Swiss forensic report on Arafat's death
aljazeera.com
aljazeera.com
It's also a super fun job to take on. Nuclear measurements can be very perceptive. Everyone I know in the business loves to have meaningful applications in the wider world. Our lab was a fun place to be immediately following Fukushima [1] (and Chernobyl, too, but that's before my time as a physicist).
On the scale of technical reports, it's well-written, and intended to be read by semi-technical readers. The analysis covers a lot of ground on sources of uncertainty. They do a reasonable job handling uncertainties on the things I know about, and my only remaining concerns extend beyond my expertise.
It's a worthy read; check it out!
(as a bonus, in the appendices, you get to see photos of everything in the travel bag.)
Love the anonymous downvote for saying something unpopular politically, but more than likely factually correct.
Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence. The US reign death from above via remote controlled drones and this isn't contested, yet thinking that very suspicious deaths at expedient times are likely assassinations is some crazy conspiracy theory...
Arafat could have been killed by other (more radical) Muslims, by the Israelis, by any number of people (though the method suggests a government was probably involved). Milosevic was likely killed by some western government, based on circumstance (being in custody at the Hague), and the fact that he revealed that people were trying to kill him before it happened...
He claimed people were trying to kill him. Revealed implies that this claim has been proven as fact, which it certainly has not.
Suppose I claim that people are trying to kill me. Have I revealed a truth, or is it possible that I'm making things up?
Secondly, it is of interest because Arafat's movements and those he had contact with were very limited around the time that he fell ill, so it raises interesting questions about who could have done it.
Hopefully this won't have a negative impact on ongoing peace negotiations.
The substance has a very short half life, which suggests only people with access to a nuclear reactor could have created it.
We are actually in worse shape than Soviet Russia. In the USSR, educated people knew that quite a bit of what was in Pravda was a lie. In the West, an attitude of malfeasance-denialism has been encouraged in the educated and upper crust elements of society to the point that erudite people tend to almost deny the existence of elite deviance or official criminality. Given the higher-educated demographic of HN, you can see it around here. Just try arguing that, say, widespread financial shenanigans have anything other than prosaic and innocent explanations.
These are rather sad times when what we thought crazy conspiracy loonies from yesterday seem to be right today.
And yeah "conspiracy theorist" is like "terrorist" it can be used to discredit someone very quickly.
I have noticed over the years that the concretes reported upon and the trends pointed out by conspiracy theorists -- even some of the wackier ones -- have a pretty good hit rate. The paranoid are often very perceptive. It's in the theory department that they fall down, imagining wild and unlikely scenarios to account for things that boil down to simple elite deviance, oligarchy, political opportunism, and corruption.
Most of them also have a political, religious, or ethnic bone to pick and try to ascribe all the wrongs of the world to some hated group.
But as I said... they're often right about the concretes.
It's sad times we live in when unstable nutjobs are the only ones pointing out our obvious descent toward naked plutocratic oligarchy and gangster-statism.
Well nutjobs and comedians... what was that quote about the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth?
They have the unique position of being able to say what they think, and then let the audience decide if it was satirical or serious.
I think "the state of a society when only comedians can tell the truth" is known as "normal". I've never seen any evidence of some fabulous bygone age where the people in charge were cool with political dissidents who didn't frame things in terms of comedy.
It doesn't matter that certain conspiracy nutjobs happened to be correct about something. That's inevitable. The breadth and scope of conspiracy theories is such that some of them are bound to be correct purely by random chance.
What makes something a "conspiracy theory" isn't claim being made, but how that claim is backed up. "9/11 was an inside job" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but 9/11 truthers fit the mold because they use decidedly irrational techniques to support their claims. "The moon landing was faked" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but the people who believe it universally use bad reasoning to do so. Likewise, "the government is spying on everyone" is not automatically a conspiracy theory, but if people use conspiracy-style reasoning to support the claim, it's a conspiracy theory even if it ends up being correct.
Conspiracy theories involve massive application of various logical fallacies, such as ignoring the fact that unlikely events still occur due to chance, focusing on successes and ignoring failures (i.e. Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy), ignoring any explanation of facts that does not fit the desired conclusion, and just plain non sequiturs.
A lot of people who were talking about government surveillance back in the day fit this pattern. The fact that they were right does not change the fact that their reasoning was bad.
Many people were talking about it without fitting this pattern, by using sanity and reason. Those are the ones to pay attention to.
