"In el-Arabi, a leftist opposition newspaper, Qandil suggested that father and son represented "a dual presidency." Mubarak's powers are "God-like," he wrote, critically. Less than a month later -- on Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2004 -- a colleague dropped Qandil off at 3 a.m. near his home on the bustling road to the Pyramids. It was Ramadan again, the Muslim month of fasting when Cairo seems to stay up round-the-clock. A few minutes later, a car with four men barreled toward him and stopped. The men jumped out, blindfolded him and stuffed him in the back seat. The car then careened into Cairo's warrens, passing checkpoints unhindered. "I thought I was a dead man," Qandil recalled. During the hour-long ride, he remembered being given a clear message: "No more words about the big people," he was told. Next time he would be killed. A few minutes later, one of the men answered his cellphone. "Yes, sir," Qandil recalled him barking, as if answering an order. The car stopped on the outskirts of the city, on the road toward Suez. Qandil said the men stripped and beat him, stole his cellphone and the equivalent of about $100, then left him lying in the desert at the side of the road. He eventually caught a ride back and later filed a complaint against the Interior Ministry, which denied any role. "It will stay forever in the court," he said glumly. In his sparse downtown office, at the top of stone stairs, each step worn into an arched bow, the editor became angry as he recalled the incident many now see as a turning point for those frustrated by increasingly brutish repression. The government is, of course, not a democracy, he said; that implies freedom. But it's not a dictatorship, either, he added; that requires strength. "It's more like the rubble, the debris left behind," he said, his voice tinged with disgust."