http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA21Ak01.html

What the Iran 'nuclear issue' is really about
By Chris Cook

It is said that there is the reason they give; and then there is the real reason. Nowhere is this more true, perhaps, than in Iran.

My experience with Iran began four and a half years ago in June 2001 when, through my Iranian business partner, I wrote to the then governor of the Iranian central bank, Dr Mohsen Nourbakhsh.

This letter was written on the basis of my experience as a former
director of the International Petroleum Exchange and in the aftermath of allegations I made in relation to market manipulation on the IPE the previous year, which were dismissed by a commissioner appointed by the exchange. I still regret that I used the description "systematic" rather than "systemic" of this alleged manipulation, but that is another story.

In this letter I pointed out that the structure of global oil markets massively favors intermediary traders and particularly investment banks, and that both consumers and producers such as Iran are adversely affected by this. I recommended that Iran consider as a matter of urgency the creation of a Middle Eastern energy exchange, and particularly a new Persian Gulf benchmark oil price.

It is therefore with wry amusement that I have seen a myth being widely propagated on the Internet that the genesis of this "Iran bourse" project is a wish to subvert the US dollar by denominating oil pricing in euros.

As anyone familiar with the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries will know, the denomination of oil sales in currencies other than the dollar is not a new subject, and as anyone familiar with economics will tell you, the denomination of oil sales is merely a transactional issue: what matters is in what assets (or, in the case of the United States, liabilities ) these proceeds are then invested.

After a couple of years of apparent inaction, my colleague and I were invited to put together a consortium to tender for a project to create such an exchange and, after a presentation at the central bank in Tehran in May 2004, we were successful, as reported in The Guardian at the time. We subsequently learned that the delay had been due to initial opposition from the Saudis and this opposition was withdrawn after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the subsequent US-led invasion of Iraq.

A major feasibility study was carried out in the summer of 2004 - for which we still have not been paid by the Iranian Oil Ministry - and after this, the process became bogged down in turf battles between the Oil Ministry and the Ministry for the Economy.

We met president Mohammad Khatami in December 2004 to resolve this problem and then spent considerable time with his close advisers, from whom we received powerful backing. Progress was made, to the extent that an exchange entity was incorporated and premises purchased on Kish Island in the Persian Gulf.

In the second quarter of 2005 the real opposition from within the Oil Ministry - from factions opposed to shedding any light on the sales regime - was becoming apparent. However, as the battle was about to be joined, Khatami's period in office came to an end and the presidential election in August intervened.

Neither we, nor anyone we knew, expected the result of the election, still less the events after it. Three times over a period of three months an oil minister was nominated by the new president, Mahmud Ahmadinejad, from among his trusted colleagues and three times they were turned down by the majlis (Iranian parliament), until finally an experienced insider was appointed in early December. Only now are further levels of appointments being made by the new minister.

Ahmadinejad is on record as saying that he favors transparency in the Iranian oil market. As anyone familiar with the City of London and Wall Street will know, transparency is the enemy of private profit, and it is this factor that was behind the delays in developing the bourse project.

However, we remain hopeful that the strategy we recommended, which is based upon (a) gradual and organic introduction of pricing built upon the neutral function of transaction registration and ( a simple (and Islamically sound) partnership-based "clearing union" synthesis of bilateral trading and a multilateral guarantee, will in due course be taken forward.

One of the most interesting aspects of the process was that during our brief spell of contacts with decision-makers, some insight into current Iranian policy was possible - in particular, the nuclear question. In our conversations we were left in no doubt that it suits both the US and Iran for the issue to be seen to be that of the Iranian "threat" from nuclear weapons.

In fact the issue is a proxy for Iraq: try looking in the media prior to the events in Fallujah, Iraq, for anything more than desultory mention of this "issue". But once factions in Iran funded Muqtada al-Sadr to the tune of $50 million and the US body count started to rise, then the issue began to attain its current level of importance.

Now that pro-Iranian Shi'ite elements are taking a primary role in the emerging government in Iraq, we see the nuclear temperature rising further.

The realpolitik is of course that those in power in the US and Iran have the reason they give - and the real reason - for what they do: and for the US, the real reason is and has been for many years energy security above any other consideration.

Chris Cook is a former director of the International Petroleum Exchange. He is now a strategic market consultant, entrepreneur and commentator. Reprinted with permission from www.energybulletin.net.

(Copyright 2006 Chris Cook.)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA21Ak02.html

It's all about the voice
By Pepe Escobar


We know that the majority of your people want this war to end and based on the substance of the polls, which indicate Americans do not want to fight Muslims on Muslim land, nor do they want Muslims to fight them on their land, we do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stand by ... a truce that offers security and stability and the rebuilding of Iraq and Afghanistan that war has destroyed ... And there is nothing wrong with this solution except that it deprives the influential people and warlords in America from hundreds of billions of dollars - those who supported [President George W] Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars.
- Osama bin Laden on tape, January 18

Just a slow, composed, husky voice out of a telephone line recorded on a scratched tape (not digital; a mere cassette). No video. Just a voice - capable of sending the markets into a tailspin and the networks into hysteria, spiking the oil bourses in London and New York, resetting the global agenda, unleashing armies of US intelligence analysts scrambling to confirm if the voice is real or fake.

You had totally vanished from the face of the Earth for more than a year. You are the most wanted man in the world. You re-enter the global stage just with your voice, a mere whisper. The simplicity of it. What politician would not dream of such power?

Osama bin Laden, master media manipulator turned global politician, is back. Talk about astonishing timing. Only a few days ago in the Pakistani tribal area of Bajur a US Central Intelligence Agency drone delivered punishment from heaven toward what should have been al-Qaeda's No 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but turned out to be villagers, including children, and also reportedly some al-Qaeda militants.

Cue to a tape moving hand-to-hand undetected from the tribal areas - it could be South Waziristan in Pakistan, it could be Kunar in Afghanistan - to Al-Jazeera's office in Peshawar and then to the network's headquarters in Doha, Qatar. There's no reason to doubt Al-Jazeera's assessment that the tape was recorded last month. It didn't have to sit very long to reach the limelight.

Bin Laden may have never read James Joyce, but he is applying to perfection the Dubliner's motto: silence, exile, cunning. Against the awesome US military machine, al-Qaeda's weapons of choice since September 11, 2001, have been subterfuge, evasion and deception.

But the Bush administration - and US public opinion - will have only themselves to blame if they confuse the messenger's tactics with the message. Whatever the tactics, bin Laden is always on message - and should be taken at his word.

Bin Laden is now explicitly offering a truce to the United States: "We do not mind offering a long-term truce based on just conditions that we will stick to. We are a nation that Allah banned from lying and stabbing others in the back, hence both parties of the truce will enjoy stability and security to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan, which were destroyed by war."

The chances of the Bush administration ("we don't negotiate with terrorists, we put them out of business") accepting the offer are as slim as the chances of Vice President Dick Cheney rejecting oil as an expendable commodity.

So, according to bin Laden, Zawahiri and al-Qaeda's "Allah bans us from lying" reasoning, they have fulfilled their duty. The enemy has been warned. This means bin Laden's threat of a renewed al-Qaeda attack inside the US is not pure imaging - or a weapon of rhetorical destruction. Then, after the fact, a tape - audio or video - will inevitably follow, florid Arabic elaborating once again that "you never listen to what we're saying".

It's always the same message. When he last showed up on video, in October 2004, a few days ahead of the US presidential election, bin Laden said there would be no more September 11s if the US stopped attacking Muslim lands.

With Bush - al-Qaeda's preferred candidate - re-elected, bin Laden reappeared in audio on late December 2004 to designate Abu Musab al-Zarqawi as leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq, an anointed supreme commander in a local defensive jihad against occupation by a Christian army.

In at least 35 messages - in audio or video - delivered by both bin Laden and Zawahiri since September 11, the heart of the matter is always the same. The US must leave the Middle East alone - it must stop supporting Israel over Palestine and stop supporting corrupt dictatorial regimes in the Arab and Muslim world.

Strategy mutating
The fact that Zawahiri - influenced by the Islamists' foremost thinker, Sayyid Qutb - defines jihad as "an armed putsch ... requiring cooperation between civilians and the military to achieve its goal" proves that al-Qaeda is all about politics, and marginally about religion.

Bin Laden's latest tape is devoid of any window-dressing of Islamic phraseology. Al-Qaeda is above all involved in a long-range political war of attrition. Al-Qaeda's ideology relates to model military operations that can be easily comprehended and identified with by local populations.

In this sense, al-Qaeda's hit-and-run tactics in Afghanistan may work with Pashtun tribesmen, but Zarqawi's senseless killings of civilians may not be working with nationalist Sunni Arabs in Iraq.

Numbers also play a crucial part. This year marks the 10th anniversary of al-Qaeda's rite of passage from strategic considerations to an overall battle plan.

In August 1996 in Afghanistan, bin Laden issued his "declaration of jihad against the Americans occupying the land of the two holy sites". Less than two years later, in February 1998, the World Islamic Front against Jews and Crusaders was created and an offensive was intensified, culminating in September 11.

So al-Qaeda's war was firmly declared twice on the record. The Madrid bombings took place exactly two and a half years after September 11, which was a precise military operation that took five years of meticulous planning. Al-Qaeda's love of symmetry may point to an attack five years after September 11 - this year.

The initial, Zawahiri-formulated basic concept was to "strike at the faraway enemy" (the United States), thus opening the way to the overthrow of the "nearby enemy" - pro-American leaders in the Muslim world. This simply did not happen; al-Qaeda's strategy failed.

So, once again showing signs of strategic operational flexibility, al-Qaeda since September 11 and the invasion of Iraq mutated into privileging local jihads in Afghanistan and Iraq, where according to its own strategic objectives, it is winning. Let a thousand mini-al-Qaedas bloom. Now bin Laden's new message may reveal a renewed commitment to "strike at the faraway enemy".

According to Zawahiri's conceptualization, radical Islam must bridge the gap between an elite - a revolutionary vanguard, of which al-Qaeda is part - and the Muslim masses. Jihad, according to Zawahiri, requires a "scientific, confrontational, rational" leadership.

So stigmatizing al-Qaeda's leadership as "evil terrorists" won't help. Zawahiri and bin Laden are now practitioners of realpolitik. They favor Niccolo Machiavelli over the Holy Koran. It's all about coining the right rhetoric - and the right audio-video global media coups - to lift the Muslim masses out of fatalistic passivity, impregnate them with political conscience, and persuade them to join the jihad.

What you hear is what you get
Al-Qaeda inevitably has to move beyond surprise, stealth and heavy symbolism (how can you top September 11?) So for a high-impact, multi-layered message like bin Laden's, you don't need video. You have to force people to listen to what the voice is saying. Enter bin Laden the politician.

Politically, addressing US public opinion, bin Laden clearly identifies the Bush administration - and its "war on terror", a military response to a concept - as the problem. Overwhelmed by media noise, Americans once again won't listen. Dealing with the Muslim masses is much more complicated. They will listen - but they won't necessarily agree.

Support for al-Qaeda may consist of scattered Muslim intellectuals, clerics, Islamic bankers and a small army of young, disgruntled, desperate suicide bombers. To succeed, al-Qaeda would have to unify poor urban youth (not only in Muslim lands but all over Western Europe), Muslim middle classes everywhere, and the Islamist intelligentsia.

Borrowing a concept from liberal democracy, al-Qaeda, to succeed, needs a broad coalition. To attract, for instance, sectors of the anti-globalization movement, it needs to be less Islamic. To conquer moderate Muslims, it needs to be less radical.

By any standards, al-Qaeda now needs political, not military, skills. This correspondent has identified many echoes - from Iraq, Egypt, Jordan, Indonesia, Western Europe - that Islamic radicals who sympathize with al-Qaeda's project have been seriously questioning its strategy, or lack of it. As far as global Muslim public opinion is concerned, bin Laden's message has tried to address these concerns.

Careful examination of bin Laden's latest words also reveal that unlike the Bush administration spin, al-Qaeda does not want to destroy the United States or its way of life. But at the same time the US, and the Bush administration in particular, may enhance al-Qaeda's appeal as it will never waver from its two strategic imperatives - absolute security for Israel in the heart of the Arab Middle East and the obsession in taking over all of the Middle East's oil reserves.

So there's no way to stop the infernal spiral. The husky voice on the tape has been, once again, unmistakable; we want a Middle East not subjected to the United States, deciding its own destiny. This is like any politician in the developing world talking about national sovereignty. But it's not going to happen. We, the damned of the Earth, seem to be condemned to "war on terror" forever.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and republishing .)

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/HA10Ak01.html

When even the pope has to whisper
By Spengler

Islam is the unexploded bomb of global politics. US foreign policy - the only foreign policy there is, for the United States is the only superpower - proceeds from the hope that a modern and democratic Islam will emerge from the ruins of Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Through democratic institutions, Washington believes, the long-marginalized Shi'ites will adapt to religious pluralism. Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani's Islam, fixed in amber since the High Middle Ages, will metamorphose into something like American mainline Protestantism.

Alas, the available facts suggest that the opposite result will ensue: more freedom equals more fundamentalism. Not the secular Shi'ite parties but the pro-Iranian religious parties dominate the Iraqi polls. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood quadrupled its vote despite heavy-handed measures to intimidate its supporters; Hamas threatens to displace Fatah in the Palestinian elections this month; Hezbollah has become the strongest electoral as well as military force in Lebanon; and, most important of all, Mahmud Ahmadinejad crushed a more pragmatic opponent in last June's Iranian presidential elections.

Islam was founded as a theocracy, such that the Western innovation of church-state separation remains alien to its culture. Is it possible for Islam to reform? A negative answer implies that Ahmadinejad's January 5 call for world domination falls within the Islamic mainstream. He told an audience of religious students, "We must believe in the fact that Islam is not confined to geographical borders, ethnic groups and nations. It's a universal ideology that leads the world to justice. We don't shy away from declaring that Islam is ready to rule the world. We must prepare ourselves to rule the world." The previous day, the London Guardian leaked a European intelligence report detailing Iran's efforts to acquire technology required to build nuclear weapons. A very few writers, including this one, have rejected the possibility of Islamic reformation, to the stony contempt of universally accepted opinion.

Now Pope Benedict XVI has let it be known that he does not believe Islam can reform. This we learn from the transcript of a January 5 US radio interview with one of Benedict's students and friends, Father Joseph Fessio, SJ, the provost of Ave Maria University in Naples, Florida, posted on the Asia Times Online forum by a sharp-eyed reader. For the pope to refute the fundamental premise of US policy is news of inestimable strategic importance, yet a Google News scan reveals that not a single media outlet has taken notice of what Fessio told interviewer Hugh Hewitt last week. No matter: still and small as Benedict's voice might be, it carries further than earthquake and whirlwind.

Fessio described a private seminar on the subject of Islam last year at Castel Gandolfo, the papal summer residence:
The main presentation by this [start new-window link here] Father [Christian] Troll http://www.sankt-georgen.de/lehrende/troll.html was very interesting. He based it on a Pakistani Muslim scholar [named] Rashan, who was at the University of Chicago for many years, and Rashan's position was Islam can enter into dialogue with modernity, but only if it radically reinterprets the Koran, and takes the specific legislation of the Koran, like cutting off your hand if you're a thief, or being able to have four wives, or whatever, and takes the principles behind those specific pieces of legislation for the 7th century of Arabia, and now applies them, and modifies them, for a new society [in] which women are now respected for their full dignity, where democracy's important, religious freedom's important, and so on. And if Islam does that, then it will be able to enter into real dialogue and live together with other religions and other kinds of cultures.

And immediately the holy father, in his beautiful calm but clear way, said, well, there's a fundamental problem with that because, he said, in the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it's an eternal word. It's not Mohammed's word. It's there for eternity the way it is. There's no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it, whereas in Christianity, and Judaism, the dynamism's completely different, that God has worked through his creatures [emphasis added]. And so it is not just the word of God, it's the word of Isaiah, not just the word of God, but the word of Mark. He's used his human creatures, and inspired them to speak his word to the world, and therefore by establishing a church in which he gives authority to his followers to carry on the tradition and interpret it, there's an inner logic to the Christian Bible, which permits it and requires it to be adapted and applied to new situations.
The interviewer then asked Fessio, "And so the pope is a pessimist about that changing, because it would require a radical reinterpretation of what the Koran is?" Fessio replied, "Yeah, which is it's impossible, because it's against the very nature of the Koran, as it's understood by Muslims."

That is precisely what I argued in an essay titled You say you want a reformation? on August 5, 2003:
Hebrew and Christian scripture claim to be the report of human encounters with God. After the Torah is read each Saturday in synagogues, the congregation intones that the text stems from "the mouth of God by the hand of Moses", a leader whose flaws kept him from entering the Promised Land. The Jewish rabbis, moreover, postulated the existence of an unwritten Revelation whose interpretation permits considerable flexibility with the text. Christianity's Gospels, by the same token, are the reports of human evangelists.

The Archangel Gabriel, by contrast, dictated the Koran to Mohammed, according to Islamic doctrine. That sets a dauntingly high threshold for textual critics. How does one criticize the word of God without rejecting its divine character? In that respect the Koran resembles the "Golden Tablets" of the Angel Moroni purported found by the Mormon leader Joseph Smith more than it does the Jewish or Christian bibles.
I claim no originality whatever in this matter, for I simply follow the leading Muslim authorities, who are unanimous that Islam is in no need of reform. The immutable character of Islamic revelation makes the subject of Koranic criticism into a minefield. It is universally known among scholars that alternative texts of the Koran have been discovered in various archeological sites - something of an embarrassment for the Archangel Gabriel - but the subject has disappeared from the media. [1] When Newsweek in 2004 published a brief mention of the work of the pseudonymous German philologist Christoph Luxenberg, the government of Pakistan seized the entire print run. Luxenberg became famous for re-translating the Koran to read that martyrs would receive raisins in Paradise rather than virgins. One finds nearly 12,000 Google references to Luxenberg but not a single hit on Google News. The subject, once so passionately debated in editorial columns, has vanished from the media in their entirety.

It is dangerous to publish anything that Muslims might interpret as blasphemy, as Jyllands-Posten, Denmark's largest newspaper, discovered when it published 12 cartoons of Mohammed, some portraying the Prophet in violent acts. Muslim protests and threats caused two of the cartoonists to go into hiding. After Arab foreign ministers condemned Denmark for refusing to act against the newspaper, Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen offered a near-apology in his New Year's address.

Strange as it may seem, the pope must whisper when he wants to state agreement with conventional Muslim opinion, namely that the Koranic prophecy is fixed for all time such that Islam cannot reform itself. If Islam cannot change, then a likely outcome will be civilizational war, something too horrific for US leaders to contemplate. What Benedict XVI thinks about the likelihood of civilizational war I do not know. Two elements of context, though, set in relief his reported comments concerning Islam's incapacity to reform.

