What Killed Arafat?

[Magda Hassan]

Of course they'll try and stop this one. They don't even want any investigations in their own countries, Dr Kelly, 911, Chillicot....Lot's of foot dragging and dissembling.

[Magda Hassan]

Was just watching the coverage on our ABC tv about the poisoning of Arafat. The Swiss scientist was offering to do more tests on the body of Arafat if he was exhumed and asked Mrs Arafat to request this. She was watching this telecast and was visibly shocked but said "Yes, as a mother, as a wife married to this man, a great Palestinian for 20 years, I request that the Palestinian Authority exhume his body'. I was very interested in the demeanour of the Swiss scientist who seems to know the importance of what he is saying and is eager that this be taken up (politically) and is willing to put his laboratory in service to this end.

Certainly Israel does have plutonium processing there. [URL="http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/plut.html"]http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/plut.html
A[/URL]nd they would have the know how to process it further in to all sorts of things. As do others.

[Peter Lemkin]

Certainly Israel does have plutonium processing there. [URL="http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/plut.html"]http://www.wisconsinproject.org/countries/israel/plut.html
A[/URL]nd they would have the know how to process it further in to all sorts of things. As do others.

To me it is quite clear that the autopsy toxicology will find very large and lethal amounts of Plutonium, if any was [it was!] found in his hair and clothes, blood etc. Afixing the blame will be a bit more tricky...but the suspects quickly narrow down to a handful and only two or three likely had any motive and means at the time. One, Israel, must be on the top of the suspect list, and yes, they have Polonium. Actually, as it is tasteless, odorless and only requires a small amount finely powdered to be administered into the body in food, drink or into the lungs somehow, it is an 'easy kill'. No high-tech administration is needed and few who have food tasters and bodyguards also use radiation detectors...but that will certainly soon change! Arafat's rivals in the Palestinian movement would NOT have had access to Polonium. A careful study of who had access to him before he became ill may well tell a tale. As I remember, he was fairly isolated at that time.

[Magda Hassan]

His rivals may have been given access. Hamas is an Israeli creation after all. Plus there is black mail and hostages of family etc that can be used against some. Could well have been some one in that compound with him. Again, a short list.

[Albert Doyle]

Maybe French intel kept the truth from coming out as a favor to CIA during the War On Terror.

[Magda Hassan]

That's where he was hospitalised. I'm surprised they didn't test for this then.

[Peter Lemkin]

His rivals may have been given access. Hamas is an Israeli creation after all. Plus there is black mail and hostages of family etc that can be used against some. Could well have been some one in that compound with him. Again, a short list.

Yes, of course groups such as Hamas who wouldn't have first-hand access to Polonium could be given it by another entity. I think the question of WHAT killed Arafat is all but solved....and attention needs to be turned to who and how. Most assassinations are carried out by 'cut-outs' to protect the actual assassins...but not all.

[Magda Hassan]

Who Killed Yasser Arafat?
Now we know he was poisoned but by whom?
by Justin Raimondo, July 04, 2012



