Leaving Out Louis Freeh's Best Bits
Reporter David Rosenbaum takes a belated peek into former F.B.I. director Louis Freeh's new book, "My F.B.I.," on Freeh's years serving the Clinton administration. The book accuses President Clinton of lacking a moral compass and, more specifically, of undermining a terrorist bombing probe in Saudi Arabia. However, Rosenbaum leads off his synopsis with Freeh's criticism of Richard Clarke, the former counter-terrorism chief who became a Times and media hero when he criticized the Bush administration for being unprepared for 9-11.
Still, the first three words from Rosenbaum make out Freeh as out for revenge: "Settling a score, Louis J. Freeh, director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation under President Bill Clinton and in the first six months of the Bush presidency, asserts in a new book that Richard A. Clarke, the former White House counterterrorism chief, was 'basically a second-tier player' who had little access to power and was in no position to issue credible warnings in advance of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon."
Two-thirds into the story, Rosenbaum gets to President Clinton: "Mr. Freeh also uses his book to fan the flames of his incendiary relationship with Mr. Clinton. 'With Bill Clinton,' Mr. Freeh writes in a chapter called 'Bill and Me,' 'the scandals and rumored scandals, the incubating ones and the dying ones, never ended. Whatever moral compass the president was consulting, it was leading him in the wrong direction, and he lacked the discipline to pull back once he found himself stepping into trouble. Worse, he had been behaving that way so long that the closets were full of skeletons just waiting to burst out.'"
Yet Rosenbaum leaves off some of the juicier bits about Clinton from Freeh's book, which were noted in the Washington Post last Friday by media reporter Howard Kurtz and Sunday night during Freeh's interview with CBS's "60 Minutes."
Kurtz writes of the Lewinsky saga: "During the Lewinsky probe that led to Clinton's impeachment, Freeh says, the FBI acted 'very confidentially' when it needed to obtain a blood sample from the president to compare to the semen stain on the former intern's blue dress. During a dinner, Freeh says, Clinton said he was going to the bathroom but entered another room where FBI technicians were waiting."
Rosenbaum also skips Freeh's account of Clinton's laxity after the 1996 Khobar Towers terrorist attack in Saudi Arabia, where 19 U.S. servicemen died. Freeh stated in his book that "Clinton raised the subject only to tell the crown prince that he understood the Saudi’s reluctance to cooperate [with the bombing investigation], and then he hit Abdullah up for a contribution to the Clinton Presidential Library."
Rosenbaum leaves Lewinsky to the very last paragraph, in a quote from Freeh.
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http://www.timeswatch.org/twarticles/2005/20051010.asp