Posted on 10/18/2001 12:25:47 PM PDT by summer
I could not format this editorial for some reason, but, it is well worth a read. Click on the source if you are interested.
The writer builds an impressive case against former FBI director Louis Freeh, lambasting Freeh for his failure to do his job during his eight years in office.
The result, according to the writer, was Freeh's "welcome mat" to terrorists -- and, the events eventually resulting in the September 11, 2001 attack on America by terrorists.
Within days, it had published the names of nearly 20 of the terrorists, and fleshed out its reports with good-quality photographs of most. These photographs, evidently, came from American files: the men they showed were all dead and burned or crushed to a pulp within the ruins of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington.
To this point, nobody has asked why the F.B.I. had not been able to do a similar job of recognising these terrorists and neutralizing them before the events of September 11.
The blunt answer can be given in two words: Louis Freeh. His mind was not on the job. Until June 30, when he retired early from his position as F.B.I. director, Freeh acted in the frequently enunciated belief that the United States had nothing or little to fear from foreign terrorists' acting within its borders.
Even worse, on May 10 this year, Freeh took action without precedent from any senior security official responsible for combatting terrorist risks. In history, in any nation.
On that day, in sworn public testimony before the US Senate committees on appropriations and armed services, and the select committee on intelligence, he told the world that the United States was not properly equipped for counterterrorism. He added the further advice that the US would not have "the core competencies to combat terrorism" until fiscal 2005. And to aid any terrorists who hadn't picked up the news that America would remain largely helpless for the next four years before any terrorist organisation wishing it ill, he caused the F.B.I. to put his testimony on its Website, where it appears to this date. Its URL is http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress01/freeh051001.htm.
Here is the relevant Freeh testimony: "In an effort to keep pace with the changing terrorist threat to the United States, the F.B.I. is implementing a new management and operational initiative to further strengthen its ability to combat terrorism. This initiative, referred to as MAXCAP05, has as its goal the achievement by Fiscal Year 2005 of five core competencies or capacities for its Counterterrorism Program: investigative, intelligence, communications, liaison, and program management."
This welcome mat for world terrorism was extended in a prepared opening statement in which Freeh had pointed out that "Loosely affiliated extremists, motivated by political or religious beliefs, may pose the most urgent threat to the United States. Within this category, Sunni Islamic extremists, such as Osama bin Laden and individuals affiliated with his Al-Qaeda organization, have demonstrated a willingness and capability to carry out attacks resulting in large-scale casualties and destruction against US citizens, facilities, and interests."
Freeh knew about the threat. He knew where it was likely to come from. He hoped it wouldn't matter until fiscal 2005.
His testimony apparently raised no eyebrows among the senators hearing it, and it seems to have attracted no interest from the US news media. Freeh's admission of grave failure came from a man who had been F.B.I. director at that point for some eight years, who had the suppression of terrorism as one of his primary responsibilities, and who had garnered considerable publicity for himself and the bureau in recent years through a series of flashy, expensive and ineffective foreign adventures against terrorist activities in Africa and Arabia.
It now seems clear that no matter whether they were in Africa, Arabia, Florida or New York City, foreign terrorists had little or nothing to fear from Freeh's F.B.I.. This did not trouble him greatly, since he had taken the public position that foreign terrorists were no domestic threat to the United States. As is now increasingly clear, Freeh, who enjoys being addressed as "Judge Freeh", had also devoted himself during his eight years in office to playing domestic politics to the profound disadvantage of his nation; had established what was to become in effect a secret, parallel Department of State with the assistance of the ambassador of a foreign state -- and former US President G H W Bush; had robbed the F.B.I. of valuable human and financial resources; was inattentive generally to many of his sworn duties; had presided over an unprecedented series of bureau bungles; and had generated a remarkable number of publicity activities designed to show that he, personally, was a nice fellow.
It appears that during Louis Freeh's eight years in office, one of the most dangerous places in official Washington was standing between the F.B.I. director and an international air ticket. In his resignation speech in May this year, he proudly said he has visited 68 foreign nations as F.B.I. director, and there met "more than 2100 foreign leaders." Why?
