Lando 
Posted on 10/11/2005 4:54:33 PM PDT by Lando Lincoln
In June of 2001 a Federal Grand Jury in Alexandria Virginia returned a 46 count indictment against fourteen individuals thought responsible for the June 25, 1996 bombing of the US Air Force housing complex, Building 131 at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia.
Five years earlier, on the day of the Khobar bombing, never missing an opportunity to role-play as the sensitive but tough Chief Executive, Clinton proved once again that the most dangerous place to be in DC during his presidency - aside from Ft. Marcy Park - was between himself and a television camera, in this instance tersely making this statement, feigning rage while studiously biting his lower lip:
"The cowards who committed this murderous act must not go unpunished. Let me say again: We will pursue this. America takes care of our own. Those who did it must not go unpunished."
On the following day June 26, 1996, grandstanding as he prepared to fly to Lyon France for the G7 Summit, Clinton committed the following gaffe - a revealing Freudian slip.
"Let me be very clear: We will not resist" - the president then correcting his misstatement - "we will not rest in our efforts to find who is responsible for this outrage, to pursue them and to punish them. Anyone who attacks one American attacks every American, and we protect and defend our own."
He went on to claim, "...Last night, I directed an FBI team of 40 experts, investigators and forensic experts to go there to work with the Saudi Arabian authorities."
In fact it was FBI Director Freeh who immediately dispatched the team to Saudi Arabia and the size of the contingent was 125, not 40.
"Louis Freeh, the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, was visiting relatives in New Jersey when he was told about the bombing, and he immediately dispatched a hundred and twenty-five agents and employees to Saudi Arabia." - Elsa Walsh, "Louis Freeh's Last Case," New Yorker Magazine, April 14, 2001
At the end of his statement he refused to answer a reporter's question, "Mr. President, will the FBI be able to conduct an independent investigation?"
The juxtaposition of Clinton's misstatement along with his refusal to even promise an "independent investigation" looms mightily in retrospect.
What is clear is that the Clinton's Justice Department's interest in the matter was in preventing the issuance of an indictment in the case for 5 years, a period of time in which leads went cold while the president obstructed justice in the matter, doing everything in his power to frustrate and curtail his long suffering FBI Director's investigation.
Clinton's obstruction took place because it quickly became obvious that the Khobar Tower bombing plot was orchestrated by the terrorist state of Iran - coordinated by its Revolutionary Guard.
Mr. Clinton's actions in shielding Iran show such an amazing degree of deference that its Mullahs might just as well have been his personal clients.
Fortunately, Mr. Freeh is in the news again, as is Mr. Clinton - the former pushing his new book, "My FBI," the latter as the seeming butt of that work.
The bad news for Bill and Hillary Clinton is that Mr. Freeh is apparently unskilled in the Kerry-esque art of nuanced language and is savaging his former boss:
"Bill Clinton raised the subject [Khobar] only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudis' reluctance to cooperate and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library...That's a fact that I am reporting." - Louis B. Freeh
In a time when sham indictments by partisan Texas Democrats serve as daily gruel for the haters of the left and their media supporters, a factual re-examination of Clinton's obstruction of the Khobar Tower's investigation might well draw the proper contrast between real and imagined wrongdoing.
If this saga's blowback also serves to hinder a Hillary Clinton candidacy in '08 - deracinating whatever good will still accrues to the co-presidency of William Jefferson Clinton, so much the better.
As outlined in our previous piece 10 Years And Counting - Still No Exit Plan From Clinton Created, European Al-Qaeda Base the Clinton Administration had a curious hands off regard for the terrorist state of Iran and the Khobar Towers case treads upon that same ground, but in a different way.
From the outset we see the same cast of foreign policy amateur players - Clinton, NSC Director Anthony Lake and Lake's Deputy Sandy Berger. Augmenting this cadre was the Don Knotts of diplomacy, Secretary of State Warren Christopher.
