From Fox News/Associated Press:
Court in Egypt sentences 2 Al-Jazeera employees to death, former President Mohammed Morsi to 40 years in prison
An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced six people, including two Al-Jazeera employees, to death for allegedly passing documents related to national security to Qatar and the Doha-based TV network during the rule of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi.
Morsi, the case's top defendant, and two of his aides were also sentenced to 25 years in prison. Morsi and his secretary, Amin el-Sirafy, received an additional 15-year sentence for a lesser crime. El-Sirafy's daughter, Karima, was also sentenced to 15 years in prison.
Morsi was ousted by the military in July 2013 and has already been sentenced to death in another case. That death sentence and another two -- life and 20 years in prison -- are under appeal.
Talk about a sea-change - they are not only jailing Morsi and his close associates, they are executing the media. A bit more:
The two Al-Jazeera employees -- identified by the judge as news producer Alaa Omar Mohammed and news editor Ibrahim Mohammed Hilal -- were sentenced in absentia along with Asmaa al-Khateib, who worked for Rasd, a media network widely suspected of links to Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood.
If this sounds a bit familiar to you, here is Alan West writing about events in 2009. At that time, West was a member of the House Armed Services Committee. From Alan's website, April 22nd, 2015 (here he is talking about an earlier conviction for Morsi, not this most recent one):
Egypt’s Morsi gets life: Here’s what the liberal media WILL NOT say about it
Back in 2009, President Barack Obama gave a monumental speech in Cairo where he sought to create a bridge to establish better relations with the Islamic world.
There were two problems with that speech — it was overly conciliatory towards the Islamic world and Obama requested members of the infamous Islamist group, the Muslim Brotherhood (MB), to be seated front and center. Not too long afterwards, the “Arab Spring” burst forth and the uprising spread to Egypt. President Obama interjected himself into the Egyptian political landscape and demanded that President Hosni Mubarak step down. The problem with that demand and the so-called push for “democratic” elections is that it would only benefit one group in Egypt: The Muslim Brotherhood.
I remember being on the House Armed Services Committee and receiving a briefing from a Pentagon official who was responsible for Middle East policy — focused on Egypt. He confided in the committee that the Muslim Brotherhood had given its word that it would not run candidates in the upcoming elections. When it came time for me to ask a question, I asked if he believed the MB. I also asked if he had read the MB charter and if anything had changed about that defining document. My point was that the MB was not to be trusted and furthermore, it was still the granddaddy of Islamic terrorist groups — as well as the group responsible for the assassination of peace and reform -minded Egyptian President Anwar Sadat.
The Muslim Brotherhood has this as its motto:
Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.
You could not meet a nicer bunch of people. Yeah. Very glad to see Egypt emerging from her seven years in purgatory and that they are not afraid to deliver justice to those people who had put them there.
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