Israeli weapons transfer to be used against Jews

Aaron Klein
WorldNetDaily.com

Weapons transferred yesterday with the help of Israel to militants from Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah party will be used in attacks against the Jewish state, a senior Fatah militant told WND.

Also, a leader of the Popular Resistance Committees, a major Palestinian terror group suspected of attacks against U.S. Middle East targets, told WND his organization has infiltrated Fatah and likely will obtain some of the new arms.

According to reports here, Egypt yesterday transferred 2,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 20,000 magazines and two million rounds of ammunition to Fatah security organizations in the Gaza Strip to bolster the groups in clashes against rival Hamas factions.

Hamas and Fatah have engaged in heavy firefights since Abbas earlier this month called for new Palestinian elections in a move widely seen as an attempt to dismantle the Hamas-led PA.


The Egyptian weapons were delivered yesterday with the help of the Israeli Defense Forces and with authorization from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, according to Israel's Haaretz daily newspaper.

Israeli and Palestinian security officials confirmed the Egyptian weapons shipments to WND.

According to the officials, four trucks filled with Egyptian weapons were transferred into Israel through a major border crossing in coordination with the IDF. The Israeli army then escorted the arms to a Gaza Strip checkpoint, where they were received by PA security personnel affiliated with Mahmoud Dahlan, a Fatah strongman in Gaza.

Israel's Defense Ministry said Olmert approved the Egyptian weapons shipment to bolster peace in the region.

"The assistance is aimed at reinforcing the forces of peace in the face of the forces of darkness that are threatening the future of the Middle East," said Amos Gilad, head of the Defense Ministry's political military policy department.

But according to Abu Yousuf, a senior member of Fatah's Force 17, which received the Egyptian weapons, the Egyptian arms shipment will be used to attack Jews and "fight Israeli occupation."

Force 17 serves as Abbas' personal security detail and as de facto police units in the West Bank and Gaza. Many of its members, including Abu Yousuf, also openly serve as militants in the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group, the declared "military wing" of Fatah.

"These weapons (from Egypt) will be used to fight Israeli occupation forces, especially to defend against Zionist aggression in the Gaza Strip," said Abu Yousuf.

The Fatah militant accused Egypt of attempting to generate Palestinian civil war by arming one faction against another.

"These weapons are an attempt by Egypt, backed by Israel and the U.S., to fuel a civil war in the Palestinian territories, but this conspiracy won't work. We will not use any weapons against Hamas unless they attack Abu Mazen (Abbas). The weapons will be used against Israel," Abu Yousuf told WND.

Abu Yousuf went on to hint new weapons provided to his group with the help of Israel could be shared with the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror organization.

"During our official service and during our job hours we are soldiers (in Force 17). What we do in our free time it is our business. Of course, as members of Fatah, some of us are members in the Brigades and we take part in the defense and protection of our people and in the fight against the Israeli occupation," Abu Yousuf said.

Anti-U.S. terror group: We'll obtain Israeli weapons shipment

Meanwhile, in a joint interview today with WND and with the Ynetnews Israeli website, Muhammad Abdel-Al, a spokesman for the Popular Resistance Committees, said his terror group would likely obtain some of the Egyptian weapons.

"We vow to show the Israelis very soon the weapons they lately channeled to the Presidential Guards (Force 17) and to the Fatah security services will be directed against the (Israeli) occupation," said Abdel-Al

"In all the security services, including in Force 17, there are activists affiliated with all the Palestinian groups, including ours, and Hamas," he said. "We vow that there will be no use (of these arms) in a civil war, as we promise that should these arms reach us we will use them against the occupation and the Zionist enemy."

The Popular Resistance Committees is a coalition of several Palestinian terror groups and is responsible for scores of anti-Israel shootings and rocket attacks. The Committees is also accused of carrying out a bombing in 2003 on a U.S. convoy in Gaza in which three American contractors were killed.

Yesterday's Egyptian arms transfer was the latest foreign weapons shipment provided to Fatah with the help of Israel.

WND reported exclusively the U.S. sent assault rifles and ammunition earlier this month to Fatah groups in Gaza. The weapons were delivered by an Israeli army convoy, according to Israeli and Palestinian officials involved in the transfer.

Fatah's Abu Yousuf told WND earlier this month the American arms will be used against Israel.

U.S. weapons prompting Palestinian arms race?

Also, Abu Abdullah, considered one of the most important operational members of Hamas' so-called military wing, told WND in an exclusive interview last week the U.S. weapons shipments prompted a Palestinian arms race.

The Hamas leader said weapons procured as a result of the U.S. shipment will be used against Israel.

"The more the Americans give Abu Mazen (Abbas) weapons, the more we will have in the future weapons to use against the Israelis, because it incites the different organizations to intensify their own supply of weapons," said Abu Abdullah of Hamas' Izzedine al-Qassam Martyrs Brigades, Hamas' declared "resistance" department.

Abu Abdullah said the U.S. weapons would eventually fall into the hands of Hamas:

"These American weapons will be one day the property of all the Palestinian people and its resistance, including Hamas," Abu Abdullah said. "The U.S. gives weapons to Fatah during internal Palestinian clashes, but one day when we go back to carrying out operations together these [weapons] will be shared."

