‘Corruption will let Hamas take W. Bank'.

by Khaled Abu Toameh

Dramatic warning delivered by Abbas’s former corruption-buster Fahmi Shabaneh.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the corrupt officials who used to work for his predecessor, Yasser Arafat, and that’s why Hamas will one day take control of the West Bank, Fahmi Shabaneh, who was appointed by Abbas four years ago to root out corruption in the Palestinian Authority, said on Thursday.

In an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post, Shabaneh, who until recently was in charge of the Anti-Corruption Department in the PA’s General Intelligence Service (GIS), warned that what happened in the Gaza Strip in the summer of 2007, when Hamas managed to overthrow the Fatah-controlled regime, is likely to recur in the West Bank.

“Had it not been for the presence of the Israeli authorities in the West Bank, Hamas would have done what they did in the Gaza Strip,” Shabaneh told the Post. “It’s hard to find people in the West Bank who support the Palestinian Authority. People are fed up with the financial corruption and mismanagement of the Palestinian Authority.

”Shabaneh said that many Palestinians in the West Bank have lost hope that the PA would one day be reformed. “The Palestinian Authority is very corrupt and needs to be overhauled,” he said.

Shabaneh cited several specific cases of alleged corruption within Fatah and the PA in the course of the interview, including asserting that Fatah personnel stole much of a $3.2 million donation given by the US to Fatah ahead of the 2006 Palestinian parliamentary election, won by Hamas, which had been intended to improve Fatah’s image and boost its chances of winning.

Shabaneh, a resident of east Jerusalem who worked as a lawyer before joining the GIS as its legal adviser after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, said he was forced to quit his anti-corruption job several months ago after exposing a sex scandal involving one of Abbas’s top aides in Ramallah in 2009.

Video footage and other documents presented to the Post by Shabaneh show the aide lying naked in bed after being lured to an apartment in Ramallah by an east Jerusalem woman.

The footage shows Shabaneh and other armed security agents storming the bedroom, much to the surprise of the Abbas aide who is heard uttering: “Thank God it’s you and not the Israelis.”

Shabaneh said in the interview, the first of its kind with a high-ranking PA security official, that he and his men had been operating on instructions from their boss, Gen. Tawfik Tirawi, the former head of the GIS. Tirwai, for his part, denied that he had authorized Shabaneh to spy on the Abbas aide.

The top aide, who is one of the closest advisers to Abbas, was caught on tape making derogatory remarks against Abbas and Arafat. “President Abbas has no charisma” and is “not in control,” he was quoted as saying. The aide was also caught on tape denouncing Arafat as one of the biggest dajjals (swindlers).

After the revelations, which were brought to Abbas’s attention and were embarrassing for the PA president, Shabaneh was removed from his anti-corruption post and reassigned as head of the GIS’s internal security force. More recently, he was promoted to overall commander of the GIS in the area.

Shortly afterwards, however, Shabaneh was arrested by Israeli police on suspicion of recruiting east Jerusalem residents to the GIS, spying on Israel, chasing suspected “collaborators” and Arabs involved in real estate deals with Jews, and threatening and blackmailing the senior Abbas aide.

Shabaneh has since been released from prison and most of the charges against him dropped. Today he remains under house arrest and is banned from entering the West Bank. The only charge he faces today is membership in a Palestinian military organization – a charge he claims is absurd given the fact that about 1,200 residents of east Jerusalem serve in the various security branches of the PA.

Shabaneh said that he had no doubt that his arrest by Israel was carried out at the request of “someone high in Abbas’s office to punish me for fighting corruption and exposing sex scandals involving not only the senior aide, but many other officials as well.”

He said that the decision to arrest him and prosecute him was also absurd because was always aware of his work and status in the PA security forces and never did anything to him.

“For many years I worked as legal adviser to the General Intelligence Apparatus and no one ever asked me anything,” Shabaneh noted. “When I was commander of the force in the area the Israelis even used to coordinate a lot with us.”

Shabaneh insisted that the decision to pursue corrupt officials in Abbas’s inner circle was part of the PA president’s declared policy to combat financial corruption. “In his pre-election platform, President Abbas promised to end financial corruption and implement major reforms, but he hasn’t done much since then,” he said. “Unfortunately, Abbas has surrounded himself with many of the thieves and officials who were involved in theft of public funds and who became icons of financial corruption.”

