Will Trump do something for US citizens in Egyptian prisons too?

The trial of Pastor Brunson in Turkish courts has been completed. He was found to have "cooperated with terrorism," and to have aided and harbored organizations engaged in terrorist activities against Turkey, and he was sentenced to 3 years, 1 month and 15 days in prison.

Although everyone has fixed their attention on the fact that Brunson was ultimately released and returned to his country, and says this came about through pressure from Trump or the United States, no one is paying attention to the following reality. A US citizen, known as a "devout, innocent, patriotic Christian citizen" and a source of pride for everyone from the American president to all official circles, has been registered as a "terrorist" in Turkish courts. A Turkish court has handed down a verdict of cooperation with terrorism against a person tied to the United States, a country that leaves not even ashes on the grill in the fight against terrorism.

As someone who has said nothing about this case, and in fact about any ongoing case, in a way that would convict the defendant in advance, in response to the claim that the verdict was given under pressure from Trump I can say only this: perhaps without that pressure Brunson would have been released earlier. Because what the court deemed reasonable and proven among the charges against him amounts to no more than this. In any case, not all of the alleged charges could be proven, and some witnesses had changed their statements.

That there can be chasms between the offenses alleged in a prosecutor's indictments and opinions and the accusations that courts find well-founded is something seen very often, both in Turkey and elsewhere.

In the end, when all dimensions of the matter are weighed, it was Turkish courts that decided just how clean the United States' squeaky-clean child is. They delivered the conviction, imposed the due sentence, and sent him home. On top of that, the US thanked Turkey, which had sent Brunson off with this conviction and this stigma. Let everyone interpret that as they wish; I think there is no harm in it. But to be frank, because of this I felt only pride and pleasure on behalf of my country.

The rest is a matter of how Trump manages to handle the affair with his own domestic public. He too can look at it from whatever angle he likes, and if he wishes he can draw fifty victories out of this situation. What else would you expect? Trump, who will soon face an election, was he going to present this situation as a fiasco? Of course he too will say that he came out ahead from his own point of view. What mind, what understanding would evaluate the event by looking at his words?

From the mere fact that he felt the need to present this situation as a victory, a great many things can be seen and said about Turkey's capacity to manage this crisis and its increasing initiative in its bilateral relations with the US.

But for today we need to go beyond this.

I would like to remind Trump, who is so devoted to the freedom, the rights and the dignity of his own citizens everywhere in the world, that while he is at it he should also take up the cause of at least 20 US citizens currently detained in Egypt.

Moreover, these US citizens are not in a position to benefit from every kind of right, from the CMUK to all the international legal conventions, as is the case in Turkey. They are living in medieval dungeon conditions, under the harshest circumstances, under systematic torture. In these conditions, in which nearly one hundred thousand people have been arrested and the great majority are held in a completely arbitrary manner without ever being brought before any court, and which make people ill, several people die every week simply because they receive no treatment.

The only cause of their deaths is in fact these dungeons, and these people have committed no crime that would require their being held in these dungeons. The putschists rounded up all dissidents, threw them into these dungeons, and have been holding them arbitrarily in inhuman conditions for more than five years. Their situation is not like that in Turkish prisons. They can meet neither with their lawyers nor with their relatives, nor can they receive health care. Among them are elderly people, women, sick people and US citizens.

Yet so far we have heard not the slightest statement about these US citizens, either from Trump or from US authorities. Is Trump, is the US administration, discriminating among its own citizens? Or does the matter lie in the difference it sees between Turkey and Egypt? Does it lack the power to deal with Egypt? I would ask this, but I am aware that this question would make even the birds laugh.

Or is the United States' sensitivity regarding its own citizens in fact merely a myth? Does this myth come into play only because of Brunson's special mission?

According to a report by Human Rights Watch, for example, "Egyptian security forces forcibly detained and arrested Khalid Hassan, a 41-year-old US citizen working as a limousine driver in New York, in Alexandria on January 8 while he was visiting his homeland. In the following weeks, security forces "beat him severely, gave him electric shocks, including to his genitals, and raped him on at least two occasions, once with a wooden stick and once by another person.""

Yes, President Trump, all of this treatment is being inflicted on a US citizen, in Egypt.

The New York Times relates another case.

It is again the story of an American citizen, Mustafa Kassem. He too is a US citizen, and he is currently being held in prison under very harsh conditions without any proven charge against him, it being deemed sufficient merely that he took part in demonstrations against the coup. Over the conditions he is in and the 15-year sentence he received in a hasty trial, he has even begun a hunger strike. Mustafa Kassem is not even a Muslim Brotherhood member; he happened to be in Cairo, a few kilometers from Rabia Square, in the days when the Rabia massacre was carried out.

His story is of course very long and has a great many dimensions to be examined. If we have time we will return to it later. But for now let us conclude by repeating the question of why the sensitivity shown in the Brunson case for being an American has not been shown to at least 20 people like him, who are likewise Americans.