The first is that Benedict's comments regarding the nature of Muslim revelation are deliberate and informed, for his primary focus as a theologian has been the subject of revelation. In his 1953 doctoral thesis, biographer George Weigel reports, Joseph Ratzinger, the future pope,
... following Bonaventure, argued that revelation is "an act in which God shows himself"; revelation cannot be reduced to the propositions that result from God's self-disclosure, as certain forms of neo-scholasticism tended to do. Revelation, in other words, has a subjective or personal dimension, in that there is no "revelation" without someone to receive it. As Ratzinger would later put it, "where there is no one to perceive 'revelation', no re-vel-ation has occurred, because no veil has been removed". [2]
The Judeo-Christian view of revelation, as summarized above by Father Fessio, expresses the mutual love between Revealer and recipient of revelation, a concept alien to Islam. [3]

A second element of context is Benedict's admiration for the US separation of church and state. In an essay published in this month's issue of First Things, Benedict makes the remarkable (for a pope) statement that the US model is what the early church really had in mind. He proceeds from the famous argument of Pope Gelasius I (492-496) that "because of human weakness (pride!), they have separated the two offices" of king and priest. Neither the state church model of Northern Europe nor the secular model of France, Italy and Spain has sufficed, Benedict observes. But he continues:
Situated between the two [failed] models is the model of the United States of America. Formed on the basis of free churches, it adopts a separation between church and state. Above and beyond the single denominations, it is characterized by a Protestant Christian consensus that is not defined in denominational terms but rather in association with its sense of a special religious mission toward the rest of the world. The religious sphere thus acquires a significant weight in public affairs and emerges as a pre-political and supra-political force with the potential to have a decisive impact on political life.
It is useless to bemoan the fact that Americans do not understand what they are until a European comes along and explains it to them; that has been true since Alexis de Tocqueville. It is most promising that a European, indeed one who speaks with the authority of the throne of St Peter, has explained the difference between the Christian foundation of the US political system and theocratic Islam - even if the explanation came in the form of a stage whisper. I expect this to have profound consequences.

Later in the same essay, Benedict takes up a theme I have addressed over the years, namely the moral cause of Europe's demographic implosion (see Why Europe chooses extinction, April 8, 2003), writing:
Europe is infected by a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as though they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen - at least by some people - as a liability rather than as a source of hope. Here it is obligatory to compare today's situation with the decline of the Roman Empire.
My investigation of the causes of Europe's present decline was inspired by comments of then-cardinal Ratzinger in a book-length interview with the German journalist Peter Seewald published in 1996 as The Salt of the Earth. Nothing is really new in Benedict's present formulation except, perhaps, his sense of urgency as the hour grows late and the moment of truth approaches. In the cited essay, Benedict excoriates the pessimism of Oswald Spengler, who claimed to have discovered a deterministic pattern of rise and fall of civilizations. Instead, he argues that "the fate of a society always depends upon its creative minorities", and that "Christians should look upon themselves as just such a creative minority".

I agree with the pope, not with my namesake. My choice of nom de guerre is ironic rather than semiotic. The fact that the West still has such a leader as Benedict XVI in itself is cause for optimism. It might be too late for Europe, but it is not too late for the United States, and that is where the pope's mustard seeds may fall on fertile ground.

Notes
1. See Toby Lester, "What is the Koran?", in The Atlantic Monthly, January 1999.
2. God's Choice by George Weigel (HarperCollins: New York, 2005), p 167.
3. For more background see Oil on the flames of civilizational war, December 2, 2003.

(Copyright 2006 Asia Times Online Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us for information on sales, syndication and

TEXT OF THE AUDIOTAPE
'People Realize That Bush Does Not Have a Plan'
From Associated Press


This is a full translated text of an audiotape believed to be from Osama bin Laden. Parts of it were aired on Al Jazeera television, which published the entire version on its website. Bin Laden appears to be addressing the American people:



My message to you is about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and how to end them. I did not intend to speak to you about this because this issue has already been decided. Only metal breaks metal, and our situation, thank God, is only getting better and better, while your situation is the opposite of that.

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But I plan to speak about the repeated errors your President Bush has committed in comments on the results of your polls that show an overwhelming majority of you want the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq. But he has opposed this wish and said that withdrawing troops sends the wrong message to opponents, that it is better to fight them [Bin Laden's followers] on their land than their fighting us [Americans] on our land.

I can reply to these errors by saying that war in Iraq is raging with no letup, and operations in Afghanistan are escalating in our favor, thank God, and Pentagon figures show the number of your dead and wounded is increasing, not to mention the massive material losses, the destruction of the soldiers' morale there and the rise in cases of suicide among them.

So you can imagine the state of psychological breakdown that afflicts a soldier as he gathers the remains of his colleagues after they stepped on land mines that tore them apart. After this situation, the soldier is caught between two hard options. He either refuses to leave his military camp on patrols and is therefore dogged by ruthless punishments enacted by the Vietnam butcher [U.S. Army] or he gets destroyed by the mines. This puts him under psychological pressure, fear and humiliation while his nation is ignorant of that [what is going on].

The soldier has no solution except to commit suicide. That is a strong message to you, written by his soul, blood and pain, to save what can be saved from this hell. The solution is in your hands if you care about them [the soldiers]. The news of our brother mujahedin is different from what the Pentagon publishes. They [the news of mujahedin] and what the media report is the truth of what is happening on the ground. And what deepens the doubt over the White House's information is the fact that it targets the media reporting the truth from the ground. And it has appeared lately, supported by documents, that the butcher of freedom in the world [Bush] had decided to bomb the headquarters of the Al Jazeera in Qatar after bombing its offices in Kabul and Baghdad.

On another issue, jihad [holy war] is ongoing, thank God, despite all the oppressive measures adopted by the U.S. Army and its agents, to a point where there is no difference between this criminality and Saddam's criminality, as it has reached the degree of raping women and taking them as hostages instead of their husbands.

As for torturing men, they have used burning chemical acids and drills on their joints. And when they give up on [interrogating] them, they sometimes use the drills on their heads until they die. Read, if you will, the reports of the horrors in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo prisons.

And I say that, despite all the barbaric methods, they have not broken the fierceness of the resistance. The mujahedin, thank God, are increasing in number and strength — so much so that reports point to the ultimate failure and defeat of the unlucky quartet of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz. Declaring this defeat is just a matter of time, depending partly on how much the American people know of the size of this tragedy. The sensible people realize that Bush does not have a plan to make his alleged victory in Iraq come true.

And if you compare the small number of dead on the day that Bush announced the end of major operations in that fake, ridiculous show aboard the aircraft carrier with the tenfold number of dead and wounded who were killed in the smaller operations, you would know the truth of what I say. This is that Bush and his administration do not have the will or the ability to get out of Iraq for their own private, suspect reasons.

And so to return to the issue, I say that results of polls please those who are sensible, and Bush's opposition to them is a mistake. The reality shows that the war against America and its allies has not been limited to Iraq as he [Bush] claims. Iraq has become a point of attraction and restorer of [our] energies. At the same time, the mujahedin, with God's grace, have managed repeatedly to penetrate all security measures adopted by the unjust allied countries. The proof of that is the explosions you have seen in the capitals of the European nations that are in this aggressive coalition. The delay in similar operations happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures. The operations are under preparation, and you will see them in your homes the minute they are through [with preparations], with God's permission.

Based on what has been said, this shows the errors of Bush's statement — the one that slipped from him — which is at the heart of polls calling for withdrawing the troops. It is better that we [Americans] don't fight Muslims on their lands and that they don't fight us on ours.

We don't mind offering you a long-term truce on fair conditions that we adhere to. We are a nation that God has forbidden to lie and cheat. So both sides can enjoy security and stability under this truce so we can build Iraq and Afghanistan, which have been destroyed in this war. There is no shame in this solution, which prevents the wasting of billions of dollars that have gone to those with influence and merchants of war in America who have supported Bush's election campaign with billions of dollars — which lets us understand the insistence by Bush and his gang to carry on with war.

If you are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book "Rogue State," which states in its introduction: "If I were president, I would stop the attacks on the United States: First I would give an apology to all the widows and orphans and those who were tortured. Then I would announce that American interference in the nations of the world has ended once and for all."

Finally, I say that war will go either in our favor or yours. If it is the former, it means your loss and your shame forever, and it is headed in this course. If it is the latter, read history! We are people who do not stand for injustice, and we will seek revenge all our lives. The nights and days will not pass without us taking vengeance like on Sept. 11, God permitting. Your minds will be troubled and your lives embittered. As for us, we have nothing to lose. A swimmer in the ocean does not fear the rain. You have occupied our lands, offended our honor and dignity and let out our blood and stolen our money and destroyed our houses and played with our security, and we will give you the same treatment.

You have tried to prevent us from leading a dignified life, but you will not be able to prevent us from a dignified death. Failing to carry out jihad, which is called for in our religion, is a sin. The best death to us is under the shadows of swords. Don't let your strength and modern arms fool you. They win a few battles but lose the war. Patience and steadfastness are much better. We were patient in fighting the Soviet Union with simple weapons for 10 years, and we bled their economy, and now they are nothing.

In that there is a lesson for you.

US stocks: Biggest fall in nearly 3 years

21.01.06 11.40am


NEW YORK - US stocks suffered their biggest loss in nearly three years on Friday, plummeting on disappointing earnings from blue chips Citigroup Inc. and General Electric Co. and a spike in oil caused by geopolitical tensions.

The Dow Jones industrial average and Standard & Poor's 500 stock index posted their biggest point declines since March 24, 2003, soon after the war in Iraq began. The Dow erased its gains for 2006.

Citigroup and GE joined a growing list of companies, including chip maker Intel Corp. and internet media firm Yahoo Inc., whose quarterly results have disappointed investors.

A surge in oil prices above US$68 also battered stocks. Crude climbed on concern about potential supply disruptions stemming from Iran's nuclear plans, the targeting of oil companies by militants in Nigeria and Osama bin Laden's threat of attacks against the United States.

"The market's been watching the earnings reports very closely. We got off on the wrong foot with Citibank and GE," said Evan Olsen, head of equity trading at Stephens Inc. "You've also had oil lifting higher with bin Laden acting up and Iran acting strange which is concerning going into a weekend, so people are taking profits." The Dow Jones industrial average was down 213.32 points, or 1.96 per cent, at 10,667.39. The Standard & Poor's 500 Index was down 23.55 points, or 1.83 per cent, at 1,261.49. The Nasdaq Composite Index was down 54.11 points, or 2.35 per cent, at 2,247.70.

Friday's decline was the biggest point loss for Nasdaq since September 2003.

The major stock indexes suffered their first weekly loss of the new year. For the week, the Dow shed 2.7 per cent, the S&P lost 2.0 per cent and Nasdaq ended 3 per cent lower.

Before Friday's slide, the Dow was up 1.5 per cent for 2006 but the blue-chip average is now down 0.5 per cent for the year.

In the bond market, Treasury prices rose slightly but failed to gain major traction from the rout in stocks and soaring oil prices. The benchmark 10-year note eked out a 3/32 gain to yield 4.37 per cent, down from 4.38 per cent Thursday.

Weighing on the technology-laced Nasdaq were shares of Google Inc. which slid 8.5 per cent to US$399.46, making it the worst week since the Web search engine made its market debut in August 2004.

Shares of Google were hurt after competitor Yahoo Inc. released disappointing earnings on Tuesday.

"The great names that had been the sweethearts of the market, like Google and Apple, are down. And you can look at oil, rallying from US$60 a barrel to US$68, so there are concerns of inflation and higher costs for businesses," said Aaron Ford, head of US institutional equity derivative sales at BNP Paribas in New York.

Citigroup shares lost 4.7 per cent to US$45.69 on the New York Stock Exchange and were the biggest drag on the Dow. Citigroup, the largest US bank, posted quarterly profit and revenue that missed analysts' estimates. Its shares had their biggest one-day percentage drop since a 4 per cent decline on March 24, 2003. ID:n20196209

Shares of GE fell 3.8 per cent to US$33.37. The stock was the heaviest drag on the S&P 500. Even though GE's fourth-quarter profit rose, its revenue fell short of expectations. ID:n19244063

Motorola Inc., the world's second-largest mobile phone maker, fell 7.6 per cent to US$22.49 on the NYSE. Late on Thursday, the company issued a first-quarter earnings per share forecast below Wall Street estimates. ID:n19361768

US crude oil futures shot up US$1.52 to settle at US$68.35 as Iran, the world's fourth-largest oil exporter, said it was moving its foreign assets to shield them from possible UN sanctions in its nuclear standoff with the West.

Trading was heavy on the NYSE, with about 2.12 billion shares changing hands, while on Nasdaq about 2.37 billion shares traded.

Declining stocks outnumbered advancing ones by a ratio of 5 to 2 on the NYSE and by about 8 to 3 on the Nasdaq.

"Three years ago, there would have been a much more volatile environment on the CME (Chicago Mercantile Exchange) floor, given this type of day," said Harry Michas, stock index futures trader at manmarketmonitor.com, a division of Man Financial.

"But since many of the S&P 500 floor traders either left the business or have moved to electronic platforms, moves like this in the market seem to be much less boisterous."

- REUTERS
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Oil: Prices near US$69 as Iran talks tough

21.01.06 10.40am


NEW YORK - Oil prices surged on Friday to the highest level since September's hurricanes crippled oil output from the Gulf of Mexico, as tensions mounted over Opec-member Iran's nuclear ambitions.

US crude oil gained US$1.52 to US$68.35 a barrel after hitting a peak of US$68.80 - the highest level since Sept. 2, while London Brent crude rose US$1.20 to US$66.43.

Crude prices have jumped more than 8 per cent so far this year, bringing them within striking distance of the record US$70.85 hit Aug. 30 after Hurricane Katrina toppled rigs and slashed output from the Gulf of Mexico.

"The market is so delicately balanced," said Mark Keenan of MPC commodity fund. "It faces a convergence of bullish factors."

A senior Iranian official said on Friday that Tehran is transferring its assets from European accounts to other foreign banks in an attempt to preempt possible UN sanctions for resuming its nuclear programme.

US and European Union leaders suspect Iran, the world's fourth largest oil exporter, of seeking to build atomic bombs under the cloak of a civilian nuclear energy programme. Analysts are concerned the dispute could lead to a disruption in Iran's crude exports.

US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman said on Friday he was hopeful that Iran would change course and halt its plans to develop its nuclear programme in the face of international pressure.

Adding to worries in the crude market, more than 220,000 barrels per day of oil have been shut in Nigeria due to civil unrest, and militants Friday warned they would soon resume attacks on oil producers in the country.

And cold weather in Russia led Moscow to cut natural gas supplies to Europe and trim some oil production.

"Severe winter weather in parts of Europe and much of northeast Asia limits import potential going forward, just as US weather should get colder and production plunges as refineries carry out winter maintenance," said Jan Stuart, economist at UBS.

Expectations that supply problems will support crude prices for the foreseeable future are reflected in record values for oil to be delivered at dates far from now.

On the New York Mercantile Exchange this week, contracts as far out as 2012 hit record levels and monthly contracts from June 2006 to June 2007 have risen to around US$70.

Despite the price surge, there is no sign of demand falling.

The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries on Friday forecast oil demand growth in 2006 would be 1.6 million bpd. World demand is expected to reach 84.8 million bpd this year compared with 83.2 million bpd in 2005.

The producer group, which meets at the end of the month to review its output policy, is considered unlikely to cut production, though the hawkish Iran said Friday that the market was oversupplied.

Adding some support to gains Friday, the United States said it would loan some crude from the emergency reserve to oil refiner Total Petrochemicals Inc. for its plant in Port Arthur, Texas, hit by an oil shipping disruption.

- REUTERS

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Iraqi FM calls for closer ties with Iran


BAGHDAD (IRNA) -- Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, during a meeting with Iranian Charge d'Affaires Hassan Kazemi-Qomi on Tuesday, called for deepening of relations between the two neighboring countries.

He urged the two governments to continue the current trend of relations and speed up implementation of plans and agreements which have already been signed by the two countries. The Iranian envoy, in the meeting, said that his country supports the political process in Iraq, saying, "Iran is ready to cooperate with the Iraqi nation and government to rebuild security and infrastructure."

He said Iran gives special attention to its policy of supporting the national government in Iraq which reflects the wisdom of the Iraqi nation and elite.

Iran respects the vote and opinion of the Iraqi nation and views the parliamentary elections recently held in the country as having great legal credence, Kazemi-Qomi told reporters in Baghdad after a separate meeting with Iraqi President Jalal Talabani.

He hailed the bold efforts of the Iraqi government in holding the referendum and parliamentary elections in the country, saying those events were positive points in Iraq's government dossier.

The result of the Iraqi parliamentary election will be announced next week, he quoted Talabani as saying.

Iraqis voted on December 15, 2005 to elect a four-year parliament for the first time since a U.S.-led invasion in 2003 overthrew Saddam Hussein's government.

Charge d'Affaires Kazemi-Qomi denied reports that four Iranian pilgrims who were kidnapped in Iraq last December have been released.

"In today's meeting with the Iraqi president, I called on the Iraqi government to earnestly work for the release of the Iranian pilgrims," he said.

Six Iranian pilgrims were kidnapped in the Balad region in northern Baghdad on December 1, 2005.

Two women were released two days later and were taken to the Iranian consulate in Karbala, but the whereabouts of the remaining four captives, all men, are still not known.

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HindustanTimes.com » World » Americas » Story

US, EU lobby hard to send Iran to Security Council

Indo-Asian News Service

Washington, January 21, 2006
The United States has said there will be enough votes at the February 2 meeting of the UN nuclear watchdog to bring the nuclear dispute with Iran before the UN Security Council.

The US and European Union are lobbying nations on the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) governing board to refer the issue to the Security Council at the upcoming meeting in Vienna.

"We believe that that's what we're going to see," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said on Friday. "And we believe the next stop after Vienna is going to be New York."

McCormack also urged Russia to join the international community in hauling Iran to the Security Council.

"We would certainly encourage them to join what is a growing consensus to send Iran to the Security Council," he said. "But ultimately whether they decide to raise their hand or not is going to be up to them."

Russia and China have balked at taking too tough a position against Tehran over concerns Iran would refuse to rejoin stalled negotiations.

The US and European Union last week announced the move after Iran resumed uranium enrichment research, which could be used to build weapons. The US insists Iran is using an atomic energy programme to develop nuclear arms, a charge Iran strongly denies.

