He's Still There - Viewpoint: There's no detour around Yasser Arafat on the Road to Peace in the Middle East
Great efforts have been invested recently by both U.S. President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to convince the world that Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasser Arafat is irrelevant. While leading an international campaign to undermine Arafat, both Bush and Sharon claim to do their best to strengthen the Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Despite these efforts and claims, it seems that Arafat is no less relevant now than at any time since he took over control of the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1968. We can argue over to what extent Arafat contributes to the Palestinian cause and to the improvement of the Israeli-Palestinian relationship, but no one can ignore the fact that Arafat has more popular support amongst the Palestinians than any Palestinian leader. A recent survey by the Palestinian Research Center in Nablus showed that showed that while Arafat's popularity has plunged — from more than 60% in the early 1990s to about 21.5% now — no other Palestinian figure enjoys more than 10 % of popular support. Prime Minister Abbas, according to the survey, has just 1.8%.
These findings underscore the fact that Arafat continues to be the national symbol of the Palestinians. Unlike Abbas, who is seen as a technocrat without a militant background, Arafat is considered by the vast majority of Palestinians to be their national revolutionary leader. The current siege on Arafat strengthens him, and not only because international opinion opposes the Bush-Sharon boycott on him. He continues to control the Palestinian security apparatus on one hand, even as he plays the a victim of American and Israeli policies in the Middle East. He has it both ways.
In any event, George Bush and Ariel Sharon know that removing Arafat from the Palestinian political arena could postpone by years any solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Since Arafat represents Palestinian political legitimacy, it is he who must approve any possible agreement reached by Abbas with the Israelis. Even Abu Mazen acknowledges this: he consults Arafat before and after meeting any non-Palestinian senior official.
Finally, many other senior Palestinian leaders continue to be dependent on Arafat, both politically and economically. These people will undermine Abu Mazen's leadership if they feel their political master is in any peril.
The bottom line, then, is that Arafat remains a central protagonist in the peace process. The Americans and the Israelis may increase their efforts to undermine him, but they know they can't progress without him. They would love to find a powerful, charismatic Palestinian leader who can be an alternative to Arafat — but they know that Abu Mazen is not that man.
MSNBC doing a story right now on the "BloomMobile" with Craig White telling about how it came to be.
Taped story kind of abruptly ended, but it looks to be one of those things they'll run intermittantly throughout the day.
Announced the vehicle will be on display all week in Rockefeller Center, for any New York freepers who care to go check it out.
Captives Deny Qaeda Worked With BaghdadWASHINGTON, June 8 Two of the highest-ranking leaders of Al Qaeda in American custody have told the C.I.A. in separate interrogations that the terrorist organization did not work jointly with the Iraqi government of Saddam Hussein, according to several intelligence officials.
Abu Zubaydah, a Qaeda planner and recruiter until his capture in March 2002, told his questioners last year that the idea of working with Mr. Hussein's government had been discussed among Qaeda leaders, but that Osama bin Laden had rejected such proposals, according to an official who has read the Central Intelligence Agency's classified report on the interrogation.
In his debriefing, Mr. Zubaydah said Mr. bin Laden had vetoed the idea because he did not want to be beholden to Mr. Hussein, the official said.
Separately, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the Qaeda chief of operations until his capture on March 1 in Pakistan, has also told interrogators that the group did not work with Mr. Hussein, officials said.
The Bush administration has not made these statements public, though it frequently highlighted intelligence reports that supported its assertions of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda as it made its case for war against Iraq.
Since the war ended, and because the administration has yet to uncover evidence of prohibited weapons in Iraq, the quality of American intelligence has come under scrutiny amid contentions that the administration selectively disclosed only those intelligence reports that supported its case for war.
Bill Harlow, a spokesman for the Central Intelligence Agency, declined to comment on what the two Qaeda leaders had told their questioners. A senior intelligence official played down the significance of their debriefings, explaining that everything Qaeda detainees say must be regarded with great skepticism.
Other intelligence and military officials added that evidence of possible links between Mr. Hussein's government and Al Qaeda had been discovered both before the war and since and that American forces were searching Iraq for more in Iraq.
Still, no conclusive evidence of joint terrorist operations by Iraq and Al Qaeda has been found, several intelligence officials acknowledged, nor have ties been discovered between Baghdad and the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on Washington and New York.
Between the time of the attacks and the start of the war in Iraq in March, senior Bush administration officials spoke frequently about intelligence on two fronts the possibility of links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, and Baghdad's drive to develop prohibited weapons. President Bush described the war against Iraq as part of the larger war on terrorism, and argued that the possibility that Mr. Hussein might hand over illicit weapons to terrorists posed a threat to the United States.
Several officials said Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was circulated by the C.I.A. within the American intelligence community last year, but his statements were not included in public discussions by administration officials about the evidence concerning Iraq-Qaeda ties.
Those officials said the statements by Mr. Zubaydah and Mr. Mohammed were examples of the type of intelligence reports that ran counter to the administration's public case.
"I remember reading the Abu Zubaydah debriefing last year, while the administration was talking about all of these other reports, and thinking that they were only putting out what they wanted," one official said.
Spokesmen at the White House, the State Department and the Pentagon declined to comment on why Mr. Zubaydah's debriefing report was not publicly disclosed by the administration last year.
In recent weeks, the director of central intelligence, George J. Tenet, and other officials have defended the information and analysis by the C.I.A. and other intelligence agencies in the months before the war. They said reports were not suppressed, and were properly handled and distributed among the intelligence agencies.
The issue of the public presentation of the evidence is different from whether the intelligence itself was valid, and some officials said they believed that the former might ultimately prove to be more significant, since the Bush administration relied heavily on the release of intelligence reports to build its case, both with the American people and abroad.
"This gets to the serious question of to what extent did they try to align the facts with the conclusions that they wanted," an intelligence official said. "Things pointing in one direction were given a lot of weight, and other things were discounted."