Video Subtitles courtesy Alive in Egypt
The interview that Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was secretly detained by the Egyptian government, gave to Egypt’s Dream TV just after his release is incredibly compelling. (The Times Lede blog has videos with several parts of the interview, which have been given English subtitles by Alive in Egypt.) Ghonim worked on the Facebook page (“We are all Khaled Said”) that helped give the protests some shape—he refers to himself as “the Admin,” and many of the protesters are calling him a hero. But he doesn’t:
“Sitting writing on the keyboard”—and sitting in a prison, blindfolded, for twelve days. He also mentions that he had been awake for the previous forty-eight hours. If his detention was meant to expose Ghonim’s rawest aspect, then his interrogators defeated themselves: what has been left most exposed, after twelve days, is a set of clear convictions about what he was doing and why, the meaning of the rule of law, and the gamble of civil disobedience. He describes what happened when he was grabbed off the street:
He worries that people will think that what he says next is “treacherous,” but goes on:
And:
He also says that the Muslim Brotherhood “was not a part of this.” One of the fascinating aspects of the exchange is when he, with increasing intensity, explains that he is not a traitor. (And he isn’t.) The interviewer, Mona El Shazly, asks him, “Were they accusing you of that?” He talks about “what I call the season of making everyone a traitor”—and the need to hold onto the truth, including refusing to exaggerate what happened to him and say he was beaten rather than blindfolded, and the way the word traitor has been thrown around. Then he begins saying, again, that he is not a traitor—if he didn’t care about Egypt, he could have stayed at his house in the Emirates, with its pool:
There he breaks down, and El Shazly says,
That is one of the interview’s defining moments: El Shazly’s unwillingness to be implicated in the usual interrogation, or to continue with the line of inquiry the security forces started and accept their questions as the right ones.
In the last part of the interview, there is a slide show of young people killed in the protests. Again, Ghonim loses his composure. Mona says, “Don’t cry, Wael. Wael, don’t cry.” But he does, and says,
And that is true.