How Arafat Got Away with Murder

The State Department covered up his responsibility for the 1973 slaughter of two American diplomats.

Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake--and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House--Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, ... Full Story »

Posted by Kaizar Campwala

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Joseph F Dunphy MBA MFP
2.5
by Joseph F Dunphy MBA MFP - Oct. 1, 2008

Politics makes strange bedfellows. In their zealousness to attack the Clinton Administration, anticipating that Hillary Clinton will run for president, as indeed she is, the right-wing Weekly Standard takes up the lance with this FOIA story. In the telling, it emerges that this actually took place on Nixon's watch, a Republican, making it absurd to blame anything on Clinton, who of couse ran for president much later. Their emphasis on the classification of the warning note being downgraded from flash to routine betrays an amazing ignorance of radio/communication proceedure. If the intercepts could not better pin down the when and where of the planned attack, its usefulness as intelligence was negligible. Where would you send somebody to react? Showing themselves thus eager to grasp at any straw to bash the Democrats, the article ends up with its loose bat doing more damage to Republican presidents. The article curiously does not illustrate the story with ANY copies of any relevant, redacted FOIA requests. And it disingenuously ignores the Bush administrations concerted attempts to impose secrecy, restrict FOIA access, even to environmental documents, to the point of closing down EPA libraries. By comparison with Clinton's administration either looking the other way, or ignorance of, the background behind the events (people do leave at a change of administrations), this perceived sin is NOTHING compared with Nixon's Watergate, continuing to prosecute the war, invasion of Cambodia, etc. Because of deeds done on Nixon's watch, some 5 million people ended up dead. What happened to Fair and Balanced? Didn't they learn any of those skills by being interviewed on Fox News?

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