The Con Remains The Same (Nigerian Email Scams)

I have just received my first Nigerian email scam so I thought I'd publish this interetsing article...

Taken from The Sydney Morning Herald, Australia, February 19, 2007
By Nick Galvin

In among the offers of cheap drugs, hot share market tips and penis enlargement schemes jostling daily for attention in your inbox, you will almost certainly have received "Nigerian scam" emails.

The Nigerian scam, also know as 419 fraud after the section of the Nigerian criminal code it violates, has many variants but the basis of the con remains the same.

The victim is promised millions of dollars in exchange for helping with a scheme that in itself is quasi-legal. Once hooked, the victim is persuaded to part with increasing amounts of cash to cover "administrative" fees. In the end, the fraudster disappears with the money.

Usually these "scambaiting" emails are easily recognisable and most people do the right thing, binning them immediately. However, incredibly, the scam continues to net hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide.

This brings us to a cautionary tale from a reader, Michael (not his real name). What separates his experience from the run-of-the mill 419 scams is that the fraudsters took the extra step of finding out a lot of his personal details before contacting him.

The scam started with an email addressed personally to Michael - both his first and second name. Infuriated by this intrusion into his privacy, he did what he would normally never do and emailed back to tell "Rev F. R. James" where to stick his promise of a multi-million-dollar bequest.

"It was a stupid response," Michael says. "But I get 30 to 40 junk mails every day that I have to wade through. It was the end of a long day and I had had enough."

Another personally addressed email arrived the next day - and then the phone calls started in the early hours. "It sounded like a call centre on the other end - no one spoke - so I just slammed down the phone," he says. "It was 4am."

This was then followed up by the same calls on his mobile phone, which got the same treatment. Then, while Michael was at work, his wife received a series of calls.

"She picked up the phone and there was some person saying that they desperately wanted to speak to me," he says. "They were being really insistent and demanding. It was really scary. My wife was in tears. She was really frightened because she didn't know whether these people were down the road or overseas."

By now, Michael was seriously concerned and he took the drastic step of barring all incoming overseas calls - which is a serious inconvenience but, he says, worth it to stop the frightening messages.

Russell Smith, principal criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology, says personally addressed 419 emails were unusual but not unheard of.

"Most advanced-fee fraud attempts are not addressed personally but there [are many] data bases of personal information circulating among fraudsters," he says.

Michael's name could have come from such a hacked or stolen database. Smith said the other possibility was that the scammers were local and targeting people by collecting personal details online and from other sources. Michael runs a small business and its website has his contact details.

Smith's advice to anyone receiving 419-type emails is to delete them immediately. "Bin it, delete it and ignore it but certainly do not enter into any correspondence with these people," he says.
You've been warned.

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Despite massive counterfeiting of U.S. currency and checks in Nigeria, the American law enforcement agency with principal jurisdiction, the Secret Service, has closed its office in Lagos, Nigeria. Nigerian officials said the decision has hurt efforts to crack down on criminal rings that produce the counterfeit currency and cheat thousands of Americans with online scams.

One of the most famous people to be duped is Ed Mezvinsky, a former Democratic Congressman from Iowa, who is serving a seven-year sentence for fraud after getting caught up in a series of Nigerian e-mail scams. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky used his connections to the Clintons and his son's social relationship with Chelsea to persuade people to give him money to participate in the scams. Mezvinsky traveled to Nigeria numerous times and ultimately lost more than $3 million as a victim of the scammers. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky fell particularly hard for what is known as the "black money" scam. Victims are told millions of dollars have been coated with black ink so the money could be smuggled out of Nigeria. Prosecutors say Mezvinsky fell for at least three separate "black money" schemes that he thought would bring him millions.

There are groups of people that are hitting back at these Nigerian scams. One of them is 419 Eater. Check out their website. It is really funny.

Here are some "must see" investigative video reports from ABC News

Confessions of a Scam Artist

Master vs. Mugu: Nigerian e-mail scams rip off millions of gullible Americans

Nigeria Leader Indicted For Graft

Taken from The BBC, 21 March 2007

A Nigerian Senate committee has indicted the president and his deputy for corruption over an oil fund. The committee recommends both President Olusegun Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar be prosecuted.

The committee resigned after pressure to block the report. The Senate will now consider the report but not until after general elections next month.

Mr Obasanjo stands down after two terms in office, but Mr Abubakar has been barred from running.

It is the first time a Nigerian Senate committee has accused President Obasanjo of corruption. A government ministerial panel had accused Mr Abubakar of diverting money belonging to the Petroleum Technology Development Fund (PTDF).

The country's anti-graft agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) which examined the PTDF financial records accused Mr Abubakar of diverting some $145m to his personal businesses.

Mr Abubakar denies all the charges and is in court challenging his exclusion from the presidential election.

'Integrity'
The senate committee report found Mr Abubakar approved $20m from the PTDF account without the president's approval.

The committee report which was obtained by the BBC also found that Mr Obasanjo had "illegally" approved the spending of over $27m dollars for some government projects.

"With regards to the approval which the vice president gave in respect of the $20m on 14 October 2003, without the authority of Mr President, the committee views the approval of the vice president as illegal" the report says.

"In respect of some projects commenced by PTDF in 2006 for which Mr President gave approval and later got them ratified retroactively, the committee views the action of the president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, as illegal."

A member of the committee told the BBC there had been efforts to make them tone down some aspects of the report which indicted the president.

Senator Umar Tsauri, chairman of the committee, told the BBC they had met "repeated roadblocks" in trying to present the report to the Senate and felt its release before the elections was being prevented.

"We pleaded with the leadership of the Senate to allow us to present our report but they said no and we just felt it was better to resign because it'd be a blow to our integrity," he said.

"Our integrity was at stake. We resigned because we are principled people."

BBC reporters in Nigeria say much of the political significance of the report will be lost once President Obasanjo stands down in May.

Bangladesh Military Government Holds 40 In Graft Sweep

Taken from The New York Times, March 14, 2007
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

DHAKA, Bangladesh, March 10 — Peering into the heart of its democracy, Bangladesh has found a latemodel Hummer, three golden pheasants, several pet peacocks and piles of money.

Those are among the assets seized in recent days as part of a widening corruption investigation opened by a new military-backed government that declared emergency rule in January.
So far, at least 40 prominent public officials and business figures from the ranks of the two principal political parties, the Bangladesh Nationalist Party and the Awami League, have been jailed on charges of corruption and related offenses. Dozens more politicians are on a list of suspects leaked to the news media. More arrests are expected.

Many Bangladeshis, even some politicians, describe the sweeps as a potential turning point in the history of a country that has seen graft fester in 16 years of democracy, threatening the health of the political system and making Bangladesh, a majority-Muslim country of 140 million people, among the most corrupt places in the world according to Transparency International’s index.

The question today is how long the military government can enjoy good will at home and abroad before it is buffeted by the many challenges of governance — or a clamor for a return to democratic rule.

“In all candor, if we look back on the 16 years of democratic government, we have to say we were let down,” said Farooq Sobhan, a former foreign secretary who now leads the Bangladesh Enterprise Institute.

“This can only be a temporary arrangement,” he said. “This is like taking the car back to the workshop, doing some urgent repair work, but then we’ve got to put it back on the road again.”
The anticorruption drive is the single most prominent item on the agenda of the new administration that took over after President Iajuddin Ahmed declared an emergency on Jan. 11 and postponed elections that were scheduled for later that month.

The president’s move came after months of crippling political violence. The opposition Awami League had vowed to disrupt the elections, accusing the governing Bangladesh Nationalist Party of rigging key electoral institutions.

Even beyond corruption, the problems facing the current government are formidable, from an electricity crisis that will probably grow more severe in summer, to rising prices for essential items, to carrying out its pledge of free and fair elections.

Beyond all that, it has now set for itself the challenge of winning in court, with a degree of credibility, corruption cases that are likely to test the capacity of the judiciary.

“This process could be undermined if the remnants of the ancien régime are not replaced from within the police, prosecution and judiciary, and if clean and competent investigations and prosecutions are not undertaken,” said Sara Hossain, a human rights lawyer representing three officials from independent organizations who are being held under preventive detention laws.
The previous anticorruption commission, appointed by the Bangladesh Nationalist government, spent two years squabbling over procedures and failed to file a single case. It resigned when the current administration took over.

The challenges facing the current administration were not lost on Iftekhar Ahmed Chowdhury, foreign affairs adviser and effectively the new foreign minister. In an interview on Thursday, he said he was confident that public support would last as long as the current government “demonstrates achievements almost on a weekly basis.”

Apparently in a bid to ensure good will abroad, the current government has signed the United Nations convention against corruption. It aspires to set up a national human rights commission, Mr. Chowdhury said.

“We are interested in holding elections and going back to where we came from, so we come out smelling like roses,” he said. “The ultimate challenge will be to keep the people with you all the time.”

For now, at least, it appears to be working. In the last few weeks, Bangladeshis have watched, sometimes with unabashed glee, how sensationally the mighty have been humbled. Bank accounts have been frozen. Luxury cars, impounded by the government, fill the parking lot of a Dhaka police station.

This week, the front pages of several daily newspapers were splashed with photographs of deer, peacocks and other birds discovered in the garden of a former minister. The animals were reported to have been kept without the required government permits.

The biggest catch of all came in a dead-of-night raid this week, when the police arrested Tarique Rahman, the son of the last prime minister, Khaleda Zia. He was produced in court on Thursday wearing a bulletproof vest and looking ashen as he was booked on extortion charges, which until recently would have been unimaginable.

