The links were helpful, but don't seem to change much: Violent thuggery is being met with violent thuggery; I still see no reason to take sides, to the extent it's even my place to do so. Whether peaceful protests are legal in Egypt is largely irrelevant to the very violent riots occurring now. The journalist at the first link sounds like he could benefit from a little objectivity as well; if he were covering protesters in the States and a "few hundred rallied in front of me... spying an empty police truck in the road, several people began to smash it up, eventually tipping it over and setting it on fire" you can bet your bottom police wold try to disperse them with tear gas. I'm not sure how that qualifies as an "attack" on the central square though. I'd expect an attack to use something more forceful than tear gas, particularly since we already know live ammunition has been used against rioters. On the other hand, if that was limited to the government officials "holed up inside" the Interior Ministry as rioters approached and "in the background, the smoking, blackened shell of Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party headquarters served as an ominous reminder of their intentions" (from your second link) I can't say I blame them: If some of the same "protesters" who'd been throwing Molotov cocktails at police approached the place I were "holed up" in sight of the smoldering wreckage they left of my party HQ I'd probably fire on them, too; that's a fairly common response from cornered people afraid for their lives.

Yet again, I'm not excusing Mubarak for anything, I'm simply saying that if all the analyst are right to expectat about a successor government from the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that almost singlehandedly created modern Islamist terrorism and thus prompted creation of the very emergency powers on which Mubarak depends, that doesn't look much better and will likely be worse. Just the links already in this thread offered the story of terrified hotel guests listening to protesters downstairs and WISHING the police were there as hotel staff tried to make them leave; if those were actually the brutal Egyptian secret police trying to defame legitimate protesters do you think they'd have been convinced to just leave? You can't excuse indiscriminate violence by saying, "but they do it, too!" Mubarak's violence is unconscionable, but that from the protesters is laudable? Why, because the latter have a majority? That's the only justification that MIGHT be claimed for doing the very thing one so forcefully opposes.

Protesters protecting national treasures with their bodies is laudable, yes; if there were of that and less violence it would be a lot easier to say which side I want to come out on top here. The first bit of encouraging news I've seen is paragraph at your second link:

That's very promising and I hope it holds up; nationalism, Egyptian or otherwise, is as much anathema to the Muslim Brotherhood as are the West, womens rights, non-Muslim rights, rights of any Muslims considered "heretical" and, in general, the individual rights their revered Qutb found so offensive in America. Put another way, the Democracy Now icon is very ironic for a site so favorable to riots every analyst I've seen says will put the Muslim Brotherhood in charge if successful: It's a statue of a WOMAN symbolizing the NATIONAL principle of INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY in a WESTERN state, no less than four things Mubaraks most likely successors are dedicated to destroying by force. So, once again, if real democracy (e.g. with the principle of individual liberty without which it's an empty shell under Mubarak or anyone) is in the offing, I'm all for it. Torching buildings, trashing police cars and throwing firebombs don't convince me that's the case though. The way this almost invariably goes is that one authoritarian regime is replaced with another (see: Iran). I'd love to be wrong in that expectation, but I've only just now seen any evidence to that effect, and there's still more on the other side.

I'm not saying Mubarak's a saint, merely that I see no evidence most of his opponents are better or deserve my endorsement. Not my call, regardless.