IAEA Director General Mohammed ElBaradei, whose agency has been inspecting Iran's nuclear activities, has not been able to rule out the possibility that Iran is seeking to develop a nuclear arsenal, but has argued that Iran should be given until March to comply and has expressed doubt about being able to issue a report in time for the February 2 meeting.

McCormack has said the US has urged ElBaradei to address the IAEA board of governors' upcoming meeting.

"It would be appropriate and helpful for the board members to hear from Director General ElBaradei concerning the IAEA's efforts to obtain information from the Iranian government regarding the unanswered questions that Iran has left on the table," he said.

A US State Department official on Friday said that the US and its European partners must maintain a common position on the dispute.

"The civilised world and trans-Atlantic world needs to speak with a single voice," said Daniel Fried, the US assistant secretary of state for European and Eurasian affairs.

The United States has not said whether it will immediately seek UN sanctions if the Security Council takes up the issue, but reports have said Washington and the EU will initially push for ways to pressure Iran and hold off on sanctions.

US officials have also been cautious to say that the intention is not to isolate or punish the Iranian people, blaming instead the Tehran government for the growing isolation.

Other forms of sanctions could include targeting government leaders or businesses closely tied to the government, or going after bank accounts held overseas.

Earlier this month, Washington enacted sanctions against two Iranian firms believed to be playing a role in the country's nuclear programme - Novin Energy Company and Mesbah Energy Company.

The two firms are controlled by the Iranian government's nuclear agency, called the Atomic Energy Organisation of Iran (AEOI).

Iran says not planning to move its money to Asia
January 21, 2006

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Iran, which has said it is shifting its money out European accounts as the threat of U.N. sanctions mounts, will not move its currency assets to Asia, a deputy central bank governor said on Saturday.

Tehran has bitter memories of its U.S. assets being frozen shortly after the 1979 Islamic revolution and many foreign and domestic media speculated that Iran was eyeing accounts in Malaysia, Shanghai, Singapore and Hong Kong.

"Iran at the moment has no plan to transfer its currency accounts to those countries," Mohammad Jafar Mojarrad told the official IRNA news agency, when asked about the reports on Tehran shifting its holdings east.

The Central Bank of Iran confirmed to Reuters that his remarks were a correct representation of policy but declined to comment further.

Several economists have speculated Iran could prefer to move its assets to Gulf and other Islamic accounts.

Iran faces referral to the U.N. Security Council for possible sanctions after failing to allay the world's suspicions it is seeking atomic weapons. Iran says it needs atomic power only for generating electricity.

Central Bank Governor Ebrahim Sheibani said on Wednesday that Iran would repatriate its assets held abroad should that prove to necessary. It is unclear how much of Iran's copious oil wealth is kept in foreign accounts. The Naftiran Intertrade Company (NICO), the trade and financing arm of the state oil company, is based in Switzerland.

Economists estimate Iran will have earned more than $40 billion in oil earnings by the end of the 12 months to March 2006. Of this, $16 billion goes straight to budgeted government spending.

The rest goes to the Central Bank of Iran which keeps an unknown amount of holdings in foreign accounts.



© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

January 21, 2006 latimes.com
THE CONFLICT IN IRAQ

U.S. Goals Adapt to New Iraq
Disappointed with vote results, Washington is now focused on keeping security forces out of the hands of religious or nationalist parties.

By Paul Richter, Times Staff Writer

WASHINGTON — Disappointed by the election performance of Iraq's moderate parties, U.S. officials have established a more modest goal as Iraqi leaders divide power in a new government: preventing religious or nationalist parties from gaining a strong hold on the army and police.

American officials have made it a priority to persuade the winners in the election not to give top posts in the defense and interior ministries to anyone linked to armed groups such as the Shiite Muslim-controlled Badr and Al Mahdi militias, and the Kurds' peshmerga forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials say.

Washington fears that such ties could again alienate Sunni Muslims — many of whom are being drawn into the political process — sparking violence and slowing efforts to withdraw U.S. forces.

"This is the red line," said one senior U.S. official, who asked to remain unidentified because he was talking about ongoing negotiations.

Yet even at an early stage of negotiations, it is clear that leaders in the winning coalition, many with close ties to militias, intend to fight hard for the posts. The party leaders believe they deserve the fruits of their election victory and also hold bitter memories of how former dictator Saddam Hussein treated Shiites and Kurds.

"It's hard to get them to forget what can happen when others control the tanks and guns," the U.S. official said. "They've lived it."

Though the United States was officially neutral in the election, some top officials hoped for a strong showing by moderate secular parties, such as the Iraqi National List of former interim Prime Minister Iyad Allawi. Yet Allawi's slate lost ground in the election, falling to 25 seats from 40 in the last transitional legislature. Meanwhile, the faction of Shiite militant leader Muqtada Sadr became a more important part of the United Iraqi Alliance, the large Shiite coalition that came up just shy of 50% in the new parliament.

U.S. officials are uneasy about the influence of Sadr, who controls Al Mahdi army, one of the largest militias. And they are uneasy about the idea that militias with ties to Iran, including the Badr organization, may have power over Iraq's military and police.

After focusing on efforts to train the Iraqi army, U.S. officials say, they will shift their attention this year to the police forces, which they say are at least as important in defeating the insurgency.

U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad signaled Washington's concern about leadership of the ministries last month after findings that Sunni inmates had been abused at Shiite-controlled prisons.

In the post of interior minister, which oversees the police, "you can't have someone who is regarded as sectarian," he told reporters Dec. 19. "You have to have someone who has the confidence of all communities."

Khalilzad's view is shared by Saadoun Dulaimi, the transitional defense minister, who is a Sunni and a former officer in Hussein's army.

"This ministry … should be the Iraqi Defense Ministry, not the Sunni or Shiite or Badr ministry," he said in an interview. "That's why I always say this ministry should be a bridge … among the Iraqi groups. And that's why I hope to keep this ministry away from politicians."

U.S. officials have offered Iraqi leaders a list of more than a dozen former Iraqi military officers they would like to be considered for the defense and interior posts. Iraqis have said the men had creditable records during their service for Hussein; the U.S. military is now looking over their records to make sure.

The senior U.S. official said it would be acceptable for the posts to go to Shiites if they were with secular parties. He cited as one possibility Kasim Daoud, who was national security advisor under Allawi and is a member of Allawi's coalition.

Iraqi party leaders said the deliberations were at an early stage and pointed out that leaders of the United Iraq Alliance were themselves divided on the issue. Yet several predicted it would be difficult for the Americans to sell their candidates, considering that the party leaders feel strongly about installing their own members and are increasingly unhappy with U.S. efforts to give Sunnis a bigger share of power.

The defense and interior ministers are among the most powerful in the Cabinet, each having authority over tens of thousands of jobs and billions of dollars in contracts.

Some Shiite and Kurdish leaders object to giving either of the posts to Sunnis, saying that most have connections to insurgent groups.

Qubad Talabani, the Washington representative of the Kurdistan regional government and son of Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, said that in filling these top posts, "the goal should be to find the best person, not to start out with some restrictive rule."

Strong candidates would have the kind of respect and authority that comes with connections to a major political party, he said. It would be a mistake to give both ministries to one ethnic group, but there is no reason that Kurds shouldn't control one of the ministries, he said.




Talabani said the two ministries had already been stripped of most of their Sunni staff members. He contended that as a practical matter, it would be difficult for any Sunni minister to exert authority over an organization that was exclusively Shiite and Kurdish.

Juan Cole, a Middle East specialist at the University of Michigan, said it was "pie in the sky" for the U.S. to expect that it could sell a secular candidate when Iraq's religious parties are strengthening their grip.

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"It may be possible for the Americans to leverage their influence to try to get the least objectionable person in the ministry, but when they say they want somebody with zero ties, what world are they living in?" he said.

He said it would be very difficult for Washington to persuade Iraqi officials to accept a minister tied to Allawi's coalition.

Cole thinks the Americans might have more luck promoting another candidate who has surfaced, Jawad Maliki, a member of the Islamic Dawa Party and an advisor to transitional Iraqi Prime Minister Ibrahim Jafari. Although Dawa has ties to the Iranians, its militia is relatively small and may not concern Washington, Cole said.

The senior U.S. official acknowledged that there had been Shiite resistance to American efforts to empower Sunnis as part of an effort to defuse the insurgency.

Many Shiites suspect that the bid to draw in the Sunnis is no more than "a campaign to deprive them [Shiites] of the fruits of victory that they fairly won at the ballot box," the U.S. official said.

As Khalilzad has pushed the Shiites to give more ground, there have been more signs of resentment in newspapers and on television, the U.S. official noted. A news program on the TV station operated by the Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the main Shiite coalition partners, recently carried footage of an Iraqi cleric waving a rifle and accusing the Americans of trying to cheat Shiites out of what was justly theirs, he said.

The official acknowledged that in pushing the powerful Shiite parties to give up powerful posts, U.S. officials were trying to carry off a delicate task.

"We want them to end up unhappy, but not so unhappy that they'll go out and start breaking things up," he said. "That makes it a very tough thing to do."

*


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Times staff writer Alissa J. Rubin in Baghdad contributed to this report.

THIS STORY HAS BEEN FORMATTED FOR EASY PRINTING


Bird flu confirmed in deaths of 2 Indonesian children
January 21, 2006

JAKARTA (Reuters) - A Hong Kong laboratory has confirmed the H5N1 strain of bird flu killed two children from the same Indonesian family this month, a senior official at the Health Ministry said on Saturday.

Indonesia has now had 14 confirmed deaths from bird flu, said the official, Hariadi Wibisono, director of control of animal-borne diseases at the ministry, and five cases where patients have survived.

"These two cases have been confirmed positive from Hong Kong," Wibisono told Reuters by telephone, referring to the laboratory, which is recognised by the World Health Organization (WHO).

The two children were a 4-year-old boy and a 13-year-old girl from the town of Indramayu in West Java province. Their father has also been admitted to hospital suffering suspected bird flu, although no test results have come back for him yet.

Officials had previously said the boy was aged 3.

The Indramayu family is Indonesia's fifth cluster of cases, where people living in close proximity have fallen ill.

There has been no evidence of human-to-human transmission in the deaths of the children and officials have said dead chickens were found in their neighborhood at Indramayu, which lies 175 km (110 miles) east of Jakarta.

The children died in the past week.

Apart from the two Indramayu children, Indonesia is awaiting confirmation from local tests that showed a 39-year-old man died of bird flu earlier this month.

The H5N1 virus is not known to pass easily between humans at the moment, but experts fear it could develop that ability and set off a global pandemic that might kill millions of people.

Prior to the two Indonesian children, the confirmed death toll from bird flu was 80 people in six countries since late 2003.

The highly pathogenic strain is endemic in poultry in parts of Asia, and has affected birds in two-thirds of the provinces in Indonesia, an archipelago of 17,000 islands and 220 million people.



© Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company

Official slams U.S. talks with insurgents
By Paul Martin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 20, 2006

AMMAN, Jordan -- Iraq National Security Adviser Mowaffak Rubaie has launched a scathing attack on secret American-led talks with insurgents, saying the process could encourage more violence.
He said the procedures are counterproductive and will increase the insurgents' morale and clout.
"I think the Americans are making a huge and fatal mistake in their policy of appeasement and they should not do this. They should leave the Iraqi government to deal with it," he told The Washington Times in a telephone interview from Baghdad.
The talks -- begun in secrecy several months ago and first reported by The Times in December -- succeeded in producing a truce for the Dec. 15 national elections.
They also were intended to set the basis for an overall deal with hard-line Sunnis that would isolate al Qaeda fighters from other Arab countries.
But the momentum broke down soon after the election as Sunnis and secular parties charged widespread vote rigging, and it became obvious that the Shi'ites were in position to control the government along with the Kurdish minority.
Mr. Rubaie accused U.S. negotiators of going behind the backs of the Iraqi government and urged them to hold off any further communication with the insurgent groups.
Instead, the United States should allow the new Iraqi government to decide on how to quell the insurgency, he said.
"We should launch all sorts of political initiatives and they should wait for the Iraqi government in a few weeks time. I believe we are capable and must be given a chance to do it," he said.
Mr. Rubaie did not specify what steps he envisaged for the new government. But he made it clear the government did not wish to talk to those carrying out violent operations.
U.S. officials met with insurgents considered "rejectionists." They said that they had not and would not make contact with terrorists who had a policy of indiscriminate killing, including supporters of al Qaeda and its affiliates.
Mr. Rubaie said: "There is no way, not a snowball in hell, that we will talk to any insurgents group or terrorists group, because we don't want to pay them off for killing our people.

"We believe in ballot boxes. They believe in bullets."
He added, "I repeat: Any policy of appeasement is a fatal mistake. It makes them misinterpret their opponents' actions as coming from a position of weakness.
"I believe it will worsen our security position," Mr. Rubaie said.
He said that if any deal were to be struck with insurgents, it would be interpreted by many Iraqis as a subversion of the democratic process.
"It will give the wrong impression to the Iraqi people. The 11 million Iraqis who believed in the ballot box will say 'what the heck; violence is paying off.' This is wrong."
The Shi'ite-led administration has long worried about deals made behind its back with its rivals, and viewed with disfavor American support for secular political alternatives.
Mr. Rubaie said he was upset that, as national security adviser, he had not been consulted about the talks, and "as far as I know" neither had anyone in the government.
Decisions on such discussions should be agreed to jointly in advance, he said.

Iran, Syria blamed for suicide blast
From correspondents in Jerusalem
21jan06

ISRAEL has accused Iran and Syria of being behind a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv that has raised tensions ahead of next week's Palestinian election.

Yesterday's bombing poses a serious challenge for interim Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, who assumed power after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon suffered a stroke on January 4, as well as to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who says the attack was designed to sabotage the January 25 poll.
Sharon aide Raanan Gissin said Israel had "ample, concrete evidence" that the Tel Aviv bombing, for which the Islamic Jihad group claimed responsibility, was bankrolled from Tehran and planned in Damascus. The bombing injured 30 people.

Mr Gissin said he could not reveal the evidence.

Israel has often made similar accusations, noting that Islamic Jihad has offices in Damascus.

Mr Gissin's comments echoed similar accusations by Defence Minister Shaul Mofaz to Israeli newspapers.

The Haaretz daily reported that Mr Mofaz said Israel had "decisive proof that the attack in Tel Aviv was a direct result of the axis of Terror That operates between Iran and Syria".

Yedioth Ahronoth quoted Mr Mofaz as saying Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, on a two-day visit to Syria, was holding a "terrorism summit" with President Bashar al-Assad.

During his visit to Damascus, Mr Ahmadinejad pledged support to militant Palestinian factions at a meeting with their leaders today, according to a Palestinian group said.

Leaders from Islamic Jihad and Hamas were present.

Hamas, expected to make a strong showing against Abbas's Fatah movement in the election, staged rallies across the Gaza Strip today attended by tens of thousands of supporters.

Senior Hamas leader Ismail Haniyah said the group would not abandon its campaign against Israel "until we raise flags over the Dome of the Rock" – the Jerusalem shrine in a complex holy to Muslims and Jews.

Mr Gissin used the Tel Aviv bombing as a warning to European powers considering measures against Tehran over its nuclear program.

The United States and the European Union want the International Atomic Energy Agency to refer Iran to the U.N. Security Council, where it could face possible sanctions.

"This attack was in Tel Aviv. Tomorrow it may be in Berlin or in Paris or in London – countries that may vote against Iran on the issue its nuclear program," Mr Gissin said.

The bombing was the first in the Jewish state since an 11-month truce expired at the end of last year.

Pakistan PM: No Evidence of al-Qaida Dead By BRADLEY BROOKS, Associated Press Writer
Fri Jan 20, 6:28 PM ET

Pakistan's prime minister said Friday no "tangible evidence" has been found that al-Qaida operatives were among those killed in a U.S. missile strike on a border village last week.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said security agencies in the area of Damadola "have not found any tangible evidence that a particular group or any individual was there."

A senior Pakistani intelligence official earlier told The Associated Press that al-Qaida figures were casualties of the Jan. 13 attack, which killed 13 villagers.

Officials believe at least four foreign militants may also have died, including an al-Qaida explosives and chemical weapons expert and a son-in-law of the terror network's No. 2 leader, Ayman al-Zawahri.

The intelligence official said the al-Qaida operatives had gathered in Damadola to discuss "new attacks" in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Despite widespread protests across Pakistan this week calling for the ouster of Pakistan President Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a close ally of the U.S., Aziz told reporters that his nation stands solidly behind the United States and its fight against terrorists.

"As regards the relations between Pakistan and the United States, or our conviction about fighting terrorism, there is no question that Pakistan is one of the countries which has done the most because we believe terorrism is no solution to any problems," he said.

But the prime minister — at the U.N. to meet with U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan — underscored that the government of Pakistan condemned the U.S. airstrike.

Aziz said he will raise the issue with President Bush when the two meet next week in Washington in what he termed a "wide-ranging discussion."

Iran, which shares a border with the nuclear-armed Pakistan, and its alleged push to build a nuclear weapon came up when Aziz spoke with Annan.

"Pakistan is opposed to proliferation in any form," Aziz said.

Aziz did say, however, that Iran has the right to use nuclear power to meets its legitimate energy needs, as long as it is done under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency.

A.Q. Khan, a national hero known as the father of Pakistan's atomic bomb, ran a network smuggling nuclear technology overseas — including to Iran, according to the IAEA — and the country's nuclear program has come under widespread criticism, particularly for proliferation concerns.

Pakistan is not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, the cornerstone of global efforts to control the spread of nuclear weapons.




Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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January 22, 2006
Pakistan's Push in Border Areas Is Said to Falter
By CARLOTTA GALL and MOHAMMAD KHAN

PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Jan. 19 - Two years after the Pakistani Army began operations in border tribal areas to root out members of Al Qaeda and other foreign militants, Pakistani officials who know the area say the military campaign is bogged down, the local political administration is powerless and the militants are stronger than ever.

Both Osama bin Laden, who released a new audiotape of threats against the United States this week, and his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, are believed to be living somewhere in the seven districts that make up these tribal areas, which run for more than 500 miles along the rugged Afghan border and have been hit by several American missile strikes in recent weeks.

The officials said they had been joined by possibly hundreds of foreign militants from Arab countries, Central Asia and the Caucasus, who present a continuing threat to the authorities within the region.

The tribal areas are off limits to foreign journalists, but the Pakistani officials, and former residents who did not want to be identified for fear of retribution, said the militants - who call themselves Taliban - now dispensed their own justice, ran their own jails, robbed banks, shelled military and civilian government compounds and attacked convoys at will. They are recruiting men from the local tribes and have gained a hold over the population through a mix of fear and religion, the officials and former residents said.