During his mother’s tenure, which ended last October, Mr. Rahman was considered invincible.
His arrest now, if nothing else, seemed intended to showcase the government’s commitment.
Emergency rule was largely seen as the military’s handiwork, opening the way for the new caretaker government led by a retired central bank governor and 10 nonpartisan bureaucrats. The government has not yet laid out when elections are to be held, except to say that before any credible voting can take place, politics must be cleansed of “black money” and criminality, and key electoral institutions reformed.

It has appointed a new three-member election commission; promised voter identification cards, which would take an estimated 10 to 12 months to distribute; and said those convicted of graft will not be allowed to run for office.

At the moment, political activity has been shut down. Political meetings are barred. It is against the law to criticize the government. The police and army have arrested an astonishing number of people — more than 40,000, according to estimates — though the government says most are suspected criminals. There is no way to know how many have been charged, or where they are held.

The politicians, none of whom wanted to be quoted by name for fear of reprisal by the army-backed government, are quietly taking a wait-and-see approach.

One Bangladesh Nationalist Party official said it would not be easy to uproot the base of the two parties, nor easy to manage the very issues that plagued the previous government, which the party led before the military stepped in.

“We wish good luck to the government,” he said, and smiled. “They don’t have the people’s mandate, and they themselves don’t know how long they will be there. How can they meet everyone’s expectations?”
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Latest News: The interim Government of Bangladesh has found millions of pounds in frozen bank accounts during an investigation into corruption among politicians. “These accounts have an estimated undisclosed sum of 26 billion taka (£190 million),” an official said. More than 160 senior politicians, including former ministers, have been arrested by security forces and some have been detained since a state of emergency was declared in January. (Reuters)

Former Iraq Minister Denies Theft Of Millions

Taken from The Times, UK, March 11, 2007
By Marie Colvin

A former Iraqi defence minister whose 10 months in office coincided with the disappearance of more than $800m (£400m) from the ministry’s coffers is living openly in Amman and London despite a warrant for his arrest.

Hazem Shaalan, a small businessman in London until Saddam Hussein was ousted in 2003, rose in a year to one of the most important jobs in the interim government that ran Iraq from 2004 to 2005.

He left Baghdad before the next government discovered that a fortune had been looted from his ministry’s account in what one senior investigator has called “one of the largest thefts in history”.

The missing money was part of $8.8 billion of shrink-wrap-ped American cash that was flown into Iraq after Saddam fell but which is now unaccounted for. It is the subject of a congressional inquiry in Washington amid growing demands by Democrats to identify those responsible.

When The Sunday Times tracked down Shaalan in Amman last week as he prepared to fly to London, he showed no sign of concern that the Iraqi government had issued a warrant for his arrest on fraud charges.

Dressed in an elegant Savile Row suit and silk tie, he denied the allegations against him, claiming that the missing money had never arrived at his ministry in the first place.

“There is nearly $800m we never received,” he said over cups of sweet tea brewed by his bodyguard. “These $800m were never at any time received by the Ministry of Defence, nor were they spent by the Ministry of Defence.”

Documents obtained during an official Iraqi investigation and seen by The Sunday Times suggest otherwise.

An investigators’ audit of the ministry during Shaalan’s tenure found that $1.7 billion went into its account at the Rafidain Bank in Baghdad before vanishing into a Jordanian account.

Two cheques drawn on the Ministry of Defence account, one for $149m and the other for $348m - were among transfers totalling $1.126 billion to al-Warka, a small private bank in Baghdad. The money was then deposited at the Housing Bank in Amman.

There it went into the account of Naer Jumaili, a little-known Iraqi businessman who held no official position but acted as a middle man for Iraq’s defence contracts while Shaalan was in charge. Jumaili also lives openly in Amman despite an Iraqi arrest warrant on charges of theft but was unavailable for comment last week.

“What Shaalan and his ministry were responsible for was possibly the largest robbery in the world,” said Judge Radhi al-Radhi, the head of Iraq’s Commission on Public Integrity which investigates official fraud.

The scandal has raised a series of perplexing questions. The nature of Shaalan’s role, the impact on the faltering development of Iraq’s nascent army as the insurgency took hold and the failure of US officials to keep track of billions of dollars are all coming under growing scrutiny in Baghdad and Washington.

Not least is the question: where did all the money go? Iraqi investigators have been denied access to Jordanian bank details and have yet to establish how much may have simply been stolen.

But they believe that most of it went on weapons deals in which the ministry was supposed to acquire expensive, modern equipment but bought cheap, substandard items instead, with the difference in price being pocketed along the way.

In one example, the latest MP5 American machineguns were ordered at a cost of $3,500 each. But what was delivered were Egyptian copies worth $200 per gun.

Other purchases included outdated Pakistani armoured personnel carriers that could hardly stop a Kalashnikov bullet and had steering wheels on the wrong side; and bullets so old that when soldiers opened the ammunition cases they feared the ammunition would explode.

“Huge amounts of money simply disappeared,” said Ali Allawi, a former finance minister who uncovered the problems after he came into office in 2005.

“We got scrap metal in return. This is not just about fraud. The substandard equipment that the army received meant soldiers died as a result.”

One Iraqi official claimed last week that the missing money would have paid for 11,000 schools or 500 hospitals. But the immediate impact was that the Iraqi army was woefully unprepared to tackle an increasingly savage and well armed insurgency, just at the time when the Americans were pressing for the national force to start replacing their own troops. Iraqi soldiers found that they were ambushed by insurgents with far better weapons than their own.

The person with overall ministerial responsbility was Shaalan, who had made a relatively meagre living from property deals and part-time journalism in Britain before the war and enjoyed a meteoric rise after the US-led invasion toppled Saddam.

Having worked on the fringes of Iraqi exile politics in London, he was initially appointed by the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) as governor of Qadisiyah province, where he evidently impressed American officials. Although he comes from a prominent Shi’ite clan, he won plaudits for his fierce opposition to fundamentalist Shi’ite factions.

When the provisional authority handed over to Iraq’s interim government in 2004, the transition was chaotic and the new administration riddled with favouritism.

Shaalan became defence minister without any experience in security or managing a large organisation. Soon after his appointment he wrote to the prime minister, Iyad Allawi, asking for an increase in his ministry’s budget, which had been set at $450m, on top of $8-$10 billion the Americans spent separately that year on training and equipping the Iraqi army.

Shaalan decided to create new mechanised divisions and a rapid deployment force to counter the insurgency, and for that he needed more money. Such an increase would normally have been submitted first to the cabinet and, if approved, to the National Assembly.

Instead, Shaalan sent a memo to the office of the prime minister, requesting an emergency exemption from the procedures.

In a memo signed by Shaalan he said there were “a number of secret contracts the amounts of which cannot be made public”, and other contracts “which require immediate expenditure”. In the same memo he demands “tax exemption for secret contracts”. The finance ministry was instructed to allocate the $1.7 billion for the creation of the rapid deployment divisions and to place it at the disposal of Shaalan’s ministry.

Shaalan’s memo was dated August 29. Two days later Jumaili incorporated the Flowing Spring company with assets of $2,000. Within months the company was doing deals for the ministry and hundreds of millions of dollars were flowing into his personal account.

Jumaili forged an alliance with Ziad Cattan, an Iraqi with dual Polish citizenship. Cattan was appointed head of military procurement at the ministry, even though he appears to have had no credentials for the job. He had run a pizza parlour in Poland while Saddam was in power, and had a small used car business in Germany.

He later admitted to an American newspaper: “Before, I sold water, flowers, shoes, cars - but not weapons. We didn’t know anything about weapons.”

Cattan turned to Flowing Spring to provide the Iraqi army with arms and other equipment. He agreed contracts worth more than $1 billion with Flowing Spring and other companies controlled by Jumaili.

There was little or no competitive tendering. The contracts, some of which the Ministry of Defence never saw, even allowed Jumaili to determine what was delivered at his own discretion.
Documents show that in one transaction Jumaili transferred about $480m in ministry funds to the account of a colleague in Baghdad. The colleague then transferred the entire sum to Jumaili’s account in Amman.

Jumaili also took $100m of ministry cash from a bank in Baghdad in a single withdrawal and flew it out of the city.

A large quantity of substandard equipment was bought by Jumaili from a Polish company through a connection established by Cattan.

Twenty-four Soviet-era helicopters were acquired for $100m, ostensibly paid in advance. They were more than 30 years old and so outdated that Iraqi army inspectors refused to take delivery of them. Another purchase of 16 Polish-made Sokol helicopters is still being disputed.

In one of the few deals not organised by Jumaili and Cattan, Shaalan personally flew to Pakistan and bought equipment supposedly worth $80m from a government stock-pile. “I was on an official visit to Pakistan to sign a military protocol,” he claimed last week. “It included armoured vehicles.” He denies claims that the vehicles were unsafe.

Last week Shaalan said he had sold a spacious villa in Amman and now lived in a small flat. But among the countless Iraqi refugees in Amman, many of them destitute, Shaalan cuts a suave figure, travelling in a luxury car and accompanied by solicitous bodyguards.

He also seems to have ready access to cash. When he travelled from Amman to London with a Sunday Times journalist in 2005, he stopped before customs to divide up bundles of US dollars from his briefcase between himself, his wife and his travelling companions.

The repercussions of financial dealings during his time as defence minister have been many and varied. Iraq’s Bureau of Supreme Audit investigated the arms fraud after it was discovered by Allawi, the finance minister. Although warrants were later issued by the Commission on Public Integrity against Shaalan for fraud, Juamili for theft and Cattan for embezzlement, none has been arrested.

