Chavez's cancer was an 'attack' by his enemies

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http://worldnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/03/05/17196733-venezuela-vp-chavezs-cancer-was-an-attack-by-his-enemies

Hours before Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez died, his second-in-command accused enemies of giving him cancer and announced the expulsion of two U.S. diplomats for an alleged plot to destabilize the government.

"There's no doubt that Commandante Chavez's health came under attack by the enemy," Vice President Nicolas Maduro said in an address to the nation from the presidential palace.

"The old enemies of our fatherland looked for a way to harm his health,'' according to Maduro, drawing a parallel to the illness and 2004 death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, which some supporters blamed on poisoning by Israeli agents.

He said a special commission would investigate how Chavez, 58, ended up with the unspecified cancer that months of chemotherapy and radiation and four surgeries failed to tame.

State Department spokesman Patrick Ventrell said in a statement it was "absurd" to suggest that the U.S. was somehow involved in Chavez's illness.

The allegation was made against a backdrop of diplomatic tension, with Caracas announcing that two American Air Force attachés had been given 24 hours to leave the country.

Maduro accused one of them, David Delmonaco, of spying and meeting with Venezuelan military officials for nefarious purposes. The expulsion of the second, Devlin Kostal, was announced soon after.

Defense Department spokesman Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale said Delmonaco would be leaving Caracas and that Kostal was already in the U.S. and denied the allegations against them.

"We completely reject the Venezuelan government's claim that the United States is involved in any type of conspiracy to destabilize Venezuela government," he said.

Ventrell also dismissed the accusations.

"Notwithstanding the significant differences between our governments, we continue to believe it important to seek a functional and more productive relationship with Venezuela based on issues of mutual interest," he said.

"This fallacious assertion of inappropriate U.S. action leads us to conclude that, unfortunately, the current Venezuelan government is not interested in an improved relationship."

Venezuela's relations with the U.S. have been strained for years, and Chavez saw conspiracies everywhere.

In 2008, he expelled the American ambassador, claiming the U.S. was orchestrating a military coup. He had repeatedly claimed to be the target of assassination plots from domestic and international opponents.

Yasser Arafat 'poisoned with Polonium'

Yasser Arafat may have been killed with a lethal dose of the highly radioactive substance Polonium, it has been claimed.
Adrian Blomfield, Middle East Correspondent
03 Jul 2012
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/palestinianauthority/9374010/Yasser-Arafat-poisoned-with-Polonium.html

Tests performed by a laboratory in Switzerland found significant traces of Polonium-210 on the late Palestinian leader's clothes, adding a new twist to a case that has obsessed the Arab world for years.

Polonium-210 is the same substance used to poison the Russian dissident Alexader Litvinenko in London.

The claims are likely to renew long-held Palestinian suspicions that the Israeli spy agency Mossad assassinated Arafat, who died in a Paris hospital in November, 2004.

The Institute de Radiophysique in Lausanne found elevated levels of the element on Arafat's personal effects. A urine stain in his underwear registered a level of 180 millibecquerels of Polonium-210, more than 20 times the dose to kill an average human being.

"I can confirm to you that we measured an unexplained, elevated amount of unsupported Polonium-210 in the belongings of Mr Arafat that contained stains of biological fluids," Dr Francois Bochod, the director of the institute, told Al Jazeera, the pan-Arab television station.

Al Jazeera sent Arafat's clothes to the institute for testing after obtaining them from his widow as part of a nine-month investigation into the revolutionary's death.

Many theories have been advanced in the past for the cause of Arafat's death, and his case notes – which are alleged to show that he had suffered cirrhosis – have never been released.

A former speech writer for President George W Bush claimed he had contracted Aids from a homosexual relationship with one of his guards, while aides of Arafat have alleged that he was poisoned by Mossad with Thallium, another radioactive element.

British police and doctors initially believed that Litvinenko, a former KGB officer who defected to London, was killed with Thallium, a misdiagnosis because Polonium-210 is harder to detect with normal hospital equipment.

Some of Arafat's symptoms, including vomiting, cirrhosis and coma, are compatible with Polonium-210 poisoning, which results in a long and agonising death. But it is not thought that Arafat suffered hair loss, which is thought to happen in half of cases of significant exposure to the element.

The dose allegedly ingested by Arafat was much smaller than the amount that killed Litvinenko, making it even harder to detect.

British police dealing with the Litvinenko case have alleged that only a sophisticated, state-backed intelligence agency could source Polonium-210 in a form that could be used to poison someone.

The real tragedy: Who killed Arafat and why?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_4947.shtml

The real tragedy: Who killed Arafat and why?
By Ramzy Baroud
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Jul 27, 2009

Who killed Yasser Arafat? When the Palestinian leader was declared dead in a French hospital on Nov. 11, 2004, there was no way of knowing how questions related to his death should be phrased. Was he killed or did he die from old age? If he was killed, then who killed him and why?

The “mysterious” nature of his symptoms gave birth to a theory that he was poisoned over a period of time, provided enough evidence that foul play was involved, even accusing some of those closest to him. Although the man’s story has been recorded in the ever-growing chronicle of the Palestinian struggle and Palestinians have somehow moved on, recent breaking news has blown his story wide open once again, breeding new controversy and stories of conspiracy.

