Those who have suffered at the hands of Egyptian president are joining the chorus of those who want to see the back of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak….and who are hoping heads of state from Western countries such as the United States will shift their allegiance from one-man rule to the people of Egypt.

Democracy and human rights activist Dr. Saad Eddin Ibrahim, now a visiting scholar at Drew University “This is what the Egyptian people want and the least we can expect from established democracies like the United States.”

Dr. Ibrahim was thrown in jail three times under Mubarak.

“We call him the velvet dictator.  For 30 years, he ruled Egypt in a more authoritarian fashion than all his predecessors and yet, he appeared in the West, especially in the United States, as a moderate, well-tempered President but he dealt with the dissidents in Egypt in a more brutal way than any ruler in Egypt in modern history.”

Dr. Ibrahim says he blew the whistle on Mubarak’s plan to pass power to his son, Gamal.

“The article I wrote was called ‘Hereditary Republic’.  The day it was published was the day I was arrested.”

Now 72, Dr. Ibrahim walks with a cane, as a result of the torture he says he endured in prison.

“I lost a great deal of my health, of my motor abilities, to walk.  Now I walk with a cane.  I used to be a marathon runner until the day I was arrested.”

Maajid Nawaz, Executive Director of the Quilliam Foundation which promotes tolerance and combats extremism was once a member of the Islamist organization Hizb ut Tahrir, and spent several years in an Egyptian prison in the early years of the new millennium.

Nawaz told Fox News, “Mubarak’s Egypt is a country that institutionalized the practice of torture.  I personally saw wives who had been tortured before their husbands, to force their husbands to confess.”

Dr. Omar Ashour , now a professor at Exeter University in Britain.  He calls Ibrahim his mentor, “one of the most credible and serious human rights activists in Egypt.”  Ashour says he was beaten while at a demonstration for Ibrahim’s freedom.  He was hit with metal rods by police—he says he suffered a concussion and had to get ten stitches.

Meanwhile, Ashour has interviewed many former political prisoners in Egypt.  I asked him which were the most horrific.

“There is multiple of them and they are all horror stories.  One way of torture—I heard it from someone who had it.  They inserted a wire into his penis and they electrocuted him inside.”

Ashour also talks about how prisoners are often not given access to information.  They have no idea what is happening in the outside world, sometimes, he says, for years.

“Usually, Islamist suspects get the worst treatment but that was in the 90’s because there was an insurgency.  But now treatment is almost equal, whether you are an Islamist or a liberal or a leftist or a democrat.  It doesn’t matter.”

Speaking of these Islamists, and the Muslim Brotherhood, Ashour says this uprising is not really theirs.

“They opposed this movement from the beginning.  They opposed it because it didn’t come from them.  They opposed it because of the different ideas, because it took the initiative away from them.”  Ashour said some of them get boo’ed in protests, both here and in Egypt.  Others have said the Muslim Brotherhood have been playing this period very cleverly, keeping their heads largely down in order not to draw condemnation from international world leaders.

In the meantime, as President Mubarak hangs onto power, there is constant discussion about how he clung on so long.

Dr. Ibrahim says he used several “tricks”.  One, he said, “was to show he was a man of peace, and he would promote peace with Israel.  Yet, the record shows that he had not advanced the cause of peace one inch beyond what President Sadat did and yet he created that image that he is a man of peace.”

Ibrahim continued, “second, he focused as a bulwark against terrorism.  Again, the record shows that there were more terrorist attacks all over the region during his reign—30 years of reign.  When he came to power no one had ever heard about Al Qaeda.”

It is the corruption of the regime that has really been what has set protestors off.  That has effected nearly everyone, people say, except the elite.  And as one Egyptian insider put it to Fox News, more and more layers of society are coming out to demand change.