On visits to his family in London, Shaalan stays in some of the capital’s most expensive hotels and has been known to take a suite at the Dorchester. Britain has an extradition treaty with Iraq. But officials in London would not say last week whether an extradition request had been made by the Iraqi government. Nor is it known whether Baghdad has sought the extradition of Jumaili from Jordan. Cattan’s whereabouts are unknown.

By the time Shaalan’s successor came to office in May 2005, the ministry’s resources had been plundered and an army that was supposed to be well equipped and trained was vulnerable and demoralised.

When Ali Allawi traced the missing money to Jordan, his request to officials in Amman for the records of Jumaili’s bank account was stonewalled..

Allawi, who now lives in London, also went to the American government, meeting Treasury officials, but says he received no help.

Paul Bremer, head of the CPA who presided over the disbursement of much of the American cash, came under pressure last month when he was summoned before a congressional committee investigating the handling of reconstruction money in Iraq.

According to US investigators, bundles of $100 bills were taken from the Federal Reserve in New York, loaded onto wooden pallets and flown into Baghdad. “Who in their right minds would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?” asked Henry Waxman, the Democratic chairman of the House of Representatives oversight committee.

Allawi said last week: “We were given no support either from the United States, or the UK or any of the Arab countries.

“The only explanation is that too many people in positions of power and authority have profited from this or, if they went to court, it would be too embarrassing for those who supported them.”

Missing cash
# $12 billion - cash shipped to Iraq from US in 2003-4
# $8.8 billion - total spent by Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and never accounted for
# $2.5 billion - Iraqi money spent by CPA from oil-for-food programme without proper accounts
#$800m - amount missing from Iraqi defence ministry
# $500m-$600m - missing from transport, electricity and interior ministries
# $69m - value of fuel missing from oil ministry

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It seems to be that Hazem Shaalan is just a small fry over the larger picture on the corruption probes and raping of the resources of the country of Iraq. Yes, money has disappeared from both oil revenues of Iraq as well as US Taxpayers but it must be noted that most of the monies that were “Lost” belonged to the Iraqi people. The biggest thieves are the contractors who have been given permission to rebuild the country after the country was bombarded by the US air force and also mercenary’s working in US security firms in Iraq – a job that should be done by the collation forces for the Iraqi security forces. These are the companies that have been sifting the Iraqi money from the Iraqi people.

Interior Ministry: 'One-Tenth Of Russia Under Criminal Control'

Taken from The Independent, UK, 15 March 2007
By Andrew Osborn in Moscow

A leaked speech given by Russia's most senior policeman has revealed that almost one-tenth of the world's largest country is under the control of organised crime groups who often face little or no official resistance.

According to Rashid Nurgaliyev, the head of Russia's Interior Ministry, the Russian mafia is alarmingly well established in Moscow, St Petersburg, the south of the country, and in Siberia.

"This problem poses a threat to the state, society and the economy," he warned, adding that more than 3.8 million crimes were registered in 2006, up by 8.5 per cent on 2005.

He admitted that clear-up rates were less than satisfactory and said that criminals were caught in only 46 per cent of cases.

He listed dozens of districts of Moscow and other major cities where organised crime groups posed what he called "a serious threat to the safety of the region". In many cases law enforcement authorities were doing far too little to break the mafia's stranglehold on significant swaths of the economy, he said, adding that key sectors were already in criminal hands.

According to the daily newspaper Novye Izvestia, Mr Nurgaliyev's bleak assessment of the situation effectively means that one-tenth of Russia's regions are in criminal hands; in most cases the regions are among the country's wealthiest and most promising.

Experts in organised crime said separately that up to 25 per cent of Russia's gross domestic product is generated by the black economy, much of which is under the control of organised crime groups. It is a figure which dwarfs the size of the shadow economies in western European countries which typically account for between five and 10 per cent of countries' GDPs.

Aleksei Mukhin, a specialist in organised crime, added that Russia is home to up to 10,000 criminal groups employing 300,000 people. Most are paid to protect the businesses and assets of a small number of powerful mafia leaders.

Since the 1990s many of those leaders have legitimised their businesses. They clean up their image by setting up superficially normal companies and thereby acquire a veneer of respectability.

At the same time, crime rates have fallen as mafia groups have moved to maintain law and order on their own patches. They eschew messy shoot-outs which only attract attention for backroom deals and bribes.

Mr Nurgaliyev's revelations coincide with one of President Vladimir Putin's biggest anti-corruption drives of recent years. Across the country, local politicians and regional governors have found themselves charged with embezzlement and abuse of power.

Perhaps the most high-profile victim of this purge has been Vladimir Nikolayev, mayor of the far-eastern city of Vladivostok and a member of Mr Putin's United Russia party. Earlier this month, the mayor was arrested. He already had a criminal record, for beating a local official and threatening to kill another, and boasted the underworld nickname of Winnie the Pooh. This time he has been accused of funding his bodyguards from city coffers, of using police cars for private escort duty and of using expensive charter planes for family holidays at taxpayers' expense.

Mr Nikolayev denies all the charges, insisting he has been framed. The mayor owns some of the region's biggest seafood, meat processing and timber firms and came to power in 2004 after his closest rival for the job "tripped" on a powerful grenade that had been placed outside his office days before the election.

Usually, businessmen with backgrounds as colourful as Mr Nikolayev's tend to prefer lower-profile roles. They place trusted lieutenants in important political positions in order to attract less attention.

Africa Anger At US 'Rendition' Of Refugees Who Fled Somalia

Taken from The Independent, 23 March 2007
By Steve Bloomfield in Nairobi

At least 150 people arrested in Kenya after fleeing violence in Somalia have been secretly flown to Somalia and Ethiopia, where they are being held incommunicado in underground prisons, human rights groups say.

It is alleged they were questioned by US and British officials.

Flight manifests seen by The Independent show that three charter planes left Nairobi for Somalia's capital Mogadishu, and Baidoa, the seat of parliament, in January and February, carrying around 80 people suspected of links with al-Qa'ida. The flights left at night, and the manifests appear to have been filled in hastily with many of the details, including the plane's destination, left blank.

Several of the suspects are understood to be held in underground prisons at Mogadishu airport where they are held shackled to the wall. Most have since been sent on to two detention facilities in Addis Ababa. Ethiopia has been accused of routinely torturing political prisoners. A further 50 or 60 people accused of belonging to Ethiopian rebel groups fighting alongside Somalia's Union of Islamic Courts were sent directly to Ethiopia.

Fighting has reignited in Mogadishu this week following Ethiopia's lightning offensive at the end of last year, which drove the Somali Islamists from the capital. On Wednesday at least 21 people were killed and more than 120 wounded in clashes that led to the burning of five uniformed soldiers, who were either Somali or Ethiopian.

The televised incident was reminiscent of events of 1993 when Somalis dragged the corpses of US soldiers through the streets, hastening the US withdrawal from the country.

The suspects deported from Kenya were interrogated beforehand by American FBI officials in Kenyan prisons, where they were accused of having links with al-Qa'ida.

"This is extraordinary rendition," said Maini Kiai, chairman of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission. "Britain and America are involved in interrogating suspects."

Following the US-backed invasion of Somalia by Ethiopian troops, thousands of Somalis have tried to escape the violence by crossing the long, porous border with Kenya. Many of those caught on the Kenya-Somalia border were accused of belonging to the Islamic Courts and refused entry.

At least 150 of those who managed to get through were detained by Kenyan police, including 17 women and 12 children, one a baby of seven months. Many needed medical attention but did not receive it, including a pregnant Tunisian woman who had a bullet lodged in her back.

All were held in Kenyan prisons for several weeks without access to lawyers and family members. As well as being interrogated by the FBI, human rights groups in Nairobi also claimed British officials were involved.

"The Americans had direct access to the prisoners, one on one," said Al-Amin Kimathi of the Muslim Human Rights Forum, adding that US diplomatic vehicles carried the suspects from Nairobi police stations to be questioned.

"Senior Kenyan police officers told us they had nothing to do with the operation," said Mr Kimathi. "It was out of their hands."

Four of the people taken to Somalia were British. But the day after they arrived in Mogadishu, they were questioned by British diplomats then released.

The US has claimed that Somalia's Islamic Courts, which controlled much of the country until December, was run by an al-Qa'ida cell. Ethiopian troops, backed by US intelligence and logistical support, overpowered the Islamic Courts within a few days of fighting at the end of last year. An interim Somali government, which had been confined to its base in Baidoa, has since taken control of Mogadishu, but guerrillas linked to the Islamic Courts have launched an insurgency with almost daily attacks against government and Ethiopian troops. Ugandan peacekeepers, operating under the auspices of the African Union (AU) have also been subjected to attacks since they arrived in the capital last week.

One diplomat who follows events in Somalia closely said reports of interrogation by US officials were "highly plausible". The deportation of the foreign nationals was "one of the prices we pay for the situation we are in".

Anger over the treatment of Kenyan Somalis trying to cross the border has intensified. Groups based in Mombasa have threatened to disrupt this weekend's world cross-country championships. The US embassy in Nairobi has issued a terror alert, warning that an attack may be carried out during the event.

