ARAFAT APPROVED ATTACK ON U.S. CONVOY

IMRA ^ | April 13, 2004 | MENL

[yonif]

RAMALLAH [MENL] -- The United States has determined that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat approved an attack on a U.S. embassy convoy in which three Americans were killed in 2003. U.S. diplomatic sources said a U.S. investigation into the bombing of the embassy convoy in the Gaza Strip in October 2003 pointed to a clear role by Arafat.

The sources said Arafat granted approval to a plan to strike U.S. interests in PA areas. Arafat, the sources said, did not draft or approve any details for a Palestinian attack. But they said Arafat agreed to a proposal relayed by a high-level aide for the Palestinians to "pass a message" to the United States.

According to the sources, a senior Arafat aide and member of the Fatah Central Committee left Gaza City for Arafat's headquarters in Ramallah in September 2003 to seek approval for a Palestinian attack on U.S. interests in the area. The Fatah official, described as a liasion between Arafat and Palestinian insurgents in the Gaza Strip, complained of U.S. policy toward the PA and Arabs.

[yonif]

As a Jew, you have sympathy for Israel. You typically post articles looking for support for Israel. I don't mind suporting them however I don't see the role of the U.S. to be assassinating terrorists who are really targetting ISRAEL.

Once again, Arafat and his terror groups have targetted not just Israel, not just Jews, but people of all faiths. You don't mind supporting Israel taking out the vermin? I have no problem with that. My problem is with the double standard. No where is Israel saying it wants the US to do it for her. Removing Arafat will not only be helpful to Israel but also to America.

So, let Israel pull it's weight and fight the "war on terrorism" instead of having others fight their wars or aid them or train them etc.. Israel is NOT helpless.

Again, Israel is not asking anyone to fight Arafat's terror for her.

[SoggyBottomBoy]

if this is true, it is time (actually it is long past time) for this terrorist and "nobel peace prize" winner to meet the Lord

[Blue Highway]

There are people that would rather see Rumsfeld shot and killed than Arafat. Tell me we don't live in a loony leftist world.

[Lijahsbubbe]

The U.S. has it's own world of trouble to deal with. It's not the fault of America that Israel has no friends.

Really. So if the US has it's own "world" of trouble to deal with, why is it the US steps in and makes an international announcement that they do not want Arafat harmed. You're acting as if Israel is trying to drag the US into this.

Did it ever occur to you that the US is involved because the Middle East is a boiling pot that affects all of us, and that there are certain things that the US wants Israel to do or not do, at certain times? Israel is the only democracy in the region.(maybe that's why Israel "has no friends") The US needs Israel as much as Israel needs the US.

[Nix 2]

'Scuse moi? You haven't seen or heard the very real broadcasts of Al Aksa and Fatah rallies actively supporting Sadr in Iraq now that they have lost their sugar daddy, Saddam? You haven't seen pictures of Arafat's wittle mirror images burning American Flags and hanging President Bush in effigy? You never saw the pictures of the Po Pallies celebrating when Al Qaida hit the Towers? Where have you been, in a long, deep sleep since September 11? You haven't heard that many of the *foreign* fighters in Iraq targeting Americans are Palestinian thugs and barbarians? What they did to the dead contractors in Iraq was previously done to Israeli soldiers in Ramallah by Arafat's crew, bloody hands, bloody people, bloody terrorists every damn one of them.
In case you hadn't noticed, it was the US that made this not so surprising announcement, not Israel. It's the REST of the world that considers arafat a diplomat and a legitimate leader, but NOT President Bush. One need not be Jewish to revile this creature, one need only be a moral human being. Evidently, your tagline is a 'do as I say, not as I do,' line. You must be a jimmah cahtuh fan....

[Tabi Katz]

I hope you're right. I can't wait for the day when Arafart joins Ahmed yASSin in hell. I hope Israel will do it's part to send him there quickly.

[dila813]

Arafat died of natural causes tomorrow of unknown causes....

[hershey]

Well, that's too bad. Arafat needs to be squashed like the cockroach he is.

