http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/01/the_taliban_and_the_plo.html
The Taliban and the PLO By Shoshana Bryen
The story below is not a history lesson; it is a cautionary tale. What happens when the United States ignores the nature and behavior of an adversary and pretends that a) people wedded to a violent ideology and believing deeply in their ultimate victory will accept less and allow their enemy to “win” as well; and b) legitimizes them and providing concessions will get them to do it?
In 2006, a 1973 State Department memo regarding the murder of two American and one Belgian diplomat in Sudan was declassified. It acknowledged, “The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) and head of Fatah.”
That was generally believed to be the case, but still it was a shock to see that the United States government had known (then) for 33 years that Arafat, murderer of Israelis and Jews, was also the murderer of Cleo Noel, George Curtis Moore, and Guy Eid, Western diplomats in service. The three were machine-gunned to death with the “full knowledge and personal approval” of the man with whom the U.S. government opened relations during the Reagan administration with the “full knowledge and personal approval” of Colin Powell, then-NSC adviser to the president and later secretary of State, the person responsible for American diplomats abroad. (Powell told a small group — of which I was a member — that “everyone has something to say, and we should offer them the opportunity to say it.”)
The world could have been spared a lot of trouble if the U.S. government had told what it knew in 1973. Arafat might not have become an acceptable interlocutor for the United States. He might not have been someone for whom the U.S. government betrayed people who worked and died in its service. He might not have become a “partner” for an unwilling Israel, pressured by the United States.
Instead, the State Department hid its contemporaneous knowledge of Arafat’s crime against American diplomats in hopes of enticing/bribing him to make peace with Israel.