SOME ROADS HAVE ROUNDABOUTS:

Peres: Once Shalit is released, Olmert and Abbas will open talks (Yoav Stern, Haaretz Correspondent, and Haaretz Service, 9/05/06, Haaretz)

Vice Premier Shimon Peres, speaking Tuesday amid reports of an imminent prisoner exchange deal for kidnapped IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, said that once Shalit were freed, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert would invite Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas for talks based on the road map peace plan. [...]

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said Monday that Shalit had to be returned before Palestinian prisoners could be freed. "I will not be involved in releasing prisoners until Gilad Shalit is returned to us," Olmert told the Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee.

"I said in the past, before the abduction, that in my talks with Abu Mazen [Abbas], I would want to release Palestinian prisoners to convey to everyone that whoever opposes terror and accepts the road map should be supported," Olmert said. "But now we are not interested in doing so under the pressure of Shalit's abduction."

The prime minister said he was personally monitoring the government's tireless efforts to secure the release of all three soldiers, and noted that the demand to free them was part of Resolution 1701, the United Nations resolution aimed at ending the Israel-Hezbollah war.

Hezbollah officials, meanwhile, were quoted as having told German intelligence chief Ernst Uhrlau Monday that Israel's blockade on Lebanon had to be lifted and IDF troops removed from Lebanon before the group could begin talks about exchanging the abducted soldiers for Lebanese prisoners.

Where prisoners are mere political currency it's just good business sense to grab some.

Posted by Orrin Judd at September 5, 2006 11:26 PM