[Hoosier-Daddy]

Get me in, get me out. My conscience would be clear.

[Boot Hill]

"Kill Arafat NOW"

Bloodthirsty bastard! Can't it wait till morning?

--Boot Hill

[The South Texan]

You mean that man that has many pictures of himself with Clinton and Clinton's wife kissing Arafat's wife. He wouldn't dare do that?

Can somebody post those pictures again? We need to be reminded that Arafat is an enemy!

[river rat]

NO

Find him and kill him in the dark, as you must a dump rat...

Semper Fi

[rmlew]

Israel is currently privatising much of its state institutions.

[rmlew]

Israel does not go after Arafat, in part because the US has been defending him since 1983.

[sarasmom]

That aint going to help them, short or long run.
Israel is screwed, by Israelis.

[rmlew]

What do you mean that privatization wont help?
Post-Thatcher Britain is better than in the pre-Thatcher era.

[Nix 2]

From VOJ:

Palestinians rally for Iraq

Palestinians rallied in support of Iraqi insurgents fighting the United
States. Following prayers on Friday, thousands of protesters in the
West
Bank and Gaza Strip burned Israeli and U.S. flags and chanted slogans
against President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, The
Associated Press reported. In Gaza City, about 2,000 Islamic Jihad
supporters chanted Death to America and burned effigies of Bush and
Sharon.

Our message to the world, to our brothers in Iraq, we are fighting
against
the same enemies, the same occupation, we are fighting in the same
battle,
Mohammed al-Hindi, an Islamic Jihad leader, told reporters. The Sunni
and
the Shiites have united in a jihad, as they should, against the
Americans,
one cleric in Nablus said.

Fallujah, the people of Palestine are with you, one group chanted,
referring to the Iraqi city at the center of the fighting.

[solmar_israel]

Let's all be fair in put it all on the table like it really is.

Here is the problem:

1. Israel has a high number of treasonous, self-hating letist voters. So does America.While lower in terms of precentage then Europe, it is still alarmingly high.

2. Israel is in large part responsible for bringing Arafat back to power. For OSlo. For arming him. For training him. For decieving a battle-worn Israeli public with lies about his intentions despite clear evidence to the countrary.

3. Because of the Holocaust, because of their isolation in the world, because the world has hated Jews for 3000 years, because of the last 50 years of attempts to exterminate Israel while the world quietly watched, Israelis are overly paranoid of losing their one and only real friend, the U.S.

This is why they are afraid of their own shadow when it comes to offending the U.S.

This is why they agree to the unfair situation where Israel helps the U.S. on many many occasions, and unlike EVERY OTHER COUNTRY that even lifts a symbolic finger, Israel recieves no public credit.

4. Israel is responsible for not doing what is takes to defeat their enemies.

5. Israel is responsible for caring too much what the rest of the world thinks, living in some kind of delusion that Europe/Arabs/UN will ever 'like' them if only they do A, B, and C.

6. The U.S. is responsible for SURRENDERING to terror over the last 20 years.

The U.S. put its tail between its legs and ran out of Lebannon like a little pansy girl. The U.S. negotiatied with terrorists (as Israel has recently), didn't respond to attacks, lied to the American
public about the government sponsored hate-media of its fake 'allies', etc...

7. The U.S., like the rest of the world still does today, spent the last 20 years seperating Islamic
terrorism against Israel (acceptable) and Islamic terrorism against the U.S. (bad).

8. The U.S. still has traces of #7 going on and lies to its citizens about the nature of Islamic hate. Islam isn't dictated by the 'peaceful' Muslims in the U.S. Islam is run by the clerics in Egypt, Saudi, Iran, etc... And they certainly don't preach a religion of peace.

9. Both Israeli and American (Western) media has lied to their citizens, under the guise of fair reporting, about what really goes on in the Islamic world. They have an agenda, and blood on their hands.

10. Western Europe is not an ally of the U.S.

11. The U.S. sometimes takes the contributions Israel makes for grants. Contributions in complete disproportion to what other allies give. Kind of like that one great girlfriend. You only realize how special she was when she isn't around anymore.