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U.S. finally admits Arafat murdered American officials

Joseph Farah
WorldNetDaily.com

After 33 years of secrecy, the U.S. State Department has finally declassified a document admitting it knew the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, plotted and supervised the murders of two U.S. diplomats in Sudan in 1973, a cover-up first exposed by WND in January 2001.

The document, released earlier this year, with no fanfare, makes it clear the Khartoum operation "was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval" of Arafat, a frequent visitor to the White House throughout the 1990s who died in 2004.

In the attack March 1, 1973, eight members of the Black September terrorist organization, part of Arafat's Fatah faction of the PLO, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum on Arafat's orders, taking U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, diplomat Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore and others hostage, and one day later, killing Noel, Moore and Belgian diplomat Guy Eid.

(Story continues below)

The admission comes 33 years after James J. Welsh, then the National Security Agency's Palestinian analyst, saw a communication intercepted from Arafat to his terrorist commandos in Sudan.

Within minutes, Welsh told WND, the director of the NSA was notified and the decision was made to send a rare "FLASH" message – the highest priority – to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum via the State Department.

But the message didn't reach the embassy in time. Somewhere between the NSA and the State Department, someone decided the warning was too vague. The alert was downgraded in urgency.

The next day, eight members of Black September, part of Arafat's Fatah organization, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, took Noel, Moore and others hostage. A day later, on March 2, 1973, Noel, Moore and Eid were machine-gunned to death – all, Welsh had insisted for years, on the direct orders of Arafat.

Welsh, who left the Navy and NSA in 1974, spoke to WND about the incident in 2001 after years of attempting to get answers from his own agency and the State Department. He became particularly troubled about the cover-up of Arafat's role in the murders of American officials when President Clinton invited the PLO leader to the White House for direct negotiations on the Middle East.

Ever since, he had been on a personal one-man mission to uncover the tape recordings and transcripts of those intercepts between Arafat and Fatah leader Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu-Iyad, in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in Khartoum.

"I have decided that my oaths of secrecy must give way to my sense of right and wrong," he told WND. "I was particularly outraged as I had spent four years following these individuals and, at the moment of our greatest intelligence coup against them, an uninformed GS level had pooh-poohed our work and cost the lives of two U.S. diplomats," he recalls.

Welsh has continued to research the Arafat murders continually and stumbled upon the 2006 State Department document during a routine Internet search.

The document goes on to say that Fatah leaders never expected their hostage-taking to result in the freeing of the captives. A primary goal of the attack, it says, "was to strike at the United States because of its efforts to achieve a Middle East peace settlement which many Arabs believe would be inimical to Palestinian interests."

The report also said the Khartoum operation demonstrated the ability of the Black September organization to strike where least expected and warned the U.S. was at risk of future attacks from the group and its Fatah allies.

Welsh believes the initial cover-up of the communications breakdown and the role of Arafat was launched to prevent embarrassment to the State Department and White House. President Nixon, he points out, was in the death throes of the Watergate scandal at the time. The last thing he needed, Welsh speculates, was an international scandal to deal with on the front page of the Washington Post.

Later, after Nixon was gone, Welsh believes the whole matter of the Arafat tapes was kept quiet to protect the future viability of signals intelligence intercepts of this kind. And, finally, he said, the cover-up persisted to foster Arafat's role as a "peacemaker" and leader of the Palestinian cause.

Back in 1973, Welsh had received spontaneous transcripts of the dialogue between Arafat and his subordinates. But, under NSA protocol, he was not permitted to keep copies. Under normal procedure, he expected copies of the final transcripts and tapes to arrive on his desk for further analysis. They never came.

"Things were recorded but never arrived at my desk," he recalls. "I know they were recorded because I was receiving simultaneous reports from a collection site. The warning I drafted for the State Department was based on those reports."

After the deadly attack in Khartoum, Arafat ordered the eight gunmen to surrender peacefully to the Sudanese authorities. Two were released for "lack of evidence." Later, in June 1973, the other six were found guilty of murdering the three diplomats. They were sentenced to life imprisonment and released 24 hours later to the PLO.

Before surrendering, the Khartoum terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as well as others being held in Israeli and European prisons. Nixon refused to negotiate.

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Woman Discovers Her Bracelet Is 10,000 Years Old Via National geographic

Fredericton, Canada (AHN) - A Canadian archeologist plans to carry out his excavations in New Brunswick after he came to know that a woman found a spearhead, as old as 10,000 years old, from a nearby area.

According to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., Joan Rennick found a spearhead seven years ago at Cape Spear, about 31 miles east of Moncton and thought it would be a good piece of jewelry.

"I put it in a little bracket and wore it around my neck for the last seven years," said Rennick.

The spearhead is about 5 inches long and is made of a dark rock.

However, she recently came to learn of its value after she saw a spearhead in National Geographic that looked very similar to hers.

She contacted Brent Suttie, an archeologist for the province of New Brunswick, who examined it and told her it was almost 10,000 years old.

