I don’t understand why the Russian team said that Yassir Arafat had not been poisoned with polonium-210 and the Swiss team just said that he probably was. Here’s the reporting from October 15th:
Polonium-210 did not cause the death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Vladimir Uyba, the physician at the helm of the Russian Medical-Biological Agency which carried out tests on the remains of the Nobel Peace prize laureate, told the Interfax news agency on Tuesday.
Arafat was 75 when he died in 2004 at a French military hospital in Percy. He suffered abdominal pain prior to dying of unknown causes.
‘Russian experts who conducted the test did not find traces of this substance’, said Uyba.
And here is the reporting from today:
The Swiss scientists who tested Arafat’s remains after the exhumation of his body in November discovered levels of polonium at least 18 times higher than the norm in Arafat’s ribs, pelvis and in soil that absorbed his leaked bodily fluids…
…The Swiss report said that even taking into account the eight years since Arafat’s death and the quality of specimens taken from bone fragments and tissue scraped from his decayed corpse and shroud, the results “moderately support the proposition that the death was the consequence of poisoning with polonium-210”.
Since we know that the Russians killed Alexander Litvinenko with polonium-210 in London just two years after Arafat died, their denials here strike me as enormously suspicious. What I don’t know is what was going on in October 2004 between the Russians and the Palestinians that might have constituted a motive for the Russians to kill Arafat.
Naturally, the Israelis will be under suspicion, too, but the Russians are the only ones known to use this method to kill.
We still haven’t heard from the French team. That should be interesting.
We do? Actually, we don’t know that. It’s what some people have claimed and it fits right in with the century of US demonization of Russia/USSR so well that the claim is accepted as fact.
Odd that only now questions are being raised about the death of Arafat and not dismissed by western powers and media as CT. Very odd indeed. I smell a rat.
Questions have been raised by Arafat’s death since he died. His wife had been calling for an investigation since then.
And, yet, according to reports, she was the one who disallowed an autopsy.
I’ve seen this from observant Muslims…you have 72 hours to get the body into the ground, and no autopsies.
There are enough irregularities around Arafat’s death to even distract the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorists.
He had tea with two KGB officers and fell ill.
After the tea, he had sushi in another restaurant with non-Russian acquaintances. The rub from Wikipedia (highlight added)
Speculate on the cause of Litvinenko’s death and possible agents that could have offed him all you want, but don’t smugly act as if either are facts.
There was quite a bit more evidence than you are suggesting.
Not one of those sites was secured any time close to when the alleged poisoning took place. Also inclined not to accept at face value anything US or British official and “security” agencies state. Both are well known to plant false evidence and lie.
Whatever Putin may be, he’s not stupid enough to send a couple of dumbasses to London with Po 210 to assassinate Litviniko. Much easier ways to accomplish that and not leave any fingerprints anywhere.
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From your link …
The chemical is, in a sense, a calling card, because only a handful of major countries, including Israel, the United States, and Russia, are known to maintain large stockpiles of polonium-210.
Always interesting to see Democrats/liberals fall for propaganda and/or officially sanctioned CT. Explains why in real time they couldn’t see through GWB’s WMD hoax, etc.
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Was he a time-traveler. Or are you using KGB generically for “Russian clandestine service”?
LOL. Like McCain asserting the Russia was cutting gas supplies to Czechoslovakia. Only a couple years worse since Czechoslovakia existed until 1993 and the KGB was dissolved in 1991.
Why would the Russians poison Arafat? Aren’t there a lot of better suspects around? And if I’m not mistaken polonium isn’t just found in Russia.
I have also heard that intelligence agencies have been known to commit crimes to blame on their enemies.
My understanding is that the Russians supply polonium-210 for commercial use, and that no one else does.
“My understanding is that the Russians supply polonium-210 for commercial use, and that no one else does.”
Supply it for what commercial operators? Western commercial operators. In the United States.
Don’t you find that a bit odd?
Smells like a CIA front.
“Ninety seven percent of the world’s legal polonium-210 (210Po) production occurs in Russia in RBMK reactors.[39][70] About 85 grams (450,000 Ci) are produced by Russia annually. According to Sergei Kiriyenko, the head of Russia’s state atomic energy agency, RosAtom, all of it goes to U.S. companies through a single authorized supplier.”
From the Wiki on the Poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko
“…the Russians supply polonium-210 for commercial use, and that no one else does”
That’s true for a lot of reactor-produced isotopes, because they decided to commercialize their nuclear industry to get hard currency, back in the immediate post-Soviet days.
But anyone running a reactor with some hot-lab capabilities could do the same. Israel, France, USA, Japan, China, etc.
It’s been something like 23 half-lives of 210Po since Arafat died; finding an anomalous 206Pb/208Pb ratio would be a smoking gun, so if you’re not hearing that, it’s probably not 210Po.
Age and ill-health is a more likely explanation for Arafat’s death, I think.
Putin..
the former KGB dude…
has already been proven to kill his enemies this way..
why not Arafat?
did he eat a lot of seafood? There is an ingestion path through the food chain for Po 210 that way.
