What the U.S. and Iran have in common

YNetNews: Iran funding Fatah

Hey, so are we, whaddya know....

This month, the White House asked Congress to release $86 million for Abbas; Israel already has freed $100 million of frozen Palestinian tax money.

Early last week, the State Department told Congress how it intends to distribute the $86 million. Much of it would go toward uniforms and communications supplies. The training and equipping would be done by U.S. government contractors. If Congress doesn't object by mid-February, the plan will proceed, requiring only a final go-ahead from Israel. Israeli officials said that won't be a problem.

Officials and diplomats in Washington said $35.5 million would be used to equip 8,500 members of the Palestinian National Security Force; $15.5 million to train an initial unit of about 670 personnel to handle civil disturbances; $26 million to shore up Abbas' presidential guard; and $10 million to improve security at the Karni crossing between Israel and Gaza.

Pending final approval by the United States and Israel, Abbas could send thousands of troops to training centers in Jordan and Egypt, said Faraj, the Palestinian military intelligence chief. The current proposal would send four groups of 1,400 Palestinian security members for two months of training.

In Jordan, the troops are expected to go to a state-of-the-art training center near Amman that's used to train thousands of Iraqi police.

The facility would be used to train counterterrorism units; other troops would be sent to Egypt to learn how to handle urban warfare, said Brig. Gen. Sabri Tumezi, who handles international relations for Palestinian Preventative Security services, an intelligence and counterterrorism agency, in the West Bank.

Like Faraj, Tumezi said that the training would be largely useless unless Israel and the United States allow the Palestinian trainees to receive arms.

The two leaders said the issue could be resolved easily if the Israeli military returned large caches of weapons that it confiscated from the Palestinian Authority during the second Palestinian intifada, or uprising.

"We don't want anything we didn't already have," Tumezi said. "We just want what was already ours."