Quotes of the Day

While he described President Obama as a very good man, he wavered when I asked him if he felt the U.S. had betrayed him. When I asked him how he responded to the United States’ veiled calls for him to step aside sooner rather than later, he said he told President Obama, “You don’t understand the Egyptian culture and what would happen if I step down now.”

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Asked for response, one Obama administration official says perhaps of most significance is the part of the interview where Mubarak says – in front of his son Gamal — that it was never his intention to have his son follow him into office.

Mubarak hasn’t said that publicly before.

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A group of angry Egyptian men carjacked an ABC News crew and threatened to behead them today in the latest and most menacing attack on foreign reporters trying to cover the anti-government uprising.

Producer Brian Hartman, cameraman Akram Abi-hanna and two other ABC News employees were surrounded on a crowded road that leads from Cairo’s airport to the city’s downtown area. …

Hartman says it was only through the appeal of Abi-hanna, who is Lebanese and a veteran ABC cameraman, that they were saved from being killed or severely beaten.

“We thought we were goners,” Hartman said later. “We absolutely thought we were doomed.”

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“Remember, this did not just happen,” Smith said. “Remember this? First of all she shut down the Internet? Remember? The shutdown SMSs so you couldn’t text. Remember? They shut down Facebook. They shut down Twitter. Remember? Then as they organized protests in the square, Tahrir Square was not going to be a big thing. It all got organized initially in mosques. People were told ‘go to your mosque,’ and then they’ll tell you where to go for peaceful protesting and then after that they did not need the Internet. What they really needed was to be able to get around because they didn’t know where to go except for Tahrir Square, the largest square in all of the country and certainly Cairo. That’s where they go. So what do they do then? They shut the trains down. Couldn’t get there by train and then they blocked off the outsides of the corridors of that place. Every side street was blocked off by someone. Then they fought in the streets and they threw Molotov cocktails in the streets and they began to kill people. They set cars on fire. They detained and beat journalists.” …

“And then the president goes to Christiane Amanpour and says I wish I could step down but I can’t there is violence in the streets,” he continued. “Remember Baghdad Bob?”