Egyptians have not yet seen former Interior Minister Habib Al-Adly in prison clothes and this is increasing their anger and entrenching the belief in their minds that the remnants of the former regime are still influential and trying to protect the regime's men from scandal. Drawing much attention was the video that was posted on YouTube and spread virally to other websites, recording scenes from the arrival of three of the former regime's prominent figures to the famous Tora prison, after the Public Prosecution Office ordered that they be jailed while under investigation in cases in which they have been accused of corruption. The three are: former Housing Minister Ahmed Maghrabi, former Tourism Minister Zuhair Garana and the regime's strongman Ahmed Ezz. There was no one there but officers and members of the police, and certainly one of them took on the task of filming with a mobile phone. People heard his voice in the video talking to a colleague who stood by his side in the prison courtyard, asking about the “customer” who had just arrived amid reinforced security. The three were wearing their uniforms, but the fourth one (Adly) who arrived at the same time did not appear in that video. It had only been less than a week when the three appeared in prison clothes being transported to the courthouse. And even when they were standing in the defendant's cage, cameras were recording this important event and conveying it to people. As for Adly, who was taken to that same courtroom two days ago to be tried in a case in which he has been accused of unlawful acquisition of wealth and money laundering, he was transported in an armored vehicle that only had narrow ventilation windows, which did not stop at the courthouse gate, but was brought into a vacant lot behind the building, away from people. Measures were also taken that exceeded the defendant's protection to individually searching journalists and reporters, as well as forbidding cameras and mobile phones from being brought into the courtroom! In the courtroom, Adly sat on a wooden bench inside the defendant's cage, wearing white prison clothes and a cap that covered his head and half of his face, so much that the public prosecutors requested from the presiding judge to verify whether the person sitting in the cage “was Adly or someone else”, who agreed and asked him to stand up and show his face. And just as Adly had entered the courthouse, he left it and reached his prison cell without being filmed by anyone. Thus the event went by without being recorded in history, and videos disseminated on the internet recorded only the insults and slogans which those crowded around the courthouse shouted at the armored vehicle transporting Adly from and to prison. It seemed as if the former minister had become “Top Secret”, exactly like the term that would normally mark the files dealt with or exchanged by Egypt's security services, and especially the State Security Intelligence Service (SSIS). Perhaps coincidence had a part to play in the fact that the day that witnessed Adly's trial, without him being seen by anyone apart from those who were present inside the courtroom, was the same day on which the SSIS fell and its headquarters were stormed by citizens whose hearts used to quiver if ever circumstance led them to pass in front of those headquarters, as those who entered them would seldom be guaranteed to ever come back out. And because the rule states that every dictatorship seems robust from the outside but is in fact fragile, hollow and weak from the inside, Hosni Mubarak's regime has fallen and its leaders have been exposed, becoming “customers” in the quick succession of corruption lawsuits. Under the constant pressure of the revolution, Ahmed Shafik's government has fallen, replaced by a government headed by one of those who were present in Tahrir Square. Yet the SSIS continued to deal with this great event as a foreign conspiracy, failing to realize that times had changed. Thus its officers continued to write reports marked “Top Secret” about how to deal with the revolution, in order to stifle it, incite against it or downplay its results. The SSIS remained the same, imagining that covering up its scandals and its crimes over long years and its involvement in setting up the killing of opposition members, protesters and demonstrators in Tahrir Squares all over Egypt's cities could last for long, just as some police officials imagine that showing loyalty to their former Minister Adly by hiding him and preventing him from being filmed will fool people. “Top Secret” is a term Egyptians are now seeing very often when reading about the “scandals” of the SSIS through the hundreds of documents they managed to seize before its officers burnt them. One of the results of the Egyptian revolution, and one of its achievements, is that everything that was “Top Secret” under Mubarak has now become “Very Public”.