While the terrorists responsible for this month's attacks on the United States were plotting their crimes, infiltrating their agents into the United States, getting them into flying schools and taking all other needed steps to kill 6000 Americans or more, Freeh was giving a series of interviews to Elsa Walsh of The New Yorker magazine that ran, she reported in the magazine's May 14, 2001 edition, over a 12-month period. Walsh clearly had no idea that Freeh's maudlin self-aggrandizement might be presenting a clear picture of an F.B.I. director betraying his country. Evidently, neither did Freeh understand that this was the story he was boastfully presenting. Nonetheless, her admiring story must have made clear to many that Louis Freeh wasn't doing his job. It seems that nobody chose to write anything about it.
To many Washington observers, Freeh's official misbehavior is no news at all. Last year, then-US Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Department of Justice lawyer Randy Bellows, described on another occasion by The Washington Post as "smart, conscientious and hardworking," to establish exactly what was going wrong in one particularly important F.B.I. activity. His report was to cover the "Handling of the Los Alamos National Laboratory Investigation." Its finding in brief was that Freeh had not kept abreast of this investigation - which was about the sensitive issue of whether American nuclear secrets were being sent abroad. (In the weeks before the hijacked aeroplane attacks, the F.B.I. boasted of cracking a criminal enterprise that was rigging the McDonald's customer sweepstakes, and separately, showing pictures of most-wanted criminal in cinemas during the intermission slide shows.)
The F.B.I. had been called in by the US Department of Energy in 1996 to investigate the DoE's belief that nuclear weapons secrets were being stolen. The DoE's report wasn't very good, Bellows was to find last year. In fact, he wrote, it "was a deeply flawed product whose shortcomings went unrecognised and unaddressed due to the F.B.I.'s own inadequate investigation. Had either the F.B.I. or DoE done what it should have done, the F.B.I. could have been investigating in the year 1996 what it is now investigating in the year 2000." And, possibly, in October 2001.
More recently, another senior DoJ lawyer, Larry Thompson, found it necessary to send the F.B.I. a memo using nice short words to explain that the F.B.I. was required by law to notify the DoJ's criminal division "without delay" when it finds reasonable indications of a significant federal crime during the course of an intelligence (or, more often, counterintelligence) investigation. This memo was prompted by the widespread belief in official Washington that under Freeh, the F.B.I. was concealing its activities more or less at whim, despite a legal requirement for the bureau to do otherwise.
The Thompson memo followed publication of the claim by long-established Washington reporter Robert Novak that he had interviewed two F.B.I. Agents who had told him that, under Freeh, they regarded keeping secrets from the DoJ as their primary responsibility. The US journalists had of course been grateful for the F.B.I. leaks, and by and large gave no details on who was leaking. Novak broke the line, but only after former F.B.I. Agent Robert Hanssen had been jailed for life. Some weeks thereafter, Novak revealed that one of his top stories of 1997 had come from Hanssen (see box). Novak, post- sentencing, quoted Hanssen, formerly and frequently a confidential source, as having told him in 1995: "'The whole idea is to keep sources secret from the Justice Department. If Justice is going to have full access to our files, we have no purpose.'" Novak continued: "I now have rechecked these quotes with another F.B.I. source ... . He agreed completely with these sentiments and attested to their accuracy." Novak's revelation that investigating crime had not been the F.B.I.'s primary responsibility, again seems to have raised no official eyebrows.
Beverley Lumpkin, who has covered the DoJ for ABC News for 15 years, discussed the Thompson memo at the time of its issuance with the former head of the DoJ's criminal division's internal security section, John Martin, who told her that some of the biggest problems he had encountered during his years of prosecuting espionage cases "surrounded not being notified by the F. B.I.". Again, this attracted no official attention. Of the long-drawn-out and so far unsuccessful Los Alamos espionage investigation, Bellows reported last year that it wasn't just the DoJ that didn't know what the F.B.I. was up to: director Freeh didn't have much of an idea, either. The Bellows report, The Los Angeles Times reported, suggests Freeh was not fully advised on the Lee case as agents continued to focus on Lee for at least two years after CIA assurances that Lee was no spy.
