CAIRO -- The echo from the microphones in the room where the prime minister had just finished his press conference on Saturday morning was still ringing in everyone's ears.

Could he have been right?

Prime Minister Kamal Ghanzoury looked journalists, and by extension the Egyptian people, square in the eye and told them the military and the police were not involved in the clashes on Friday -- and if they were, they were only acting in self-defense.

He went on to add that the military exercised restraint and did not fire on the crowds.

But even more surprising to many activists, Ghanzoury said the people involved in Friday's clashes were not revolutionaries.

The three-weeklong peaceful protests outside his office turned violent Friday when, according to him, troublemakers attacked the military.

• Violence flares after Egypt tries to crush protest

His depiction was an attempt, protesters felt, to taint them and their sit-in.

Ghanzoury's comments contradicted widespread reports and eyewitness accounts from journalists and activists.

Regardless of the moment that precipitated the initial clash between the military and the protesters, the military's conduct over the past 48 hours has many Egyptians questioning its competence and intentions.

In fact, videos made by eyewitnesses show the military engaged in all kinds of behavior, originally denied by the prime minister, including taunting protesters with rude gestures, lobbing stones at them, chasing them with sticks, beating and dragging them while they are on the ground and in more than one instance, opening fire with pistols.

In the video above, posted on the website of Mosireen, an Egyptian non-profit organization that helps citizen journalists by running a media center in downtown Cairo, alleged members of Egypt's military are seen taunting protesters with rude hand gestures. They can also be seen throwing stones at the protesters in this video.

In another video, aired by a private Egyptian satellite channel, a soldier can be seen aiming a pistol at people who were coming to recover a wounded protester being attacked by a crowd in military riot gear.

In his press conference the prime minister reiterated a point made earlier in a statement by the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. All of the families of those killed would be compensated. Those injured would be treated at the state's expense. An independent civilian advisory council created after last month's deadly fighting between security forces and protesters recommended all those arrested during the clashes be released.

But on Saturday, the PM said they were not revolutionaries. In fact, Egypt's general prosecutor ordered 16 people detained for four days pending investigation into their involvement in instigating the clashes and the killings -- and none were members of the military or police. And despite widespread complaints by protesters and human rights organizations, no investigations into alleged military misconduct have been launched by prosecutors.

So why would the military offer to treat those injured and compensate victims if it felt they were behaving illegally? It seems odd for the state to treat so-called martyrs if it viewed them as vandals and agents of foreign hands.

For its part, the military has posted video http://youtu.be/8grDc-iz5wg) on its Facebook page showing what it claims were vandals destroying government buildings. Egypt's historic Geographic Society building was set on fire on Saturday. It was not clear how the fire started in the building, home to some of Egypt's most important historic documents.

 After last month's deadly clashes, the Supreme Council accepted the previous prime minister's resignation and promised to empower his replacement with the full authority he needs to run the country. The new prime minister pledged that force would not be used against demonstrators. But some analysts say that the new clashes raise questions about his ability to reign in the security forces and about the degree of cooperation between the military and the civilians supposedly running the country.  

In a post on his Twitter page, prominent opposition figure Mohammed El Baradei said that if the PM had all of the executive authority of the president, which includes security in the country, then in what capacity did the military police act against the protesters?

So did Prime Minister Ghanzoury know that within minutes of concluding his press conference, the military would unleash an assault against the protesters? If he did, then he purposely put a civilian facade on a military crackdown, some say. If he didn't know, then, as El Baradei pointed out, how can he restore law and order in the country if he is not in charge of the one institution that has all the guns?

Felipe Trueba / EPA

Protesters carry a tired comrade over their heads Tuesday in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Click the photo for a slideshow of new images from Egypt.

Vice President Omar Suleiman's announcement of constitutional and electoral reforms doesn't appear to be assuaging the hundreds of thousands of Egyptians packing Tahrir Square today in what reporters on the scene are calling the biggest demonstration since the protests began Jan. 25.

An Al Jazeera correspondent reported that "the vice president came out about 10:30 this morning and said the president had signed a decree allowing for constitutional amendments. ... But I don’t think it worked well. I don’t think anyone here has bothered listening to that yet. The call here is for an end to the regime of the past 30 years and to make sure they will not return once it’s over." 

There are calls for another million man march on Friday; they do not want those that died in the first week to be forgotten. They already have huge posters of those killed in those clashes — and they are planning some kind of memorial service to mark those who have fallen.

They want to keep Tahrir Square as a reminder of the very serious actions that have happened here, and discourage people from just coming down to sightsee and just walk around for a few hours.

Update 11:50 a.m. ET: President Barack Obama will take questions on Egypt at 3:10 p.m. ET, The Associated Press reports.

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Here's the latest news from Egypt this morning:

• Protesters demanding President Hosni Mubarak's ouster have packed Tahrir Square by the tens of thousands in what is being called the "Friday of Departure."

• Tens of thousands of people are also protesting again in Alexandria, Al Jazeera reports.

• Prominent government figures are beginning to join the protesters, The New York Times reports.

• Security forces broke into the headquarters of the Muslim Brotherhood's official news Web site ikhwanonline.com, and arrested 12 journalists and technicians inside, according to Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt's largest independent newspaper.

•  Media in Montenegro are reporting that President Hosni Mubarak's  son and close personal friends are preparing for him to flee to exile there, Al Jazeera reports. Montenegro already hosts deposed Thai Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra.

• The protests have shuttered businesses, forced factories to halt operations, closed banks and the stock exchange and limited suppliers' ability to restock store shelves — adding to the economic pinch many protesters say is a key catalyst for joining the demonstrations.

• Desperate pleas for food, for help finding lost friends, even remote offers of first aid help from supposed professionals can be found in abundance on Twitter.

Miguel Medina / AFP - Getty Images

Anywhere from 100,000 to 2 million people gathered in Cairo's Tahrir Square, depending on whom you believe.

Update 1:10 p.m. ET: Al-Jazeera has now cut its estimate in half. Earlier: "up to two million." Now: "more than a million."

Wired, meanwhile, offers a way to guesstimate a big crowd. 

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Estimating crowds is a notoriously inexact science, so much so that the National Park Service stopped doing it for protests in Washington many years ago. That leaves it up to news organizations to make their best guesses.

So it's no surprise that estimates of the crowd that gathered today in Cairo's Tahrir Square are very imprecise and wide-ranging:

• Washington Post: "Tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands."

• New York Times: "Hundreds of thousands."

• Wall Street Journal: "Hundreds of thousands."

• Associated Press: "more than a quarter of a million people."

• Reuters: "At least one million people."

• Al-Jazeera: "Up to two million."

• BBC: "More than 100,000."

• Guardian (U.K.): "An estimated one million people."

• Telegraph (U.K.): "Estimated crowd of more than 1 million."

In January 2009, shortly before Barack Obama's inauguration as president, Steve Doig, a journalism professor at Arizona State University specializing in data analysis, wrote this explanation of why crowd-counting is a mug's game.