When you see somebody labeling something as a "conspiracy theory", look at the mechanics of the argument being made, rather than the conclusion. For example, in this case we have a comment that states, "Dangerous political prisoners/personalities dying in mysterious circumstances at opportune times is not coincidence." Well, that's classic conspiracy thinking. Coincidences can and do happen, all the time. Do people get assassinated sometimes? Yes. Do important people die at extremely convenient times purely due to natural causes? Also yes. Thus, while the fact that somebody died at a convenient time can be suggestive, it is not conclusive.
Even if Arafat was assassinated, it can still be a conspiracy theory to say it if the argument is done in a certain way. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because he died at a certain time is nonsense. Saying that Arafat must have been assassinated because his bones were filled with Polonium is reasonable.
To shut down complaints about the first kind of argument because the second kind of argument also exists in parallel is awful.
I don't disagree with any of this. Unfortunately these are the only muckrakers we've got. Everyone else just smiles and nods until the muck is shoved in their face.
There aren't enough critics of every persuasion on the Internet?
I've heard plenty about what's wrong with "these modern times", but this must be the first time ever for that particular criticism.
The other problem is that official types use ridicule instead of reason to slam people with ideas that contradict theirs. It seems that some people like evidence and some dont.
It says nothing. Stating something as a fact doesn't make it a fact.
For the record I have absolutely no agenda here and I must say I have absolutely no opinion on the subject at hand (nor do I think it belongs on the frontpage of HN, but that's an other subject).
Sure the comment doesn't have further facts, just a broad gesture to the context. But hey, when a situation has been established, you comment on it.
This does not mean I disagree with the findings of this report, not least because I haven't read it yet. It's entirely plausible that Arafat could have been murdered...but considering that he was a thorn in Israel's side for around 40 years, you're in no position to talk about him dying at an opportune time. I'm sure there were people who wanted to assassinate him over the last several decades. For the last 2 years of his life he was effectively under house arrest by the Israeli army, so why wait 2? Is there something terribly unusual about 75-year old men dying? Hardly. It's certainly possible that he was assassinated, but by your logic we should also be investigating the death of counterculture icon Lou Reed, who was a mere 71.
Also it's rain, not reign.
It certainly seems more likely today than yesterday. But who killed him? It almost certainly wasn't the Israelis or the US - they liked the fact that they could mostly deal with Arafat, and he'd keep more radical Palestinian elements under control.
Milosevic.. why would anyone bother killing him? He was going to be locked away for life, and there wasn't anyone he could really blame, so I can't see what the motive would be?
Love the anonymous downvote for saying something unpopular politically, but more than likely factually correct.
That's the HN way of saying "eeee it's not fair I'm being downvoted. Someone vote me up". I don't see you complaining about the anonymous up votes.
Around the time of his death al-Aqsa was seeking to cut links with Arafat[2].
To claim that Sharon was trying to cut any kind of deal with the Palestinians is... unusual. (For those not aware, it was former Israeli PM Aiel Sharon's visit to the Moslem area of Temple Mount in Jerusalem that sparked the second intifāḍah[3] (prior to him becoming PM). The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade is named after this incident).
Additionally, Arafat's Fatah group was seen as the one group strong enough to keep Hamas controlled.
The al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was a problem for Israel, but it was seen as much less of a problem than Hamas. Subsequent events would show this view was probably correct: When Abbas took control of Fatah it quickly lost control of Gaza to Hamas, and the Israelis have consistently struggled to find a successful approach to dealing with Hamas in Gaza (eg, they later fought a fairly unsuccessful war to try to control Hamas in Gaza).
Edit: Although I disagree with you, I think you do make some good points. You were downvoted when I wrote this, so I have upvoted you.
[1] http://books.google.com.au/books?id=CGiot772MSEC&pg=PA77&dq=...
[2] http://www.worldtribune.com/worldtribune/WTARC/2004/me_pales...
[3] http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/538892/Ariel-Sharo...
First, I appreciate the acknowledgment that Arafat was indeed involved with Al-Aqusa (a terrorist group bombing Israeli civilians). Not sure why you think that that would make the US and Israel consider him a suitable interlocutor - I still think that stands in favour of my argument that Sharon was done with him and killed him to create the circumstances for a deal.
Arafat may have reduced funding to Al-Aqusa, but that's because they were on the ropes militarily by 2004. He certainly didn't stop funding because he thought terrorism was an unacceptable option. The simple fact was, that he was funding terrorists after the failure of Camp David, which again, makes him a very bad candidate for the next round of grand bargain negotiation.