An American military official in Afghanistan, in an e-mail response to questions about Pakistan's tribal areas, said: "I believe this region is going through a period of revolutionary change, in which moderates and extremists fight for the future of their nations. And with vast, lawless areas in which Taliban-style justice holds sway, Pakistan faces serious challenges." The official agreed to comment only on the condition of anonymity.

Maj. Gen. Shaukat Sultan, chief spokesman for the Pakistani military, said the accounts of the size of the militants' forces were exaggerated. He put the number of foreign militants in the whole of the tribal areas at "100, plus or minus."

But the officials and residents say the militants are far more numerous, and have embarked on a disruptive campaign of terrorism, particularly in North and South Waziristan: in the last year, 108 pro-government tribal elders, 4 or 5 government officials, informers and even 2 local journalists, have been assassinated by militants, local journalists say.

Qaeda operatives are the driving force behind the local militants and are influencing their tactics, the officials said. The militants have managed this despite a hammer-and-anvil strategy in the region, with American military forces pressing from the Afghan side of the border. There have been three American strikes in the area in the past six weeks, involving missiles fired from remotely piloted Predator aircraft operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, but whether they were an expression of American frustration or the outcome of a burst of intelligence remains unclear.

Despite government denials, the officials said, the strikes may have had the tacit approval of Pakistan's leadership, which has issued mostly pro forma condemnations. The officials asked not to be identified because their supervisors do not allow them to talk to the media.

The most recent strike, in Bajaur on Jan. 13, killed as many as 18 civilians, but might also have killed several high-level Qaeda members.

[On Saturday, President Pervez Musharraf told Under Secretary of State R. Nicholas Burns that the Jan. 13 strike "must not be repeated," The Associated Press reported.]

Bajaur, Afghan and Pakistani security officials said, is not as out of control as North and South Waziristan, but it has become a staging post for fighters entering and leaving the eastern Afghan province of Kunar, where American forces have encountered some of the most serious resistance over the past year.

Al Qaeda's propaganda unit has produced video CD's showing Afghan fighters being trained by an Arab commander and mounting ambushes on American soldiers and convoys in Kunar. Afghans know of two Arab commanders who fought against Soviet forces and have stayed on in Bajaur, said the governor of Kunar, Asadullah Wafa.

The Afghan border police say they learned of a meeting in a mosque in Bajaur six months ago between members of the Afghan Taliban, a group led by the renegade mujahedeen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar from Afghanistan and the Arabs, during which they are said to have divided up responsibility for insurgent operations in Afghanistan.

Pakistan's military has become more cautious about emerging from its bases in North and South Waziristan, and the civilian administration is so hamstrung that the senior government representative in South Waziristan does not even live there.

"We run a government on paper, but not on the ground," said one government official who has worked in North and South Waziristan, which have seen some of the heaviest combat of the past two years.

Now, the heaviest fighting has shifted to North Waziristan, where there are reports of casualties among the military or the civilian population almost daily. At least three small mountain lookout posts built by the army with American funds have been knocked out, one official who was there recently said.

"The situation is going from bad to worse," the official said. "No one can raise their voice against the Taliban." Armed local militants come and go freely and have even opened offices in the main bazaar of Wana, in South Waziristan, driving up in pickups filled with armed fighters. They use the offices to recruit followers from the large, illiterate and unemployed youth of the area, a former resident said, asking not to be identified for fear of retribution from the militants.

Military operations, which have killed at least 40 civilians and wounded 600, said one official, have also driven youths to join the militants.

General Sultan, the military spokesman, cautioned against taking such reports too seriously. "Calling them Taliban is sensationalizing the situation," in an interview in his headquarters Rawalpindi. "There is a mix of foreigners, Al Qaeda and Taliban and local supporters." By Taliban, he meant fighters from Afghanistan.

He said foreign militants had been eliminated in South Waziristan and existed in North Waziristan now only in small groups, adding that there were also few local militants allied to Al Qaeda and other foreigners.

He did not have figures for military casualties in 2005 but said there were fewer than in 2004, when 250 Pakistani soldiers died. "It's not anything like that now," he said.

Home to six million people and covering 10,000 square miles, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas for years provided a sanctuary for Afghan and other foreign fighters opposed to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But for the past four years, after members of the Taliban, Al Qaeda and foreign allies were driven out of Afghanistan, they have lived in the area and gradually taken greater control.

Government officials who have spent time in the tribal areas say there may be as many as 1,000 foreign militants there, but because many have intermarried and raised families, their status as foreigners is somewhat blurred.

Today the region is believed to be home to a kind of rogue's gallery. Besides Al Qaeda's leaders, Tohir Yuldashev, the Uzbek leader of the Independence Movement of Uzbekistan, which was allied with the Taliban, is thought to be in North Waziristan.

Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mr. Hekmatyar, who are both wanted by American forces in Afghanistan, and gained their fame as Afghan commanders from the days of resistance to the Soviet occupation, are widely believed to move between the tribal areas and Afghanistan.

(The Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his close deputies, are thought to be farther south in the province of Baluchistan.)

The local militants are mostly also men who gained fought in Afghanistan, either against the Soviet Army or alongside the Taliban in its civil war against the Northern Alliance. But it is the foreign fighters who have most radicalized the local population, all agree. "The driving forces are the foreigners," General Sultan said.

The American military official in Afghanistan said the solution to the problem was to strengthen the Afghan Border Police, and "almost certainly it will involve Pakistan continuing to conduct operations in the border region and coming to grips with the Taliban influence inside Pakistan."

"Pakistan appears to struggle with whether to crack down on Al Qaeda and the Taliban, not just with how to crack down on them," he wrote. "This war will take time and unfortunately we expect future attacks on coalition and Afghan forces."

The inhabitants of the tribal areas are deeply religious, yet the local militants have introduced a new extremist language, like that of Al Qaeda, said one official who has spent time in the tribal areas.

The militants' main obsession is to fight Americans in Afghanistan, but they also attack the Pakistani Army and government officials, who are seen as subservient allies.

"They are religious, mujahedeen, and they think the military are serving the cause of Bush," the official said. The struggle is cast in the most messianic of terms, as a battle between God and Satan, he said.

Anyone who is seen to have links to the West or the government, including journalists who work for international news agencies, are also targets. Two local journalists have been killed and one kidnapped in recent months. Another left the area with his family last month after a bomb destroyed part of his house.

The military, rather than pacifying the region, has aggravated the situation by sidelining the civilian administration and the traditional tribal councils, which have also been drastically undermined by the numerous assassinations of tribal elders, the officials said.

The army's tactic of negotiating with militants in South Waziristan has only emboldened them, the Pakistani officials said. Self-styled Taliban militants have emerged in spectacular fashion in North Waziristan.

On Dec. 7 in Miram Shah, the administrative center, a band of militants waged a battle with a local criminal gang, killing 11 of them and burning down 25 houses.

The military and the Frontier Corps, which is a militia drawn from the local tribes, stayed out of the battle, and later the Taliban killed 26 or 27 gang members.

The clash made the militants enormously popular among local residents, who had suffered extortion at the hands of the gang, the official said. The campaign was reminiscent of those under the Afghan Taliban, who were born out of a movement to cleanse southern Afghanistan of rapists and other criminals in 1994.

Now, the official said, no one can contest the Taliban's authority in Miram Shah. General Sultan dismissed that, saying both groups in the clash had been put out of action.

Ruhallah Khapalwak contributed reporting from Asadabad, Afghanistan, for this article.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 22, 2006
News Analysis
Iraqis Urging Unity, but Rifts May Be Too Deep
By DEXTER FILKINS
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 21 - With all the ballots from last month's election finally counted, the leader of Iraq's largest Sunni alliance telephoned his Shiite rival on Friday night to wish him well in the weeks ahead.

"I was hoping we could build a good relationship," said Adnan Dulaimi, the Sunni leader, of his chat with the leader of the Shiite alliance, Abdul Aziz Hakim.

The warm feeling may not last very long.

With the results now in, most Iraqi political leaders say they want to form a "national unity" government, a coalition that would include the three main alliances of Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. With none of the major blocs capturing a majority of the 275 parliamentary seats, the talks to form such a government are already under way.

The stakes are high. Anything short of a unity government, Iraqi and American officials here say, would be tantamount to disaster, with the Sunnis the most likely losers. Leaving them out of the government could very well prompt them to turn away from democratic politics again, and give the insurgency a fresh shot of energy.

Zalmay Khalilzad, the American ambassador here, has made it clear that he intends to involve himself directly in the negotiations - as forcefully as is necessary - to make sure the Sunnis are given a significant role.

But for all the expressions of solidarity, most of the political factors now in play seem weighted against a broad-based government. Many Iraqis suggest that the most likely government will be an alliance between the Shiites and the Kurds, with the Sunnis cut out altogether.

In the vote totals announced Friday, the Shiite coalition and an alliance of the two largest Kurdish parties fell just three seats shy of the two-thirds parliamentary majority needed to form a government.

With 181 seats in all, the Shiites and Kurds would need to pick up just three additional seats from the 10 other groups that won seats in the election. If they can do that, they will not need the Sunnis to form a government or to pass laws.

It seems clear that the Shiite leadership is considering going ahead without the Sunnis. Shiite leaders are petitioning the Iraqi election commission for a re-interpretation of the vote counting rules that would, if it were accepted, grant the Shiites 10 additional seats.

The same arithmetic would also come into play in the mechanism to amend Iraq's new Constitution. The Constitution, which would create a weak central government and give the state an Islamic cast, was approved by a majority of Iraqis in October but rejected by most Sunnis. The Sunnis were coaxed into the democratic process by the promise that the new government would consider amending the Constitution.

Under the mechanism set up, any change would require a two-thirds vote of the assembly. Early this month, Mr. Hakim, with a rough outline of the election totals already in hand, declared that the Shiite coalition would oppose any significant changes in the constitution.

American officials, as well as some Iraqi leaders, interpreted Mr. Hakim's remarks as little more than an opening bid in what are expected to be difficult negotiations. But in any talks over the new Constitution - as over the new government - the Shiites and the Kurds already hold most of the cards.

Even a vigorous effort by Mr. Khalilzad, who helped the Iraqis complete the Constitution in October, might not be enough. At times, the old hatreds that divide Sunni, Shiites and Kurds here seemed too daunting even for diplomacy.

For the moment, the leaders of the Shiite and Kurdish blocs are saying that they will make every effort to bring the Sunnis into the government. They say they are aware of the dangers - and the futility - of trying to impose their will on an embattled and often violent minority.

"We are not living in a country where a party with a two-vote majority in Parliament can rule - this is not Iraq," Jalal Talabani, the Iraqi president and Kurdish leader, said in an interview. "If the Shiites and Kurds will cooperate, there will be a majority, but this is not right, and not the correct way to rule the country."

But Mr. Talabani made it clear that his tolerance would reach only so far. One thing he would not brook, he said, was any hint that the Sunni parties were acting as a political front for the insurgents. In an interview earlier this month, a prominent Sunni political leader said that he was in contact with guerrilla leaders, and that he had asked them to hold their fire in December to allow the Sunnis to go to the polls.

That raised the possibility that the insurgent violence was being calibrated to help the Sunni parties.

"They must be clear they are with the terrorists, or with the political process," Mr. Talabani said, referring to the Sunni leaders. "We will never accept this dirty game. If they are with the political process, they are welcome. If they are with the terrorists, they will lose everything. That is my advice to them."

"We, the Kurds and the Shiites and the democratic elements among the Sunnis, will never never, never accept this role," Mr. Talabani said. "They will be out of the government, they will be out of the state, we will rule the country in a democratic way. And we will impose peace and freedom on the country."

For now, the Sunnis are hoping that, whatever the arithmetic, they will be granted a role in the new government if only because the consequences of leaving them out are so dire.

"They cannot form a cabinet without us," said Mr. Dulaimi, the Sunni leader. "And if there is no consensus, the new cabinet will not be able to solve the Iraqi problem."

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi contributed reporting for this article.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 22, 2006
Israel Looks at Possible Elections Win by Hamas
By STEVEN ERLANGER
JERUSALEM, Jan. 22 - The Israeli cabinet met today to discuss policy toward the Palestinian Authority in the event the radical Islamic group Hamas does well or even wins the election for the Palestinian Legislative Council on Wednesday.

Israel says it will refuse to deal with Hamas, which Israel, the United States and the European Union consider a terrorist group seeking Israel's destruction. If Hamas wins, Israel may even stop paying the Palestinian Authority the taxes it collects on its behalf, the daily Yediot Aharonot reported.

Hamas, running for the first time in Palestinian Authority elections, says that it is prepared to consider a long-term truce with Israel within its 1967 boundaries. But it rejects the 1993 Oslo accords and a permanent two-state solution.

Israel's chief of staff, Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz, warned today that violence could follow the Palestinian election, especially if Hamas should win, suggesting that the ruling Fatah faction might resist the results. Chaos could follow, he suggested.

"We have to prepare for the possibility of an escalation with the Palestinians, for the next round of violence," he said in a speech to a security conference in Herzliya.

On Saturday night, the Irsaeli defense minister, Shaul Mofaz, said Israel could act alone if the elections produced a Palestinian Authority that was not "a legitimate and effective partner" for peace talks. If so, Israel would continue to seek "to establish defensible borders, strengthen settlement blocs, keep Jerusalem undivided, including its surrounding area, and demilitarize the Palestinian territory," code for ongoing Israeli army sweeps.

Mr. Mofaz also warned Tehran in clear terms that Israel would not tolerate a nuclear-armed Iran. "We are giving priority at this stage to diplomatic action," he said. "But in any case we cannot tolerate a nuclear option for Iran and we must prepare ourselves."

Israel itself has nuclear weapons, but does not say so. Mr. Mofaz, who was born in Iran, is a member of the Kadima Party headed by acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. The Israeli elections are on March 28.

In the Palestinian election, Marwan Barghouti, the imprisoned leader of the Fatah Party list, was allowed by Israel to give interviews to the Arab satellite stations Al Jazeera and Al Arabiya, both watched by Palestinians. He called for a large turnout and repeated his prediction that Hamas and Fatah "are heading toward being partners in the field, and in Parliament." He called for "a broad national reform government with the participation of all."

But Nabil Shaath, a Fatah veteran, suggested that it would form a coalition with independents, leaving Hamas in opposition. "With Hamas, it will be very difficult to reach a joint program" that includes negotiations with Israel, he said.

To aid Fatah against Hamas, the United States has spent about $1.9 million of its yearly $400 million in aid to the Palestinians on some 55 quick projects, to be completed before the election, that allow the Palestinian Authority to show that it is delivering to its voters.

That aid effort, described by The Washington Post today, was designed "to work with the Palestinian Authority to enhance democratic institutions and support democratic actors, not just Fatah," said Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm, a spokeswoman for the American consulate in East Jerusalem, which deals with the Palestinians.

American and Palestinian officials who were granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak said that the program, which started up in August, was aimed at helping defeat Hamas, and that the government had done a detailed political analysis to try to focus on constituencies where Hamas was doing well. The Office of Transition Initiatives in the United States Agency for International Development was allowed up to $30,000 in discretionary spending for each project instead of $10,000. The projects - tree planting, schoolroom additions, a soccer tournament, street cleaning, computers at community centers - were coordinated with President Mahmoud Abbas and meant to be associated with him and the Palestinian Authority, which is run by Fatah. While American aid was always acknowledged publicly, Ms. Schweitzer-Bluhm said, "our logo was not always on the banner."

A senior Palestinian official said that many of the 45 projects aimed at Gaza were not carried out, that the procurement bureaucracy had proved difficult, and that the projects had little or no impact on municipal voting, where Hamas did very well. Mr. Abbas was also reluctant to show up to claim credit for the projects, the official said.

In Gaza City, at least one person was killed and two were wounded when a car exploded. A militant group accused Israel of trying to kill its fighters, but the Israeli army denied involvement in the car explosion. It said it carried out an airstrike on three gunmen it believed were trying to cross into Israel near Karni, and at least one man was killed.




Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 22, 2006
Kuwait Moves to Strip Power From Ill Emir
By HASSAN M. FATTAH
DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 21 - A succession crisis in Kuwait continued Saturday, as the country's cabinet began proceedings to remove the ailing new emir.

The extraordinary move occurred amid growing concern over who should lead the oil-rich city-state after the death of Emir Sheik Jaber al-Ahmad al-Sabah last Sunday.

The crown prince, Sheik Saad al-Abdullah al-Sabah , believed to be 76, immediately became emir under the Constitution, and he has insisted that Parliament call a special session to allow him to take the oath of office.

But members of the cabinet say his poor health will keep him from governing properly. Recently, he has appeared in public in a wheelchair and has not spoken, raising speculation about whether he would even be able to recite the oath of office. His supporters have suggested that the procedure be done behind closed doors or shortened to prevent embarrassment.

The cabinet is moving to transfer power to the prime minister, Sheik Sabah al-Ahmad al-Sabah, also thought to be 76. Sheik Sabah, who is the late emir's half brother, is in good health and has run the day-to-day affairs of the government for years. In announcing the move, the Parliament released a statement to Kuna, Kuwait's official news agency, specifically citing the emir's health. "The Council of Ministers expresses its deepest sorrow and sadness about the health condition of His Highness Emir Sheik Saad al-Abdullah al-Salem al-Sabah, may God protect him," the statement said.

Under Kuwait's Constitution, Parliament may declare the emir unfit to govern with a two-thirds majority. An article of the succession law says that if the emir fails to meet the conditions for ruling, or is incapable of carrying them out for health reasons, the cabinet may replace him.

The government-controlled Kuwaiti television reported Friday that a delegation from the royal family had urged Sheik Sabah to take over as emir, and Sheik Sabah had agreed to do so. The broadcast then showed family members congratulating him; Sheik Saad did not appear.



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

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Tehran plans a nuclear weapons test before March 20, 2006 – the Iranian New Year, moves Shahab-3 missiles within striking range of Israel

January 22, 2006, 9:30 AM (GMT+02:00)

Reporting this, the dissident Foundation for Democracy in Iran, a US-based watch group, cites sources in the US and Iran. The FDI adds from Iran: on June 16, the high command of the Revolutionary Guards Air Force ordered Shahab-3 missile units to move mobile launchers every 24 hours instead of weekly. This is in view of a potential pre-emptive strike by the US or Israel.

Advance Shahab-3 units have been positioned in Kermanshah and Hamad within striking distance of Israel, reserve launchers moved to Esfahan and Fars.

The missile units were told to change positions “in a radius of 30-35 kilometers” and only at night.

