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Exclusive: John McCain on His Meeting With the Muslim Brotherhood in Cairo

By C. J. Refsland on August 7, 2013 • ( 0 )

My comment: ‘Oh what a tangled web we weave!’ Why are we still backing the muslim brotherhood? Why are the republicans engaged in trying to salvage one of the most failed foreign blunders this president has made?

The Daily Beast

During their whirlwind tour of Cairo Tuesday, two top GOP senators held the most extensive meeting to date between U.S. officials and senior officials in the embattled Muslim Brotherhood, whose supporters are fighting in the streets to overturn last month’s military takeover of Egypt.

Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham (R) address a news conference in Cairo, August 6, 2013. McCain and Graham, two senior U.S. Republican senators visiting Cairo on Tuesday urged both sides in Egypt’s political crisis to start a national dialogue and to avoid violence. (Asmaa Waguih/Reuters, via Landov)

Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) also met with Egyptian Prime Minister Hazem El Beblawi, the leader of the military takeover Gen. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, Vice President Mohamed ElBaradei, local political party leaders, and civil society representatives. But their meeting with Muslim Brotherhood leaders was perhaps the most important in their effort to help the administration push both sides back to the negotiating table and end the violence that has seen 400 Egyptians killed in just over a month.

“We met some Muslim Brotherhood representatives. They were senior level people,” McCain told The Daily Beast Tuesday in an exclusive interview from Cairo, adding that the officials requested to remain anonymous. “They believe things are going to get a lot worse before they get better. They demand that [deposed President Mohamed] Morsi get released. They believe it was a military coup and they are very far apart from the military and the new government.”

McCain and Graham also believe the removal and imprisonment of Morsi and several other Muslim Brotherhood leaders was a military coup, one that could mandate a cutoff of $1.3 billion of U.S. military aid to Egypt. The Obama administration has avoided saying whether or not they believe there was a coup in Egypt.

“We have determined that we do not need to make a determination on Egypt,” State Department spokeswoman Jen Psaki said this week.

Nevertheless, McCain and Graham told the Muslim Brotherhood leaders that they should be open to negotiations with the new government if and when the government makes some concessions that international actors are pushing for, such as letting up on the arrests and prosecutions of the leadership of the deposed group.

“We told [the Muslim Brother leaders] that in our view, the best way to resolve this issue was to renounce and condemn violence, that they should be willing to negotiate if some of the brotherhood were released from prison,” McCain said. “We were not negotiating, we were just saying what we thought had to be done to get back to the negotiating table.”