Descent into chaos
# October 1993: Two US Black Hawk helicopters shot down over Mogadishu. Rescue leaves 18 # US soldiers dead. Images of dead Americansdragged through streets prompts pullout.
# August 2000: Abdulkassim Salat Hassan elected President by tribal leaders and senior figures. He appoints Ali Khalif Gelayadh as his Prime Minister. In October they arrive in Mogadishu.
# April 2001: Ethiopian-backed warlords announce intention to form government. More fighting ensues.
# August 2004: Transitional parliament inaugurated in Kenya. In October, Abdullahi Yusuf appointed President.
# November 2005: Assassination attempt on Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Ghedi. Six die but the PM survives.
# February 2006: Transitional parliament meets for the first time since being appointed.
# March-May 2006: Fiercest fighting in almost a decade between rival militias in Mogadishu leaves dozens dead and hundreds injured.
# June-July 2006: Islamic militias seize control of the capital and southern parts of the country.
# December 2006: American-backed Ethiopian and government troops engage and defeat Islamic militias, driving them out of Mogadishu.
# March 2007: Pitched battles break out between insurgents and government and Ethiopian troops. Clashes in Mogadishu result in more pictures of the bodies of soldiers being dragged through the city.

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The following is a good explanation of what is happening in Somalia...

The Big Question: What's going on in Somalia, and is the Horn of Africa on the brink of war?
(from The Independent Published: 08 December 2006)

Why is this an issue now?
Because the UN security council unanimously adopted a resolution on Wednesday night providing for the dispatch of foreign peacekeepers to Somalia, which has triggered warnings that the move will spark all-out war and a regional conflagration. The peacekeepers were authorised to support the weak, unpopular transitional government which has international backing even though it only controls just one town in Somalia, Baidoa. The rest of the desperately poor Horn of Africa country, including the capital Mogadishu, is controlled by a loose coalition of Islamists known as the Union of Islamic Courts, whose fighters have swept across the country since June.

Is that a problem then?
The Americans and their Ethiopian allies think so because of their fear that al-Qa'ida is gaining a foothold in Somalia which had been in the grip of warlords since 1991, following the overthrow of the Somali dictator Mohamed Siad Barre. Washington says Somalia is a haven for those who carried out the US embassy bombings in Nairobi and Tanzania. The transitional government, which was formed two years ago under UN auspices, says it has proof that Islamic radicals from such places as Yemen and Chechnya have been pouring into the country to fight on the side of the Islamic courts.

But the Islamic courts - a purely Somali movement - do include many moderates and have bolstered their popularity by establishing law and order in the regions of southern Somalia which they now control. (The hardliners have shut down some cinemas and told radio stations not to play foreign music.)

The UN itself further poured fuel on the fire when a report by an expert panel claimed that 720 fighters from the Islamic courts had fought alongside Hizbollah during the Lebanon war last summer. The same report also accused Iran of attempting to buy uranium from the Islamists in return for weapons. The report named 11 countries that had violated an arms embargo in force since 1992 by sending weapons to one side or the other. However some of these claims seemed far-fetched to say the least. It was unusual for a UN report, whose conclusions are usually authoritative, to be queried by experts as this one was. But the most dangerous development has been the intervention of outside forces in Somalia as the Islamic courts have gained territory.

Who's involved in the conflict?
Mainly Ethiopia and Eritrea so far. Ethiopia, a largely Christian country which is terrified of an Islamist state on its border, is reported to have deployed up to 8,000 troops in Somalia in defence of the transitional government. The Ethiopian government denies that troops are present and only admits to military advisers. However witnesses last month described the killing of six Ethiopian soldiers and wounding of 20 in a gun battle after Islamic fighters opened fire on a convoy of 80 trucks heading to Baidoa. Eritrea, which fought a bitter 30-year war of independence from Ethiopia, is believed to have a smaller number of troops supporting the Islamic courts.

How did the UN security council get involved?
The security council is supporting a peace process that is supposed to lead to a political settlement as a result of talks between the transitional government and the Islamists - which have so far gone precisely nowhere.

The US has been pressing for the UN partially to lift the arms embargo on the ground that the military expansion by the Islamic courts had created the need for a regional force to stabilise the situation inside the country. Resolution 1725 adopted on Wednesday authorised a regional force of 8,000 to protect the transitional government. It urged the Islamic courts to stop any further military expansion and carry on with the peace talks. It also specified that "those states that border Somalia would not deploy troops " to that country - thereby ensuring that neither Ethiopia nor Eritrea would be part of the peacekeeping force.

However it did not call on the foreign forces believed to be inside the country to pull out. The resolution threatened UN action against those who block peace efforts or attempt to overthrow the government, which could include targeted sanctions.

Britain, like the US a permanent member of the security council, voted in favour but did not join the US in co-sponsoring the resolution amid concerns that the Islamists would see the authorisation of peacekeepers as a provocation and intensify the conflict. Those concerns are shared by some members of the East African group Igad, which is sponsoring the Somalia peace process.

What has been the reaction to the UN decision?
Delight, as you might expect, in Baidoa where the transitional government is based. The Islamic courts were predictably furious. Ethiopia said that the peacekeeping force should have been authorised two years ago, when it was originally proposed, while Eritrea complained that the move was "an attack on the Somali people". The US ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, dismissed accusations that the foreign peacekeepers - expected to come from Uganda and possibly Sudan - would inflame tensions further. He said that the UN was always being accused of not acting in time, and that this is an opportunity to have a regional force in place to prevent the situation from getting worse.

Is there a danger of a wider war?
Very much so, and possibly as soon as the rainy season ends later this month. A likely scenario that has given diplomats the jitters is that the Islamic courts fighters move on Baidoa, which Ethiopia would take as a signal to invade in support of the transitional government and to prevent the Islamists from destabilising parts of Ethiopia. And behind Ethiopia stands America - although in the light of the 1993 US debacle in Somalia it can be safely assumed that no American troops will ever head back to Mogadishu.

The Horn of Africa has long been a cauldron of clan warfare and proxy wars, and nobody wants a return to the kind of conflict seen in 1977-78 between Somalia and Ethiopia over the Ethiopian Ogaden region. The last thing the Somali people need is more outside intervention.

It is hoped, however, that instead of deepening the conflict, the UN move will heighten the political pressure on both sides in Somalia to reach a political settlement, as it will take many months before any foreign peacekeepers can be deployed. But diplomats admit that there is a question mark hanging over the continued international recognition of the transitional government.

Should peacekeeping forces intervene in Somalia?

Yes...
* The Somalis have known nothing but war, drought and famine for decades. The peace they deserve can only be imposed from outside
* Somalia could be a hot-bed of international terror unless foreign troops intervene
* African peacekeepers should be sent in as soon as possible to stop the conflict spreading and engulfing the region

No...
* Foreign intervention has, if anything, made Somalia's problems worse in the past rather than solving them
* The transitional government is deeply unpopular and deserves to be ousted by its Islamist rivals without external involvement
* It will take too long for peacekeepers to be deployed, so they will not be able to prevent the conflict from escalating

Detainee Pleads Ignorance In Bomb Plot

Taken from Yahoo News, Mar 23, 2007
By LOLITA C. BALDOR, Associated Press

A Guantanamo Bay detainee indicted in the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Tanzania says he unwittingly delivered the explosives used by others for the deadly attack.



Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani said he did not know about the assault beforehand and was sorry for the role he played, according to the Pentagon transcript of his hearing at the Guantanamo Bay military base in Cuba. It was released Friday.

"It was without my knowledge what they were doing, but I helped them," he said. "So I apologize to the United States government for what I did. And I'm sorry for what happened to those families who lost, who lost their friends and their beloved ones."

More than 200 people were killed in the simultaneous attacks in August 1998 on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Eleven people were killed and as many as 85 were wounded by the explosion in the parking lot of the embassy in Tanzania; nearly two-thirds of the building was destroyed.

Ghailani, a Tanzanian, is suspected of buying the Nissan truck used to deliver the bomb, supplying the TNT and detonators, and later running a document forgery office for al-Qaida in Afghanistan. He was arrested after a gun battle in Gujrat in eastern Pakistan in July 2004.

Speaking through a military representative, Ghailani said he was first told the TNT he carried was soap for washing horses, then later - after he delivered it - was told it was explosives "for mining for diamonds in Somalia" and also for a Somali training camp.

During the hearing, Ghailani denied buying the truck but said he was there when it was purchased. He said he delivered the TNT to "Fahad Mohammed." Fahid Mohammed Ally Msalam, of Mombasa, Kenya, is one of five suspects added to an indictment in December 1998 in connection with the embassy bombings. He has never been reported captured.

Ghailani also asked that a witness, Khalfan Khamis Mohammad, be called to speak in his defense. Military officials at the hearing, however, said Mohammad, who reportedly identified Ghailani as one of the participants in the bombing, is in federal prison and declined to provide a statement on Ghailani's behalf.

"Maybe he said Ahmed was involved in this and there was two Ahmeds. Me and another one," Ghailani said at the hearing. "He mean another Ahmed. Not me."

At times speaking in English, Ghailani said he went to an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan after the bombing, because he wanted military training for self-defense. He said he was not there to train to be an enemy combatant to attack the United States.

While there, he said, he met Osama bin Laden and lived with a relative of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Mohammed is also at Guantanamo and, according to hearing transcripts, confessed to about three dozen terrorist plots, including the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Ghailani said he later he worked for al-Qaida in Pakistan providing passports and documents to help them get across borders.

The Pentagon also Friday released the hearing transcript of a Malaysian terror suspect who reportedly played a role in financing the 2003 bombing of the J.W. Marriott Hotel in Jakarta, Indonesia, and may have participated in plans to attack a building in the United States.

Mohammed Farik Bin Amin, the Malaysian better known as Zubair, allegedly worked with the al-Qaida linked Southeast Asian terror network known as Jemaah Islamiyah. He is believed to have been tapped to be a suicide operative for an al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles.