From Freeh's vantage point he saw the unprecedented scandals fall, one upon another: Whitewater/Madison Guarantee, corrupt aides such as Web Hubble and Bernie Nussbaum, Jennifer Flowers, the Paula Jones sexual harassment case, Hillary's attempted health care putsch and "cattle futures" speculation, the curious death of Vincent Foster, Travelgate, Clinton/Gore's massive Chinagate campaign funding abuses, Janet Reno's refusal to appoint a special prosecutor to deal with it and a dozen other scandals including Clinton's pardoning of the FALN Puerto Rican terrorists and Filegate.
About the latter Freeh opined:
"The prior system of providing files to the White House relied on good faith and honor. Unfortunately, the FBI and I were victimized."
Clinton was not held in high regard by the professionals at the FBI. Regarding a briefing demanded by Secretary of State Madeline Albright on the Chinese angle to the campaign contribution investigation, Robert "Bear" Bryant [Freeh's National Security Deputy] knowing that the information would eventually filter back to Bill Clinton, exclaimed incredulously to Freeh in a telephone conversation:
"Why should we brief him?...He's a crook. He's no better than a bank robber. Would we tell a bank robber about our investigation?" - Elsa Walsh, "Louis Freeh's Last Case," New Yorker Magazine, April 14, 2001
Clinton's motivation to hinder the Khobar investigation, which now prompts the unusually harsh criticism of a former FBI Director, bled throughout his administration. While the FBI necessarily took the lead role delving into the Saudi bombing, Congress was also pursuing it independently, though it also found itself being stonewalled at the highest levels.
On July 7, 1998 Arlen Specter charged Defense Dept. Secretary William Perry with obstructing the Senate's investigation into Khobar.
"...This letter constitutes a formal complaint on the obstruction by you, others and the Department of Defense on the inquiry by the Intelligence Committee to determine whether there was an intelligence failure relating to the terrorist attack in Dhahran on June 25, 1996 on the following...Prohibiting key witnesses from being interviewed by this Committee...the concerns we had on prohibiting General Downing from testifying...Refusing to give this committee access to an Air Force report which, was reported in the Washington Post on October 10..." - Congressional Record, July 7, 1997
From the outset Freeh sensed that while the Clinton team publicly feigned interest in getting to the bottom of Khobar, in private they sabotaged it:
"Freeh also heard from his Saudi counterparts that there had been little followup to the Administration's statements; as a result, a mixed signal was being sent about the seriousness of United States resolve. Freeh came to believe that the Clinton Administration feared jeopardizing its strategic relationships in the Middle East by pressing too hard; in fact, by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he believed that he had developed enough evidence to seek indictments against the masterminds behind the attack, not just the front-line suspects, he decided to wait for a new Administration." - Elsa Walsh, "Louis Freeh's Last Case," New Yorker Magazine, April 14, 2001
The simple fact is that the key evidence that the FBI developed and which led to the 2001 indictment [containing a total of 38 references to the Iranian government] came only as a result of the sudden cooperation by the Saudis - orchestrated by George Herbert Walker Bush, who had serious clout with the Royal Family after the first Gulf War - and who had been asked by Freeh to intervene in the matter.
"...he approached former President George Bush and asked him to intervene with the Saudi royal family...On November 9, 1998, Freeh finally got what he had been seeking for two and a half years. From behind a one-way mirror, F.B.I. agents watched and listened as Saudi law-enforcement officers posed the Bureau's two hundred and twelve questions to eight suspects. The suspects confirmed their involvement in the bombing and described how the Iranians had ordered, supported, and financed the attack." - Elsa Walsh, "Louis Freeh's Last Case," New Yorker Magazine, April 14, 2001
From the Clinton administration's ill-reasoned intervention in Bosnia to its refusal to confront the obvious in the Khobar Towers case, the only constant seems to be a policy of tilting towards Tehran.
Why was that?
