*EPF104 04/19/2004
Rice Says U.S. Had No Knowledge of Israel's Plans to Kill Rantisi
(Security adviser also states U.S. will not negotiate with kidnappers in Iraq) (770)

By Peggy B. Hu
Washington File Staff Writer

Washington -- In several talk show appearances April 18, National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice denied that the United States had any prior knowledge of Israel's plans to kill Hamas leader Abdel Aziz Rantisi.

"The [U.S.] president doesn't discuss with the [Israeli] prime minister Israeli operations," Rice said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.

Rice said the United States understands and supports Israel's right to defend itself from terrorists, but added that Israel also needs to "take account of the consequences of what they're doing."

Rice said the timing of Rantisi's assassination was "not helpful" given that "we had just talked about trying to get the road map [toward peace] under way in the Middle East, trying to get the Gaza disengagement plan under way."

"[W]e understand that the Israelis have to defend themselves. It's just extremely important that the Israelis also keep in mind the long view here," she said.

Speaking on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace, Rice expressed optimism about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's proposal to evacuate Israeli settlements from Gaza and the West Bank.

"[F]or all of the negotiations that we've had over the last 30 years on this conflict," she noted, "the Israelis have not given back essentially a kilometer of land in the occupied territories. Now we have an opportunity for an Israeli prime minister -- not just any Israeli prime minister -- Ariel Sharon, in many ways, the father of the settlement movement in Israel -- to begin to remove settlements, to take Israeli armed forces out of the Gaza, to do so in a small portion of the West Bank and to leapfrog, in many ways, a lot of the careful steps that have been anticipated on the way to peace."

"This is a tremendous opportunity and I would hope that the Palestinians will avail themselves of this opportunity to show that they can build a peaceful, democratic, governing structure; to show that they can fight terror; to show that they are prepared to deal with the needs of their own people," she said.

Regarding Iraq, Rice said that the recent kidnappings of foreign citizens are an effort by "killers and thugs who are trying to intimidate the international community." She stressed that such intimidation tactics will not succeed.

[P]eople are doing everything that they can, both to make people as safe as possible against this latest technique of hostage-taking, and to see what can be done to free these hostages," she said. However, Rice added, "I think you can be certain that negotiations with terrorists are not on this president's agenda."

Speaking on ABC, Rice said "the worst thing the United States of America can do is to give an idea to terrorists and to people who want to intimidate that somehow their intimidation techniques are going to be rewarded."

"We're looking at what we can do. The people on the ground are doing everything they can to find a way to deal with the hostages. But we have to take this in a broader context," she said.

"[T]his is an attack by regime loyalists and some foreign terrorists on a process that is under way in Iraq. They want to intimidate us, they want to intimidate our allies, they want to intimidate the Iraqis. They can't be allowed to have that happen," she said.

Rice said that an increased level of violent activity by foreign terrorists and those loyal to the former regime is to be expected as June 30, the scheduled date for the transfer of power from the Coalition Provisional Authority to the Iraqi people, approaches.

"They've been aggressive and violent in the last few days, last couple of weeks. We're responding to that," she said. "We're also responding politically by working with the people on the ground, local leaders, members of the Governing Council, who also don't want to see this disrupted by these people who want to throw Iraq back into the dead of night in which it existed under Saddam Hussein."

Rice said that the United Nations has been working through their electoral commission to try to help the Iraqis arrange for elections in January of 2005. She added that U.N. Special Envoy Lakhdar Brahimi "has laid out . . . a quite realistic plan of how to get to an interim government that can be a governing structure for Iraq until those elections can be held."

(The Washington File is a product of the Bureau of International Information Programs, U.S. Department of State. Web site: http://usinfo.state.gov)

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