“Arafat’s Getting Away With Murder”

That’s the headline that the Minneapolis Star Tribune supplied for the Trunk’s brilliant column, which leads tomorrow’s op-ed section. More than anyone else, the Trunk has taken the lead in keeping alive the memory of Ambassador Cleo Noel and charge d’affaires George Curtis Moore, who were murdered on the orders of terrorist leader Yasser Arafat in Sudan in 1973. Notwithstanding the fact that two of its own officers were brutally murdered in cold blood by Arafat’s thugs, the U.S. State Department has for thirty years covered up Arafat’s complicity in the crime.
The Trunk has blown the lid off this story by corresponding with the National Security Agency official who received the key radio intercepts in 1973, James Welsh, who has been waiting for thirty years for someone to listen to his story, and by serving a Freedom of Information Act request on the State Department. The cables which the State Department supplied in response to his request–one year later–utterly contradict the pro-Arafat position which the Department has maintained for three decades.
We have covered this issue in greater detail on this site than was possible in the Trunk’s brief column in tomorrow’s Strib. But tomorrow’s article contains the essence of the story. That Arafat’s responsibility for the murder of two American diplomats is finally seeing the light of day is a tribute to what one determined individual can accomplish–now, with the internet and blogs like this one, more than ever.