One reason is Mr. Clinton's understanding of Iranian history, a subject which he expounded upon in an interview he did with Charlie Rose in Davos, Switzerland in January of 2005:
"Iran's a whole different kettle of fish, but it's a sad story that really began in the 1950s when the United States deposed Mr. Mossadegh, who was an elected parliamentary democrat, and brought the Shah back in [Rose says "CIA" in the background] and then he was overturned by the Ayatollah Khomeini, driving us into the arms of one Saddam Hussein. Most of the terrible things Saddam Hussein did in the 1980s he did with the full, knowing support of the United States government, because he was in Iran, and Iran was what it was because we got rid of the parliamentary democracy back in the '50s; at least, that is my belief."
So great were the "crimes" the United States committed against Iran that Clinton felt it - unbelievably - necessary to apologize.
"I apologized when President Khatami was elected. I publicly acknowledged that the United States had actively overthrown Mossadegh and I apologized for it..."
This is a shocking thing to see in print, an American ex-president apologizing to the Mullahs and evidently swallowing the standard hard-left/Marxist line on Iran - one indistinguishable from that put forth by Noam Chomsky and Gar Alperovitz - and goes a long way to explaining where the leader of the Clinton team was coming from ideologically.
But as the interview progressed it got even stranger; Clinton seemingly having an Al Gore moment:
"It [Iran] is the only one with elections, including the United States, including Israel, including you name it, where the liberals, or the progressives, have won two-thirds to 70 percent of the vote in six elections...In every single election, the guys I identify with got two-thirds to 70% of the vote. There is no other country in the world I can say that about, certainly not my own..."
This country that the ex-president so admires is the same one which held 66 American hostages for 444 days [until freed by the mere presence of Ronald Reagan], killed 19 American servicemen in at Khobar and continues to underwrite the terrorist organizations Hizbullah, Hamas, Al Gama'at al-Islamiya, al-Jihad, PKK [Kurdish Worker's Party], Palestinian Islamic Jihad and the PFLP [Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine].
Iran is exporting Islamic terror all over the world - even funding Hizbullah bases in South America. To the surprise of few, Clinton's "progressives" are building nuclear weapons, already having medium range ballistic missiles thoroughly capable of delivering them.
At some point determining the motives of people like Bill Clinton is a wasteful and futile exercise, the fact is that he has consistently - for reasons which are obvious, and not so obvious - demonstrated a willingness to betray America to an ideology indistinguishable from the threat represented by the Third Reich.
Taken as a whole, the Clinton administration's promoting of Iranian influence in Europe during the war in the Balkans combined with his obstruction of justice in the Khobar Towers bombing investigation - acting as an agent for Tehran - should force us to realize the national security threat that the Clintonista regime represented in the past and might again in the near future.
A conservative led national discussion of this matter might possibly be the best opportunity to stop a Hillary candidacy dead-cold before '08 - already discredited Clinton hacks like document thief Sandy "The Burglar" Berger and hatchet man Lanny Davis are mounting the counter-attack.
In our opinion, if the Republican party flinches on this one, it may very well cease to be a relevant political force.
Lando
Not when the American ex-President is a hard left Marxist!
Very good article Lando, thanks a bunch!
marking for later.
One word...WOW
I can't believe I actually favored Clinton over the republicans at one time.... I feel so dirty.
Why did I not learn of this from SeeBS?
yeah this is a powerhouse of a piece, my only complaint is that it really doesn't belong in the Blog section.
I agree.....I'd hope that the mods would give it a place on the News/editorial board. It's powerful content warrants it. In the meantime.....pinging to a few FRiends.
Lando 
Good find, thanks for the ping Lando.
Very good article about our former "crook-in-chief".
Thanks for the ping!
Thanks for the ping.
Thanks Lando, this is a great piece. Sort of makes all the other carping and whining insignificant, doesn't it?
Thank you both for bringing this important editorial/article to my attention!!!
And to think his wife thought Nixon was a crook whilst she worked overtime as a CONgressional crookette to try to impeach Nixon!!! Phhhhhhhht!!!
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