The video is what one would normally expect, of shiny clinics in prisons, clean facilities, and praise showered from “prisoners” on how ethically they are treated.

One thing that struck me though was seeing Samir Omar, the Sky News Arabia correspondent in Cairo, going on to give a propaganda speech in defense of the Interior Ministry.

I haven’t been in touch with Samir for years, but at some point in my life he was a friend. From Nasserist activists’ ranks he went on to join Al-Jazeera and became its star Cairo correspondent for years, covering the Kefaya protests and the burgeoning scene of dissent. Samir was very brave journalist and sympathetic to grassroots activists and human rights defenders. It is a pity to see him hitting rock bottom.

It’s already disgusting he’s sold his soul to Sky News Arabia, the official mouthpiece of Arab counterrevolutions, but gosh! It was a shock to see him praising the same prisons he had reported for years on their brutality and horrors, prisons that housed (and still house) former friends of his!

To find out some good research into Sisi’s prisons, follow HRW and Nadeem Center.

Just to give you a sample, above is Al-Akhbar’s front page on 28 March, breaking the news about the Egyptian army’s heroic efforts to “abort a terror strike” on a security check point in Sinai’s Sheikh Zuweid’s area, as the “Apaches bomb a Houthi cell in Rafah that includes Palestinians and Iranians!”

And today’s front page runs a headline announcing the “martyrdom of 15 [Egyptian army] fighters and the liquidation of 27 infidels!”

يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين يا مصريين تحيا مصر تحيا مصر تحيا مصر
والسلام عليكم ورحمة الله وبركاته

— ؤ ئ ؤ (@OffTheHookPain) March 26, 2015

But the insurgency in Sinai, which is already a decade long at least, starting with the 2004 Taba bombings, has only escalated during Sisi’s rule and will continue to escalate as his army pursues the Dirty War strategies and tactics by the book.

Supported by the US and Israel, the Egyptian army is completely embroiled now in the counterinsurgency operations, and is leading the “fight against terrorism”, even when Sisi initially admitted in a meeting with senior commanders sometime in 2013 before the coup, that it was not “the army’s job to fight terrorism. The army is a killing machine… [Fighting terrorism] is the job of the ministry of interior.”

And after more than a year of the start of the counterinsurgency, it is clear the security situation is going down the drains, with no accountability.

And of course the mainstream “singers” have to chip in and aid the war on terror efforts, by even more lousy songs.