Shabaneh said that as head of the anti-corruption unit he and his men succeeded in exposing dozens of cases involving senior officials who had stolen public funds but were never held accountable.

“Some of the most senior Palestinian officials didn’t have even $3,000 in their pocket when they arrived [after the signing of the Oslo Accords],” Shabaneh said. “Yet we discovered that some of them had tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars in their bank accounts.

Until today we didn’t hear about one official who was brought to trial for stealing money from the PA, although we had transferred many of the cases to the Palestinian prosecutor-general.”

Questioned as to why he had decided to go public now, Shabaneh said: “I’m not criticizing the Palestinian Authority simply because I like to criticize, but because I want to see a state of law, one with no room for corruption. I was offered $100,000 not to expose the last sex scandal, but I chose not to accept the bribe. I’m the one who resigned after my arrest, because after all that I’ve seen I no longer believe that Abbas’s authority can be reformed.

Asked whether PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is working to establish good government, Shabaneh said: “Salam Fayyad is a good man and I have a lot of respect for him. He’s really working to build professional institutions and good government, but the corrupt Fatah people around Abbas are doing their utmost to thwart his efforts.”

He added: “Even Abbas tried in the beginning, but the corrupt officials working with him didn’t allow him to make progress.”

Shabaneh also said he had managed to track down some of the financial aid that went missing during and after the period of Arafat’s death.

“I discovered, for example, that several senior officials had taken millions of dollars from the Palestinian leadership under the pretext that they wanted to purchase land that would otherwise be confiscated by Israel,” he said.“

Our investigations revealed that many of the purported land deals were fictitious transactions and we even forced one official to return more than $800,000. We had another case where a senior Fatah official and his brother pocketed about $2.5m. which they took from Arafat under the pretext that they wanted to purchase land in the West Bank before Israel lays its hand on it.

Asked whether he believed outside donors should stop channeling funds to Abbas, he said his advice to the donor countries “is to follow up on their donations to examine how and where the money is being spent. We caught some officials who stole about $700,000 from the donors to study the atmosphere in . Why do we need to spend such a huge amount of money on something trivial like this when many people are suffering and have nothing to eat or feed their children?”

Was he serious about Hamas taking over the ? “Yes, no question about that,” he said. “It will happen one day if the state of corruption and anarchy continue in the West Bank .

“Why do you think Hamas kicked us out of the Gaza Strip? Because the people there were fed up with the corruption and bad government of Fatah. What do you think the people in the Gaza Strip used to think when they saw a colonel in the Palestinian Authority driving in a big motorcade and surrounded by dozens of bodyguards and assistants?”

Did he see no chance that Fatah would reform? “As long as the same corrupt guys are running the show we shouldn’t expect real changes,” said Shabaneh.

“Before the 2006 parliamentary election, the Americans gave Fatah $3.2m. to improve the party’s image and boost its chances of winning. But the Fatah people even stole most of the money that was intended to help them improve their image and reputation. These corrupt officials know no limits. They even used to forge Arafat’s signature to obtain money by fraud,” he said.


Khaled Abu Toameh
Copyright - Original materials copyright (c) by the authors.

Ending Corruption in Washington

By Vasko Kohlmayer
January 14, 2010
AmericanThinker.com

Even as our government officials claim that the worst of the recession is behind us, their actions hardly indicate that they believe it themselves. The financial reform bill that the House of Representatives passed last month authorizes the Federal Reserve to provide up to $4 trillion in emergency relief to big banks the next time things come crashing down. This flies directly in the face of the oft-heard assurances that the bailout spree is over. Obviously not, as the House is laying the groundwork for the continuation of the money bonanza.

And what a bonanza it promises to be. The authorized figure is far more than anything we have seen so far. To give a sense of scale, it exceeds by a factor of five the amount of President Obama's stimulus package.

The bill is the brainchild of Barney Frank, the ultra-liberal chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. Believe it or not, this is the same Barney Frank who has been calling for tighter regulations of Wall Street and its practices. And yet at the same time, this man is prepared to give the bankers unprecedented amounts of money. How can this be?

