"Putting the Ship Behind Us"
Yesterday at lunch I was reading the Michigan Daily, and ran across a news clip about a letter that Arafat wrote to Colin Powell:
"Hassan Abdel Rahman, the ranking Palestinian official in the United States, said Arafat did not say in the letter that he knew about an attempt to smuggle 50 tons of weapons from Iran. "That's not the issue," Rahman said in an interview. "The letter is an attempt to put the whole issue of the ship behind us."
That's absolutely ridiculous.
Yesterday, Kenneth Lay refused to testify before the Senate commerce committee. Suppose that some fellow board members explained his invocation of the fifth amendment by saying, "We're trying to put the whole Enron issue behind us." Everyone would realize that to be the sham it is.
You put mistakes behind you. The Karine-A was a violation of damn near every treaty and agreement that the Palestinians had with Israel. It was not a mistake.