ARAFAT

 Have you seen the Aljazeera documentary about what killed Arafat?

.

I'm so intrigued with this story.

The guy who narrates the documentary is an American, Clayton E. Swisher.

 He is a former Marine reservist and federal criminal investigator, and he was a VIP security guard at the Barak+Clinton/Arafat talks in Camp David in 2000.
Now he's director of programs at the Middle East Institute in D.C.

Here he is with Arafat:

He wrote this book which I'm reading now:

In case you don't want to watch the 50-minute documentary, I'll give you a brief resume along with some of my questions.

Swisher went to Malta (Malta!  Wasn't that where the Lockerbie bomber bought some stuff?) to meet with Arafat's wife, Suha.  Suha was kicked out of Tunisia by the former dictator.  She had Arafat's gym bag with his belongings from the hospital in France, where he died in 2004.  Underwear, toothbrushes (yes, plural), his hospital hat--all had blood, saliva and/or urine on them.  This was all that remained of his bodily fluids.  It turned out that the French authorities who were providing his final care had disposed of all the fluids they had drawn from him.  Hmmm.  Wouldn't you have saved that stuff?  It's Yasser Arafat for Pete's sake!  Suha was not in charge of Arafat's body when he died.  The Palestinian Authority took him back to Ramallah and buried him.  No autopsy.

Swisher took the gym bag to a lab in Switzerland (as carry-on or checked luggage?) and the scientists there found unusual amounts of Polonium in Arafat's stuff.



Polonium!  Remember this guy?  Alexander Litvinenko.  We watched him on tv as he slowly died from Polonium that he ingested somehow in a sushi restaurant in London:



This is how he looked when he was healthy, before the KGB (allegedly) poisoned him:



Not everyone has access to Polonium, as you might guess.  Only countries that produce nuclear materials have it on hand.  Well, they better not have it literally "on hand."  The amount needed to kill someone is so small you can't even see it.  It can be inhaled or ingested.  How would you carry it?  How would you, as an assassin, make sure none got on you if you wanted to kill someone?  So few victims have been studied that scientists don't even know exactly how it affects the body.  Arafat's symptoms included vomiting and diarrhea before all his systems shut down.  His first doctors in Palestine thought he had the flu.  No one could figure out what was wrong.  Not mentioned in the documentary is where he ate his last meal before he got sick or who was with him.

At the end of the documentary, Swisher tells Arafat's widow of the Polonium finding and asks if she will ask the Palestinian Authority to exhume his body.  Yes, she says.      

And now it is reported that the Palestinians are going to allow Arafat's body to be exhumed, which will allow scientists to examine his tissues to prove definitively if he was poisoned with Polonium or not.