Zubair attended the hearing but made no statements on the allegations. The transcript referred to a U.S. bombing plot, but did not mention Los Angeles or provide any other details. The Marriott bombing killed 12 and injured more than 140, including two U.S. citizens.

Speaking through a translator, Zubair asked the hearing officials several questions about the tribunal process, and also asked if the Malaysian government has the right to petition for his extradition. The head of the tribunal said he could not answer the questions.

Ghailani and Zubair are two of 14 high-profile detainees that were moved to Guantanamo in September from a secret CIA prison network. Secret hearings for nine of them have been conducted so far to determine whether they should be declared "enemy combatants" who can be held indefinitely and prosecuted by military tribunals.

If they are declared enemy combatants, they could then be charged and tried under the new military commissions law signed by President Bush in October.

Pentagon spokesman Bryan Whitman said Friday it is unclear when the next hearing will be held because U.S. authorities have to resolve questions about the appearance of witnesses for the last five detainees. He provided no details on the problems.

Also on Friday, a federal judge said she would not delay a military terrorism trial against another Guantanamo detainee, David Hicks of Australia.

Lawyers for Hicks asked that his military commission be suspended until the Supreme Court decides whether the Guantanamo detainees have the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts. An appeals court ruled last month that they do not.

Hicks was captured in Afghanistan and faces charges of providing material support for terrorism. He allegedly fought with the Taliban against U.S.-led forces. He is scheduled to appear before a military commission Monday.

In the law that set up the commissions, Congress stripped federal courts of jurisdiction to get involved in cases involving detainees. The Supreme Court has not said whether it will take up the question. U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said she has no jurisdiction in Hick's case.

US Warns On Corporate Terror Payments After Chiquita Fine

Taken from Yahoo News, Mar 19, 2007
By Associated Free Press

US authorities warned companies Monday they can never deal with terrorists after fruit giant Chiquita agreed to a hefty fine for paying protection money to Colombian paramilitaries.

Chiquita Brands International admitted to the US government in 2003 that it had been paying the money for years to the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC), a right-wing paramilitary group on the US list of terrorists.



Under a settlement confirmed by the US Department of Justice Monday, the Cincinnati-based company agreed to pay a fine of 25 million dollars and to bolster its internal compliance and ethics program.

Chiquita pleaded guilty before Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court in Washington to one count of engaging in transactions with a designated global terrorist group. Judicial officials paid credit to Chiquita's cooperation in their investigation but stressed the gravity of the offense.

"Funding a terrorist organization can never be treated as a cost of doing business," US Attorney Jeffrey Taylor said in a statement.

"American businesses must take note that payments to terrorists are of a whole different category. They are crimes," he said.

Chiquita, through its wholly owned Colombian subsidiary C.I. Bananos de Exportaction S.A. (Banadex), paid the AUC in exchange for protection in the banana-producing areas of Uraba and Santa Marta, Colombia. In the past, the company had also made payments to leftist rebels of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) and National Liberation Army (ELN), both also listed as terror groups, US prosecutors said.

Chiquita, which sold Banadex in 2004, said it had voluntarily disclosed that its subsidiary "had been forced to make payments to right- and left-wing paramilitary groups in Colombia to protect the lives of its employees."

"The payments made by the company were always motivated by our good-faith concern for the safety of our employees," Chiquita chief executive Fernando Aguirre said in a statement last week.

"Nevertheless, we recognized - and acted upon - our legal obligation to inform the DoJ of this admittedly difficult situation."

According to the US investigation, Chiquita made over 100 payments to the AUC amounting to more than 1.7 million dollars, masked in its corporate records as contributions for "security."

U.S. Cautions Foreign Companies On Iran Deals

Taken from The New York Times,March 21, 2007
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN

WASHINGTON, March 20 — For all its efforts to apply economic and political pressure on Iran over its nuclear program, the United States has never used a potentially potent tool in its arsenal — penalties on foreign companies that assist Iran in producing oil and natural gas.

That may be about to change. The Bush administration has quietly been warning energy companies, including Shell, Repsol and SKS, the Malaysian oil company, as well as the governments of China, India, Pakistan and Malaysia, that penalties are possible if they pursue energy deals with Iran.

As a result, several huge projects planned for Iran could be vulnerable. These include one possible $10 billion project by Royal Dutch Shell and the Spanish oil company, Repsol YPF, to develop a natural gas field offshore in Iran, and a $20 billion venture by SKS Ventures of Malaysia to produce natural gas in Iran’s Golshan and Ferdows fields.

In recent months, the administration has tried to avoid diplomatic or political controversies as a result of its jawboning. But the potential for sanctions is posing a quandary for the administration by setting up a possible fight with Europe if it proceeds with them or a fight with Congress if it does not.

One factor behind the warnings, administration officials acknowledge, is that the Democratic-controlled Congress appears to be moving quickly to pass a law that would make sanctions mandatory out of concern about Iran’s suspected nuclear arms program and support for terrorism.

“What we’re trying to do is create multiple points of pressure on Iran in both the private and public sector,” said R. Nicholas Burns, the under secretary of state for political affairs. “These companies also need to know that the attitude of Congress on their activities in Iran is hardening.”

But in orchestrating all this pressure on Iran, President Bush and his aides have been careful to avoid any kind of boycott or other threat that might cause oil and gas prices to soar and strangle the economies of the West.

Short of a cutoff, the administration clearly wants to make it harder for Iran to tap into its oil and gas reserves to increase exports in the future. Iran’s energy output has lagged in recent years, and many experts say the country faces the possibility of not having enough oil to export within as little as 10 years.

Last month, the United States ambassador to Spain, Eduardo Aguirre Jr., met with Repsol executives in Madrid to advise them against going forward with a deal to develop Iran’s South Pars field, which contains one of the world’s biggest natural gas deposits. The ambassador was told that the deal was not yet final, according to American and Repsol officials.

“No investment is being made at present,” said a Repsol spokesman in Madrid, who asked not to be identified by name. “There will not be a decision on this until next year.”

The messages to oil companies mark the latest episode in a long campaign of pressure that reached a turning point in December, when the administration won approval of a United Nations Security Council resolution designating 10 Iranian companies and a dozen individuals as off-limits for international financial dealings.

Another resolution designating an additional 15 individuals and 13 Iranian government and business groups, including a leading Iranian bank, could be approved later this week. The administration, using the Security Council list, wants virtually all of the world’s banks and businesses to boycott all of these Iranian entities.

Despite the stepped up American pressure, some Democratic leaders in Congress are complaining that the administration has not gone far enough.

They want Mr. Bush to invoke a statute enacted in 1996 that obliges the United States government to punish any foreign energy company doing business with Iran unless the president waives the sanction on national security grounds.

“This administration has done nothing to punish Iran,” said Representative Tom Lantos, a Democrat of California who is chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “The method I don’t favor on Iran is to bomb their nuclear facilities. The method I favor is to starve them of resources, which can only be done through sanctions.”

After the bill passed a decade ago, European governments and companies vehemently objected, charging that it amounted to a brazen case of extra-territoriality, the term for one nation imposing its laws on foreign companies and sovereign nations.

At the time, President Bill Clinton, acting to avoid a confrontation with Europe and in part to send a conciliatory message to Iran when moderates seemed to be vying for power, waived the sanctions on several European companies, including Total, the leading French oil concern.

Recalling that precedent, Mr. Lantos said his bill would strip the president of the ability to waive sanctions on Iran on national security grounds. The Bush administration opposes that provision as a weakening of presidential prerogatives in foreign policy.

A spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that she supported Mr. Lantos’s bill. Mr. Lantos says he is confident he can persuade lawmakers to pass his bill with a big enough majority to override a presidential veto.

The existing sanctions law gives Washington the option to choose among several penalties, including denial of government credits to companies that deal with the foreign oil company, denial of export licenses and a ban on United States government procurement or imports from these companies.

Administration officials say the reason no decisions have been made on whether to invoke or waive sanctions is that the energy exploration deals by Shell, Repsol, China, Malaysia, China and Pakistan are all still in an embryonic stage and that it is better to head them off by using persuasion than penalties.

But they also say that the administration does not want to take any action now that would divide the United States from its allies in Europe on Iran, or to provoke China, India and Pakistan, whose support Washington needs for other foreign policy objectives.

A senior European envoy involved in discussions over Iran said that Europeans would be unhappy with American sanctions against private oil companies, but that they also understood the importance of pressing the Tehran government. “As long as we want to avoid a war with Iran, we have to try sanctions,” he said.

The steps being contemplated are part of a web of pressures, American and European officials say, which could be invoked in coming months. These include plans to sanction more Iranian banks, beyond the two that have already been hit by sanctions and barred from obtaining dollars from American banks.

The aim, American officials say, is to prevent Iran from obtaining dollars, the world’s reserve currency, for use in the purchase of goods or services. Iranian leaders have said that American sanctions are forcing them to sell oil for euros or other currencies, even though oil is traded on the international markets in dollars.

In a separate set of actions, American and European officials say that recent pressure on European governments has led several to reduce or to pledge to reduce their government-backed credit guarantees for deals with Iran.

Germany had $6.2 billion in outstanding export credits to Iran as of 2005, according to figures circulating at the United Nations. But Germany reported recently that after cutting back credits by 60 percent in the last two years, it planned further cutbacks this year.

Japan, which had $1.9 billion in credits as of 2005, has also informed the United States that it has granted no medium- or long-term credit insurance since last June and has cut short-term credits. American officials say they have received similar pledges from Italy and France to cut back their export credits.