DEBKAfile’s Iranian sources add: FDI reporting has a reputation for credibility. Western and Israeli intelligence have known for more than six months that Iran’s nuclear program has reached the capability of being able to carry out a nuclear explosion, albeit underground. It would probably be staged in a desert or mountain region and activated by a distant control center. Tehran would aim at confronting the Americans, Europeans and Israelis with an irreversible situation.

At the same time, an explosion of this sort would indicate that Iran is not yet able to produce a nuclear bomb that can be delivered by airplane or a warhead adapted to a missile. The stage Iran has reached is comparable to Pakistan’s when it conducted its first nuclear tests in the nineties and North Korea’s in 2001. All the same, an Iranian underground nuclear blast, which will most probably be attempted on March 22, would turn around the strategic position of all the parties concerned and the Middle East as whole.

The question now is: will the United States, Israel or both deliver a pre-emptive strike ahead of the Iranian underground test - or later? Or will Washington alternatively use the event to bring the UN Security Council round to economic sanctions? Tehran is already organizing to withstand economic penalties. For Israel, the timing is getting tight in view of its general election on March 28. Acting prime minister Ehud Olmert must take into account that a ruling party which allows an Iranian nuclear explosion to take place six days before the poll would draw painful punishment from the voter.

Israeli Hints at Preparation to Stop Iran

Jan 21, 9:00 PM (ET)

By JOSEF FEDERMAN


JERUSALEM (AP) - Israel's defense minister hinted Saturday that the Jewish state is preparing for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program, but said international diplomacy must be the first course of action.

"Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability and it must have the capability to defend itself, with all that that implies, and this we are preparing," Shaul Mofaz said.

His comments at an academic conference stopped short of overtly threatening a military strike but were likely to add to growing tensions with Iran.

Germany's defense minister said in an interview published Saturday that he is hopeful of a diplomatic solution to the impasse over Iran's nuclear program, but argued that "all options" should remain open.


(AP) Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, leaves his office in Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, Jan. 18,...
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Asked by the Bild am Sonntag weekly whether the threat of a military solution should remain in place, Franz Josef Jung was quoted as responding: "Yes, we need all options."

French President Jacques Chirac said Thursday that France could respond with nuclear weapons against any state-sponsored terrorist attack.

Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi said Saturday that Chirac's threats reflect the true intentions of nuclear nations, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported.

"The French president uncovered the covert intentions of nuclear powers in using this lever (nuclear weapons) to determine political games," IRNA quoted Asefi as saying.

Israel long has identified Iran as its biggest threat and accuses Tehran of pursuing nuclear weapons. Iran says its atomic program is peaceful.


(AP) Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr Mottaki walks during a farewell ceremony for Tajik President...
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Iran broke U.N. seals at a uranium enrichment plant Jan. 10 and said it was resuming nuclear research after a 2 1/2-year freeze. Germany, France and Britain said two days later that talks aimed at halting Iran's nuclear progress were at a dead end and called for Iran's referral to the U.N. Security Council.

The International Atomic Energy Agency, the U.N. nuclear watchdog, will meet Feb. 2 to discuss possible referral.

Israel's Mofaz said sanctions and international oversight of Iran's nuclear program stood as the "correct policy at this time."

In Germany, Jung called himself "confident that there will be a diplomatic solution in the case of Iran."

Israeli leaders have also repeatedly said they hope the crisis can be resolved through diplomacy, and they said any military action would have to be part of an international effort. They have denied having plans for a unilateral preventive strike.


(AP) Iranian President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, left, talks with Iran's Foreign Minister Manouchehr...
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Russian President Vladimir Putin has said Tehran might still agree to Moscow's offer to move its uranium enrichment program to Russia, a step backed by the United States and Europeans as a way to resolve the deadlock.

Israel's concerns about Iran have grown since the election of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who said last year that Israel should be "wiped off the map."

On Friday, Iran's Students News Agency reported Friday that Central Bank governor Ebrahim Sheibani said Iran had begun moving its foreign currency reserves from European banks and transferring them to an undisclosed location as protection against possible U.N. sanctions.

Sheibani backed away Saturday from his statement that the transfers were already underway, and Iran's Central Bank said there had been no change in its currency policy.

Estimates put Iranian funds in Europe at as much as $50 billion.

---_

Associated Press writers Nasser Karimi and Ali Akbar Dareini in Tehran and Geir Moulson in Berlin contributed to this report.

http://www.iranfocus.com/modules/news/arti...hp?storyid=5410

Iran’s president sees “final war” between Muslims, West
Sat. 21 Jan 2006
Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 21 – Hard-line Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad told senior leaders of a radical Palestinian group in Damascus on Friday that the Middle East conflict has become “the locus of the final war” between Muslims and the West, Iran’s official news agency, IRNA, reported.

Ahmadinejad, who was speaking on the second day of his two-day trip to Syria, told the leaders of Hamas, “Today, victory in Palestine has become a matter of life and death for the Islamic world and for Global Arrogance (the West)”.

The Iranian president urged the Palestinians to reject moves such as Israel’s withdrawal from Gaza.

“Some point to the withdrawal of the occupiers from parts of Palestine, but this event has already been greatly detrimental to Muslims”, Ahmadinejad said.

“If the occupiers stay on even one inch of Palestinian soil, the goal of Palestine will not be realised”, Ahmadinejad told Hamas leaders, who included Khalid Mash’al, the head of the group’s political bureau.

“We must not let our guard down now for even one moment against the enemies’ plots. Belittling the goal of Palestine is a great plot that the enemies are after”, he said.

Ahmadinejad has called the Holocaust a “myth” and said that Israel must be “wiped off the map”.

Firebrand strategist to head Iran’s Air Force
Sat. 21 Jan 2006
Iran Focus

Tehran, Iran, Jan. 21 – A senior commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards who once vowed that “no part of the Islamic world is going to be safe and secure for America” was named as the new head of the Guards’ Air Force.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei issued a decree on Saturday, appointing Brigadier General Hossein Salami as the new commander of the Air Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). Another senior Guards commander, Brigadier General Mohammad-Reza Zahedi, was put in charge of the IRGC Ground Forces.

Salami is known as the father of the IRGC’s “asymmetric warfare” doctrine, which he helped to develop in the months preceding the war in Iraq. At the time, Salami was Director of Operations in the IRGC command headquarters.

The military doctrine is based on two components as strategic tools in any military confrontation: the massive use of suicide operations to target U.S. and Western interests around the world, and the use of weapons of mass destruction.

On July 4, 2004, General Salami called for the destruction of the United States during a ceremony to recruit suicide bombers that were willing to attack Western and Israeli targets.

“Now, America knows that Muslims with their desires for martyrdom have discovered a new technology and are capable of technological production. This has made [the U.S.] fear them”, Salami was quoted as saying by the state-run news agency ISNA.

In his new position as commander of the IRGC’s Air force, General Salami will be in charge of the country’s ballistic missile development project, a key component of the asymmetric warfare doctrine. Missiles are important as means of delivery for such weapons.

In November, Khamenei had appointed Salami as Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of the IRGC.

In the July 2004 speech, Salami had argued for the use of oil as a weapon by Muslim countries to put pressure on the West.

Salami said that because of the strategic location and resources of the Middle East, the United States had a goal of dominating the region, but was faced with the world of Islam.

Referring to suicide attacks against Israel, Salami said, “A young group following the ideology of Imam [Ruhollah] Khomeini and the [1979] Islamic revolution have started a new strategy of struggle and jihad against the Israelis”.

“With martyrdom-seeking operations, the fight against Israel has taken on a religious quality and has spread Islamic values. It was these martyrdom-seeking operations that brought about victory for the Hezbollah forces in southern Lebanon”.

He said that the West and Israel were terrified of suicide operations. “Now, no part of the Islamic world is safe and secure for America, thus the U.S. cannot move forward in the region and is currently trying to secure its present location”.

The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps was founded in the early days of the Islamic revolution in 1979 as an armed force loyal to Iran’s clerical rulers. Its commanders directly report to the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and their mission is to “protect and propagate the Islamic revolution”.

The appointments come 12 days after a plane crash in northwest Iran, which killed 11 senior IRGC commanders, including the commander of the IRGC Ground Forces. The crash was a serious blow to the IRGC at a critical time when the force has been given huge powers by the Supreme Leader in the wake of the consolidation of power by the ultra-conservative faction after hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office as president.

Swiss banking giant UBS AG stops doing business with Iran . A similar policy implemented against Syria

January 22, 2006, 2:50 PM (GMT+02:00)

UBS AG spokesman Serge Steiner announced Sunday, Jan. 22, that all existing business with customers in Iran will be cancelled, except for Iranians in exile.

DEBKAfile’s financial sources reveal that, under the threat of sanctions over Iran’s nuclear program, the ayatollahs and corporate heads as well as the government have begun transferring vast private fortunes out of secret accounts in Europe.

The money is being spread out among dozens of banks around the world, including the oil emirates, Hong Kong, Malaysia and Indonesia.

DEBKAfile has learned that Iran’s spiritual ruler Ayatollah Ali Khameini has transferred his personal fortune of $1.2 bn from the Swiss UBS AG to banks in Singapore and Malaysia. Former president Hashemi Rafsanjani has ordered the removal of two large sums in Canadian dollars – 856 m and 1,425 bn – from Canadian banks to establishments in Beirut, Dubai, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Our financial experts estimate that in the last ten days, some $7.5bn dollars have been drained from private Iranian accounts in Germany, Switzerland, France, Britain and Italy and concealed in Southeast Asian banks. That is in addition to the estimated $23bn in governing holdings that Iran has taken out of European banks and deposited in the Bahamas, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Dubai and Singapore.

Rumors began circulating at the end of last week that the two European banking giants, LNB in Italy and UBS AG, were about to freeze Iranian assets. DEBKAfile’s financial experts calculate the holdings in the two banks as totaling $17bn of oil revenues. The Swiss bank appears to have acted on a tip from Washington and pre-empted Tehran’s massive withdrawals which would created havoc on the world currency markets. The UBS AG took advantage of the bank being closed on a Sunday for this maneuver.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

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The international community must deal with the Iranian nuclear issue and prospective Hamas inclusion in Palestinian government

January 22, 2006, 7:33 PM (GMT+02:00)

This view was advanced by Israel’s new foreign and justice minister Tzipi Livneh. in an TV interview Sunday, Jan. 22. She stressed that the Iranian nuclear threat is of concern to the West as a whole and does not pinpoint Israel. Israel has accepted the international community’s undertaking to make Abu Mazen dismantle all terrorist organizations, especially Hamas, a commitment that will be tested after, not before, the Palestinian election next Wednesday.

DEBKAfile: The attempt to internationalize Israel’s security problems is unrealistic. Israel cannot rely on outsiders to undertake the daily burden of combating Palestinian terrorism, any more than Abu Mazen.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

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Heads of 10 Palestinian terrorist leaders received in Damascus Friday by Iranian president Ahmedenijad . He promised to support their “struggle.”

January 20, 2006, 6:32 PM (GMT+02:00)

Among them were Khaled Mashaal, whose Hamas is running for election in five days, Abdallah Ramadan Shalah, head of Jihad Islami, whose suicide bomber injured 30 Israels in Tel Aviv Thursday, Ahmed Jibril, head of the radical PFLP-General Command, and Hizballah’s Hassan Nasrallah.

DEBKAfile adds: The Olmert government is standing aside as Hamas heads for certain victory in the Palestinian elections. This group, like the other Palestinian terrorist groups whose commands are comfortably ensconced in Damascus, receives funding, aid and support from the hands of a leader who openly advocates wiping Israel off the map. The Tel Aviv suicide bombing was hailed enthusiastically by Iran’s state TV.

Copyright 2000-2006 DEBKAfile. All Rights Reserved.

Thumbnail Sketches of Canadian Candidates Forbes
Brief biographies of the four top federal party candidates vying for leadership of the House of Commons in Canada's elections on Monday: Paul Martin, 67, is head of Canada's Liberal Party and succeeded Jean Chretien to become the 21st prime minister in December, 2003. The son of a longtime Liberal Party Cabinet minister, Martin was born in Windsor, Ontario, and has a bachelor's degree in history and philosophy and a law degree from the University of Toronto. He worked for Montreal-based conglomerate Power Corp. of Canada, before becoming president, then sole owner of Canada Steamship Lines. Elected to Parliament in 1988 as Liberal candidate in a Montreal district, he served as finance minister under Chretien from 1993-2002.
Canadians face tough choices in election Miami Herald
`Mr. Dithers' faces ouster in Canada Chicago Tribune
Christian Science Monitor - Calgary Sun - Reuters - Globe and Mail - all 472 related »

Violence in Nepal Leaves 26 Dead Forbes
Clashes between Maoist rebels who attacked government forces in a southern Nepal village left 25 people dead and suspected rebels killed a pro-government candidate candidate in next month's municipal elections, officials said Sunday. The gunbattle began Saturday night when insurgents attacked a security patrol in Phapar Badi village, 100 miles south of the capital. The fighting lasted until daybreak Sunday.At least 17 rebels, five soldiers, two civilians and a policeman were killed and helicopters were searching the area for the attackers, Defense Ministry spokesman Bhupendra Poudel said.
Pro-democracy activists, police clash in Nepal Boston Globe
Nepal opposition parties call strike Financial Times
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Tehran plans nuclear weapon test by March:

Tehran is planning a nuclear weapons test before the Iranian New Year on March 20, 2006 says a group opposed to the regime in Tehran.
http://tinyurl.com/7ulb6

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Iran: Israeli military strike against nuclear program would be 'fatal mistake' :

Iran on Sunday said Israel would be making a "fatal mistake" if it resorted to military action against Tehran's nuclear program, and dismissed comments on the issue made by Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz as a "childish game."
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11640.htm

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Iraq's Sadr says his militia will support Iran:

Iraqi cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has assured Iran that his Shi'ite Muslim militiamen will support the Islamic Republic if it comes under attack, the official IRNA news agency reported on Sunday.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11642.htm

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Iran's Bomb:

There's been a lot of talk recently about Israel and/or the United States bombing the nuclear facilities in Iran. I wouldn't worry about that. I believe they are both bluffing.
http://www.lewrockwell.com/reese/reese256.html

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Iran will be taught a lesson: Burns:

US Undersecretary of State R Nicolas Burns has called Iran “a threat to world peace” and vowed to “teach it a lesson”.
http://tinyurl.com/7lqrq

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Talk Of Military Action As Iran Nuclear Standoff Continues:

Israel's defense minister hinted Saturday that the Jewish state is preparing for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program
http://www.wsbtv.com/news/6317172/detail.html

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Iran's conventional forces remain key to deterring potential threats:

The minimum force packages required for an Israeli or US strike would vary widely. An Israeli strike on even a single Iranian nuclear facility would stretch Israel's nascent long-range strike capability and require innovative basing and airborne refuelling solutions
http://www.janes.com/defence/news/jir/jir060120_2_n.shtml

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U.S. Still Short in Iran Security Council Push:

The United States has been unable to win international support to officially report Iran to the U.N. Security Council, despite two years of diplomatic efforts and defiant new actions by the country to resume uranium enrichment research
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11638.htm

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Italy Min Warns Against Any Israeli Action Vs Iran : -

Italian Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini warned Friday that any pre-emptive strike by Israel on Iranian nuclear facilities would have potentially disastrous consequences for the Middle East and the world.
http://tinyurl.com/7addw

Georgia blames Russia for gas cut-off ABC Online
Georgia's President Mikhail Saakashvili blamed Russia on Sunday for cutting gas supplies to his country and triggering an energy crisis as people shivered in sub-zero temperatures. Explosions in Russia's southern region of North Ossetia knocked out the main pipeline that exports Russian gas to Georgia and onward to its neighbour Armenia. Russian officials blamed anti-Moscow insurgents. But Mr Saakashvili, who has tense relations with the Kremlin and has sought to bring his ex-Soviet state closer to the West, said he did not believe the Russian explanation. "This morning there was a serious act of sabotage on the part of Russia on Georgia's energy system," Mr Saakashvili told a news briefing.
Gas blasts hit Caucasus supplies BBC News
Georgia blames Russia for gas cut-off Reuters.uk
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Al Qaeda's No. 2 Follows bin Laden's Lead and Resurfaces :

The Central Intelligence Agency confirmed today that the voice on the 18-minute audiotape, posted on an Internet forum that has carried Al Qaeda communiqués before, was Mr. Zawahiri's.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11629.htm

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Extraordinary renditions:

Osama bin Laden, who, like Bush, is the privileged son of an oil dynasty, was once the good friend of the United States. Now the commander-in-chief has turned his guns on this one- time ally in a repetitive mantra of demonology.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article11630.htm

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Decoding the latest "bin Laden" tape :

Ah, yes, another low-quality tape from bin Laden's secret cave complex. Pardon my skepticism
http://www.charm.net/~profpan/2006/01/deco...laden-tape.html

Kosovo leader dies on eve of talks on province's fate Seattle Times
Ibrahim Rugova, the president of Kosovo who embodied the province's drive to break away from Serbia, died of lung cancer Saturday, just days before talks were set to begin on Kosovo's future status and possible independence. U.N. envoy Martti Ahtisaari announced that the talks, scheduled to begin Wednesday in Vienna, had been postponed. In the view of Kosovo Albanians, the talks are aimed at obtaining full independence for the province. Serbia and Montenegro, the union that replaced what remained of Yugoslavia, insists that it must remain part of the country. "It is particularly tragic that President Rugova should leave us at this very decisive moment for the future of Kosovo," said Soren Jessen-Petersen, who heads the United Nations Mission in Kosovo, a virtual caretaker government for the province.
Kosovo's ethnic Albanians mourn the death of pro-independence ... International Herald Tribune
Kosovo mourns Rugova Reuters
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Grief sounds as whale rescue fails Melbourne Herald Sun
A LOST young whale that swam up the Thames into central London died despite a marathon rescue effort that brought it back close to the open sea. In an operation watched by riverbank crowds and covered live on TV, marine experts finally snared the whale, which had eluded them since Friday, and hoisted it on to a barge before sailing it downriver toward the North Sea. But the health of the northern bottle-nosed whale, injured and exhausted after its mysterious two-day sojourn in fresh water, took a turn for the worse near the Thames estuary.
Thames whale dies during rescue bid Australian
Post mortem on Thames whale News24
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Jailed leader urges Palestinians to vote ABC Online
The jailed leader of the Palestinian uprising has urged all Palestinians to vote in this week's parliamentary elections saying the poll could lead to statehood. Marwan Barghouti made the appeal in his first interview since being imprisoned by Israel. In a rare move, Israel gave permission for the Arabic satellite TV network Al Jazeera to interview Marwan Barghouti from inside his jail cell. The West Bank leader of the ruling Fatah movement was sentenced to five life terms after an Israeli court found him guilty of being involved in suicide bombings and shooting attacks. From his cell Barghouti appealed to Palestinians to vote in Wednesday's parliamentary election, saying the poll is essential for reform and could eventually lead to Palestinian statehood. Despite being in jail, Marwan Barghouti is on top of Fatah's list of candidates standing in the election.
Fatah's 'young guard' faces test at the ballot box Boston Globe
Palestinian Authority - Abbas threatens to quit Angus Reid Global Scan
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January 23, 2006
In a Stronghold, Fatah Fights to Beat Back a Rising Hamas
By STEVEN ERLANGER
NABLUS, West Bank, Jan. 20 - Nasser Joumaa, pale and thin, was facing some tough questions from his own Fatah members.

