Tweet The leading Egyptian political dissident, Ayman Nour, was suddenly released by the Egyptian regime after spending almost four years in Egyptian prison.  In 2005, Mr. Nour was the first Egyptian to challenge the 80-year-old President Hosni Mubarak, who has ruled Egypt for almost 30 years, thanks to marshal law that was imposed on the Egyptian people during the first year he took office.  Mr. Nour was comically accused of forging signatures while forming his Al-Ghad (Tomorrow) party;   he needed only 50 signatures to legally form his new party; he got 50,000. According to the Egyptian prosecutor’s office, “he was released Wednesday for health reasons”.  Now there is a lot of…

Tweet A note from torture chamber Thanks to digital cameras, millions of people around the world were instantly able to see the gruesome images of the Iraqi prisoners’ torture. However, in spite of the impressive delivery speed that relayed what happened inside the prison, those images were still only snapshots-pictures that are devoid of the context that only human eyes and minds can record and convey. For me, there wasn’t any camera in the Egyptian torture chamber, there wasn’t any witness to tell the story. But after many years the deep physical and emotional pain and its tragic details remain vivid in my memory. I was a freshman at Cairo…