The masses are gathering in Tahrir Square for the “Day of Departure,” with the goal of getting Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to leave office. Al Jazeera has a live blog of events with some pictures.

According to the New York Times, the Obama Administration shares the goal of the protesters to get Mubarak out. But this was a strange story when it was rushed to release, with lots of spelling errors and misplaced sentence fragments last night, and it’s still a strange story now.

The news feeds from CNN and Al Jazeera English provide both a sharp contrast and a possible glimpse at the Egyptian government’s current strategy to repress the pro-democracy movement.

In his second major speech since protests began, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak announced that he would not stand for re-election in September. He said that, at 82, he was actually not planning to run for re-election anyway, so… there.

When this came down a while ago on Al Arabiya, the collective response from the Twitterati was that this signals the end of the Mubarak regime:

Egypt’s powerful military said yesterday it would not open fire on protesters as a coalition of Egyptian opposition groups called for a million people to take to Cairo’s streets today.

“To the great people of Egypt, your armed forces, acknowledging the legitimate rights of the people … have not and will not use force against the Egyptian people,” an army statement said.

The Mubarak government seems to know this as well, as they responded to this statement with a round of bargaining.

After a few hesitant days, which resulted in their being called out by Egyptian protesters and even the nascent leader of the revolution Mohammed ElBaradei, the United States government does look to be trying to slowly move Hosni Mubarak out the door and prepare for his successor. In the words of one former official privy to the thoughts of the White House, “They don’t want to push Mubarak over the cliff, but they understand that the Mubarak era is over and that the only way Mubarak could be saved now is by a ruthless suppression of the population, which would probably set the stage for a much more radical revolution down the road.”

You gotta wonder whether the US would take some comfort in having the guy we outsourced torture to running Egypt.