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Latest news: Total boss quizzed in Iran probe
The boss of French oil giant Total is being questioned by police as part of a probe into alleged corruption in Iran. Total said Christophe de Margerie and two employees were being interviewed about the firm's role in the South Pars natural gas project in Iran. The company said it was "confident" the investigation would not uncover any illegal activities. The inquiry concerns allegations that illegal payments were made to win the gas contract in 1997. Mr de Margerie was also placed under investigation last year over claims he paid bribes to win bids in Iraq.

Between 1995 and 1999 he headed Total's Middle East operations, then became head of exploration and production before taking the role of chief executive. A number of global figures have been caught up in the so-called Iraq oil-for-food scandal. A French judge is investigating claims that Mr de Margerie paid illegal kickbacks to win favours for his company between 1996 and 2002. The oil-for-food scandal damaged the reputation of former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan, who took personal responsibility for failures at the programme last year.

Iranian Regime Must Be Toppled

Former US ambassador to UN John Bolton tells Ynet world has waited too long and has done too little to restrain Iran, deal with its nuclear program. Bolton does not advocate military action, but says current diplomatic efforts have proved futile

Taken from YNet News, Israel, 03.23.07
By Yitzhak Benhorin

WASHINGTON - John Bolton, the outgoing American ambassador to the UN, said that his country should have launched efforts to topple the Mullahs' regime in Iran four years ago. In a special interview, Bolton told Ynet that he was disappointed by Russia's support of Iran in the UN Security Council, and the failure of diplomatic efforts to address the Iranian nuclear threat.

Bolton served as undersecretary of state for arms control during George W. Bush's firs term in office, and has been the US ambassador to the UN in the past 17 months.

"I'd dealt with the Russians extensively…on a range of proliferation matters. In the discussions on the Security Council over Iran, Russia emerged as Iran's biggest protector, for a variety of reasons, some commercial, some strategic, some just political, as opposition to the United States.
"China I think was content to follow Russia's lead in the Security Council, just the reverse of what they did with North Korea where China was the main actor and Russia followed China," he stated.

Bolton explained that the Russians played a major role in helping Iran deal with the diplomatic steps taken against it.

"Russia helped Iran by trying to explain to them that they should not position themselves in a way that maximized the strength of the sanctions against them and to work out where Russia had commercial interests like the Busher nuclear power facility, and to protect and shield as much of that as they could," he said.

Why, in your opinion, did Russia pull out its experts from the Busher nuclear reactor site?
"That was an interesting piece of information, I'd like to see if that really is borne out, but the Russians have been in a dispute over the fuel rods for four years, and we've been urging them for four years not to ship the fuel rods.

"There are obviously different points of view inside Russia, but I think that the nuclear scientists… know Iran is pursuing nuclear weapons. Maybe the Foreign Ministry hasn't yet figured it out."

According to Bolton, the US "should certainly be increasing the pressure, It's certainly got to be more than we got from the sanctions the Security Council has imposed or will impose in this next resolution.

"I think we've had some success in the financial institutions area, I think we should do more through the proliferation security initiative to deny Iran access to materials and technology that they need. But I think ultimately the only answer to Iran's pursuit of nuclear weapons is to overthrow the current regime in Tehran. They've been pursuing nuclear weapons for almost 20 years.

"We do have historical evidence that when a regime that's been pursuing nuclear weapons changes that there's an opportunity to give up this pursuit. South Africa is one example, the collapse of the Soviet Union saw Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Belarus give back to Russia Soviet-era weapons. Libya gave up its weapons after it saw what we had done to Saddam Hussein."

Are there any forces inside Iran that are working to overthrow the regime?
"I think there are a lot of Iranians that are unsatisfied with the regime, I think that there is more unrest there than what people believe, I think that the government is constrained because of the fall of oil prices and there is mismanagement of the oil sector of Iran's economy, they've got fewer resources to spread around to keep the populous happy.

"There's a large Iranian diaspora that know what the situation is. So, I think that there are a lot of possibilities. It won't necessarily be easy or quick, but that's not to say we shouldn't be pursuing it.

"In think it's very close to the point where Iran will have completely indigenous mastery over the fuel sites, that is to say the point in which stopping the things from the outside will not be sufficient, so I don't think we have much time. That's why all these negotiations with the Europeans have played to Iran's advantage, because time is on their side, time is not on our side."

How can the Iranian regime be toppled?
"Well, I wish we had started four years ago, but I think through internal dissent and outside pressure, those in general terms are what we have to do."

Not through military action?
"I don't think military force is the preferable way to go. I don't rule military force out because as unpalatable as military force might be, Iran with nuclear weapons is even worse. I think you have to show you have tried the alternatives, I think we've spent too much time on this EU-three diplomacy, I think now is the time to ramp up the pressure very dramatically."

What should Israel do? Wait for the world to resolve this?
"I think Israel has to make its own decisions…I think any country threatened with its own survival at stake has to be prepared to do what it has to do. I wouldn't second guess that."

What would be the world's reaction if Israel attacks Iran?
"I'm sure a lot of people would be outraged, they'd be outraged if the United States decided to attack. That's why, if you want to avoid that possibility, then increased pressure on Iran now is important, and the inability of the Security Council to pass strong sanctions resolutions doesn’t augur well for a peaceful outcome."

Is there a way to on monitor the use of nuclear weapons by terror organizations?
"It's very hard, and I think we're all acutely aware of the limitations on what we know, which is why it is so important and such a priority under the Bush doctrine to deny rogue states and terrorist groups nuclear weapons in the first place."

Bolton, who as ambassador to the UN pushed for the approval of Resolution 1701 in the Security Council, believes that the UN failed in implementing it.

"I was quite concerned during that entire process that we're going to end up with UNIFIL 2, which has been ineffective since it was put on the ground in 1979, and I'm afraid this is what we've come to, even though we call it enhanced UNIFIL, even though it's troops from Italy and France, in other words troops from real armies.

"It's not sealing the border with Syria, Hizbullah is being rearmed, we made a conscious decision in 1701 to put off the question of disarming Hizbullah until another resolution and we're nowhere close to coming back to that.

"So, I don't think 1701 has achieved what the United States at lease said at the outset was our objective, which was to use the conflict to change the strategic circumstances in the region and to avoid yet another Middle East ceasefire that represents simply a return to the status quo antebellum."
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Today, the 15-member U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to impose new sanctions on Iran because of its refusal to suspend its uranium enrichment program. The acting U.S. representative to the United Nations, Alejandro D. Wolff, said after the vote: "While we hope that Iran complies with this resolution ... the United States is fully prepared to take additional measures in 60 days should Iran choose another course." He didn't elaborate.

Iran also claimed today that 15 British sailors and marines had confessed to entering its waters in an act of "blatant aggression," an escalation of Tehran's rhetoric over the confrontation. Iran's top military official, Gen. Ali Reza Afshar, said the sailors and marines were moved to Tehran and under interrogation "confessed to illegal entry" and an "aggression into the Islamic Republic of Iran's waters." Afshar did not say what would happen to the sailors. He accused Britain of trying to cover up the incursion, saying it should "refrain from putting the blame on others."

Here is a link to a nice interview done by Newsnight with John Bolton with regards to the Iraq War Bolton: Few regrets over Iraq

German Neo-Nazi Fear Over Police Cadets

Taken from The Times, UK, March 23, 2007
By Roger Boyes in Berlin

Fears that the German police force contains neo-Nazi sympathisers have been sparked after disdainful cadets delivered an extraordinary rebuff to a Holocaust survivor.

Students at the Berlin police academy refused to listen to the harrowing testimony of Isaak Behar, 83, who had been invited to lecture them on his experiences as a Jew in the Third Reich. Mr Behar lost his parents and his two sisters in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

The cadets shouted that they did not want to hear about the Holocaust any more, and said that the Jewish community was emotionally blackmailing Germany, according to German press reports. Dieter Glietsch, Berlin’s police commissioner, has opened an investigation.

German police officers are given compulsory Holocaust-awareness training. Visits to sites where Nazis murdered or deported Jews are part of the curriculum. Mr Behar and other Jewish survivors frequently lecture at police and army colleges. “There have always been antiSemitic incidents in the army as well as the police,” said Mr Behar. “But senior officers take action when they hear of them.”

This episode, though, which occurred on Feb 27, is seen as part of a broader and more menacing trend. Last month it was revealed that at least three police bodyguards assigned to protect Michael Friedman, a leading Jewish activist, were neo-Nazi sympathisers.

One dressed in his free time in a black SS uniform and put photographs of himself on the internet. Another printed out a fake certificate declaring himself to be a member of the SS “M.F” Division — M.F. being the intitals of Michael Friedman, who was for many years the deputy chairman of the German Jewish community. The wording of the certificate began: “In the Name of the Föhrer . . .” mimicking a genuine SS document.

Yet another police guard stored the Nazi anthem, the Horst Wessel song, on his computer and played it out loud when colleagues were in the room. The policemen claimed that they were no more than harmless pranks.

But Mr Friedman, who has received many death threats because of his vociferous support for Jewish causes, is taking the case seriously. He has demanded a parliamentary inquiry from the state of Hesse, which is responsible for protecting him. According to the mass circulation newspaper Bild, one of the investigated bodguards threatened “to spill the beans about far-right activity at Frankfurt police headquarters” if charges were pressed against him.

The bodyguards have been suspended from duty. The German press and Police Workers’ Association have called for their dismissal from the force.