Yasser Arafat died on November 11, 2004, of a mysterious ailment. His enemies spread the rumor he had AIDS: David Frum, with typical classiness, claimed he had contracted AIDS as a consequence of having sex with his bodyguards. Now, however, it has been revealed Arafat was poisoned: the cause of his death was exposure to very high levels of polonium-210 [pdf], a rare radioactive substance. An investigation conducted by Al Jazeera showed Arafat's personal items, released to the media organization by his widow, contained several times the normal level of polonium that would normally be detected on such items. The Palestinian leader's terminal symptoms were similar to those experienced by victims of polonium poisoning: the substance targets the gastrointestinal tract and the subject wastes away.
Arafat's Ramallah compound had been bombed several times by the Israelis, and they had the place surrounded yet still he persisted. They couldn't get him out. Worse, his plight was becoming a metaphor for the condition of his people, who were and still are prisoners in their own land. A former adviser claimed he was poisoned by the Israelis, who detained the Palestinian ambulance used to deliver Arafat's medications to the Ramallah compound. At the time, one tended to write this off as a purely polemical exercise: in light of the new evidence, however, the question has to be asked.
Simply by continuing to exist in the face of such a sustained assault, Arafat was defeating the Israelis every day. They had to get rid of him. Did they? We'll never know for sure, but it is worth noting that Israeli threats to kill him preceded his untimely death by less than a year. As is well-known, Israeli intelligence has carried out numerous assassinations: it is simply another tool in their international operations, one they have never hesitated to utilize. A passport-falsification schemeinvolving New Zealand, Britain, France, Spain, and a number of other countries was widely believed to have been meant to equip the Mossad's crack team of assassins, who could slip into and out of target areas at will.
The Israelis hated Arafat with a particular passion, for two reasons:
1) His longevity The Palestinian movement is thick [pdf] with factions, but thin when it comes to recognizable leaders. Arafat was the principal leader, and no one since his death has achieved his stature. He was a political survivor, having lived through numerous assassination attempts, and deflected the schemes of internal enemies to displace him. Simply by sticking around for so long, he became a living symbol of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination and that is one big reason why the Israelis got rid of him.
2) His secularism The Israelis encouraged the growth of groups such as Hamas in the beginning, in order to split away the more religious elements from the decidedly secular Palestine Liberation Organization/Fatah, which Arafat headed. It is easy to sell the Palestinians as crazed jihadists when a group like Hamas or Islamic Jihad is the most visible champion of their cause: the secular PLO presented the Israelis with a public relations problem. There's another reason for the Israelis to have knocked him off.
One aspect of this case is extremely odd: polonium-210 is the same poison Alexander Litvinenko was dosed with. Litvinenko, a former KGB official, converted to Islam, joined the Chechen rebels, and became an associate of Boris Berezovsky, the notorious Russian oligarch wanted on charges of embezzlement in his home country. Litvinenko and Berezovsky are the Russian version of 9/11 Truthers: they believe practically every terrorist attack on Russian cities has been "staged" by Vladimir Putin in order to keep him in power. When he became ill, Litvinenko charged the Russian spy agency with poisoning him although that seems highly unlikely.
Polonium-210 isn't something you can buy off the shelf at your local Walmart. It isn't even something a mad scientist might cook up in his home lab. About 100 grams are produced each year for specialized technical uses. The only entities with access to this sort of thing are state actors, or, at least, a private organization with very substantial resources at its disposal.
What's interesting is that a diplomatic cable, dated Dec. 26, 2006 and published by WikiLeaks, details the conversation of a US diplomat with Russian spook Anatoly Safonov in which Safonov claims the Russians told the British about the importation of "nuclear materials" into London during the Litvinenko affair and were told that the whole thing was "under control before the poisoning took place." In the course of the same conversation, Safonov Putin's chief representative on terrorism-related matters went on to describe a number of threats and their possible sources:
"Safonov noted the daunting number of countries that posed particular terrorism threats, mentioning North Korea, Pakistan, South Africa, Libya, Iran, India, and Israel (sic?). He described a range of dangers, stressing the more immediate threats posed by nuclear and biological terrorism, but also acknowledging the risks of chemical terrorism."
While the use of "sic" is meant to indicate our diplomat's incredulity at the inclusion of Israel in this list, what we now know about how Arafat died should tear away the blinders from several sets of eyes yes, even at the US State Department.
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2012/...er-arafat/

[Peter Lemkin]

By Jeffrey Heller and Dan Williams

JERUSALEM | Wed Jul 4, 2012 10:19am EDT

(Reuters) - New suspicions that Yasser Arafat was murdered, perhaps poisoned by radioactive polonium, prompted the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday to agree to exhume the body of the iconic leader.

Israel, seen by many Arabs as the prime suspect behind the mysterious illness that killed the 75-year-old Arafat in 2004, sought to distance itself anew from the death of the man who led Palestinians' bid for a state through years of war and peace.

A Swiss institute which examined clothing provided by Arafat's widow Suha for a documentary by Qatar-based Al Jazeera television said its radiation protection experts had found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210, the same substance found to have killed a former Russian spy in London in 2006.

But it said symptoms described in the president's medical reports were not consistent with the radioactive agent.

"I want the world to know the truth about the assassination of Yasser Arafat," Suha Arafat, 48, told Al Jazeera, without making any direct accusations, but noting that both Israel and the United States saw him as an obstacle to peace.

Allegations of foul play - and of Palestinian involvement in it - have long marked factional fighting among Palestinians. The latest revelation coincides with renewed tensions within Arafat's Fatah movement, now headed by his successor President Mahmoud Abbas, and between Fatah and Hamas, the Islamist movement which controls the Gaza Strip.

Abbas's administration said it would approve Suha Arafat's request to bring her husband's remains out for autopsy from a limestone mausoleum built next to his headquarters in the West Bank city of Ramallah, without giving a date for such a move.

"The Authority, as it always has been, is ready to completely cooperate with and clear the way for an investigation into the true causes leading to the martyrdom of the late president," said Nabil Abu Rdeineh, spokesman for Abbas.

Saeb Erekat, a senior member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO), told Reuters the exhumation could take place as soon as "religious and family procedures" were complete.