Both the United States and Israel share tremendous blame for the misjudgements, historic miscalculations, and occasionally (too often) weakness.

Time we opened our eyes to the honest truth, so that we can prevent these mistakes in the future.

Time for America to once again become the great nation it was in WWII. Time for Israel to once again become the great nation it was in its first 20 years.

[Nix 2]

You must be reading my mind. I said almost those exact words to a friend on the telephone this morning. It is a hard thing to try and explain to those who remember Entebbe and can't reconcile THAT Israel with the one we see these last years. I think that Sharon has sacrificed himself to get Israelis in the fighting spirit again. I also think he is succeeding though his methods look intensely strange to those of us who wait for Israel to rise from the ashes Carter, Peres, Terje Larsen, and Rabin have relegated them to.
He has made a martyr of Noam Federman. He has mainstream Israel now fighting FOR the Settlements instead of hating the settlers and blaming them for all the ills in Israel. I pray I am right and the lion will once again join with the eagle to rid the earth of this evil scourge.
Am America od Yisrael Chai.

[Adam36]

Arafat also killed 3 U.S diplomats in 1973 in Sudan

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=21365
Is U.S. hiding
Arafat murders?
Ex-NSA op blows whistle in ’73 killings of American diplomats in Sudan embassy
By Joseph Farah

On Feb. 28, 1973, James J. Welsh, the National Security Agency's Palestinian analyst, was summoned by a colleague about a communication intercepted from Yasser Arafat involving an imminent Black September operation in Khartoum, Sudan.

Within minutes, Welsh recalls, the director of the NSA was notified and the decision was made to send a rare "FLASH" message -- the highest priority -- to the U.S. Embassy in Khartoum via the State Department.

But the message didn't reach the embassy in time. Somewhere between the NSA and the State Department, someone decided the warning was too vague. The alert was downgraded in urgency.

The next day, eight members of Black September, part of Arafat's Fatah organization, stormed the Saudi embassy in Khartoum, took U.S. Ambassador Cleo Noel, diplomat Charge d'Affaires George Curtis Moore and others hostage. A day later, on March 2, 1973, Noel, Moore and Belgian Guy Eid were machine-gunned to death -- all, Welsh charges, on the direct orders of Arafat.

Welsh, who left the Navy and NSA in 1974, speaking publicly for the first time to WorldNetDaily, accuses the U.S. government of a 28-year-old cover-up of Arafat's role in the planning and execution of the attack.

"Over the years I have kept my silence about what I know about this tragic episode," Welsh told WorldNetDaily. "But recently I began to wonder how recent administrations could overlook something as terrible as this in our dealings with Yasser Arafat."

When President Clinton invited Arafat to the White House for direct negotiations on the Middle East, Welsh says, that was the last straw. He has been on a personal one-man mission to uncover the tape recordings and transcripts of those intercepts between Arafat and Fatah leader Salah Khalaf, also known as Abu-Iyad, in Beirut and Khalil al-Wazir in Khartoum.

So far, Welsh has not found many allies among members of the U.S. Congress -- in either party.

"No one wants to touch this thing," Welsh says. "It's a hot potato. No one wants to be responsible for derailing the Mideast peace process."

But Welsh thinks the American people, who are footing much of the bill for Arafat's current activities, have a right to know about his personal responsibility for the murder of two Americans. And he is the first American involved directly in the affair to charge publicly what has long been rumored -- that Arafat ordered the embassy takeover and the murders of the American diplomats.

"I have decided that my oaths of secrecy must give way to my sense of right and wrong," he told WorldNetDaily. "I was particularly outraged as I had spent four years following these individuals and, at the moment of our greatest intelligence coup against them, an uninformed GS level had pooh-poohed our work and cost the lives of two U.S. diplomats," he recalls.

Welsh immediately began demanding answers about the breakdown in communication that led to the tragedy.

"After some effort, I was told that the choice was mine: Shut up or lose my clearance and get ready for Fleet Oiler duty within 48 hours," he said. "I gave in."