To claim that Sharon wasn't looking for a deal is just silly (even if he was often inflammatory and arguably quite evil). The fact that Sharon was looking for a deal was widely acknowledged and published in newspapers - here's a quote from wikipedia: "In May 2003, Sharon endorsed the Road Map for Peace put forth by the United States, European Union, and Russia, which opened a dialogue with Mahmud Abbas, and announced his commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state in the future." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ariel_Sharon#Founding_of_Kadim... I'd provide more quotes, but this is pretty self evident.
You also seem to suggest that because Sharon was an aggressive guy, he wasn't looking for a deal. That just doesn't follow (especially in the Middle East, where the perception of strength is everything).
You also say "Additionally, Arafat's Fatah group was seen as the one group strong enough to keep Hamas controlled." My response: killing Arafat would / did not prevent Fateh from acting as a counterweight to Hamas. In fact, it's likely that Fateh was ultimately a far better counter-weight to Hamas with Abbas at the helm. Israel was able to work with Fateh to squash Hamas in the West Bank in a way that may well have been impossible with Arafat running the show (supplies of weapons to the Palestinian authority etc).
On an anecdotal note, it was clear on the streets (I was living there at the time), that in many cases, Palestinian policemen went from carrying shitty old AKs to gleaming new M16s within a year after Arafat was out of the picture.
I suspect (given your other comments) that you are familiar with the realpolitik of the middle east - there are no lily white good guys. Of course Arafat funded terrorists!
My view is that the Israelis viewed him as "the devil they knew", and that he was infinitely preferable (and more controllable) than Hamas.
It's true that Arafat didn't want a complete peace deal (he turned down the alleged Barak offer to split Jerusalem or whatever it was), but it's not at all clear to me that there was any Palestinian leader with anything like real power who did want a deal. I mean.. Abbas? Seriously?
Sharon endorsed the Road Map for Peace put forth by the United States, European Union, and Russia, which opened a dialogue with Mahmud Abbas, and announced his commitment to the creation of a Palestinian state in the future.
Has any Israeli PM not endorsed whatever the latest peace plan is? Even Netanyahu sometimes says things that could be read as an endorsement if you didn't know better. The endorsement is meant for US consumption.
OTOH Sharon's plan (essentially isolation from the Palestinian territories) wasn't the worse plan ever, and even sort of worked.
Oh hell.. I'm persuading myself that you might be right. Persuade me of this: killing Arafat would / did not prevent Fateh from acting as a counterweight to Hamas. In fact, it's likely that Fateh was ultimately a far better counter-weight to Hamas with Abbas at the helm.
That clearly failed, and to me it was obvious even at the time that Fatah would lose Gaza. Why do you think otherwise?
You say: "My view is that the Israelis viewed him as "the devil they knew", and that he was infinitely preferable (and more controllable) than Hamas."
I say: That's where you're getting it wrong. It wasn't a choice between Arafat and Hamas, it was a choice between Arafat and Abbas. Abbas was clearly preferable (for all the reasons stated above).
You say: "...it's not at all clear to me that there was any Palestinian leader with anything like real power who did want a deal. I mean.. Abbas? Seriously?"
I say: Yes, Abbas, seriously. Sharon was pursuing a strategy that was largely unilateral - in other words, a weaker leader on the other side was fine, as long as they didn't get in the way and kept the PA running. Arafat was in Sharon's way (not a good place to be historically).
You say: "The endorsement is meant for US consumption."
I say: No, I am absolutely sure that the Israelis are deadly serious about a Palestinian state (or something that can be called that). Israelis are terrified of the "demographic bomb", which is what they call the far higher fertility rate of Palestinians. The Palestinian birth rate threatens the Jewish majority even in what is currently agreed to be Israel over the next few decades. Giving away areas of current Israel with high Arab populations to the Palestinian state is often mooted as an option in a final status deal, in exchange for bits of land covered with Israeli settlements (which would be a double win for Israel).
Don't want to write more on this here. If you'd really like to continue the discussion, you can email me on slooge[at]hotmail.com.
I must say thanks to you and to nl for having a reasoned discussion, you seldom see that on this subject. Made my day.
I could care less about downvotes, but it's nice if people give an explanation, counter-point, etc... Discussion is what brings understanding.
> It certainly seems more likely today than yesterday. But who killed him? It almost certainly wasn't the Israelis or the US - they liked the fact that they could mostly deal with Arafat, and he'd keep more radical Palestinian elements under control.
