Soon after being freed, he appeared live on one of Egypt's most watched talk shows, on the Dream 2 television channel. He was shown video of some of those who had died during the protests, events he was seeing for the first time.
He burst into tears, insisting it was the fault of the authorities, not the campaigners, and left the studio - a human response that provoked a wave of sympathy. At least , people have joined a Facebook page titled "I delegate Wael Ghonim to speak in the name of Egypt's revolutionaries" since the interview, the Associated Press news agency reports. Fifi Shawqi, a year-old upper-class housewife, said she had come to the square with her three daughters and sister for the first time after seeing the interview with Mr Ghonim, whom she had never heard of before the TV appearance.
During his TV interview, the Google executive came over as a passionate Egyptian patriot, who even expressed some empathy for the officers who had interrogated him because they, too, seemed to love their country. This bridge has all but collapsed. The Nobel laureate Mohamed ElBaradei, the great liberal hope, announced last week that he was withdrawing from the race for president.
When he goes out in Cairo, Ghonim is often confronted both by opponents of the revolution, who hold him responsible for its radicalization, and by more doctrinaire revolutionary activists, who believe he never really shared their views at all. One activist opened a mocking Twitter account under the handle GhonimWithBalls. A young comedian, Ahmad Spider, made himself famous by unspooling a conspiracy theory in which Ghonim is the agent of a global plot, run by Freemasons, to destroy Egypt.
To many Egyptians, Ghonim had almost seemed to materialize from the Internet and then disappear back into it. Since the spring, Ghonim has come to view his reputations abroad and in Egypt as if they are operating inversely, on either end of a seesaw, and he monitors them, ambivalently, all the time.
In Cairo last month, ABC News wanted to film him voting, but he agreed to cooperate only if the producers would arrive at the polls independently and then pretend to come upon him by accident. ABC News declined. A little more than two weeks ago, Ghonim settled into his regular three-hour flight from Dubai to Cairo.
His seatmate, an older Egyptian executive type, recognized him immediately and started right in. But as the revolution had barreled on, some of its demands seemingly extreme, and the country continued to falter, the consultant had come to resent all of it. The man was unsparing. When Ghonim sat awake in jail, isolated and singing to himself for company, it was the passwords that preoccupied him. The passwords, he thought, would be a problem. Ghonim had been kidnapped on day three of the revolution—tackled to the ground, stuffed in a car—just after leaving dinner with two of his Google colleagues in the posh neighborhood of Zamalek, and the police took his laptop.
This was the first time Ghonim had flown to Cairo to physically participate in any protest he had helped organize, and now the risks of such engagement were very real. His e-mail, if properly dissected by the secret police, would yield a contact list for the revolution. The layers of protection were so thin. This seemed like too many conditions to count on. Ghonim spent the next eleven days blindfolded. He was not beaten badly, but neither was he permitted to shower; over time he began to experience coughing fits, and a rash spread over his body.
He had no idea what had happened to the revolution—whether it had toppled the regime, been violently put down, or simply evaporated. There were daily interrogations. Ghonim quickly confessed to being the administrator of the Khaled Said website and to having called for the January 25 protests; he gave up the password to the site itself, figuring the worst they could do was to shut the site down. When they asked for the password to his computer, he delayed, saying that it had been automatically reset and the new one was in his phone, which was at the time in some separate bureaucratic cubbyhole.
What was the relationship between the CIA and Google? It took three days for the police to access his computer and register an interest in his e-mail. He gave it up. That night Ghonim was sleeping in his cell when his guard woke him. The delay had been enough. Prominent activists had demanded his release, and the interior minister acquiesced in hopes of demonstrating that the regime could be amenable to change. Ghonim was permitted to call his wife, Ilka, in Dubai. Then he was out. It was February 7, day fourteen.
The revolution had gone on without him; the protesters had stayed in the square, but neither side had buckled. Mubarak had just given a dramatic speech, volunteering to step down in September, and many of the young protesters were getting calls from their parents telling them to come home, that the revolution had run its course. Normally, Ghonim is as logical and straightforward as an algorithm. Now he was an emotional mess.
After he got on the air, he forgot it all. The camera settled on Ghonim, sitting across a round table from Shazly. His hands were clasped on the table, and he was staring down fixedly. He spoke without lifting his eyes. When they came back from commercial, Shazly asked if Ghonim had seen a series of photographs. Watch TED Talks. Wael Ghonim Internet activist and computer engineer.
Ghonim Parlio. As someone who was arrested, detained and kept blindfolded, how do you see these issues being resolved? WG: This is going to be one of the toughest challenges facing the new president.
DP: What is the role of activists — on-the-ground types, as well as those who operate via social media — in post-revolution, post-election Egypt?
WG: Activists are evangelists. The other job is to continue to communicate with as many Egyptians as we can, to ensure that their level of involvement is high enough to ensure that the government is listening to the voice of reason. One of the most critical roles the newly elected leader will need to work on is that of uniting Egyptians.
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