"If you ask me, it's a matter of a days, not more than a few days," he said. "Then we will be in contact with the Swiss team or any other team that could come and exhume the body."

FINAL DAYS

Confined by Israel to his West Bank headquarters in Ramallah for three years after a Palestinian uprising erupted, an ailing Arafat collapsed in October 2004.

Foreign doctors flocked to his bedside from Tunisia, Egypt and Jordan amid public assurances from Arafat's aides over the next two weeks that he was suffering from no more than the flu.

But looking weak and thin - and telling aides "God willing, I will be back" - he was airlifted to a military hospital in France, where he slipped into a coma and died on November 11, 2004.

At the time, rumors flew that he had died from anything from stomach cancer to poisoning to AIDS. French doctors who treated Arafat in his final days said they could not establish the cause of death. French officials, citing privacy laws, refused to give details of the nature of his illness.

Israel denied involvement in Arafat's death and the head of its Shin Bet intelligence service at the time, Avi Dichter, said on Wednesday it was for Palestinians to investigate: "The body is in their hands. It is in Ramallah, and really, all the keys are in their hands," he told Israel's Army Radio.

Polonium, apparently ingested with food, was found to have caused the slow death of former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006. At high doses, polonium-210 causes damage to organs and tissues. Britain tried and failed to extradite from Russia a suspect who was a former Kremlin security officer.

Israeli Army Radio said introducing polonium into food was the only way to kill someone with the poison and asked Dichter, whose agency had overall responsibility for monitoring the Palestinians, whether it would have been possible with Arafat.

"You're asking me as his cook?" he answered, laughing.

"MANY ENEMIES"

He continued: "No, we were focused on more serious things. Arafat's food did not interest us. I think it interested those around him, in order, really, to keep his health up, as he was indeed known to be unwell. But the Shin Bet, or the State of Israel, were not involved in Yasser Arafat's food."

Pressed on the poisoning scenario, Dichter said: "Yasser Arafat had many enemies, domestically, abroad. But let them investigate ... The Palestinians know well how to investigate what goes on in their house. Let them investigate and find out."

A Hamas official, Salah Al-Bardaweel, called for an investigation, suggesting Palestinians might have helped Israel kill him, calling them "sinful hands that cooperated or facilitated the occupier's mission to get these poisonous materials into the body of President Arafat".

Commenting on the Al Jazeera report, Paddy Regan, professor of nuclear physics at Britain's University of Surrey, said "there is not enough information in the public domain to be clear about whether polonium-210 was, or indeed could have been, the cause of death".

Regan said there could be several other explanations, such as naturally occurring radioactivity, for the high readings on Arafat's clothing. He said all such "natural sources" must be ruled out before concluding polonium-210 was "a murder weapon".

In 1997, Israeli assassins were caught trying to poison a senior member of Hamas in Jordan. Israel is also suspected in the 2010 death in a Dubai hotel room of a Hamas commander, Mahmoud al-Mabhouh, who UAE authorities said had been drugged.

Suha Arafat, who lives in Malta and France and whose lavish lifestyle abroad has made her a controversial figure among Palestinians, said determining there had been a plot to kill her husband "will glorify more his legacy" and harden Palestinian resolve in any future negotiations with Israel.

U.S.-sponsored peace talks collapsed in 2010 in a dispute over Israeli settlement building in the occupied West Bank.

"Arafat wanted to arrive with the Palestinian cause to a Palestinian state, and because of this they got rid of him," she said, without elaborating.

Israel's foreign minister in 2004, Silvan Shalom, rejected at the time as "scandalous and false" the idea that his country had a role in Arafat's death. But Israel had earlier threatened Arafat, blaming him for Palestinian violence.

After losing 15 citizens to suicide bombings in September 2003, Israel's security cabinet decided to "remove" Arafat, without elaborating publicly on the precise action it planned to take. An Israeli newspaper quoted Dichter as saying at the time that it would be better to kill Arafat than exile him.

My note: The reference above that it might have been 'natural radiation' is so remote a possibility as to make me wonder who that physicist is working for! The average Palastinian leader just would not have come in contact with any Polonium-210. End of story. This man is working for someone and that someone want to spin lies. I think I'll have a look at who he might work for.....but a quick search showed him making statements that Fukashima radiation was 'not so very dangerous'. So, he's at least in bed with the nuclear industry, if not the spook industry too. Kind of 'funny' how Reuters found him of all the nuclear physicists in the world

[Danny Jarman]

I'm sure the entirely noble and neutral ICC will now issue arrest warrants for Israeli leaders during the time of Arafat.