If we want to understand why a politician takes the positions he does, we can usually figure it out by following the money. Barney Frank is no exception. A recent article by Kevin Connor offers some revealing data and facts. Since rising to a leadership position on the House Financial Services Committee in 2002, Frank has been getting almost half of his campaign contributions from what is referred to as FIRE. The acronym stands for the finance, insurance, and real estate industries. In other words, some fifty percent of Congressman Frank's campaign cash is supplied by that bundle of special interests loosely referred to as Wall Street. So liked is Frank by them that they have made him a leading beneficiary of their generosity on Capitol Hill. Notes Connor:

Only two members of the House have taken in a larger share of their money from Wall Street over the past two campaign cycles - Paul Kanjorski, a Democrat, and Spencer Bachus, a Republican. And during the 2006 cycle, Frank took in more money from FIRE than any other Democratic member of the House, and all but a few Republicans.

In light of the above, Frank's willingness to authorize $4 trillion for his benefactors should come as no surprise. The truth is that Barney Frank is in the back pocket of Wall Street, and judging from his "reform" bill, his sponsors are getting an excellent rate of return on their investment. This is, however, something Frank would not want his liberal base to figure out, given that in public, he poses as the scourge of unscrupulous financiers. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

The case of Barney Frank shows the cancerous corruption at the heart of our system, whereby lawmakers write favorable legislation in exchange for bribes. To make the whole racket even more perverse, such legislation often involves massive transfers of cash. In practical terms, it means that politicians use the power of the state to take money from one group of citizens and give it to the special interests who finance their careers.

Many people think that to stamp out this corruption, we need some reform bill that would regulate how campaign donations are given and received. But this is a futile hope. There have been bills of this kind, but politicians have always found ways around them. After all, such bills must be written and passed by the very people whose conduct we seek to regulate. Because of this, we can be certain that the measures they propose will be weak and loophole-ridden.

Neither will it do to vote the bums out. This has also been tried before, and always with the same result: Most of those who replace the bums eventually turn into bums themselves. We saw it in 1994 when the Gingrich Republicans, riding a wave of national disgust with congressional shenanigans, threw out the spendthrift, earmark-addicted, special-interest-beholden Democrats. But barely a decade later, one could hardly tell the difference between the new boss and the old one, and in 2006, the latter were sent packing by an angry electorate. The Democrats who took their place promised the most ethical Congress in history. Instead, we got a gang of thieves whose pilfering of our national wealth makes Bernie Madoff look like choir boy.

The problem is not that all our politicians are inherently corrupt before they come to Washington. Surely not many travel to the nation's capital hoping to end up as harlots of special interests. But such is human nature that only a few can resist for very long the perverse incentives of the corrupt system. It is not unreasonable to assume that many of us would stumble in just the same way were we to find ourselves in their position.

The way to fight this is not by forcing our congressmen to write self-correcting legislation, but to deal with the problem at its root, which is Washington's ability to regulate almost every aspect of our lives. This in turn invites two kinds of bribery, which are in Beltway-speak euphemistically called "campaign contributions." Bribes of the first kind are given by those who seek to escape onerous regulations that Congress constantly threatens to impose. Bribes of the second kind are made by those who wish to appropriate other people's wealth. Many bribes are given with both objects in mind. Barney Frank's latest piece of legislation bears unmistakable evidence of this double-play. Bribed to the hilt, Frank concocted a bill that essentially gives Wall Street a free pass while authorizing immense amounts of money for the next emergency.

The only way to get rid of such corruption is to deprive Congress of its vast regulatory powers. There is truly no reason why politicians should superintend any portion of the private sphere. Finance, health care, energy, housing, farming, and all the rest should be left wholly to the market, since the market invariably delivers goods and services in the most economical and cost-efficient manner. Every time politicians decide to regulate, they only make matters worse. There is not a single regulatory regime that would make the working of any part of our lives more efficient or less costly. It is no accident that those areas that are most heavily regulated -- such as health care and finance -- tend to be the most problem-ridden. But this does not bother Barney Frank and his colleagues a bit, because their ability to control and regulate is the main source of their clout and cash.

If we want our lives back, we must strip politicians of that power. They are not supposed to have it in the first place. The federal government was not established to run every aspect of our lives. It was set up for the primary purpose of protecting the lives, liberty, and property of American citizens. But these days, our federal representatives show little zeal for safeguarding these. And when it comes to liberty and property, it would seem that their desire is to take away as much as they can.

We are now paying the price for losing sight of this country's founding principles and granting politicians extra-constitutional powers in the misguided belief that they would solve our problems. That was an unwise thing to do, because instead of the goodies they promised, they have delivered abuse, theft, and corruption. We need to look no farther than Barney Frank's "financial-reform" legislation to see it.

Note: Cartoons added by BeeSting.