Yet in a statement in December 2009, when he was sentenced to 11 years' imprisonment for "inciting sedition", he was "full of optimistic expectations of freedom coming to China in the future".
As the Cairene blogger who writes as Zeinobia explains, the ad seems to evoke the case of Ilan Grapel, an Israeli-American who was detained by Egyptian authorities last year after appearing in Tahrir Square and accused of spying for Israel by "inciting sedition, spreading rumors and urging protesters toward friction with the armed forces and to commit acts of violence".
After the BBC and other outlets reported that pro-Morsi protesters had been killed by soldiers outside the Republican Guard club, an unnamed military source told the state newspaper, Al Ahram, that "foreign media outlets" were "inciting sedition between the people and its army".
When Ilan Grapel was arrested, the official Egyptian news agency said an investigation had shown that he had been going to Tahrir Square from January and "inciting sedition, spreading rumors and urging protesters toward friction with the armed forces and to commit acts of violence".
Word of Mr. Roca's imminent freedom over the weekend, after he had served all but 70 days of a five-year sentence for inciting sedition, led to speculation his release was a government gesture before the scheduled visit next Sunday of former President Jimmy Carter.
He laughed, and added, "If we could have come out of churches, we would have come out of churches!" According to captured minutes from the Deir Ezzor security committee, its members decided to infiltrate the mosques with Baath Party loyalists, "an average of two hundred comrades per mosque, to deal with any case that incites sedition".
Hezbollah's deputy leader, Sheik Naim Qassem, told Al Manar that the biggest danger lies in what he described as a campaign to incite sectarian sedition in Lebanon.
That's right, sedition: inciting rebellion against the government.
Mr. Powell's case was one of the rare federal prosecutions for sedition — inciting resistance to the government — in the decades since World War I. Though the government eventually dropped all charges against him, his case dragged on for five years and became a cause célèbre.
Egyptian officials also accused him of sedition and inciting protesters to violence.
