In another disheartening turn to the Mubarak-era playbook (after calling on media to NOT debate the constitutional referendum, violently dispersing protestors, entertaining a draft law criminalizing protests, and turning the national museum into a kind of assembly line for rapid detention and toruture), the Egyptian military has allegedly arrested blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad.

Sanad has butted heads with the military before (also as a conscientious objector) and has lately been very active writing and conducting research critical of the SCAF. I have not seen any English reporting on this yet, but am told that the army came to his home on Wednesday night to make the arrest.  His last blogpost prior to arrest is apparently a satirical play on the early-revolutionairy mantra that the army and the people are one. The post is long, and appears to be as thorough as it is critical, using a narrative timeline  of the past weeks and collection of multi-media documentation to equate the supreme council’s recent actions with continuing dictatorship.

International players have generally been slow (or reluctant) to note recent military maleficence (check Hillary Clinton getting called out by Hossam Bahgat of the EIPR here). This is likely due in part to an earnest wish to believe that the revolution is all it first promised to be (I too am guilty of this perennial naiveté), but it is also a journalistic failure. Assuming that the rumors on the ground prove true, this should be a good opportunity for the international free expression crew to start banging pots and pans, and refocusing popular media attention on Egypt’s revolutionary progress.