From the Daily News Egypt:
The US will remove a freeze on $100 million earmarked for aid to Egypt, US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice told reporters in Cairo Tuesday.
The American Congress originally froze this amount for several reasons, most notably due to what it considered a lack of Egyptian will to tighten security on the border with Gaza.
In a joint press conference with Foreign Minister Ahmad Aboul Gheit Tuesday, Rice said that this was now in the past.
“I have exercised on behalf of the United States the waiver in terms of Egyptian assistance,” she said, “the Bush administration sought to have that flexibility. We believe that this relationship with Egypt is an important one and that the waiver was the right thing to do.”
Congress had also attributed the freeze to domestic issues such as human rights violations and slow democratic reform, but it had presented the administration with an option to waive the freeze if it suited the “national security interest of the United States.”