There's a good post a few lines up that explains it well. Needless to say, the Israeli cause has advanced without Arafat in the picture. It was most definitely in their interest to kill him, and they had the ability (his compound was under siege at the time he fell ill).
> Milosevic.. why would anyone bother killing him? He was going to be locked away for life, and there wasn't anyone he could really blame, so I can't see what the motive would be?
You must not have followed his trial. He said alot of things that were embarrassing to the west, and cast alot of doubt. You're right in that he would have been found guilty, since it's just a show court, but the trial wasn't going the way the prosecutors wanted.
'Danny Rubinstein, a journalist and author of a book about Arafat, had a different memory of events. In the weeks and months before Arafat's death, he said, people in Sharon's inner circle talked constantly about how to get rid of him. "For me, it was very clear from the beginning. Every day this was the topic – should we expel him, or kill him, or bomb the Muqata [Arafat's HQ]. It was obvious to me that they would find a way."'
While he might have kept more radical Palestinians under control, he was also himself seen as a tougher counterpart than Abbas, which might have been a motive.
Chavez
Not saying it's not possible, but seems less likely IMO.
I was living in the West Bank when Arafat died, and I knew a bunch of people who worked in his compound. He got very sick, very quickly. The doctors around him were baffled by the steep decline, which is why he was flown to France just before he died.
I acknowledge that my theory on the issue is purely circumstantial, but a good place to start with these things is "qui bono?". Ariel Sharon (and Israel, and in my view, everyone) had a lot to gain by Arafat's death.
Whatever you think of the nastiness that he'd been involved in, Sharon was a remarkable human - Israelis aren't given to overstatement and they called him the "Lion of God".
Sharon was clearly making a dash for a grand bargain, and it's obvious that the "bulldozer" (another of his nicknames) wasn't letting anything get in his way.
By pure force of will, he withdrew Israel from Gaza (an absolutely wrenching move for Israel to make), and then left Likud to establish Kadimah so that he could move forward without blockage from the right wing radicals in his old party. In a very short time frame, Sharon bent a famously fractious Israeli parliament into a position to make a grand bargain that would stick - the last major road block to a bargain was Arafat.
Israel had had a real go at negotiating with Arafat with Bill Clinton at Camp David. It didn't work out. Of course, there are a bunch of conflicting opinions on who's to blame for the breakdown in talks, but the basic, unarguable outcome was that Arafat wasn't willing to take Israel's best offer.
Sharon obviously knew that, and also knew that Arafat's successor was going to be the comparatively mild mannered Abbas, who Sharon was already dealing with constructively. I think Sharon basically decided that, given Arafat's previous form, he was a very high risk as a grand bargain spoiler - Arafat's moral authority with the Palestinian population remained high. So, in the absence of any other option (since Arafat was essentially a dictator), good night Arafat.
If you think that Sharon wasn't capable of something that cold, take a look at his conduct in the massacre at Sabra and Shatila in Lebanon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabra_and_Shatila_massacre).
Sharon had a stroke shortly thereafter, and with that, arguably the only person capable of cutting the gordian knot in the medium term was out of the picture. Gotta love ash-sharq al-awsat.
Regarding Sabra and Shatila, afaik two separate courts said he couldn't be proven to be responsible? He should have considered the risk of a revenge. The wikipedia link supports this, too.
(I read up on this because I've seen SaS arguments so often. I've never seen an answer to the counter question of how to judge those who themselves did attacks on civilians in that civil war. Like PLO, unlike Sharon.)
"The disengagement is actually formaldehyde," he said. "It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians."
Asked why the disengagement plan had been hatched, Weisglass replied: "Because in the fall of 2003 we understood that everything was stuck. And although by the way the Americans read the situation, the blame fell on the Palestinians, not on us, Arik [Sharon] grasped that this state of affairs could not last, that they wouldn't leave us alone, wouldn't get off our case. Time was not on our side. There was international erosion, internal erosion. Domestically, in the meantime, everything was collapsing. The economy was stagnant, and the Geneva Initiative had gained broad support. And then we were hit with the letters of officers and letters of pilots and letters of commandos [refusing to serve in the territories]. These were not weird kids with green ponytails and a ring in their nose with a strong odor of grass. These were people like Spector's group [Yiftah Spector, a renowned Air Force pilot who signed the pilot's letter]. Really our finest young people."
Weisglass does not deny that the main achievement of the Gaza plan is the freezing of the peace process in a "legitimate manner."