"Our generation is being ignored," said a tall, bearded man in a small house, packed and cloudy with cigarette smoke, as more young men listened at the windows. "Where are the respected people to vote for on Fatah's list? Not you, Nasser, but there are corrupted people in this list."

Mr. Joumaa, 39 and respected here for his military and political prowess, looked pained. "I share your concerns," he said. "People are angry with Fatah and its performance, and so am I. I'm one of the angry members of Fatah. But we express our anger inside. We face a bigger challenge now from Hamas, and in a difficult situation we stand together."

Fatah, the mainstay of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, is in trouble, even here in Nablus, one of the West Bank's toughest and largest cities, and a longtime stronghold for the group. Fatah is struggling to beat back the radical Islamic movement Hamas - which won an astonishing 13 of Nablus's 15 local council seats a month ago, and elected an efficient, worldly yet devout mayor, Adli Yaish.

Palestinians vote Wednesday in elections for a new legislature, the first such vote in a decade. The United States, which lists Hamas as a terrorist organization, has quietly spent almost $2 million on dozens of quick projects to strengthen Fatah's hand, American and Palestinian officials say.

The coming vote is the first time that Hamas has run in elections for roles within the Palestinian Authority - because the authority was set up in the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, which Hamas is committed to destroy.

But Mr. Joumaa is convinced that Hamas means to destroy Fatah first, if not now then by stages, and he warns Fatah members not to lose sight of the longer battle.

"Hamas talks of partnership with Fatah, but it wants to replace Fatah," he said. "We have power and authority, and we can't just give it up. We don't know Hamas's real program or goals, or to whom they will be subject. We cannot leave ourselves in Hamas's control."

Nablus is a stunning city, set in a steep valley, founded by the Romans in A.D. 72 and proud of its ancient aqueducts. It is the second-largest city in the West Bank, with some 325,000 people. But it has also been severely affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially in the last five years, with the highest number of casualties, most severe physical damage and most intensive restrictions on movement in the West Bank, according to a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in December. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are paying the price for the economy and the border closures, as well as for Fatah's reputation for corruption.

Palestinian opinion polls vary, but all show that Fatah still leads Hamas, but not by much, and Hamas seems to be gaining. Fatah has 42 percent to Hamas's 35 percent, according to pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; it has 35 percent to Hamas's 30 percent, with a larger number of undecided voters, according to Nader Said, a poll director for Birzeit University in Ramallah. Both polls have margins of error of at least 2 percent, but both show Fatah holding onto a majority, especially in coalition with other secular candidate lists like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, that of the independent Mustafa Barghouti, and another independent list called the Third Way, headed by the former finance minister Salam Fayyad, the likely next prime minister.

Both independent lists are getting aid from European and American supporters. But Fatah and Mr. Joumaa are worried that those competing independents, especially in constituencies, where many are also using the Fatah symbol, could allow Hamas candidates to win with small pluralities. Each voter will cast two ballots. Half of the 132 seats will be determined by votes for party lists, and half by votes in 16 local districts, which are harder to predict through polling.

So Fatah is trying to overcome its internal hatreds and unite, at the end, to face down Hamas, including pressing Fatah members running independently to withdraw. It is not easy for some in Fatah, upset that Hamas is even being allowed to take part. Fatah activists in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus insist they will not allow the elections to proceed, and there are worries of election-day violence.

Mr. Joumaa has reasons to be angry with Fatah's leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, who mismanaged its party primaries, finally scrapping them. Mr. Joumaa was a top member of a rival slate of 40-somethings led by the jailed leader Marwan Barghouti and was unhappy when that slate was merged with the official Fatah one. He is No. 18 on the list, so will be elected to the new legislature (as will Marwan Barghouti, who is No. 1), and his posters show him with Mr. Barghouti and the slogan: "Only the shoulders of the fighters can raise the torches of freedom. Vote for Fatah."

It has been an extraordinary personal journey for Mr. Joumaa, who spent 14 months in a Palestinian prison beginning in 1996, when older Fatah figures accused him of disloyalty. He was tortured there, and watched his best friend die there from torture, but then became the commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Nablus. He was wanted by the Israelis and kept hidden, even as his mother was dying, 15 months ago, from cancer. When her body was laid out in a crowded mosque, however, he slipped in to pay last respects.

With the cease-fire brokered by Mr. Abbas early in 2005, Mr. Joumaa is no longer being hunted. He has laid aside his arms - for good, he hopes - and turned to Fatah politics, one of the young men toughened by a life under Israeli occupation and by Palestinian misrule. Between Sept. 29, 2000, and Oct. 31, 2005, 522 Palestinians were killed in Nablus, including 80 children and 28 women - 27.8 percent of all West Bank Palestinians killed, according to the December United Nations report.

A center for Palestinian militancy, Nablus is surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints and 53 other physical obstacles to travel, and by 14 Israeli settlements and 26 settlement outposts. But with the cease-fire, the number of military incursions and curfews has dropped and some of the obstacles have been removed, and the number of deaths and injuries has dropped considerably from 2004.

So there is some new optimism here, but not much confidence, and many men still have difficulty getting permission to travel out of Nablus.

Mr. Yaish, the new Hamas mayor here, only three weeks in office, is an example of why the group is doing well. He is devout, but wealthy from auto parts and a Mercedes agency. He studied mechanical engineering in England from 1970 to 1975 and speaks English fluently; he speaks the modern language of efficiency and budget oversight; he keeps a picture of Yasir Arafat in his office and not Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in March 2004.

"This is a government office," Mr. Yaish said. "President Abbas said to leave the photos of Arafat in offices, so we left it. Sheik Yassin was not elected, and this is not my house."

Mr. Yaish agrees that some people will vote differently on national and local issues, and he expects Hamas to get nowhere close to the 73 percent of the local vote it received a month ago. "We want partnership with Fatah," he said. "Democracy is competition and makes us stronger."

Hamas in the legislature will monitor government work, especially finances and accounts, to prevent corruption, he said, and to improve tax collection. "The same party as judge and jury is not good," he said. "If there is no oversight, even a good man can be tempted."

Hamas opposes negotiations with Israel, but Mr. Yaish thinks its presence in the legislature will stiffen the Palestinian Authority's back in dealings with Israel. "I don't like the Palestinian Authority to negotiate from a weak position," Mr. Yaish said, pragmatically. "We're occupied, and I want my government to talk harder to Israel."

Mouna Mansour is another Hamas candidate, 44 years old, a physics teacher and the widow of a famous local Hamas leader, Jamal Mansour, who was assassinated in 2001 by an Israeli missile strike on his office. His colleague and six others, including two children, also died in what the State Department then called "excessive" and "a new and dangerous escalation."

Today, Mrs. Mansour lives in a building named for her husband in an apartment filled with his "martyrdom" posters. She is practical and straightforward. "Hamas wants to be in the legislature to protect the resistance against occupation," she said. "It is our strategic choice. Our political role is to back the resistance."

But resistance is not just arms and bombs, she insists. "Resistance is also the farmer steadfast on his land, or the factory worker hiring as many as he can and making local products," she said.

"We will be partners with Fatah," she said. "The role of the legislature is accountability."

Should the cease-fire with Israel continue? "It's needed for a period of time, because our people are exhausted by the occupation," she said, and then added, smiling: "It's a time for the warriors to rest up."

That is exactly what Israel warns, that Hamas has not changed its goals.

Mr. Yaish says benignly: "I say to the world with open heart: 'Don't worry so much.' "

Mr. Joumaa thinks differently. "Hamas wants to infiltrate the institutions and take over," he said. "I think a Palestinian state now is farther away."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

Indians in Bolivia Celebrate Swearing in of One of Their Own New York Times
Evo Morales, a Socialist protest leader and steadfast critic of American policies in the region, was sworn in Sunday as president of Bolivia, the first Indian to hold the position in this landlocked country whose indigenous majority had long felt oppressed and cut off from political power. With tears welling in his eyes, his left fist raised and his right hand over his heart, Mr. Morales, 46, an Aymara Indian, took the oath of office as the leaders of 11 countries, American diplomats and the crown prince of Spain watched from the gallery of the country's ornate 19th-century Congress.
Bolivia's Morales Proves `Pragmatic,' Limits Anti-US Rhetoric Bloomberg
Bolivia's New Leader Takes Office CBS News
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Professionals Fleeing Iraq As Violence, Threats Persist
Exodus of Educated Elite Puts Rebuilding at Risk

By Doug Struck
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, January 23, 2006; A01



BAGHDAD -- The office of Iraq's most eminent cardiologist is padlocked. A handwritten sign is taped on his wooden door in the private clinic in Baghdad: Patients of Dr. Omar Kubasi should call him in Amman, Jordan.

There, Kubasi, 63, spends his days sitting at a cafe with other physicians and professionals from Iraq. Frustrated, he watches from afar as the medical education system he helped set up during his 36-year career slowly disintegrates. His teaching doctors are fleeing the country in fear. Younger physicians are looking for other countries to train in. Even patients are leaving, no longer confident in the care they can get in Iraq.

"I think it's part of the plan for the country's destruction," Kubasi said by telephone. "The situation in the last six months has gotten so bad, we couldn't continue."

Kubasi left Baghdad in May after he and nine other doctors received letters, written in a childish hand, telling them they would be killed if they did not stop working in their native Iraq. He and his colleagues had been the objects of threats before, but the last carried a foreboding urgency, he said.

Iraq's top professionals -- doctors, lawyers, professors -- and businessmen have been targeted by shadowy political groups for kidnapping and ransom, as well as murder, some of them say. So many have fled the country that Iraq is in danger of losing the core of skilled people it needs most just as it is trying to build a newly independent society.

"It's creating a brain drain," said Amer Hassan Fayed, assistant dean of political science at Baghdad University. "We could end up with a society without knowledge. How can such a society make progress?"

Professionals and businessmen with the means to escape are going to Jordan, Syria, Egypt or, if they have visas, to Western countries. Those left behind say they feel abandoned.

Ahmed Meer Ali, a 27-year-old resident doctor, is left alone to man the private hospital where Kubasi's office is locked and shuttered. Most of the specialists who worked there, providing care to patients and guidance to Ali, have left.

"They are the ones with specialties from England or the U.S.A. They were the ones teaching me," he said. "Now, some patients even go to Iran to get care. In the past, no one in Iraq would go to Iran."

And many educated young Iraqis are hoping to follow.

"Of course I would leave if I could," said Ihana Nabil, 22, who will soon graduate from Baghdad University with a degree in political science. "There's no peace, no stability and no jobs here," she said. Other students at the campus, a temporary oasis in a violent city, agreed.

Exodus is not new to the country. Iraqis who could flee Saddam Hussein's repressive rule did: Poor Shiite Muslims sneaked across the border into Iran, and Sunni Arabs crossed the mountains into Syria or the desert to Jordan. People often waited years for permission to attend a seminar or do business in another country and then would disappear there. Hussein began holding such people's families hostage to guarantee their return.

Many of those йmigrйs flooded back into Iraq when Hussein fell. But the country's instability and daily regimen of violence have made some reconsider their return. Others who stayed throughout Hussein's rule are finally saying goodbye to their homeland now.

Numbers are impossible to document, partly because those who leave often tell passport officials they are going out of the country for a short visit. Often without telling friends or neighbors, they take a few things from their homes, lock the doors and vanish.

An official at the Interior Ministry's statistics office said the number of Iraqis traveling overland to Jordan held steady at about 200 to 250 a day from July 2004 to June 2005. Since last July, however, the number crossing the border -- excluding truckers and traders -- has ballooned to 1,100 a day, according to the official.

"They may come back if it's safe," Fayed said.

Or they may not. Since the fall of Hussein, kidnapping has mushroomed into a lucrative business. Even children are snatched, to be ransomed the same day for a few hundred dollars from their distraught parents.

Anyone displaying signs of wealth, often professionals and businessmen, are particular targets of kidnappers in search of high ransoms. However, payment is no guarantee a hostage will not simply be killed and dumped; some authorities claim dozens of bodies are found every day but never reported.

That danger is overlaid by the activities of an insurgency that aims to terrify the society by means of bombings, murder and abduction -- or threats. In addition, the death toll from sectarian violence among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds has climbed steadily.

"Professors have been threatened. Doctors have been killed in their clinics. Killing has become common," Fayed said. "Some people believe this is intentional, to try to empty Iraq of its elite."

Kubasi, the former head of Iraq's military medical corps, believes that. In late April, his secretary handed him a letter written in what he called "bad Arabic" giving them all by May 6 -- 10 days -- to leave the country. He showed the letter to authorities, who suggested he had faked it. By May 8, Kubasi was in Jordan.

His three sons and his daughter are all physicians. They could not risk staying, he said.

"Every day, we sit here, 10 or 12 of us, senior professionals, just discussing the situation," Kubasi said from Amman. "It's mental death to sit here. But even my patients say I should not come back. Really, really, I could not pay for a kidnapper's ransom. And in that case, you would be killed."

It frustrates him to watch the medical training system he helped create fall apart. "The circuit of teaching, training and care is being broken. It may not be recovered," he said.

"Our medical schools and doctors are known all over the Arab world. The teaching care was excellent, based on the British system. We were successful under Saddam Hussein to start our own postgraduate studies, including many medical specialties. Now they are ridding the country of all of this."

Um Mustafa and her husband, a businessman, had hoped to stay. But they abandoned that goal when thieves burst into their bedroom, held their young son in a headlock, with a gun to his head, and demanded that his parents hand over all their gold and jewelry.

"We didn't want to leave," said Um Mustafa, 27, who still fears attack and asked not to be fully identified. "We were a very happy family. Wealthy. My husband had a good job. We had money, a house, car and servants."

The men terrorized the family for more than two hours, threatening to kill or kidnap their 6-year-old son, while their 2-year-old cried. They beat Um Mustafa's husband, finally leaving when they were satisfied they had found all the jewelry, guns and money in the house. They left the couple bound with plastic handcuffs and locked in a room, saying they would burn the house as they left.

"Maybe God wanted to give us a new life," Um Mustafa said. "They didn't kill us."

She and her husband decided to move to Jordan. But they heard that Jordanian authorities, worried about the influx, were making life more difficult for Iraqis there. So they have bought tickets to Cairo instead.

"We don't know how we will live there. My husband will have to find a new job. I will go to work," she said. "Leaving the country was not an easy decision. Any time you start a new life, it's very difficult. But it will be better than staying here in a country were there is no safety anymore.

"I've been through four wars. I never, never felt like leaving before," Um Mustafa said. "Now, life in Iraq has become unsafe. I don't feel safe in my own bedroom -- or in the whole country."

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Bid for nuclear venture

23jan06

IRAN is reportedly proposing to bring China into a joint uranium enrichment program.

The revelation came as Israel's Defence Minister hinted it was preparing for military action to stop Iran's nuclear program.
Der Spiegel reported today that German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier had received the proposal from Iranian leaders.

It follows a suggestion by Moscow, initially rejected by Iran, that enrichment be done on Russian territory in a joint-venture factory.

But Der Spiegel said it had since asked if China could be a party to the joint venture.

Uranium enrichment is needed to provide fuel for power generation, but can also produce weapons-grade uranium to make nuclear weapons.

Use of an external factory would enable activities to be verified.

Foreign Office officials in Berlin declined to comment on the report.

"I am fairly confident that there will be a diplomatic solution in the case of Iran," German Defence Minister Franz Josef Jung said yesterday.

Israel's Defence Minister, Shaul Mofaz, suggested that Israel was preparing for military action if the diplomatic efforts fail.

"Israel will not be able to accept an Iranian nuclear capability and it must have the capability to defend itself, with all that that implies -- and this we are preparing," he said.

Israeli officials

have denied having plans for a unilateral preventive strike.

