Israel Matzav

United States covered up Arafat's role in murdering its diplomats

In today's Jerusalem Post, Uri Dan tells the story of how the United States covered up the involvement of Yasser Arafat in the murder of its own diplomats. As an American (I'm a dual citizen), I cannot help but wonder what would ever make my own government cover up for that scumbag.

AS A journalist, I immediately learned after the murders in Khartoum in 1973 that Israeli intelligence had succeeded in intercepting radio-telephone transmissions between Yasser Arafat and his Beirut aides and the Palestinian murderers in Khartoum. Naturally, this achievement remained a closely guarded secret - but prime minister Golda Meir ordered that the incriminating intelligence material be passed on to the CIA and Nixon's White House through the proper channels.

Except that the US didn't need Israel's interception of Arafat's telephone and radio transmissions. Its own wiretapping services based in Cyprus received the exact same criminal transmissions between Arafat in Beirut and his hit men in Khartoum.

While the American intelligence report from June 1973 does of course not note the secret sources of the intelligence, but is based only on the essence of those interceptions, the report was able to note that "A key aim of the Khartoum siege was [...] to punish the US," the newly released document points to only the tip of the scandalous iceberg: Despite the fact that the American administration knew and had legal proof of Yasser Arafat's direct involvement in the murder of its own diplomats, they turned a blind eye.

On the contrary, throughout all the years, the Americans exerted pressure on Israel to turn Arafat into a "peace partner."

Thanks to diplomatic cynicism, the Nixon administration [which was in the last throes of being undone by Watergate. CiJ] was willing to whitewash a person directly responsible for the murder of American diplomats.

...

What should be on our minds, however, is how many hundreds or thousands of innocents might still be alive today had the US related to Arafat properly, as the depraved murderer that he was and treated him accordingly, already back in 1973, when it had the proof that it kept hidden from its own citizens. After all, the US, unlike Israel, is a country in which law and order abide.

Read it all.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 6:46 PM