Nearly five years have passed since Arafat died. During those years, a number of high-ranking Palestinian leaders, especially from the Hamas movement, have been assassinated by Israel in various and consistently gory methods. Among Palestinians, Arafat is referred to, like all those killed by Israel, as a “martyr,” an indication of the widespread belief that his death was hardly the result of natural causes.

If Arafat was indeed killed and since his death was not caused by an Israeli airstrike or an assassin’s bullet, a key question has been lingering, giving rise to all sorts of answers: Who killed Arafat and how?

Israelis made little secret of their desire to see Arafat dead. Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon expressed regret in a newspaper interview on Feb. 1, 2002, that he hadn’t killed Arafat decades earlier when he had had the chance. Sharon told the Israeli newspaper Maariv that he should have “eliminated” Arafat during the invasion of Lebanon in 1982. “Do you regret it (not killing Arafat)?” he was asked. “Certainly, yes,” he replied.

On the day of Arafat’s death, BBC news carried comments by then Israeli opposition leader Shimon Peres, saying it is “good that the world is rid of him . . . The sun is shining in the Middle East.” Held hostage in his bullet-riddled West Bank office for years, Arafat represented an international embarrassment for Israel. He was not “moderate” enough to concede all Palestinian rights, but ‘moderate’ enough to maintain an aura of international attention and support among Arab, Muslim, European and other nations.

Still, in the minds of some, Arafat was determined, and often declared to represent an ‘obstacle.’ The PA’s truly “moderate” camp disliked him for his tireless compromises aimed at preventing factional infighting, thus blocking their attempts at dominating Palestinian society. Israel despised him for numerous reasons, not least his refusal to “concede” issues of paramount importance, such as refugees and Jerusalem. The Bush administration took every opportunity to discredit, discount and insult him, constantly propping up an “alternative” leadership, namely, Mahmoud Abbas, Mohammed Dahlan and others.

Strangely enough, even Abbas and other high-ranking PA officials refer to Arafat as a “martyr,” especially whenever they need to capitalize on his legacy among low-ranking Fatah members and ordinary Palestinians. But the story was meant to end here, with Abbas and Dahlan, carrying the torch of Arafat the “martyr” as they continue with their rhetoric-based “revolution” to liberate Palestine. That was the case until the second highest-ranking Fatah member and one of the PLO’s most visible leaders, Farouk Qaddoumi, went public with a document that contained some unanticipated surprises: that Abbas and Dahlan, along with Sharon, US Undersecretary of State William Burns, and others jointly plotted the assassination of Arafat. Qaddoumi’s document contained the minutes of that meeting, in 2004.

Qaddoumi broke the news in a press conference in Amman, Jordan on July 12, 2009, asserting that Arafat had entrusted him with the minutes of that secret meeting involving top Israeli, Palestinian and American leaders and officials. The plot, according to Qaddoumi included the assassination of other Palestinian leaders, some of them have indeed been assassinated since while others are still alive, thanks to the failure of Israeli missiles and car bombs.

Expectedly, the Ramallah-based Fatah leaders launched fierce verbal attacks against Qaddoumi, questioning his objectives, timing and even his sanity. Abbas accused Qaddoumi of wanting to torpedo the Fatah faction’s long-delayed congress, scheduled to convene in Bethlehem on Aug. 4. “He (Qaddoumi) knows full well that this information is false; he has released it to undermine the convention but we are continuing with the preparations,” Abbas said. Qaddoumi had in fact criticized the convention of a supposedly ‘revolutionary’ movement held with Israeli consent, if not support.

The fact is, we may never know the authenticity of Qaddoumi’s report without an independent investigation or irrefutable evidence. However, just as with Arafat’s death, conclusive evidence is not always required for the public to formulate an opinion. Considering Israel’s threats to Arafat, Palestinians have no reason to believe that Israel did not kill him. Similarly, ordinary Palestinians, especially those in Gaza, have little reason to trust that corrupt Palestinians were not involved in Arafat’s death. A clique of the Palestinian elite have made it clear that their personal interests surpass those of the Palestinian people; Dahlan openly advocated the toppling of an elected government in Gaza as the Ramallah-based “revolutionary” movement, was dispatching US-armed and trained Palestinian fighters to crack down on Israel’s enemies in various West Bank towns.

As bizarre as all of this may sound, it is at least enough to explain why Palestinians are willing to believe the recent statements made by Qaddoumi, a respected figure among all Palestinian factions. True, Qaddoumi’s accusations have yet to be authenticated by an independent investigation, but they are made in a fractious, if not peculiar political context that makes them most plausible and, in a sense, that is the real tragedy.

Ramzy Baroud is an author and editor of PalestineChronicle.com. His work has been published in many newspapers and journals worldwide. His latest book is The Second Palestinian Intifada: A Chronicle of a People’s Struggle (Pluto Press, London,) and his forthcoming book is, “My Father Was a Freedom Fighter: Gaza The Untold Story” (Pluto Press, London).