Welsh believes the initial cover-up of the communications breakdown and the role of Arafat was launched to prevent embarrassment to the State Department and White House. President Nixon, he points out, was in the death throes of the Watergate scandal at the time. The last thing he needed, Welsh speculates, was an international scandal to deal with on the front page of the Washington Post.

Later, after Nixon was gone, Welsh believes the whole matter of the Arafat tapes was kept quiet to protect the future viability of signals intelligence intercepts of this kind. And, finally, he says, the cover-up persists to foster Arafat's role as a "peacemaker" and leader of the Palestinian cause.

"Yet, there is no statute of limitations on murder," Welsh says. "Obviously the United States cannot go after Yasser Arafat and put him on trial. But the American people deserve to know the truth about a man and his associates to whom we now give millions, if not billions of taxpayer dollars."

In fact, in 1985 and 1986, Congress requested then-Attorney General Ed Meese to investigate Arafat's complicity in the murders of the diplomats.

On Feb. 12, 1986, some 47 U.S. senators, including now-Vice President Al Gore, petitioned Meese "to assign the highest priority to completing this review, and to issue an indictment of Yasser Arafat if the evidence so warrants."

However, the one critical piece of evidence needed to warrant an indictment -- the tape recordings -- was not produced by the NSA, the Central Intelligence Agency or the State Department.

"These tapes do exist," claims Welsh. "I participated in their production. But no one has ever been willing to come forward and acknowledge their existence."

Welsh recently received responses from the three separate agencies to Freedom of Information Act requests for the recordings or transcripts.

"I had written them (CIA, State and NSA) on three different dates," says Welsh. "Guess what? All three agencies just happened to have all written their replies on the same date -- Dec. 21, 2000."

Back in 1973, Welsh had received spontaneous transcripts of the dialogue between Arafat and his subordinates. But, under NSA protocol, he was not permitted to keep copies. Under normal procedure, he expected copies of the final transcripts and tapes to arrive on his desk for further analysis. They never came.

"Things were recorded but never arrived at my desk," he recalls. "I know they were recorded because I was receiving simultaneous reports from a collection site. The warning I drafted for the State Department was based on those reports."

Over the years, there have been reports that the Israelis also had tapes of Arafat ordering the executions of the U.S. diplomats and that Jerusalem provided copies to Nixon. Gen. Ariel Sharon said in 1995 that Israeli intelligence gave tapes proving Arafat's culpability in the murders to the U.S State Department and White House in March 1973.

Arafat reportedly ordered the eight gunmen to surrender peacefully to the Sudanese authorities. Two were released for "lack of evidence." Later, in June 1973, the other six were found guilty of murdering the three diplomats. They were sentenced to life imprisonment and released 24 hours later to the PLO.

During their trial, commander Salim Rizak, also known as Abu Ghassan, told the court: "We carried out this operation on the orders of the Palestine Liberation Organization and should only be questioned by that organization."

Sudanese Vice President Mohammed Bakir said, after questioning the six: "They relied on radio messages from Beirut Fatah headquarters, both for the order to kill the three diplomats and for their own surrender Sunday morning."

"I know Yasser Arafat was a direct player in the murder of our diplomats and so has every U.S. administration since Richard Nixon's," says Welsh.

Before surrendering, the Khartoum terrorists demanded the release of Sirhan Bishara Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, as well as others being held in Israeli and European prisons. Nixon refused to negotiate.

Will the full story of the Khartoum diplomatic murders ever be fully told? Will the tapes ever be released by American officials?

"When Arafat dies, possibly the tapes will be acknowledged, but not released," predicts Welsh. "Oil, oil, oil. That's the big fear. If Arafat were to be destroyed politically -- and this would do it -- the Arab world would reply with a boycott we would not be able to deal with."

What's the lesson from this 28-year-old tale of murder and international intrigue?

"I guess there may be no statute of limitations on murder, but there is a statute of importance," says Welsh. "If you can evade justice for your crime long enough, then it will be forgiven if you are an important person. So much for the honor of our government."