“These incidents show that far-right thinking is now anchored in the mainstream of German society,” said Mr Friedman, “and it is increasingly obvious in the police force”.

That sentiment was echoed by Andreas Nachama, a leading rabbi. “This antisemitism is appearing everywhere and it is as threatening as it is reprehensible.”

Insiders say that police antisemitism is usually more discreet, confined to comments at the police station after a stint of duty.

The guarding of Jewish sites, from synagogues to the Jewish Museum in Berlin, is particularly unpopular among the police rank-and-file. Their task is to head off neo-Nazi attacks or report antisemitic symbols daubed on buildings overnight.

Hate crimes
# Displaying Nazi symbols and the production of pro-Nazi materials is illegal in Germany
# Overt support for neo-Nazi groups rose after reunification of East and West Germany, with attacks on immigrant communities
# Four men linked to neo-Nazi groups firebombed a house of Turkish immigrants in Solingen in 1993, killing five
# Marius Schoeberl, 16, was murdered in 2002 by three youths in East Germany because he looked Jewish
# Support is growing for the German far-right National Democratic Party

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The consensus is that young Germans are fed up with having the Holocaust shoved down their throats and can you blame them? Whilst we should never forget the evils of the Holocaust - the new generation of Germans need to be given a fresh chance without the constant reminders of what their grandfathers did nor should they take responsibly for their actions. What would help is if Germany paid back what it stole from the Jews that lived in Germany and compensated the Jewish families. To this date there are many Jews still waiting to be compensated but are being ignored by the German government. The German chancellor is a joke, possibly one of the worst female leaders in the world. Incidentally, she is to receive an honorary doctorate of philosophy from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem next month. Apparently she is to be honored by the university in recognition of her lifelong dedication to the principles of democracy and in appreciation of her warm and constant friendship for the people and State of Israel. It is more likely she is getting her degree for supplying Israel with two free nuclear submarines as well as various reduced rate arsenal. If she was going to be an advocate for democracy then she would’ve done justice to the plight of the Palestinians living in the occupied territories as well as those living in Israel and the refugees who want to return currently living outside Israel.

Israel To Brand Arabs As Peace Spoilers

The following has been extracted from the The Jerusalem Post, Mar. 23, 2007, By HERB KEINON:

Israel is gearing up for a diplomatic campaign that will paint the Arab world as the recalcitrant party if it does not drop the article in the Arab peace initiative that calls for the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees, The Jerusalem Post has learned.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has been saying for months that there were positive elements in the Saudi peace initiative, which preceded the Arab initiative by a month and did not include a clause calling for the "right of return" for Palestinian refugees. On Thursday, he reiterated that elements of the plan were acceptable to Israel. The proposal will be taken up at the Arab League summit scheduled for Wednesday and Thursday in Riyadh.

"I am the one who said the Saudi initiative was interesting, and that there are elements that I would be willing to accept and that it could be a basis for contact between us and moderate Arab elements," Olmert said.

The Saudi initiative from February 2002 calls for a full Israeli withdrawal to the pre-1967 lines in exchange for normalization of relations. The Arab peace initiative, launched in Beirut a month later, added the clause regarding the refugees.

"This government will not miss out on an opportunity to engage in talks with our enemies," Olmert said. "This includes making concessions. We will maneuver responsibly and with care." Israel was willing to make "sweeping, painful and tough concessions," he added.

In the last few weeks - through comments such as those by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni in the Palestinian press about the need to amend the initiative to make it palatable to Israel, and through quiet diplomacy involving the US - there have been attempts to get the Arab League members to drop the refugee clause.

One senior government official said if the League refused to amend the plan, reconfirming it with the knowledge that it is something Israel could not accept, then Israel would embark on a campaign to cast them in the role of naysayers who once again missed an opportunity.

Arab diplomats said the US has quietly joined Israel in urging Arab leaders to reformulate the plan, even as key Arab diplomats - including Arab League Secretary-General Amr Moussa - have publicly come out against the idea.

Three Arab diplomats in different Arab capitals said Washington has been pressing for changes to place the offer in line with the road map peace plan. The road map does not deal much with the refugee issue, beyond calling for an "agreed, just, fair and realistic solution to the refugee issue." The road map also does not specify the borders - as the Arab peace initiative does - of a future Palestinian state.

Border Guard Policemen Admit They Abused Palestinian Teen

Policemen who were filmed beating youth at Hawara village questioned by police Friday, admit to act

Taken from YNet News, Israel, 03.23.07
By Efrat Weiss

The three Border Guard policemen who were caught on camera beating a Palestinian teen in the Hawara village, near Nablus, Wednesday, were questioned Friday morning by the Police Investigation Unit in Tel Aviv.



Two of them are suspected of excessive use of force. Sources involved in the investigation said that the suspects admitted to the act.

On Thursday, Border Guard chief Hassein Fares ordered that the three policemen be suspended. The Police Investigation Unit has also contacted the Palestinian teen, Hindawi Qawarik, who was allegedly abused by the officers and will summon him to give his testimony soon.

According to Qawarik, the policemen detained him and his friends after they were leaving school, and then "two of the policemen started hitting me in the legs with a rifle, punching me, slamming my head against the door of a nearby container, pushing me to the floor and hitting me in the head."

Officers may face jail time
Hassein said Thursday, in response to the incident, "I view such behavior as extremely severe. The matter will be probed by the Police Investigation Unit.

"Border Guard fighters work to protect the citizens of Israel and are responsible for thwarting hostile terrorist acts, while dealing with numerous acts of violence carried out against them," he added.

The head of the team investigating the incident, Avi Peretz, said that the investigation would not take long as the evidence was solid and "one picture is worth a thousand words."

Peretz estimated that the investigation would last a week or two and hat its findings would then be handed over to the State Prosecutor's Office.

"We still have to listen to the suspects' version. In similar cases in the past, soldiers were tried and even went to jail," he said.

Ali Waked contributed to the report

Letter From Israel: Israel's Soldiers Engage In Some Soul Searching

Taken from the International Herald Tribune
Steven Erlanger, March 22, 2007

JERUSALEM: Some of Jerusalem's nicest people gathered the other night to listen to a talk by an Israeli soldier, troubled by how he and some of his colleagues had behaved in the occupied West Bank.

The small crowd was a bit disheveled, with lots of untamed hair and sensible shoes. Largely English- speaking, they were generally somewhere on the left of Israel's wide political spectrum, and they listened earnestly as Mikhael Manekin, 27, spoke quietly about his four years of service with the Golani infantry brigade in the West Bank.

Manekin and his colleagues often manned checkpoints around Hebron and Nablus, controlling Palestinian movement to try to ensure that suicide bombers could not infiltrate Israeli cities. The checkpoints are part of a security network, including the separation barrier, that protects Israel, but also deeply discommodes ordinary Palestinians who wouldn't consider strapping on a bomb.

Manekin, who was a first lieutenant, is the director of Breaking the Silence, a group of former soldiers, shocked at their own misconduct and that of others, who have gathered to collect their stories and bear witness. Since 2004, the group has collected testimonies from nearly 400 soldiers (in English, www.shovrimshtika.org/ index_e.asp).

He spoke of how some soldiers humiliate or beat Palestinians to keep crowds in line, how soldiers are taught to be aggressive, but how most behave within decent moral limits — and of how the fear that hundreds of people could erupt in anger wears at the soul and turns young men callous.

"I don't think this is a problem of the military," he said. "It's a problem of the society. We're sending these kids in our name. And there has to be a space to talk of bad things. It's not enough to say, 'But there's Palestinian terrorism,' which there is, but that's too easy."

In the aftermath of Israel's inconclusive summer war against Lebanon, Manekin's stories struck an ambivalent note even in this audience at the Yakar Center for Social Concern, founded in 1992 to promote debate and dialogue among Israelis and their neighbors. Run by Benjamin Pogrund, a distinguished journalist from South Africa, the center embraces difficult topics like Israeli Arabs, settlements, religious orthodoxy and challenges to democracy.

There is a general gloominess in Israel after the Lebanese war, a sense that neither the government nor the army performed very well.

The government is one thing, but the army is the core institution of this embattled state, and a fine new film about the army's last days in Lebanon in 2000, "Beaufort," is being praised for its depiction of the sensitive Israeli soldier bravely doing his duty despite his fear and the usual political and military confusion.

While criticism of the army is quite acceptable in Israel's democracy, and not just on the left, Breaking the Silence left some raw feelings here.

One man stood and said Manekin and his friends were hurting Israel, especially its image abroad, to salve their own consciences. Many in the audience nodded in agreement. Tall and dignified, about 45, the man said that he, too, had served in the West Bank, "and I'm proud of what I did there to defend Israelis."

It's crucial to intimidate people at checkpoints to keep them cowed, he said, his voice shaking a little, "because we are so few there and they are so many."

Then he said: "These people are not like us! They come up to our faces and they lie to us!"
That was enough for Uriel Simon, 77, a professor emeritus of Biblical Studies at Bar-Ilan University and a noted religious dove.

"As for liars," he said, then paused. "My father was a liar. My grandfather was a liar. How else did we cross lines to get to this country? We stayed alive by lying. We lied to the Russians, we lied to the Germans, we lied to the British! We lie for survival! Jacob the Liar was my father!" he said.

As for the Palestinians, he said, "of course they lie! Everyone lies at a checkpoint! We lied at checkpoints, too."

Many Israelis fled a hostile Europe, Simon said. (His father, Ernst, a teacher and founder with Martin Buber of an early peace movement, Brit Shalom, came from Germany.) "Americans hate liars," he said. "But we came from Europe, the worst place in the world, the place that gave us both Fascism and Communism."