"We may be able to find an intact site there," he said.

"We'd be able to garner so much more information, like what they were eating [10,000 years ago], how their tents were laid out ... all these kinds of things we didn't know before," he added.

source

NowPublic

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'Papa Pilgrim' pleads no contest to sex charges

A self-styled religious patriarch known as "Papa Pilgrim" pleaded no contest Tuesday to felony charges including incest.

Robert Hale, 65, was accused of molesting one of his 15 children over a seven-year span, including a period when his family lived in seclusion at Wrangell-St. Elias National Park.

The Pilgrims, as they once called themselves, gained notoriety for their feud with the National Park Service over access to the family's remote homestead within the 13.2 million-acre park.

In Tuesday's hearing, Hale pleaded no contest to consolidated counts of first-degree sexual assault, incest and coercion.

He told Superior Court Judge Donald Hopwood that he never sexually assaulted anyone but decided to plead "for the good of his family," said Palmer assistant district attorney Richard Payne.

Hale had been scheduled for a January 16 trial on 30 felony counts involving one of his daughters. The incest and two other counts were consolidated and charges of kidnapping and assault were dropped in a deal Hale made in exchange for a state-approved sentence of 14 years.

Family member Moses Hale, 22, said no one in the family wanted to comment.

source

NowPublic

Tags: seven-year | self-styled | million-acre | Wrangell-St | Hopwood | span | SEXUAL | sex | seclusion | remote | RELIGIOUS | plead | patriarch | notoriety | molesting | lived | known | including | incest | homestead | hearing | gained | FIRST-DEGREE | feud | FELONY | District | decided | counts | contest | consolidated | charges | called | attorney | assistant | assault | accused | access | tuesday | superior | SERVICE | Richard | pilgrim | Park | papa | palmer | judge | Hale | Elias | donald | Crime | court | anchorage | Alaska

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Today in History - Dec. 28

The Associated Press

Today is Thursday, Dec. 28, the 362nd day of 2006. There are three days left in the year.

Today's Highlight in History:

One hundred and fifty years ago, on Dec. 28, 1856, the 28th president of the United States, Thomas Woodrow Wilson, was born in Staunton, Va.

On this date:

In 1694, Queen Mary II of England died after five years of joint rule with her husband, King William III.

In 1832, John C. Calhoun became the first vice president of the United States to resign, stepping down over differences with President Jackson.

In 1846, Iowa became the 29th state to be admitted to the Union.

In 1897, the play "Cyrano de Bergerac," by Edmond Rostand, premiered in Paris.

In 1917, the New York Evening Mail published a facetious essay by H.L. Mencken on the history of bathtubs in America.

In 1937, composer Maurice Ravel died in Paris.

In 1944, the musical "On the Town," with music by Leonard Bernstein and book and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, opened on Broadway.

In 1945, Congress officially recognized the Pledge of Allegiance.

In 1973, Alexander Solzhenitsyn published "Gulag Archipelago," an expose of the Soviet prison system.

In 1981, Elizabeth Jordan Carr, the first American "test-tube" baby, was born in Norfolk, Va.

Ten years ago: Leftist rebels in Peru released 20 more hostages, including two ambassadors, from Japan's embassy residence, following the first face-to-face talks between guerrillas and the government's negotiator.

Five years ago: The National Guard was called out to help Buffalo, New York, dig out from a paralyzing, five-day storm that had unloaded nearly seven feet of snow. Lawrence Singleton, a rapist and killer whose most notorious crime was chopping off a teen-age hitchhiker's forearms in California in 1978, died at a prison in Starke, Fla., at age 74.

One year ago: Former top Enron Corp. accountant Richard Causey pleaded guilty to securities fraud and agreed to help pursue convictions against Enron founder Kenneth Lay and former CEO Jeffrey Skilling. A U.S. immigration judge ordered retired auto worker John Demjanjuk, accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard, deported to his native Ukraine. (Demjanjuk is appealing the deportation order.)

Today's Birthdays: Actor Lou Jacobi is 93. Bandleader Johnny Otis is 85. Comic book creator Stan Lee is 84. Former United Auto Workers union president Owen Bieber is 77. Actor Martin Milner is 75. Actress Dame Maggie Smith is 72. Rock singer-musician Charles Neville is 68. Rock singer-musician Edgar Winter is 60. Rock singer-musician Alex Chilton (The Box Tops; Big Star) is 56. Actor Denzel Washington is 52. Country singer Joe Diffie is 48. Country musician Mike McGuire (Shenandoah) is 48. Actor Chad McQueen is 46. Country singer-musician Marty Roe (Diamond Rio) is 46. Actor Malcolm Gets is 42. Actor Mauricio Mendoza is 37. Comedian Seth Meyers is 33. Rhythm-and-blues singer John Legend is 28. Actress Sienna Miller is 25. Actress Mackenzie Rosman is 17.

Thought for Today: "More persons, on the whole, are humbugged by believing nothing, than by believing too much." — Phineas T. Barnum, American showman (1810-1891).

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