January 20, 2007

Silence and Denial

PowerLine's Scott Johnson has been writing for three years on the 30-year cover-up by State Department officials of evidence that Yasser Arafat personally ordered and approved the murder of two U.S. diplomats in 1973. He has a new piece at TWS this week: How Arafat Got Away with Murder. Here's the hook:

Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake--and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House--Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, yet neither the State Department nor any other government agency made public its knowledge. Indeed, as recently as the summer of 2002, the State Department denied that such evidence existed. Across seven administrations, the State Department hewed to silence and denial.

Until last spring. In June 2006, the department's Office of the Historian quietly posted an authoritative summary of the events dated June 1973. The source of the summary is not given, but the CIA had previously produced it in redacted form in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. Prepared by the CIA on the basis of intercepted communications, it baldly states: "The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasser Arafat." What happened?

Lots of related links, including Johnson's previous posts here: Wizblog: State Dept. Covered For Arafat (Dec. 2006)

Posted by dan at January 20, 2007 1:48 PM