Also, the russians never really had a good reason (publicly) to off Arafat. What possible reason would they have had? I could only speculate that something in the realm of the russian mafia needed him taken out for double dealing on something.
The other reason to doubt the russians is the character of the posioning. even though it was before Litveneko would have come out eventually, too many traces of the decay chain of Po 210 to Pb 206 would have been found. They could have hoped that no samples would ever be taken, but for such a high profile doesn’t make sense. Unless, someone was trying to blame shift or frame the russians.
even if “The Russians” didn’t want to off Arafat, that doesn’t mean that “A Russian or Two” who had their own motivations and access to polonium might be persuaded to do so.
Well, why do their scientists disagree with the Swiss scientists?
Maybe the Russians were covering for the Syrians? But why would Syrians want Arafat dead.
If Russia is involved, it is unlikely to be as the assassin of Arafat and more likely to be the source of materials in the samples for some other motive. And that does not seem very likely.
Motive? The assertion of Israel as killing Arafat rests on the assumption of a substantial motive and the possibility that given their nuclear research Israel would also have the means to create sufficient quantities of whatever they needed to kill him. But there is the problem of delivery to Arafat.
The timing makes it seem like an attempt to backfoot Netanyahu in the midst of US negotiations with Syria and Iran. Or to backfoot a more general reduction of WMDs in the Middle East. Who has a motive for this kind of disinformation?
Heck. Let’s just watch for further news.
Here is some of the contemporary news coverage (Guardian Israel and the Middle East 2004. The word “Russia” appears nowhere in the headlines:
October 14 2004
Israel is set on a collision course with the EU and could turn into a pariah state on a par with South Africa during the apartheid years if the conflict with the Palestinians is not resolved, Israel’s foreign ministry warns.
Israel could become pariah state, report warns
October 24 2004
The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, seeks approval by the country’s parliament for parts of his plan to withdraw Jewish settlements from the Gaza Strip and northern West Bank.
…
November 3 2004
MPs in Ariel Sharon’s Likud party rebel over his plans to pull out of Gaza, forcing him to postpone the annual budget vote.
MPs’ Gaza revolt forces Sharon to defer budget vote
November 4 2004
Unfounded rumours circulate that Yasser Arafat has died, as more of his powers are passed to the Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia.
Arafat clings to life as switch of power begins
November 7 2004
The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, appeals to political and military factions to avoid violence while Yasser Arafat lies critically ill.
Hamas agrees to avoid infighting
November 9 2004
Palestinian leaders visit Yasser Arafat in hospital in Paris, and admit he is close to death.
Arafat close to death, say officials
November 10 2004
It is confirmed that when Yasser Arafat dies, he will be buried in Ramallah, after the Israelis refuse to allow him to be interred in Jerusalem.
Burial site prepared as Arafat clings on
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Russians did not poison Yasser Arafat in the fall of 2004, and as a consequence the Russians should not be suspect in the 2006 murder of Litvinenko, a MI-5 spy for the British. See article in The Independent – Censored: British intelligence links to murdered Litvinenko and the NY Times. Later it was stated Litvinenko was also employed by the Spanish secret service. By some estimates, a lethal dose of Polonium-210 might cost as little as $22.50, plus tax. After preventing evidence at Robert Owen’s coroner inquest, the British government has denied a public inquiry into Litvinenko’s death in July 2013.
The British have tried to frame the Russians for the murder out of self-interest. The British and Russians were in a bitter intelligence dispute. France and the US tried to prevent an investigation into the death of Yasser Arafat. The most trustworthy analysis will be from the Swiss – a 108 page forensic report.
○ Debunking the Putin Killed Litvinenko Story by soj on Nov 24th, 2006
○ A Not So Common Poison for Assassins by Oui on July 3rd, 2012
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The other actor in the Litvinenko polonium-210 incident. On March 23, 2013 Boris Berezovsky died at the age of 67 under “unexplained” circumstances. Hazardous material experts from the British police searching the home of Berezovsky have given the scene the “all clear” after finding “nothing of concern.”
Though the Russians would be a natural choice for a state sponsored hit; it’s equally viable that with Arafat’s many corporate black market and just plain old corruption ties that one of them merely resourced the polonium-210 and offed him for their own reasons.
Arafat was not merely an infamously hard leader to deal with he was also a deal maker with some of the biggest and baddest in business. Anyone else remember the phone call he had with Christianne Amanpour where he railed at her for a good 5 minutes then suddenly broke into a sweet, ‘bahbye love’ and hung up? Fruitcake.
A standard thing the CIA used to do during the Cold War was to supply their killers around the world with Soviet weapons. That’s why you can’t say polonium=Russia. Could be the US, could be Israel, could be a Palestinian political enemy. Could be Russia, but I don’t see a motive for Russia to see Arafat dead. Or the US for that matter.
Polonium is supposed to have a half-life of three or four months. At this late date, how polonium is left?