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Clinton Has No Clothes
What 9/11 revealed about the ex-president.

By Byron York, NR White House Correspondent
From the December 17, 2001, issue of National Review

snip

Khobar Towers happened not only in the midst of the president's re-election campaign but also at the end of a month in which there were new and damaging developments in the Whitewater and Filegate scandals.

Khobar Towers

"In June of 1996, it felt like an entire herd was converging on the White House," wrote Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos in his memoir, All Too Human. A herd of scandals, that is: In late May, independent counsel Kenneth Starr had convicted Jim and Susan McDougal and Jim Guy Tucker in the first big Whitewater trial; in June, the Filegate story first broke into public view, and Sen. Alphonse D'Amato issued his committee's Whitewater report recommending that several administration officials be investigated for perjury. It was also in June that the White House went into full battle mode against a variety of allegations contained in Unlimited Access, a book by former FBI agent Gary Aldrich.

All these developments were heavy on the minds of Clinton, Dick Morris, and the other members of the re-election strategy team when the bomb went off at Khobar Towers on June 25. As it had after the World Trade Center bombing, a distracted White House gave the case to law enforcement. But there is significant evidence to suggest that the White House was even less interested in finding answers than it had been in the World Trade Center case. In the Khobar investigation, the Clinton administration not only failed to follow potentially productive leads but in some instances actively made the investigators' job more difficult.

From the beginning, the administration ran into significant Saudi resistance (the Saudis quickly identified a few low-level suspects and beheaded them, hoping to end the matter there). According to a long account of the case by Elsa Walsh published earlier this year in The New Yorker, FBI director Louis Freeh on several occasions urged the White House to pressure the Saudis for more cooperation. More than once, Walsh reports, Freeh was frustrated to learn that the president barely mentioned the case in meetings with Saudi leaders.

Freeh — whose own relations with the White House had deteriorated badly in the wake of the Filegate and campaign-finance scandals — became convinced that the White House didn't really want to push the Saudis for more information, which Freeh believed would confirm strong suspicions of extensive Iranian involvement in the attack. Walsh reports that in September 1998, Freeh, angry and losing hope, took the extraordinary step of secretly asking former president George H. W. Bush to intercede with the Saudi royal family. Acting without Clinton's knowledge, Bush made the request, and the Saudis began to provide new information, which indeed pointed to Iran.

In late 1998, Walsh reports, Freeh went to national security adviser Sandy Berger to tell him that it appeared the FBI had enough evidence to indict several suspects. "Who else knows this?" Berger asked Freeh, demanding to know if it had been leaked to the press. Freeh said it was a closely held secret. Then Berger challenged some of the evidence of Iranian involvement. "That's just hearsay," Berger said. "No, Sandy," Freeh responded. "It's testimony of a co-conspirator . . ." According to Walsh's account, Freeh thought that "Berger . . . was not a national security adviser; he was a public-relations hack, interested in how something would play in the press. After more than two years, Freeh had concluded that the administration did not really want to resolve the Khobar bombing."

Ultimately, Freeh never got the support he wanted from the White House. Walsh writes that "by the end of the Clinton era, Freeh had become so mistrustful of Clinton that, although he believed 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." Just before Freeh left office, Walsh reports, he met with new president George W. Bush and gave him a list of suspects in the bombing. In June, attorney general John Ashcroft announced the indictment of 14 suspects: 13 Saudis and one Lebanese. It is not clear whether any of them are the "masterminds" of Khobar; none is in American custody and no Iranian officials were named in the indictment.

Both the Khobar investigation and the World Trade Center bombing presented Clinton with daunting challenges; there were sensitive political issues involved, and in each case it was not immediately clear who was behind the violence. But in neither instance did Clinton press hard for answers and demand action; Berger would not have taken the position he did if the president fully supported a vigorous investigation. In the coming years, Clinton would be faced with clear acts of terrorism carried out by an organization with undeniable state support. But again, busy with other things, he did little.

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