Israelis needed to remember, he said, "Buber's demarcation line: What is necessary is allowed, but what is not necessary is forbidden."

Everyone is afraid of mirrors, he said, readjusting the knitted kippa on his nimbus of white hair. "We hate the mirror. We don't want to look at ourselves. We don't like photographs of us — we say, 'Oh, that's not a very good likeness.' We want to be much nicer than we are. But here there are also prophets who are mirrors, who are not afraid of kings and generals. The prophet says: 'You are ugly,' and we don't want to hear it, but we have to look at the mirror honestly, without fear."

The army is central to Israel, and the problems are complicated, he said. At the beginning of the summer war, as in the beginning of any war, including Iraq, "there's a euphoria that derives from an almost irrational belief in power and force, that the sword can cut through all the slow processes."

It's more enthralling if, like Israel, "you have so much power that you can't use, and suddenly you can."

But the euphoria is always short- lived, he said.

"We bomb southern Lebanon like mad and still they continue to send missiles at us," he said.
The frustration is even more intense "for a people like Israel forced to live on its sword, for who will save this little state?" he asked. "The United Nations? The good will of America? We'd be overrun 10 times before America awakes, even if it wants to awake. So every 10-year-old knows the sheer importance of the Israeli Army, and the more you need it, the more you expect from it."

At the end of the evening, Simon said, he had gone to talk to the tall man who had been so upset.
"He said to me, 'You won't believe me, but I agree with 90 percent of what you said.'" Simon laughed softly. "It just showed how confused he was."

UN Chief Raps IAF Lebanon Overflights

In Washington, former U.N. Ambassador John R. Bolton stated that the US encouraged Isreal to continue it's bombing of Lebanon to eliminate Hezbollah. He defended the war with Hezbollah as a legitimate act of self-defense. At the same time Israeli Vice-Premier Shimon Peres told a panel investigating the government's handling of last year's war in Lebanon that Israel' decision to invade was a mistake and the military was unprepared, according to testimony made public. Peres also said Hezbollah did a better job of handling media coverage than the Israelis did. The 15-page transcript of his appearance before the commission last November has large swathes deleted by Israel's military censors on security grounds, but nevertheless provides insights into the veteran statesman's thinking. "The greatest mistake is the very fact of war," he told the commission. "If it had been up to me, I would not have gone into this war." Israel has now given a name to the failed war in the Lebanon. It has now been called 'Second Lebanon War'. Other contenders for the name included "Operation Peace of the Galilee 2" and "The Northern War." The war has long been over, it is time to discuss peace but this still happens...

Taken from The Jerusalem Post, Mar. 17, 2007
By YAAKOV KATZ
Herb Keinon and AP contributed to this report

Citing continued violations of the Blue Line international border between Israel and Lebanon, United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon slammed Israel in a report he submitted to the Security Council last week on the implementation of Resolution 1701 that ended the Lebanon war last summer.

Contradicting claims by high-ranking IAF officers that Israel had dramatically reduced the number of flights over Lebanon, Ban claimed the opposite saying that UNIFIL had reported an increase in overflights in February and March. On some days, the report claimed, Israel violated Lebanese airspace more than 10 times with flights by fighter jets, intelligence-gathering planes and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

In response, a high-ranking IAF officer told The Jerusalem Post that Israel planned to continue flying over Lebanon until the Lebanese fully implemented 1701, which included the return of abducted reservists Eldad Regev and Ehud Goldwasser, and put an end to the arms smuggling to Hizbullah across the Syrian border.

Ban noted reports by UNIFIL of increased tensions between the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and IDF along the Blue Line, citing a number of cases in which soldiers from both militaries pointed their weapons at one another.

Ban also took Israel to task on its repeated refusal to transfer data related to the use of cluster bombs by the IDF during the Lebanon war. The report revealed the extent of the use of cluster bombs, claiming that Israel had dropped them on 854 targets covering more than 34 million square meters.

According to the report, each strike location contains hundreds of individual bomblets or sub-munitions and as of February 22, the bomblets have caused 22 civilian deaths and 159 injuries.

"I call on the government of Israel, once again, to review its policy of overflights through Lebanese airspace, which are a continuing violation of Resolution 1701 (2006), and most urgently to provide the UN with all information on cluster munitions fired during the 2006 conflict," Ban wrote in the report.

In response, a senior government official said that Israel's use of cluster bombs was in "complete compliance with international law" and came in the face of "overwhelming attacks" against Israeli civilian targets.

Regarding Israeli claims that Syria was smuggling weapons into Lebanon, Ban suggested that Security Council members weigh supporting an "independent assessment mission to consider the monitoring of the border."

He said the authentication of detailed information from Israel about alleged breaches of the arms embargo across the Lebanese-Syrian border would require independent military assessment.

In the report, Ban warned that without progress on "core issues" including the abducted soldiers and Lebanese prisoners as well as the disputed Sheba Farms and Israeli overflights, "progress on 1701 could be severely tested in the months to come."

Ban said he was nonetheless pleased that the overall commitment of the governments of Israel and Lebanon to the resolution "remains strong."

Israel Won't Receive Norwegian Envoy (& Angry At The US For Talking With Palestinian Ministers)

Taken from The Jerusalem Post, Mar. 20, 2007
By HERB KEINON & Associated Press

Israeli officials will not meet with foreign diplomats who meet Hamas members of the new Palestinian Authority unity government during the same trip, senior government officials indicated on Tuesday.

Foreign Ministry Director-General Aharon Abramovitch declined to meet the deputy Norwegian Foreign Minister Raymond Johansen on Tuesday, a day after Johansen met in Gaza with PA Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.

Asked whether this was now Israel's official policy, senior officials in the Prime Minister's Office referred to the cabinet decision from April 11, 2006, following the establishment of the Hamas government, which they said remained in effect.

According to that decision, "Foreign dignitaries who visit the area and meet with Hamas officials will not be received by Israeli officials for meetings." Nevertheless, "logistical problems" were the reason the Foreign Ministry gave the Norwegians for canceling the meeting. Johansen's spokeswoman, Gry Larsen, said the meeting scheduled at the Foreign Ministry had been called off, but did not give further details.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev said that "giving legitimacy and recognition to an extremist political personality or individual will only give legitimacy and recognition to that individual's extremist agenda. Hamas is a terrorist organization, not only under Israeli law, but also under EU, Canadian, Japanese and Australian law." Regev said that "giving legitimacy and recognition to the extremists will not in any way further the peace process." By contrast, neither the Foreign Ministry nor the Prime Minister's Office would comment on a meeting Tuesday between PA Finance Minister Salaam Fayad and the US consul-general in Jerusalem, Jacob Walles.

US officials have said in recent days that the US would continue to meet non-Hamas officials with whom it has met in the past, even if they were members of the new government. It was not clear, however, whether the US would invite these officials to Washington, or only meet them on visits here.

PA Information Minister Mustafa Barghouti said that the Fayad-Walles meeting took place in Ramallah. Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, spokeswoman for the US consulate, would not confirm the meeting, saying that she did not give out information about Walles's schedule.

While the US will continue to meet with Fayad, neither it nor the EU has changed its policy regarding the PA government, a position that Jerusalem applauded.

The United States and the European Union announced Monday night in Washington that the economic embargo would remain in effect despite the formation of the PA unity government.

The announcement came at a joint press conference in Washington following a meeting between US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier, EU foreign policy chairman Javier Solana, and European Commissioner for External Relations Benita Ferrero-Waldner.

Regev responded by saying that "the international community is stating clearly that this Hamas led government has not met the three benchmarks, and as a result will not be given legitimacy and will not be worked with."

As an indication that neither the US or EU planned to lift its financial embargo of the PA, Ferrero-Waldner said that the EU would continue to funnel funds to the Palestinians using the temporary international mechanism, which bypasses the PA government, for another three months.

Rice, who is expected in Israel on Sunday, spoke against the clause in the new PA platform calling for the "right of resistance."

"I'm not going to try to interpret what the 'right of resistance' means, but I'll tell you, it doesn't sound very good to me," Rice said. "So I would put the question to the Palestinian government and to its prime minister: Do you mean the right of resistance by violence? And let's get an answer."

Olmert, meanwhile, discussed the situation on Tuesday with visiting Slovak Prime Minister Robert Fico. Olmert told Fico, whose country is an EU member and also currently on the UN Security Council, that Israel would not have any contact with the new PA government or any of its ministers.

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The US for once is acting in the interest of the world by telling Israel to be quiet during their contacts with Mr Fayyad, the Palestinian finance minister in a move which underlined a difference between Israel and its closest allies over their approach to the new coalition government. The US is also hoping to do the same with Syria with regards to the issue of the Golan Heights but it's difficult to state how far the talks with Syria have progressed. Israel's cabinet on Sunday approved a policy of having no contacts with ministers in the new "national unity" Palestinian Authority whether they were in Hamas or not. Norway and the US defied Israel and began talks that hopefully will bring an end to the destruction that is happening in Israel and Palestine. The only people that won't benefit is Israel. The Norwegian delegates have been harshly criticised by Israel. Anything that brings peace to the region should be encouraged. Israel easily attacked Norway for its handling but it never made any comments when Russia were talking to Hamas. Tides are changing, a number of European countries, including Britain & Sweden believe that the EU should have contacts with a range of non-Hamas ministers and consider ways of co-ordinating aid with Mr Fayyad. Jaw Jaw is better than War War.