AP
Bush Administration Wishes Arafat Well
Date: Thu, Oct 28, 2004
By BARRY SCHWEID, AP Diplomatic Writer
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration said Thursday it hopes that ailing Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) gets the medical care he needs.
"This is not a political matter for us," the State Department spokesman Richard Boucher said. "This is a matter of seeing that an ill person gets the medical care they need for health."
"That is our wish and our hope in this circumstance," Boucher said.
The administration has shunned Arafat as incapable of leading Palestinians to statehood. It has accused him of mismangement, involvement with violence against Israel and being either unable or unwilling to stop Palestinian homicidal attacks on Israelis.
The administration has tried, with only limited success, to have other senior Palestinians take charge of security. Persistent calls by Secretary of State Colin Powell (news - web sites) that terror groups in Palestinian areas be uprooted have gone unheeded.
Boucher on Thursday said "we have been in touch with the Palestinians at senior levels" through the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem as well as in direct telephone calls from Washington.
He added that the State Department is in close touch with Israel as it tries to faciliate access to proper medical care for Arafat.
"Our view is that it is not a political situation, it's a matter of someone being able to get appropriate medical care, and that's the way it should be handled," he said.
Boucher said the State Department had been keeping track of reports on Arafat's medical condition and no American diplomat had talked to the Palestinian leader. "I don't think he is in a position to talk to anybody in any case," Boucher said.
Edward Abington, a former American diplomat who is a consultant to the 75-year-old leader, said Arafat had made the decision to go to Paris for a diagnosis after discussing his condition with his wife.
Abington, who headed the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem from 1993 to 1997, disputed reports that Arafat was not lucid. He said the Palestinian leader was being taken to Paris because the physicians who examined him in Ramallah were unable to make a diagnosis.
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SOURCE
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