OPINION:
Hillary Clinton is taking a lot of heat for her manifold greed and transgressions over the years since she and her husband brought their long-running circus to town 22 years ago, and she just can’t find a way to turn the thermostat down. Bubba, working the sidelines, has so far escaped renewed scrutiny of his past sins. Husband or wife, the Clintons just don’t have time to think about anyone but themselves. They have buried one particular transgression that inflicted considerable pain on a lot of innocent and trusting Americans.
Until now. Our John Solomon reported in The Washington Times Tuesday that President Clinton’s administration gathered enough evidence to accuse Iran of facilitating the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia, which killed 19 American soldiers and wounded nearly 500 others of several nationalities. A decade later an American court found Iran and Hezbollah guilty of orchestrating the crime.
But Mr. Clinton suppressed much of that information, keeping it away from the families of the slain, who took it on faith that he was doing everything he could to bring the guilty to justice. He kept the information away from the public, and worse, away from elements of U.S. intelligence agencies because he was afraid it would lead to an outcry for reprisal. Interviews with administration officials, armed with documents, make all that very clear.
The revelations about what Mr. Clinton and his administration knew, and when they knew it (in the classic definition of presidential culpability lifted from the Watergate scandal) takes on new significance in the wake of Barack Obama’s sweetheart deal with Iran, and with the arrest in August of Ahmed al-Mughasi, one of the Saudi conspirators. His apprehension provided fresh evidence of Iranian complicity in the Khobar Towers attack and efforts to shield him from justice for more than a decade.
Louis Freeh, who was the director of the FBI at the time, tells The Times that when he asked the Clinton White House for help in getting access to the Saudi suspects he was thwarted once, twice, several times. When he succeeded in going around Mr. Clinton and returned with evidence of Iranian complicity, he was told it was “hearsay” and he should not “spread it around” because the administration had decided to warm relations with Tehran and didn’t want to rock the boat.
“They were looking to change the relationship with the regime there,” he told The Times, “which is foreign policy, and the FBI has nothing to do with that. They didn’t like that, but I did what I thought was proper.” It was a classic case of cops closing in on criminals, only to be stopped by politics. Was Mr. Clinton and his administration merely trying to relieve pressure to do something? He was offering big talk elsewhere that he was in hot pursuit of justice to avenge the loss of American lives.
Mr. Freeh cites another example of the Clinton administration showing undue deference to Iran, deference the FBI thought put national security at risk. “They were encouraging me not to do surveillance on the cultural teams and athletic teams that were starting to come into the United States. And I refused as director, saying we had good evidence that the Iranians had put their agents on those wrestling teams and they were coming into the United States to contact [their] sources.”
Such interference with the pursuit of the conspirators pollutes the search for the intelligence every president must have. “You cannot provide your intelligence community with selective intelligence without corrupting the process,” he said, “and that was an outrage.”
Hillary has endorsed Mr. Obama’s deal with the mullahs in Tehran, and vowed to strike with arms if Iran cheats, as it always has. She insists she’s her own woman, and perhaps she would never be influenced by her husband’s precedent of going easy on a foe for the sake of politics. But she hasn’t earned trust like that.
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