Military

DATE=08/22/02

TYPE=U-S OPINION ROUNDUP

TITLE=ABU NIDAL (CQ)

NUMBER=6-12606

BYLINE=ANDREW GUTHRIE

DATELINE=WASHINGTON

EDITOR=ASSIGNMENTS

TELEPHONE=619-3335

CONTENT=

///Resending to clarify in intro that Abu Nidal was found dead, deleting reference to whether he died in his apartment or in a Baghdad hospital. There are conflicting news reports. Also adding that his group claims he was assassinated.///

INTRO: One of the world's most notorious terrorists, Abu Nidal, has died in Baghdad. Some reports say the leader of the Fatah Revolutionary Council shot himself to avoid arrest by Iraqi security forces who were going to bring him in for questioning. His own group claims he was assassinated.

Whatever the cause of his demise, it was being hailed in the American press and we get a sampling now from V-O-A's ______________ in today's U-S Opinion Roundup.

TEXT: Abu Nidal, which in Arabic means "father of the struggle" was the nom de guerre of Sabri Banna, a 65-year-old Palestinian man who during the 1970s and 1980s was one of the most feared terrorists in the world. He was considered responsible for the deaths of about 300 people and the wounding of at least twice that many. He was an ally of Yasser Arafat but broke with the PLO in 1974 because he felt it wasn't radical enough towards the state of Israel. His men later killed two key Arafat aides in Tunis.

Some of his other most well-known attacks included the simultaneous December 1985 assault on El Al Israeli Airlines ticket counters at the Rome and Vienna airports, in which 20 people died, and the hijacking to Malta of an Egyptian airliner, in which sixty people were killed. The American newspapers commenting on his death, like The Boston Herald, are all expressing relief that such an evil man is gone.

VOICE: Abu Nidal, a terrorist to rival Osama bin Laden for absolute evil, is dead. His bullet-riddled body was found in his apartment in Baghdad, where he had lived, ill with cancer, since 1998. The world is a better place for his passing.

. [Mr.] Nidal's career ought to be a reminder that fundamentalist Islam, which preoccupies the intelligence agencies of civilized governments these days, is not the origin of modern terror. [Mr.] Nidal was absolutely secular (as [Yasser] Arafat, another terrorist, has been). His killers did not shout, "God is great!" He was driven by hatred of Jews, a more ancient evil that still plagues the world.

TEXT: The Houston [Texas] Chronicle adds that Mr. Nidal's: ". terrorist rap sheet [Editors: U-S slang for ["official law enforcement record"] was as long as a cruise ship. Multiple gunshot wounds seem fitting."

VOICE: Few will mourn the bullet-riddled passing . His Fatah-Revolutionary Council was blamed for attacks in 20 countries that killed or wounded hundreds of people . The official line is that Abu Nidal committed suicide rather than face charges he was plotting against the Iraqi government, which has harbored him for years. If true, he must have committed suicide many times over, as a number of bullet wounds reportedly were found in his corpse.

. Jeanne Kirkpatrick, the former U-S representative to the United Nations, wrote about Abu Nidal's butchery in a January 1986 [Houston] Chronicle Outlook piece: "Attack by murderous attack, terrorists are teaching us about the world: about the vulnerability of open societies to assault, about the complexity and violence of Middle Eastern politics, about the difficulties of protecting ourselves, about the limits of our alliances and the reluctances of our allies, about the limits of law in international relations, and about the limits of civilization as well."

"Sooner or later," she added prophetically, "it will be necessary to take on the terrorists themselves."

TEXT: A syndicated Scripps Howard editorial appearing in both Ohio's Cincinnati Post and Tennessee's [Memphis] Commercial Appeal welcomed the news.

VOICE: The terrorist Abu Nidal is dead by gunshot at age 65, probably by his own hand but maybe not. There is no shortage of people who wanted him dead, including, perhaps, his Iraqi hosts. If terrorists could think long-term, which they can't .Abu Nidal's death would be a cautionary lesson. He died sick and alone except for a single bodyguard, his once fearsome terrorist organization reduced to a stash of weapons, explosives and fake identifications. . However his death occurred, there can only be one judgment on his passing: Good riddance.

TEXT: The Chicago Tribune, in commenting on the death, resurrects a famed comment from the past on another notorious figure.

VOICE: In one of the great, economical editorials of all time, the Philadelphia Daily News in 1975 noted the passing of Spain's ruthless ruler with two sentences: "They say only the good die young. Francisco Franco was 86." That came to mind Monday with the reports that Sabri Banna, better known as the terrorist Abu Nidal, was dead. He was about 65 [and reportedly] . suffering from cancer.

. America's most wanted terrorist in the 1970s and '80s, he lived most of his life in exile, dependent upon the transient support of regimes that hoped to profit from his activities. Abu Nidal . was a renegade Palestinian militant and something of an equal-opportunity killer: He may have been responsible for the deaths of as many "collaborationist" Arabs as he was for the slaying of Jews and their Western supporters.

Furious at Yasser Arafat for being too willing to compromise with Israel, Abu Nidal split from [Mr.] Arafat's Palestine Liberation Organization in 1974 and went on a rampage. Among his hits: the bombing of a Paris synagogue in 1980; the attempted assassination of the Israeli ambassador to London in 1982 . and the assassination of two of [Mr.] Arafat's top lieutenants in 1991. His successors in terror represent a more complicated system in which lines of authority are murkier and the motivation less mercenary, but he does have one common thread with the next generation: He was, first and last, a murderer.

TEXT: And lastly, The Kansas City [Missouri] Star is disturbed by the apparent link between Mr. Nidal and the government of Saddam Hussein.

VOICE: The world is a better place if reports of Abu Nidal's death are true. The Palestinian terrorist . showed the depths to which extremists can sink to satisfy their lust for innocent blood. The reports of [Mr.] Nidal's violent end in Baghdad came as the world was considering fresh evidence of the barbarism of other terrorists, those within the al-Qaida organization. This evidence came in dozens of videotapes that CNN [The Cable News Network] began showing this week.

The tapes, like Abu Nidal's long record of brutal atrocities, underscore the importance of the U-S-led war on international terrorism. Both should remind the world how much is at stake in the struggle against terrorist psychopaths and the regimes behind them.

TEXT: On that grim note from The Kansas City [Missouri] Star, we conclude this editorial sampling of comments on the death this week of Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal.

NEB/ANG/MEM