” – Egypt’s most well known English-language blogger – who calls downtown Cairo a “war zone”, and who said in his last blog post:

The End is near. I have no illusions about this regime or its leader, and how he will pluck us and hunt us down one by one till we are over and done with and 8 months from now will pay people to stage fake protests urging him not to leave power, and he will stay “because he has to acquiesce to the voice of the people”. This is a losing battle and they have all the weapons, but we will continue fighting until we can’t.

“People here are not afraid anymore – and it just may be that a woman helped break that barrier of fear”, writes Mona El-Naggar in her February 01 NYT article Equal Rights Takes to the Barricades: “Asmaa Mahfouz was celebrating her 26th birthday on Tuesday among tens of thousands of Egyptians as they took to the streets, parting with old fears in a bid to end President Hosni Mubarak’s three decades of authoritarian, single-party rule.”

“As long as you say there is no hope, then there will be no hope, but if you go down and take a stance, then there will be hope”, Ms. Mahfouz said bluntly in an impassioned video posted on YouTube January 18. She spoke straight to the camera and held a sign saying she would go out and protest to try to bring down Mr. Mubarak’s regime, noted El-Naggar.

Asmaa “is a member of the April 6 Youth Movement, which has been using the Internet to organize protests against Egypt’s authoritarian government since 2008. As protests against President Mubarak continued to grow, the group called Monday for a ‘march of millions’ and an indefinite general strike. The next day, Mubarak announced he would not seek reelection at the end of his term in September.”, writes Eric Dolan at RawStory Feb 02, who also notes that “Mahfouz made the video after four Egyptian men set themselves on fire. The men were apparently inspired by the example of Tunisia, where a self-immolation triggered protests that eventually led to the ouster of the nation’s president.”

Although Asmaa spoke in her native Egyptian language in her video, an English subtitled version was later posted to YouTube Feb. 02, 2011 by Iyad El-Baghdadi, subbed by Ammara Alavi:

In Cairo, Egypt today hundreds if not thousands of thugs suspected to be on the payroll of either the police or Egypt’s internal security, on behalf of the embattled Hosni Mubarek, in some form or another attacked peaceful protesters in Tahrir Square and other parts of Cairo.

Paul Jay of The Real News Networks talks here with Khaled Fahmy, professor and chair of American University in Cairo’s Department of History about the unfolding events in Cairo and plans for more massive anti-Mubarek demonstrations  this Friday. Fahmy describes in graphic detail the current events on the street in Cairo, as he marched with the protesters.