watching the backside of the bed. i think they were there to be witnesses. i encourage you to go to c cnn.com to watch ivan s entire report. mowna, journalist and columnist, and i want you to do me a favor and take off the journalistic hat, and talk to me as an egyptian female and talk to me about the visceral reaction to the charges? well, i m sickened and relieved that some general has admitted to it, but ironically and horrifically, the way he has justified this off of the record has confirmed to your journalists that the so-called virginity tests happened justified them by saying shockingly, that these are not women like your daughters and mine and he is insinuating that these are quote, unquote bad women and deserved the sexual assaults which they call virginity testing. so, i m absolutely horrified, but u it is another reminder that although 800 egyptians dind
consider sexual assault and torture. a senior egyptian general tells cnn that the tests were done on women arrested at a demonstration on march 9th. about a month after president hosni mubarak s resignation. egypt s military initially denied the allegations which first arose in an amnesty international report. prior to the virginity tests, the women were allegedly given electric shocks, strip searched, threatened with prostitution charges. our ivan watson has reported extensively on the alleged abuse of protesters. he is joining us from istanbul, turkey. ivan, tell us what the women protesters said to you. reporter: well, we spoke with one of these women in particular, a young woman. she had been in cairo s emblematic tahrir square on march 9th when a demonstration was broken up. a number of the protesters were dragged into the egyptian
conservative cultures that place a high value on women s virginity. so you will hear of conservative parts of egypt where a traditional midwife will be in charge of showing or examining whether a bride-to-be is a virgin or not. and there are cases in which some egyptian families have gone to medical authorities to determine whether women are virgins or not in the way that we hear in latin america they have, and also as recently as 1976 in the u.k., where virginity tests were forced on women immigrating from india. so essentially what i m saying is, these are tests that are forced on women by a patriarchal authority to determine something as flimsy as a hyman. so it happens in egypt, in countries that are conservative. and at the end of the day, extremely humiliating to women. and mona, you bring up a good point. you talk about the fact that this was used as a form of sexual assault under the mubarak regime, but now you have the military in charge, and it is also being used in that wa
horrible. it s just devastating to see all of the destruction of my school, my home. the world health organization is going to announce this hour whether radiation from cell phones should be classified as a carcinogen. a panel of 31 scientists has been reviewing studies on that subject. they re going to try to synthesize the inconclusive findings to make some kind of recommendation. president obama will step into the rose garden this afternoon to announce his new commerce secretary. two white house sources say the president will nominate businessman john brycen, a former ceo at edison international, a former california energy company. we have live coverage at 8:15 eastern. we have exclusive confirmation that egypt s military forcibly subjected female protesters to what it calls virginity tests. it is something that many
i guess the fact that they took place is disturbing and now the egyptian army, a senior general, is actually defending the case. yes, indeed. all this happened on the 9th of march when the army wanted to disperse the crowds from tahrir square and they rounded up 149 protesters and detained them. 17 women were among the detainees. they were electrocuted and some of them said they had to undergo virginity tests. as you said, at first they were denying, but now a senior general who doesn t want his name mentioned, he admitted that this in fact did happen. and his explanation is that these girls had been camping out in the square with the male protesters in tents and that the