"That is exactly what happened," he said. "You know, the term `peace process' is a bundle of concepts and commitments. The peace process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The peace process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen.... what I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns. That is the significance of what we did."
* edit: changed wasn't to was
http://www.france24.com/en/20121101-israel-admits-responsibi...
This got the downvote for me. It means anyone that disagrees with you is insane, and that's a bad place to start.
I would bet that the poisoning was ordered by someone within the factions of Palestinian struggles.
Also curious: why did his wife refuse to permit an autopsy?
Islam has fairly strict burial customs, and many Islamic clerics have outlawed autopsies. It isn't a universal belief, but likely figured into the equation...
I am not saying he was poisoned or not (I do not know). I am just going by Occam's Razor, here.
Second, you made grand bargain with the strongest player that could deliver the result. That was Arafat at the time.
...I don't know that much about poisons, but I bet the people in this lob have whole arsenal of "stealth" poisons that could much more easily go unnoticed. And if you want to make it obvious, why not go for something even more obvious or simply a bullet?
It seems more like an "artist's signature" thing and it would be interesting to know who this "artist" is!
That same reason also makes me somewhat sceptic in this case, but who knows. Hopefully, time will tell.
With Arafat, the assassin almost got away with it unnoticed. There could be other cases of Polonium use as well which were never reported, it's remarkably tough poison to detect.
It's a very rare agent that only very few assassins have access to, so most routine poison searches would not pick it up. Especially since the symptoms are basically nondescript. In addition to that polonium was pretty much unknown as a poison when Arafat was killed - the high profile Litvinenko killing was after Arafats death. The lethal dose is extremely low and even if it is detected, there's no antidote.
That's a pretty good stealth poison in my book.
It's a very interesting article about what happened to Litvinenko and how polonium poisoning actually works.
You're right that it's a curious choice in some respects. In the Litvinenko case, police were literally able to retrace the steps of the assassins by following the radiation. Its short half-life also suggests that whoever was behind it had access to a nuclear reactor.
"Notably, the murder of Alexander Litvinenko, a Russian dissident, in 2006 was announced as due to Polonium poisoning."
"According to the book The Bomb in the Basement, several deaths in Israel during 1957–1969 were caused by Polonium."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polonium#Well-known_poisoning_...
Russian agents learning from Israel perhaps.
Just curious.
I don't agree with the statement, but I think that may be what he is saying.
(Said sarcastically)
It was used on Alexander Litvinenko because the Russians wanted to show that they were able and willing to take the life of former agents that attacked their interests.
What motivates the use of a radioactive element that very few possess?
Or maybe not. It is very well known that Russian security services brutally murdered Litvinenko, but there is remarkably little evidence. The only evidence, in fact, is that "everyone knows it". What if new data will make you reconsider this well known wisdom?
> What motivates the use of a radioactive element that very few possess?
It is very widely used and easily available.
http://unitednuclear.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&cP...
http://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/po...
> They are typically in a form that, if ingested, would pose no health problem, and the radiation is so small that they do not pose a hazard even if the polonium were to be absorbed. It would take 30,000 of these exempt quantities to represent the 3-millicurie fatal dose estimate.
Button sources are typically of the size where you wouldn't mind letting undergrads gnaw on them during their physics labs. The worst they could do is choke.
Fun fact: I went to school in a building which later became the PLO Embassy.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/10/15/us-palestinians-ar...
"However, the government scientific body later denied that it had made any official statement about the research, saying only that it had handed its results to the Russian Foreign Ministry."
Prof. Paddy Regan, says:
"They are saying the hypothesis that Arafat was poisoned with polonium-210 is valid and has not been disproven by the data. However they cannot say definitively that he was murdered.
Prof Regan says a series of assumptions would have been made in order to ascertain how much Po-210 may or may not have been in Mr Arafat's body at the time of his death."
'has not been disproven' - means it has not been proven either. No?
Quite a few high ranking sources in Israel insinuated he died of AIDS. He contracted the disease in the '80s. He was a homosexual and the Israeli intelligence is rumored to have videotaped proof.
Israel had no reason to poison him. After the Karine A affair http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karine_A_Affair Arafat's reputation was tarnished beyond repair with Western leaders. In later 2004 the intifada was mostly mitigated already. He was no longer a threat politically or militarily. Israel knew he was dying anyway and if you go back and read news reports you can see that over years he received quite a few treatments overseas for cover up diseases.
Poisoning is not only more plausible, but also seems to be better supported by evidence now.
That always happens. I'll try not to think of anyone here.