(Ha'aretz) Amir Oren - Since Yasser Arafat first appeared at the UN in 1974, his gun holster hanging from his belt, the Palestinians have advanced from being an organization (the Palestine Liberation Organization) to an "authority" created by the Oslo Accords, and from there to being an embryonic state. Arafat leveraged Palestinian terror crudely - and directly. The terror attacks he masterminded eventually drove the Americans to offer him diplomatic recognition at the expense of its two veteran partners, Israel and Jordan. On the eve of UN recognition of Palestine, 18 years after the Oslo Accords carried Arafat to the White House and from there to the Nobel Peace Prize, the U.S. government now confirms that Arafat was responsible for the 1973 murder of American ambassador Cleo Noel and U.S. deputy chief of mission George Curtis Moore in Khartoum, Sudan. The two were taken hostage and killed "with the full knowledge and by the personal authorization" of Arafat, according to a study released last month by the U.S. State Department's Office of the Historian. A day or two before the attack, the U.S. National Security Agency recorded conversations about the terror plans, said former navy officer James Welsh who worked in the NSA between 1970 and 1974. Welsh said he recognized the voice of Arafat telling his aides, Abu Jihad and Abu Iyad, to carry out the attack. The U.S. State Department was warned immediately, so it could pass on the message to the diplomats in Khartoum, but the warning arrived in Khartoum only after the murders. From now on it will be hard for official American visitors to the future Palestinian state to lay a wreath on the grave of the person who orchestrated the Khartoum murders.
2011-09-02 00:00:00Full ArticleBACK Visit the Daily Alert Archive