Secretary Rice is a little uneasy over the PA's foot-dragging on disarming Fatah, but not enough to actually stop sending them more money:
"Now, I think it would be a good start for the Palestinians, by the way, if they would disarm the militias of Fatah. That would be a good start. They have a roadmap obligation to disarm terrorist organizations and militias. But as a starting point, because I understand that there are complications with Hamas and there are questions about how capable they would be of actually insisting on disarmament of Hamas."Abbas has other ideas:
The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday rejected an appeal from the Quartet to dismantle armed militias and called on the international community to stop meddling in the Palestinians' internal affairs.
Ministers of the Quartet – the United States, the United Nations, Russia and the European Union – said in a joint statement Tuesday that following Israel's pullout from the Gaza Strip, Palestinians needed to "dismantle terrorist capabilities and infrastructures."
PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas dismissed the appeal, saying the Palestinians knew how to handle their own affairs.
And where exactly is this money going? A little factoid buried in another article about Palestinian infighting may give us a glimpse:
Hani al-Hassan, a former interior minister in the Palestinian Authority, escaped an assassination attempt on his life Tuesday night when a group of masked men fired several shots at him during a visit to Nablus.
Hassan, who is a member of the Fatah central committee, was not hurt. Sources in the city said the assailants belonged to Fatah's armed wing, Aksa Martyrs Brigades.
The Aksa Martyrs Brigades have issued several threats against Hassan in the past, accusing him of suspending their salaries when he served as interior minister under Yasser Arafat.
Isn't this interesting? Members of the terror group are angry because their salaries were suspended by the PA interior minister?
Maybe I'm crazy, but this seems to imply to me that there is still a relatively consistent funding source directly from the PA to the Fatah terrorists that neither Abbas nor Condi are bothering to address in public. So many "observers" are supposedly watching how the PA is spending its money and no one is uncovering the fact that terrorists are still getting funding straight from the PA?