The Culpepper Log managed to bait me with this story of how Arafat tried to assassinate Colin Powell this April. The source is Yossef Bodansky’s new book. I’m not sure how reliable he is as a source, but it requires a lot of gall for someone described here as “director of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare” to publish such a claim in a book if it is a complete fabrication.

The story of the attempted assassination is interesting, although, if true, doomed to fail because the Shabak (Shin Bet) routinely “cleans” areas that such possible targets as Powell are going to pass through. I was witness to such a “cleaning” operation myself around the same period, which was a very tense one, if you remember, when I found myself at a location soon to be visited by Defense Minister Ben Eliezer.