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said last year that Israel should be "wiped off the map." – AP

© Herald and Weekly Times

Peace envoy arrives in Sri Lanka CNN International
A Sri Lankan army soldier stands guard at a checkpoint in Sri Lanka's capital, Colombo. A top Norwegian envoy arrived in Sri Lanka on Monday on a mission to save the cease-fire he negotiated four years ago and prevent the island nation from slipping back into war. In meetings through Wednesday, envoy Eric Solheim, was to confer with President Mahinda Rajapakse and travel to the Tamil Tiger rebels' capital of Kilinochchi to meet with their reclusive leader, Vellupillai Prabhakaran, officials said. Separately, the rebels' peace negotiator, Anton Balasingham, also arrived from his home in London. Balasingham, who holds a British passport, will aid Prabhakaran during talks with Solheim. The pro-rebel Web-site said Balasingham will be traveling to Kilinochchi aboard a Sri Lankan air force helicopter later Monday.
Explosion mars beginning of new Sri Lankan peace bid Xinhua
Blast clouds Sri Lanka peace push Aljazeera.net
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Pipeline blasts cut Georgia gas supply International Herald Tribune
MOSCOW Explosions in southern Russia early Sunday severed the country's natural gas pipelines to Georgia, swiftly plunging Russia's neighbor into heat and electricity shortages and causing a sharp diplomatic flare-up between the two nations. wo more explosions hours later severed one of Russia's main severed one of Russia's main electricity cables to Georgia, increasing the electricity shortage even as the gas supply in Georgia dwindled.
Georgia blames Russia as blasts hit power supply Financial Times
Georgia blames Russia for gas cut-off Reuters.uk
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Guns or politics? Now Hamas must choose Independent
With 48 hours to go before polling in the first Palestinian parliamentary elections in a decade, Hamas is on a roll. The armed faction long committed to destroying Israel is virtually certain to send shock waves through the Middle East by securing a major influence in the very institutions it has opposed for nearly a decade. The prospect has triggered an urgent appraisal in Western capitals and Israel over handling the political power that the organisation they have long proscribed as "terrorist" is likely to wield in Palestinian politics from the end of this week. The dilemma is partly over whether Hamas's probable success is a menacing new threat in an already unstable region, or the first stage of a conversion to the ballot box by the Islamic faction which has been responsible for the largest proportion of Israeli deaths in suicide bombings in the past five years. Hamas's electoral momentum has been evident way beyond its natural stronghold of Gaza. It was tangible for example, from the moment its members and supporters swept to victory in the West Bank city of Nablus on an anti-corruption ticket in the town council elections on 15 December. Everybody who was anybody in the town turned out to congratulate the new mayor, Adli Yaish, a local car-parts dealer. He is prominent in several of the Islamic charities which go a long way to making up for the lack of an effective Palestinian welfare state and on which Hamas has built much of its popular reputation for fair dealing. True, outside the trade union theatre where his victory reception was held, they were selling DVDs portraying the Hamas "martyrs" to the conflict with Israel to the accompaniment of martial music. But inside, as local community leaders from headmasters to a posse of Christian clergy queued up to embrace Mr Yaish, the green campaign buttons and banners had not a vestige of this. Party organisers handed out baklava to those arriving, as Yasser Mansour, the number seven candidate on the faction's national list, expertly worked the room to exploit the victory. "In the name of God, the results are not strange," Mr Mansour told visitors. "We can attribute them to two things - corruption [in the Palestinian Authority] and the security chaos that the Palestinian people have been suffering for 10 years." To the untutored, it may seem odd to hear Hamas condemning "security chaos". But nowhere is the deeply unpopular internal violence to which Mr Mansour was referring more evident than here in Gaza. The Fatah-dominated PA has failed to prevent kidnappings, lethal tribal feuds, and political gun battles - mainly within Fatah itself. Yesterday, in Gaza City's Shifa Hospital, Suleiman Ashabia winced with pain as he explained how he took seven bullets in his legs and hand on Friday evening. Mr Ashabia, 22, the local deputy campaign manager for the independent Third Way party is "90 per cent sure" the masked gunman who shot him at close range with an AK-47 was political. "We are doing a great job in Maghazi. Whoever it was wanted to stop the hard work. After what happened, people in the Third Way will be afraid." Posing as a party supporter, one of the gang who targeted him had lured him to a bogus meeting in the market of the Maghazi refugee camp and used a mobile phone call to check what he was wearing. He opened fire as Mr Ashabia returned to his home and then continued shooting him on the ground after he was felled by the first bullet. The faction least likely to have attacked him, on the face of it, is Hamas. The polls suggest it has next to nothing to fear from Third Way. But it has also fought this campaign with a professionalism and discipline that has eluded most other parties. You could see it in the horn-honking, banner-waving, 30-vehicle loudspeaker motorcade that drove through the streets of Gaza City yesterday, and in the women's rally which Hamas slickly organised in Nablus last week. That was opened by Hamas's distant equivalent of drum majorettes, with long-skirted, white-scarfed, banner-bearing young women processing into Balur hall to chants of: "The Koran is [Hamas's] constitution and Jihad for the sake of God is its way." The most prominent local female candidate, Muna Mansour, did not seek to disguise her desire to see sharia embodied in Palestinian law - something feared by secular Palestinians. In talks with reporters she even told - approvingly - a chilling story about the Prophet Mohamed authorising the stoning to death of a self-confessed unmarried mother, though only after the woman's child had grown up. But Mrs Mansour also presented a more pragmatic side, declaring several times: "Hamas is not the Taliban." Distancing herself from Hamas's reputation for fierce social conservatism, she insisted she was in favour of shelters for battered wives, for an end to "honour killing" and of better education for women. And she suggested that a long-term truce with Israel was possible while believing that an interim phase of two states side by side would not deflect Hamas from its goal of "liberating Palestine from the river to the sea". This goes to the heart of Israel's and the West's dilemma. Awakening to the new reality - including perhaps the realisation that Israel's effort to disrupt Hamas's campaign by arresting candidates has, if anything, strengthened it politically - some senior figures, from President Moshe Katsav to Shimon Peres, have hinted that Israel could talk to Hamas if it abandoned its militancy and ended its commitment to destroy Israel. Difficult as it is, the first condition may be easier to fulfil than the second. Skilfully Hamas, having largely adhered to the truce it made last year with Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has given little away on post-election plans. But Mr Abbas has always believed that Hamas's assumption of influence will lead it to abandon weapons against Israel and has warned it will not join any coalition with Fatah unless it does so. But Hamas has so far made it clear it has no intention of recognising Israel, as the PLO eventually did under Yasser Arafat. Mohammed Abu Teir, Hamas's number two candidate, declined to comment on talks though he acknowledged that Hamas councils like Qalqilya's had had "no problem" discussing "technical matters" with Israel. But his message to Israel had been: "You have negotiated with the PLO for 30 years - and what you have given to the PLO?" On Hamas's notable decision not to include its long-held commitment to the destruction of Israel in its election manifesto, Sheikh Abu Teir said guardedly: "We know how to conduct politics - we are passing through a new stage of politics and we are part of it. We raise the appropriate slogans and there is no need to raise an inappropriate slogan [destroying Israel]. We have a programme that deals with internal issues." Interpreting that enigmatic statement will be only one of many questions exercising the world's capitals if Hamas fulfils poll predictions on Wednesday.
Illusion of democracy San Francisco Chronicle
Israel Looks at Possible Elections Win by Hamas New York Times
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Canadians appear ready to end 12 years of Liberal Party rule in today's election but are uncertain about the alternative offered by the opposition Conservatives, polls show. The Conservatives, led by Stephen Harper, clung to a 7 to 10 percentage point lead over Prime Minister Paul Martin's Liberal Party, according to several polls. A small narrowing in the margin, however, sparked hopes among Liberals for a repeat of the last-minute upset that kept the party in power in 2004.
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Israeli Leaders Brace for Hamas Landslide
By JOSEF FEDERMAN, Associated Press Writer
Sun Jan 22, 6:31 PM ET

Acting Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with top military and political officials Sunday to discuss the growing likelihood that the militant group Hamas could dominate this week's Palestinian elections.

The ascendance of Hamas has alarmed Israel, which appears to have been caught off guard by the group's surging popularity before Wednesday's vote. Hamas has killed hundreds of Israelis in suicide bombings and remains committed to Israel's destruction.

"What Israel has to do is the big question," Cabinet minister Tzachi Hanegbi said before Sunday's meeting. "We have to think hard and explore all the options."

The United States and European Union also have been scrambling to figure out how to deal with Hamas. U.S. officials confirmed Sunday they have been directing money to promote democratic parties in the election but denied the move was aimed against Hamas.

Hamas, best known for its suicide attacks, has won over the Palestinian public in its first run for the legislature by focusing on domestic concerns, halting corruption and restoring law and order to the chaotic West Bank and Gaza Strip.

In contrast, the ruling Fatah Party has been unable to shed its corrupt image or overcome infighting. Recent opinion polls show the two movements running even.

While some security officials privately support a dialogue with Hamas, top leaders, including military chief Lt. Gen. Dan Halutz and Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, say the group must disarm and revoke its charter calling for Israel's elimination.

"Regarding the elections in the Palestinian authority, there are three options: that Fatah wins, that Hamas wins or anarchy wins. One of these results could put all progress back several years," Halutz told an academic conference Sunday, apparently referring to Hamas and warning that violence could follow the election.

Commentators said Olmert's meeting Sunday — which included the army chief, head of the Shin Bet security agency, and the justice and defense ministers — reflected a failure by Israel to detect Hamas' growing popularity, despite its strong performance in Palestinian municipal voting in recent months.

"Their assumption was Fatah will handily win any election," said Mouin Rabbani, an analyst with the International Crisis Group based in Jordan.

Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has said he hopes Hamas would tame its positions once it formally joins the political system, but other Fatah officials sent mixed signals over whether they would work with the Islamic group. Palestinian Information Minister Nabil Shaath, a top Fatah official, said Hamas must accept the principle of peace with Israel if it wants to share power.

However, Fatah's top candidate, the jailed Palestinian uprising leader Marwan Barghouti, said Sunday that "Hamas will be part and parcel of the Palestinian Authority" after the vote. Barghouti was interviewed in an Israeli prison by the Arab satellite TV station Al-Jazeera.

The United States and EU both consider Hamas a terrorist group, and both have said millions of dollars in aid to the Palestinians could be jeopardized.

"As a matter of policy, we don't deal with Hamas," said Stewart Tuttle, the U.S. Embassy spokesman in Tel Aviv. "If Hamas members win seats ... we are not going to deal with those individuals."

The U.S. Agency for International Development has used a special $1.9 million budget to promote democratic parties in the Palestinian election, said a U.S. Consulate spokeswoman in Jerusalem, Micaela Schweitzer-Bluhm.

She denied that the money, used in part to clean streets, distribute free food and water and to help fund a youth soccer tournament, was used to boost Fatah's prospects.

Behind the scenes, U.S. officials are considering the possibility of distinguishing between Hamas legislators tied to violence and those who are not — a position Israel rejects. European diplomats said they would decide what to do after election results are in.

The West Bank and Gaza Strip have been plagued by chaos and lawlessness in recent months, and some armed groups have threatened to disrupt the voting.

Visiting election commission offices on Sunday, Abbas was resolute. "Orders have been issued to security forces to strike with an iron fist against anyone who would try to sabotage this election," he said.

In other developments, an Israeli aircraft fired at three Palestinian gunmen trying to enter Israel from the Gaza Strip, killing one man and wounding two, according to the army and Palestinian officials. The Popular Resistance Committees, a tiny militant group not running in the election, vowed revenge.

Separately, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of the battered Likud Party, said Sunday that he would be willing to make "significant concessions" in a final peace deal with the Palestinians if his party wins elections March 28.

However, he spelled out a tough negotiating line, saying Israel's final borders would include east Jerusalem, the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank — areas the Palestinians want for a future state — if a government run by Netanyahu signs a peace accord with the Palestinians.



Copyright © 2006 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.


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U.S. tells Israel it will shun PA gov't that includes Hamas

By Aluf Benn, Haaretz Correspondent and Haaretz Service

The American administration has promised Israel that the United States will not recognize any Palestinian government in which Hamas participates, government sources in Jerusalem have said.

The sources said that American envoys who visited here about 10 days ago told Israeli officials that recognizing such a government would violate American law.

Israel has also received similar messages from Javier Solana, the European Union's top foreign policy official, and Spanish Foreign Minister Miguel Moratinos, who visited Israel last week, the sources said.

Polls have shown that Hamas could win a third or more of the vote in the Wednesday elections for the Palestinian parliament, a showing that could prompt an offer from the ruling Fatah party to share power in a coalition government.

On Sunday, Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas defended his decision to allow Hamas to run in the election, saying he hopes Hamas would tame its positions once it formally joins the political system.

Acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert held a special meeting Sunday to discuss the PA elections. It was attended by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, Public Security Minister Gideon Ezra, Minister Tzachi Hanegbi and senior officials from the police, the Israel Defense Forces, the Shin Bet security service, the National Security Council and the Defense Ministry.

Olmert asked the participants not to offer concrete suggestions for action, lest the proposals leak and Israel be accused of trying to interfere in the elections. He also took the unusual step of declaring the entire discussion classified, even though it dealt with a civilian diplomatic issue - the Palestinian elections - rather than sensitive security matters.

At the meeting, several officials presented different possible scenarios for the outcome of the elections and their potential ramifications.

The defense establishment's prediction is that Fatah will win by a small margin. However, Israel is also preparing for the possibility that Hamas will participate in a Fatah-led government or even win the elections itself. But whatever happens, Israel will wait for both the official results and the formation of the new government before deciding on its next steps.

During the meeting, an argument erupted when National Security Council Chairman Giora Eiland disputed some of the assessments presented by Dov Weissglas, a senior adviser to the prime minister, and certain senior defense officials. As a result, Olmert decided that both sides should continue to produce independent assessments.

The main work will be done by the team headed by Weissglas, which includes the chief of staff, the head of the Shin Bet, the Foreign Ministry's director general and the prime minister's military secretary. This team will follow developments in the PA both during and after the elections and issue recommendations to the government. Their proposals will first be presented to Mofaz, and then, if he approves them, to a special ministerial committee headed by Olmert.

At the same time, however, Eiland and the NSC will independently draft their own recommendations for different post-election scenarios.

Olmert will present his own diplomatic program in a speech to the Herzliya Conference on Wednesday. The speech, which will call for resuming final-status negotiations after the PA dismantles the terrorist organizations, will deal extensively with the PA elections.

Iran defies nuclear pressure, brandishes Iraq influence Sun Jan 22, 1:09 PM ET

Iran said it was not worried if the crisis over its disputed nuclear drive ended up at the Security Council, and brandished its influence in Iraq in the form of support from radical Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr.

"We are not worried by the Security Council, but it is the wrong method," foreign ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told reporters. "An emergency meeting of the board of governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency is not necessary. It is a political act."

Iran faces the threat of being hauled to New York for resuming sensitive nuclear fuel research work that the Western powers and Israel fear would give the clerical regime the know-how to build a bomb.

Tehran insists such work is legal given it has signed the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, and has branded atomic weapons "un-Islamic" -- but a lengthy IAEA probe has yet to confirm the claimed civilian nature of the programme and has uncovered suspect activities.

Britain, France and Germany have called an urgent meeting of the IAEA's 35-nation board for February 2, and are confident of getting a referral even though they are still struggling to get Russia and China on board.

"It is clear in advance that the result of a meeting that takes place under the pressure of certain countries will be political," Asefi said.

The West wants Iran to voluntarily limit its fuel cycle work so that enrichment does not take place in the country. Uranium enrichment can make reactor fuel, but the technology is dual-use and would give Iran the strategic option to enrich to levels required for making the core of a weapon.

Iran's hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has already vowed his country would not back down, even if ordered to do so by the Security Council.

The country has been brandishing its oil wealth and influence in the already troubled region in what some Western diplomats have described as a concerted effort to dissuade countries from siding with the US hard line.

Radical Iraqi Shiite cleric Moqtada Sadr -- a key opponent of US forces -- said on a visit to Tehran that his Mehdi Army militia would "support" any neighbouring country if they were attacked.

In December, the radical Palestinian group Hamas also vowed to step up attacks against Israel if the Jewish state takes military action against Iran and said it and the Islamic republic formed a "united front".

The prospect of military action against Iran has been evoked in Israel, which has come to view the Islamic republic as its number one enemy. Its fears were heightened in October when Ahmadinejad called for the Jewish state to be "wiped off the map."

Israel is widely believed to be the only nuclear armed power in the Middle East, although it has never confirmed or denied having a nuclear arsenal.

And on Thursday, President Jacques Chirac warned that France could use nuclear weapons against state sponsors of terrorism -- although he did not single out any country.

Iran, however, was been quick to blast Chirac's remarks as "shameful" and "unacceptable".

Iran also gave a fresh show of its determination, enrolling some 1,000 athletes to form a human shield in front of a key nuclear facility near the historic central city of Isfahan.

"Since we have reached this technology indigenously and with our own scientists, we will safeguard it at any cost," the director of the facility, Behrouz Samani, said at the event.

Still seen by Moscow as a way out of the impasse is a proposal for Iran to enrich uranium on Russian soil, something which Iran has implicitly rejected but not totally ruled out.

"The Russian plan should be taken as a complimenting enrichment inside the country (Iran)," Asefi said, again insisting on Iran's wish to master the fuel cycle on its own soil.

Iran's top nuclear negotiator Ali Larijani also said he would be heading to Moscow to further discuss the proposal, but did not give a date.

Larijani also denied allegations the Islamic republic had acquired advanced centrifuges on the black market for its nuclear programme.



Copyright © 2006 Agence France Presse. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AFP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of Agence France Presse.


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ADL chief: Franklin affair could pose threat to Jewish lobbyists

By Shlomo Shamir and Amiram Barkat, Haaretz Correspondents

Two days after former Pentagon analyst Larry A. Franklin was sentenced to 12 years and seven months in jail for sharing classified information with pro-Israel lobbyists, several American Jewish community leaders echoed a single refrain: There's reason to worry, but no need to feel like this is a crisis.

Anti-Defamation League director Abe Foxman said the Franklin affair could potentially pose a threat to all Jewish lobbyists.

Foxman said it is not clear what exactly is allowed in terms of the relationships between the administration and the media and between nongovernmental organizations and foreign governments. The lack of clarity, he said, could have a destructive influence on the activities of all U.S. Jewish groups.

Franklin pleaded guilty in October to sharing the information with AIPAC lobbyists and Israeli diplomat Naor Gilon. Steve Rosen and Keith Weissman, who were fired from AIPAC in 2004, are facing charges of disclosing confidential information to Israel, apparently about Iran.

Some American Jewish leaders are concerned by the influence the trial could have on the relations between Jewish groups and the administration.

Malcolm Hoenlein, executive vice chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, said on Sunday that he found Franklin's sentence "disturbing."

"The very fact that this kind of climate can exist in the capital of the U.S. is unacceptable," he said at the Herzliya Conference.

Rosen and Weissman, he said, "are two patriotic American citizens working for a Jewish organization, who did nothing to violate the American security."

Israel warns Iran of 'destruction'
By Martin Walker
UPI Editor
Published January 22, 2006


HERZLIYA, Israel -- Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz warned the Iranian people Saturday that they faced "destruction" unless they managed to restrain their new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

"Look at the fate of others who sought the destruction of the Jewish people. They only brought havoc and destruction to the own people," Mofaz said.


"I know that a large part of the people of Iran do not support his policies but his despicable acts could bring destruction to all of you. You understand what must be done to prevent this," Mofaz added, directly addressing the Iranian people.

It was the toughest statement of Israel's determination to block Iran's nuclear ambitions since the stroke that felled Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon two weeks ago, and it came just two days before the next scheduled international inspection of Iran's nuclear research facilities.

Mofaz's speech to an international conference of security experts in Herzliya, an exclusive resort just north of Tel Aviv, contained a clear warning that Israel if the United Nations and the international community failed to act, Israel would do so.

"Israel has to be able to defend itself," Mofaz said. "This we can do, and we are working on it now."

The Mofaz speech was intended not only for Iran and an international audience but also for Israeli voters, who go to the polls in March in a general election that seems likely to elect a new government led by the new Kadima party, founded by Sharon, to which Mofaz has rallied along with the acting Prime Minister Ehud Olmert. With the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran looming heavily over the Israeli elections, Mofaz's speech was aimed to reassure the voters that Israel's security would be safe in Kadima's hands.

Iran's nuclear development program is "an existential risk to the entire world, not just Israel," Mofaz went on, and said that Ahmadinejad led "an extremist regime that denies the existence of Israel and calls for its obliteration."

"I believe everyone present here understands the extent to which the combination of an extremist regime with long-range ballistic capability, ongoing effort to obtain nuclear weapons and support in terror constitutes a danger not only to Israel, but to the entire world," Mofaz added.

