Bush extends PLO presence in Washington for six months By The Associated Press
U.S. President George W. Bush extended permission for the Palestine Liberation Organization to maintain an office in Washington for six months.
Bush acted by waiving provisions of the Anti-Terrorism Act of 1987 that prohibited the PLO from having an official presence in Washington. "I hereby determine and certify that it is important to the national security interests of the United States to waive the provisions," Bush wrote to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
After the ban became law, PLO founder and longtime chief Yasser Arafat renounced violence and recognized Israel the next year, and official U.S. PLO contact began a month later, in December 1989.
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President Bill Clinton was the first to waive the restriction, in 1993, and it has been waived continually since then.
The office serves as a contact point between the United States and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas.
While Abbas' Fatah group, the base of the PLO, controlled the Palestinians' autonomous government in Gaza and the West Bank, the office was considered the Palestinian government's unofficial mission in Washington.
Fatah lost government elections this year to Hamas, which the United States considers a terror group. Bush's order specified the Palestine Liberation Organization and did not mention the Palestinian Authority or Hamas.
