History Might Have Been Different

Arafat’s Orchestration of 1973 Murders Acknowledged by State Department

WorldNetDaily reported yesterday on the discovery of a State Department document released earlier this year (Here it is, converted to an HTML doc by yours truly for easy reference). State acknowledges, apparently for the first time, something that Scott at Powerline (here and here) demonstrated definitively more than three years ago from other available evidence.

The admission is that State has known for decades that the late Yasser Arafat, chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization and the head of Fatah, plotted and supervised the 1973 murders of three diplomats: two from the United States (Cleo Noel and George Curtis), and one from Belgium (Guy Eid) who was apparently in the wrong place at the wrong time, in Khartoum, The Sudan.

Interesting post back in June at Daled Amos here (thanks to Larwyn)

According to a New York Times article back in April 1986:

Assistant Attorney General John R. Bolton told Congress today that the United States would not seek the indictment of Yasir Arafat, the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization, in the 1973 killings of two American diplomats in the Sudan.

The department said it had insufficient evidence to prosecute Mr. Arafat in the deaths of the American Ambassador, Cleo A. Noel Jr., and the charge d'affaires, George C. Moore.

Members of Congress had asked the department to study recent evidence that the lawmakers said indicated Mr. Arafat might have taken part in the decision by Palestinian guerrillas to kill the two men.

This is the same controversial and outspoken John Bolton that  represented the US at the UN.

[...]the following was released by the Office of the Historian:

In the early evening hours of 1 March 1973, eight Black September Organization (BSO) terrorists seized the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Khartoum as a diplomatic reception honoring the departing United States Deputy Chief of Mission (DCM) was ending. After slightly wounding the United States Ambassador and the Belgian Charge d'Affaires, the terrorists took these officials plus the United States DCM, the Saudi Arabian Ambassador and the Jordanian Charge d'Affaires hostage. In return for the freedom of the hostages, the captors demanded the release of various individuals, mostly Palestinian guerrillas, imprisoned in Jordan, Israel and the United States.

The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the head of Fatah. Fatah representatives based in Khartoum participated in the attack, using a Fatah vehicle to transport the terrorists to the Saudi Arabian Embassy.

The fact that Arafat was directly involved in the assassination is not new knowledge.

Scott Johnson points out in an article in November 2003 and again in a post on Powerline  that the State Department knew that Arafat was directly involved in the assasination of the two Americans from the beginning. [see also Solomonia on the electronic intercept of Arafat's order]

While writing an article on the topic in 2002, Johnson wrote to the State Department and was informed:

Evidence clearly points to the terrorist group Black September as having committed the assassinations of Amb. Noel and George Moore, and though Black September was a part of the Fatah movement, the linkage between Arafat and this group has never been established. [emphasis added]

Johnson later acquired 27 previously classified cables through the Freedom of Information Act. According to Johnson:

The cables demonstrated that in March 1973 the State Department had promptly concluded that Black September was nothing more than a front for Fatah and that Arafat himself had directed the operation resulting in the assassination of Noel and Moore. Both points are made over and over again in the cables to and from the Secretary of State.

To take one example, in early March the U.S Mission in Vienna reported to Secretary Rogers: "The Black September Organization (BSO) is a cover term for Fatah's terrorist operations executed by Fatah's intelligence organization, Jihaz al-Rasd...For all intents and purposes no significant distinction now can be made between the BSO and Fatah...Fatah leader Yasir Arafat has now been described in recent intelligence as having given approval to the Khartoum operation prior to its inception."

It's all very well for the US to assume to attempt to broker a peace treaty between Rabin and Arafat, but if it had been common knowledge that Arafat--a world terrorist and no freedom fighter--had ordered the murder of US officials, would Clinton and the US been so ready to push Israel into the Oslo Accords? 

Soccer Dad recalls that Lady Margaret Thatcher said it best 20 years ago:

Democratic nations must try to find ways to starve the terrorist and the hijacker of the oxygen of publicity on which they depend.

Comments

[photoncourier.blogspot.com]

"if it had been common knowledge...would Clinton and the US been so ready to push Israel into the Oslo Accords?" It certainly wasn't common knowledge for the "US", in the sense of the vast majority of people--but either (a)it was known by Clinton, or (b)the system for providing the President with information relevant to particular decisions is *very* badly broken.

[directorblue]

Coddling dictators and terrorist thugs... Clinton/Arafat, Clinton/Jong-Il, Carter/Chavez, Carter/Castro, Assad/Nelson, Assad/Kerry... you would think the Democrats would have started to detect some sort of pattern...

I tried a trackback earlier and it didn't take, but here's a manual one. Cheers.

[flying submarine]

The government of the United States of America has been kissing up to murderous thugs for about its entire existence. If not actually kissing up, then it certainly has let the murderers murder in the dark of night without any effort to "out" the acts of evil. For instance, the US and England knew quite well that railroad cars full of Jews, Russians and anyone else the Nazis could grab were being carted off to the death camps. The US did nothing, or worse than that by failing to even attempt to end the practice. We pulled out of Vietnam, but did that mean that we had to let the Khmer Rouge murder 3,000,000 Cambodians without the slightest effort on our part to slow them down. We knew who the genocidal maniacs were in the Hutu slaughter of over 1/2 a million Tutsis.

Who does this information indict? The State Department? Give me a break, Sadam Hussein was a wholly owned subsidary of the State Department for a decade before he stepped on the wrong crank. It was okay to let the Shah kill and imprison thousands until Carter decided that the Mullahs would be better. (Ford should be alive attending the a$$hole's funeral instead of the other way around.) State watched as Pinochet murdered as many of his political opponents as he could. Samoza was practically cashing checks written by State while he was murdering people by the thousands. The Serbs, who were our allies in WWII and were also systematically exterminated by the Nazis, tried to set the stage for some well-intended getback, but the State Department and Billy-Jeff Whorehopper comes to the rescue of the Croats who crushed Serbian resistance. The Phillipines, Uganda, virtually any country with murderers running it has had a free ride with State.

Anyone who believes that the State Department operates in the best interests of humanity or the United States had better wake up: they don't. They've been Arabists since at least the end of WWII. George Bush, the old fart, was closely tied to the Saudis (a fact betrayed by the disgusting ISG report, authored by former Sec. of State Baker). Clinton has been to Dubai at least twice to give extravantly paid speeches.

If ever somone with a conscience gets in over there, the lot should be drawn and quartered. Or at least keelhauled.

That's my just opinion.

[Carl in Jerusalem]

I commented on this post here.

[Richard Davis]

flying submarine - hits another homer.

BZ!