Mofaz, formerly chief of staff of Israeli defense forces, told the annual Herzliya Conference on the Israel's national security that in addition to Tehran's nuclear ambitions, Iran was directly sponsoring the Hizbollah terrorist organization to the tune of $100 million a year.

"Money is the fuel for terror," Mofaz said. "The financial assistance Iran transfers to Hizbollah totals some 100 million dollars each year. Some of these funds are funneled from Hizbollah to Palestinian terror groups. In addition, Iran is the main sponsor of the Islamic Jihad, which carried out most suicide attacks in Israel last year, including the attack in Tel Aviv's central bus station."

He added that Islamic Jihad cells in the West Bank received about 10 million dollars from Hizbullah in 2005, compared to just 5 million dollars in 2004.

In his combative speech, Mofaz described last week's Damascus meeting between Ahmadinejad and Syrian President Bashar Assad as "the summit of terror," and called the two leaders "representatives of the past."

But Mofaz made it clear that while Israel could act alone of it had to, the Jewish state was also wary of being isolated diplomatically, and would work hard to build regional alliances and cooperate with the international community.

"In the coming years we need to boost the strategic coordination with the U.S. and Europe, as well as with the peaceful countries Egypt and Jordan. Jihad draws near to us, and so we must combine efforts with the countries of the West," the defense minister said.

"Syria is under international pressure, while we have peace agreements with Arab states and the reality does not allow for the formation of an Arab coalition against Israel. The strength of the peace agreements with Jordan and Egypt contributes to stability in the region, which is why they must continue to be nurtured," Mofaz concluded.

January 23, 2006
In a Stronghold, Fatah Fights to Beat Back a Rising Hamas
By STEVEN ERLANGER
NABLUS, West Bank, Jan. 20 - Nasser Joumaa, pale and thin, was facing some tough questions from his own Fatah members.

"Our generation is being ignored," said a tall, bearded man in a small house, packed and cloudy with cigarette smoke, as more young men listened at the windows. "Where are the respected people to vote for on Fatah's list? Not you, Nasser, but there are corrupted people in this list."

Mr. Joumaa, 39 and respected here for his military and political prowess, looked pained. "I share your concerns," he said. "People are angry with Fatah and its performance, and so am I. I'm one of the angry members of Fatah. But we express our anger inside. We face a bigger challenge now from Hamas, and in a difficult situation we stand together."

Fatah, the mainstay of the Palestinian Authority and the Palestine Liberation Organization, is in trouble, even here in Nablus, one of the West Bank's toughest and largest cities, and a longtime stronghold for the group. Fatah is struggling to beat back the radical Islamic movement Hamas - which won an astonishing 13 of Nablus's 15 local council seats a month ago, and elected an efficient, worldly yet devout mayor, Adli Yaish.

Palestinians vote Wednesday in elections for a new legislature, the first such vote in a decade. The United States, which lists Hamas as a terrorist organization, has quietly spent almost $2 million on dozens of quick projects to strengthen Fatah's hand, American and Palestinian officials say.

The coming vote is the first time that Hamas has run in elections for roles within the Palestinian Authority - because the authority was set up in the 1993 Oslo accords with Israel, which Hamas is committed to destroy.

But Mr. Joumaa is convinced that Hamas means to destroy Fatah first, if not now then by stages, and he warns Fatah members not to lose sight of the longer battle.

"Hamas talks of partnership with Fatah, but it wants to replace Fatah," he said. "We have power and authority, and we can't just give it up. We don't know Hamas's real program or goals, or to whom they will be subject. We cannot leave ourselves in Hamas's control."

Nablus is a stunning city, set in a steep valley, founded by the Romans in A.D. 72 and proud of its ancient aqueducts. It is the second-largest city in the West Bank, with some 325,000 people. But it has also been severely affected by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, especially in the last five years, with the highest number of casualties, most severe physical damage and most intensive restrictions on movement in the West Bank, according to a report issued by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in December. Fatah and the Palestinian Authority are paying the price for the economy and the border closures, as well as for Fatah's reputation for corruption.

Palestinian opinion polls vary, but all show that Fatah still leads Hamas, but not by much, and Hamas seems to be gaining. Fatah has 42 percent to Hamas's 35 percent, according to pollster Khalil Shikaki of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research; it has 35 percent to Hamas's 30 percent, with a larger number of undecided voters, according to Nader Said, a poll director for Birzeit University in Ramallah. Both polls have margins of error of at least 2 percent, but both show Fatah holding onto a majority, especially in coalition with other secular candidate lists like the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, that of the independent Mustafa Barghouti, and another independent list called the Third Way, headed by the former finance minister Salam Fayyad, the likely next prime minister.

Both independent lists are getting aid from European and American supporters. But Fatah and Mr. Joumaa are worried that those competing independents, especially in constituencies, where many are also using the Fatah symbol, could allow Hamas candidates to win with small pluralities. Each voter will cast two ballots. Half of the 132 seats will be determined by votes for party lists, and half by votes in 16 local districts, which are harder to predict through polling.

So Fatah is trying to overcome its internal hatreds and unite, at the end, to face down Hamas, including pressing Fatah members running independently to withdraw. It is not easy for some in Fatah, upset that Hamas is even being allowed to take part. Fatah activists in the Balata refugee camp in Nablus insist they will not allow the elections to proceed, and there are worries of election-day violence.

Mr. Joumaa has reasons to be angry with Fatah's leader, President Mahmoud Abbas, who mismanaged its party primaries, finally scrapping them. Mr. Joumaa was a top member of a rival slate of 40-somethings led by the jailed leader Marwan Barghouti and was unhappy when that slate was merged with the official Fatah one. He is No. 18 on the list, so will be elected to the new legislature (as will Marwan Barghouti, who is No. 1), and his posters show him with Mr. Barghouti and the slogan: "Only the shoulders of the fighters can raise the torches of freedom. Vote for Fatah."

It has been an extraordinary personal journey for Mr. Joumaa, who spent 14 months in a Palestinian prison beginning in 1996, when older Fatah figures accused him of disloyalty. He was tortured there, and watched his best friend die there from torture, but then became the commander of Al Aksa Martyrs Brigades in Nablus. He was wanted by the Israelis and kept hidden, even as his mother was dying, 15 months ago, from cancer. When her body was laid out in a crowded mosque, however, he slipped in to pay last respects.

With the cease-fire brokered by Mr. Abbas early in 2005, Mr. Joumaa is no longer being hunted. He has laid aside his arms - for good, he hopes - and turned to Fatah politics, one of the young men toughened by a life under Israeli occupation and by Palestinian misrule. Between Sept. 29, 2000, and Oct. 31, 2005, 522 Palestinians were killed in Nablus, including 80 children and 28 women - 27.8 percent of all West Bank Palestinians killed, according to the December United Nations report.

A center for Palestinian militancy, Nablus is surrounded by six Israeli checkpoints and 53 other physical obstacles to travel, and by 14 Israeli settlements and 26 settlement outposts. But with the cease-fire, the number of military incursions and curfews has dropped and some of the obstacles have been removed, and the number of deaths and injuries has dropped considerably from 2004.

So there is some new optimism here, but not much confidence, and many men still have difficulty getting permission to travel out of Nablus.

Mr. Yaish, the new Hamas mayor here, only three weeks in office, is an example of why the group is doing well. He is devout, but wealthy from auto parts and a Mercedes agency. He studied mechanical engineering in England from 1970 to 1975 and speaks English fluently; he speaks the modern language of efficiency and budget oversight; he keeps a picture of Yasir Arafat in his office and not Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the Hamas leader killed by Israel in March 2004.

"This is a government office," Mr. Yaish said. "President Abbas said to leave the photos of Arafat in offices, so we left it. Sheik Yassin was not elected, and this is not my house."

Mr. Yaish agrees that some people will vote differently on national and local issues, and he expects Hamas to get nowhere close to the 73 percent of the local vote it received a month ago. "We want partnership with Fatah," he said. "Democracy is competition and makes us stronger."

Hamas in the legislature will monitor government work, especially finances and accounts, to prevent corruption, he said, and to improve tax collection. "The same party as judge and jury is not good," he said. "If there is no oversight, even a good man can be tempted."

Hamas opposes negotiations with Israel, but Mr. Yaish thinks its presence in the legislature will stiffen the Palestinian Authority's back in dealings with Israel. "I don't like the Palestinian Authority to negotiate from a weak position," Mr. Yaish said, pragmatically. "We're occupied, and I want my government to talk harder to Israel."

Mouna Mansour is another Hamas candidate, 44 years old, a physics teacher and the widow of a famous local Hamas leader, Jamal Mansour, who was assassinated in 2001 by an Israeli missile strike on his office. His colleague and six others, including two children, also died in what the State Department then called "excessive" and "a new and dangerous escalation."

Today, Mrs. Mansour lives in a building named for her husband in an apartment filled with his "martyrdom" posters. She is practical and straightforward. "Hamas wants to be in the legislature to protect the resistance against occupation," she said. "It is our strategic choice. Our political role is to back the resistance."

But resistance is not just arms and bombs, she insists. "Resistance is also the farmer steadfast on his land, or the factory worker hiring as many as he can and making local products," she said.

"We will be partners with Fatah," she said. "The role of the legislature is accountability."

Should the cease-fire with Israel continue? "It's needed for a period of time, because our people are exhausted by the occupation," she said, and then added, smiling: "It's a time for the warriors to rest up."

That is exactly what Israel warns, that Hamas has not changed its goals.

Mr. Yaish says benignly: "I say to the world with open heart: 'Don't worry so much.' "

Mr. Joumaa thinks differently. "Hamas wants to infiltrate the institutions and take over," he said. "I think a Palestinian state now is farther away."



Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 23, 2006
Kurd Is Named as New Judge for Hussein's Trial
By ROBERT F. WORTH
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Jan. 23 - After a swirl of confusion, a new judge was appointed Monday to preside over the trial of Saddam Hussein, which is set to resume on Tuesday after a month's recess.

The judge who has become the trial's most public face, Rizgar Muhammad Amin, submitted a letter of resignation this month, saying he was fed up with criticism by high-ranking Iraqi officials who wanted him to be tougher with Mr. Hussein.

This morning, the chief investigative judge for the tribunal announced that the new presiding judge would be a Kurd already on the panel, Ra'uf Rashid Abdul Rahman.

Mr. Rahman had been a judge before the fall of Saddam Hussein.

The announcement follows several days of conflict over Mr. Amin's resignation and replacement. Last week, it was announced that Mr. Amin would be replaced by a different colleague on the five-judge panel, Said al-Hammash.

But in recent days President Jalal Talabani and other Iraqi leaders, apparently eager to dispel the widespread impression that Judge Amin was forced off the case through political pressure, urged him to stay on. The tribunal has not accepted Judge Amin's resignation.

And the earlier choice of Judge Hammash had caused another conflict. Last week, a senior Iraqi official petitioned the court to bar Judge Hammash from presiding at the trial, saying the judge was a former member of Mr. Hussein's Baath Party. The official, Ali Feisal al-Lami, is a director of the de-Baathification commission, set up to purge former high-level Baathists from public office. Judge Hammash has denied that he was a Baathist.

The office of Prime Minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari has told the tribunal to ignore Mr. Lami's petition, saying he has no authority over the judges. But one tribunal official raised the possibility over the weekend that to avoid controversy, the body might choose to pass over Judge Hammash even if Judge Amin resigns. The official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to speak publicly.

The judicial disputes have threatened to bring further disarray to a trial that has already seen its share of chaos. Some judges on the tribunal say they fear that Mr. Hussein and his fellow defendants, who have unleashed repeated broadsides against the tribunal, will pick up on the questions surrounding Judge Amin's resignation and stir further conflict.

The trial, which started on Oct. 19, will resume with more testimony from witnesses to the massacre of 148 men and boys in the Shiite town of Dujail, north of Baghdad, in 1982 after an assassination attempt there against Mr. Hussein. Former members of Mr. Hussein's government could be among those who are called to testify in the next two weeks, according to an American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid given the impression of interference in the proceedings.

The current phase of the trial, the first of several expected cases against Mr. Hussein and other top officials in his government, is likely to last at least until the end of May, the official said.

As Iraqi parties positioned themselves on Sunday after the release of election results, Tariq al-Hashemi, a leader of Iraq's largest Sunni Arab political coalition, said Sunni Arabs would not accept the inclusion in a new government of any official who was involved in violence against Sunnis by the Shiite-led security forces. The warning appeared to be aimed at Bayan Jabr, the current interior minister, who is widely believed by Sunnis to have orchestrated death squads that have carried out killings.

Mr. Hashemi's coalition, the Iraqi Consensus Front, won 44 of the new Parliament's 275 seats in the December elections, and is expected to be part of a government with the Shiite and Kurdish alliances. But at a news conference on Sunday, Mr. Hashemi also said the group's leaders would consult with party members before deciding whether to be part of a government or the opposition.

Insurgent violence left at least five people dead across Iraq on Monday after a dozen were killed on Sunday.

An interior ministry official said that a suicide bomber killed three people and wounded seven others at a police checkpoint near the Iranian embassy in Baghdad, while a bomb killed one person and wounded five near a hospital in Mahmudiyah.

A member of the National Assembly narrowly missed being assassinated when his car was fired on in Baghdad, killing his bodyguard and wounding his son, according to the interior ministry.

On Sunday, in Baquba, the bodies of five policemen, some mutilated, were left outside a hospital, police officials said. In Balad Ruz, northeast of Baghdad, insurgents fired rocket-propelled grenades at the home of a police officer, killing five of his relatives but leaving the officer unharmed, the police said.

North of Baghdad in Hawija, the bodies of a prominent Sunni Arab tribal leader and his son were found shot to death with their hands bound. The leader, Ibrahim Ali al-Neami, 75, and his 28 year-old son, Ziad, were last seen Saturday leaving their home south of Kirkuk for a funeral in Hawija, the police said.

The last of three Reuters journalists who had been detained by the American military in Iraq was freed Sunday after nearly eight months without being charged, the agency reported. Samir Muhammad Noor, a 30 year-old cameraman, was arrested in June. Two other Reuters journalists, also Iraqis, were released Jan. 15, also without being charged.

Abdul Razzaq al-Saiedi, Mona Mahmoud and Omar al-Neami contributed reporting for this article.




Copyright 2006The New York Times Company

January 23, 2006
Four British Diplomats Accused of Spying in Moscow
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:06 a.m. ET

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia's main intelligence agency said Monday it had uncovered spying by four British diplomats -- using electronic equipment inside a fake rock -- and accused them of channeling funds to non-governmental organizations including one of the country's most well-known human rights watchdogs.

The head of the Foreign Security Service or FSB, the main successor agency to the Soviet-era KGB, last year accused U.S. and other foreign intelligence services of using NGOs to spy on Russia and foment political upheaval in ex-Soviet republics.

The agency's spokesman, Sergei Ignatchenko, said the situation would be resolved ''at a political level,'' the RIA-Novosti news agency reported, an apparent indication that the Russian government could expel them.

Officials at the British Embassy in Moscow and Foreign Office in London declined to comment. Prime Minster Tony Blair told a news conference that he had only heard about Russian spy allegations in media reports and he declined further comment.

Russian state television broadcast video Sunday showing four British Embassy staff allegedly using electronic equipment concealed in the rock in a Moscow square to receive intelligence from Russian agents.

In 1996, Russia and Britain engaged in a spying dispute launched by Moscow, each expelling four diplomats.

Among the diplomats named in the TV broadcast were Marc Doe and Paul Crompton, both of the embassy's political section.

Rossiya also showed copies of documents allegedly showing that Britain had transferred money to NGOs in Russia. It described Doe as the main contact point for NGOs.

''This is the first time we literally caught them red-handed in the process of contacting their agents here and received evidence that they finance a number of non-governmental organizations,'' the ITAR-Tass news agency quoted Ignatchenko as saying.

In addition to a chill in Russian-British relations, the espionage announcement reflected a toughening Russian attitude toward NGOs. Earlier this year, President Vladimir Putin signed a law severely restricting NGOs' financing and activities.

Moscow has been highly suspicious of groups that promote human rights and democracy since opposition leaders came to power in uprisings in Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan in recent years. Russian officials have accused Western nations of encouraging regime change in the former Soviet Union by financing NGOs.

In a statement released following the Sunday broadcast, Britain's Foreign Office rejected allegations that its dealings with Russian NGOs were improper.

''It is well-known that the British government has financially supported projects implemented by Russian NGOs in the field of human rights and civil society. All our assistance is given openly and aims to support the development of a healthy civil society in Russia,'' the statement said.

Rossiya showed a document authorizing a transfer of $41,000 in October to the Moscow Helsinki Group, a leading Russian human rights group that has been a persistent Putin critic.

The group's head, Lyudmila Alexeyeva, who was a Soviet-era dissident, said the document was a fabrication because her organization had not received any funding from British sources since 2004. She accused the authorities of seeking a pretext to launch a crackdown on NGOs.

''This is an attempt to smear a well-known group with allegations of involvement in espionage activity. They are preparing public opinion for a government move to close us down, which they can now do under the new law,'' Alexeyeva told The Associated Press.

''This will not stop our activities, though. I managed to keep on working in Soviet times,'' she said.

Fyodor Lukyanov, editor of the magazine Russia in Global Affairs, predicted the spy scandal would increase tensions between Moscow and the West as Russia chairs the Group of Eight this year.

''This will provoke a very negative commentary in the West. It will only worsen the picture since Russia already started its G8 presidency on a very inauspicious note,'' Lukyanov told the AP, alluding to its cutoff of gas to Ukraine over the New Year holiday, which resulted in brief shortages for other European countries as well.



Copyright 2006 The Associated Press

http://www.gulfnews.com/region/Saudi_Arabia/10013390.html


Saudi King in China for oil talks
http://archive.gulfnews.com/region/Saudi_A...a/10013390.html

01/22/2006 09:40 PM | Agencies

Beijing: Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah is in China for a three-day visit to discuss energy cooperation and anti-terrorism measures, the Chinese Foreign Ministry said.

The visit to China is a first by a Saudi ruler since the two nations formed diplomatic relations in 1990.

Abdullah is scheduled to meet with President Hu Jintao on Monday. On Tuesday, he is to meet Communist Party leader Wu Bangguo and Prime Minister Wen Jiabao.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Kong Quan said that discussion on energy cooperation, anti-terrorism, politics, economics, culture, health and telecommunications are expected.

He had no information about possible energy deals to be signed.

The main Saudi government oil company, a Chinese producer and Exxon Mobil Corp. are partners in a US$3.5 billion project to expand a refinery in southern China.