Inattentive on the job, illegally keeping secrets from the Department of Justice; widely accused by Washington journalists of leaking or permitting the leaking of many confidential bureau documents designed to harm the Clinton administration; and devoting considerable work time to home duties that included coaching his children's sport teams during office hours, Freeh moved from simple incompetence that showed up in an increasing number of public bungles of increasing seriousness; moved on to malfeasance and possible treason. It may be naive to hope that the events of September 11 will be the most serious evidences of his failures to come to attention. Evidence was amassing from several sources that director Freeh was leading an F.B.I. in which professional misconduct was standard operating procedure. He himself clearly moved into criminal malfeasance and perhaps active treason in a series of events admiringly recounted by a naive Elsa Walsh in The New Yorker's 11-page article of May 14, 2001. The New Yorker's Walsh evidently found Freeh hypnotic. She cites the Freeh gloat about the Clinton cabinet that "they are terrified of me" without suggesting there was any moral oddity about it.
For reasons tied up with his personal status, Freeh had cultivated her in a series of appointments throughout the last 12 months of his term in office. The article as published seemed of negligible value to the F.B.I. or the United States, but it made Louis J Freeh look pretty good.
In broad outline, what Freeh proudly laid out to Walsh was that he had formed a secret liaison with Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia's ambassador to the United Nations, following the bombing of Khobar Towers, a building in Saudi Arabia that housed American air force personnel. Eleven US service personnel had been killed, and as soon as Freeh heard of the incident, he sent 150 F.B.I. staff to Saudi Arabia. It's not known whether any of them spoke or understood Arabic. Troubled by the fact that Saudi Arabian investigators were not cooperating as he wished with the F.B.I. visitors, Freeh soon thereafter made three separate trips to the kingdom and as well set up a secret and parallel State Department in association with Prince Bandar. The two enlisted former president George H W Bush, whom Walsh describes as favourably known to the Saudis because of his role in leading the United Nations forces in the Gulf War 10 years ago.
This preposterous and very likely treasonous conduct persisted despite the fact that the Saudis had already rounded up all the known persons responsible for the bombing: the F.B.I. had no investigation work to do there, and Freeh did not suggest to Walsh that it had any skills appropriate to this unprecedented assignment.
In the wake of the affair, Prince Bandar recalled with pleasure how Freeh had allowed him to be the only person to smoke at F.B.I. headquarters - he favours large cigars - and described the F.B.I. director to Walsh as "a lovely human being, but much more sophisticated and deadly than he is benign. "
The mixed feelings with which local US law enforcement agencies recognise that the F.B.I. is muscling in on their investigations is part of America's common understandings. That foreign governments might have mixed feelings about the F.B.I.'s - to them, a foreign and uninvited organisation - arrival to tramp into a domestic investigation, was beyond Freeh's comprehension, as later events were to show.
Come 1998 and the terrorist bombings that killed Americans in Kenya and Somalia, and this time, Freeh doubled his bet and the F.B.I.'s financial investment. He dispatched more than 300 F.B.I. personnel ("Nearly 400." - Walsh) to those nations. As before, they caught nobody. All arrests resulted from investigations by local authorities.
Come 2000, and the USS Cole bombing drew 150 F.B.I. staff to Yemen. As before, all arrests were achieved by local authorities apparently without US assistance, and as before, it's still not clear whether any of the F.B.I. staff sent to Yemen spoke or understood Arabic.
On May 1 this year, a week or so before the Walsh article appeared, Freeh delivered a retirement speech to senior colleagues that's extraordinary both for its blindness and its maudlin nature. Blind in that he boasted as among his achievements having accomplished "uncompromising personal and institutional integrity" days after senior F.B.I. Agent Robert Hanssen had been jailed for life for selling secrets to the USSR and later, Russia, for 15 years, and funneling his fees for this service to a drug-addicted stripper.
Blind in that he boasted of his "compassion" after the world knew of the shameless persecution of Wen Ho Lee, denied the right to speak Chinese, his native tongue, to his wife and children for months while in unnecessary solitary detention in a federal jail. It appears that the F.B.I. may be deficient in understanding Mandarin, a language spoken very widely even within the United States. The judge who imposed the ban on speaking it, at F.B.I. demand, later apologised to Dr Lee in open court for doing so. Freeh was blind also in his boasting of "rigorous obedience to the United States Constitution" after years of being untrue to his oath of office by keeping secrets from his president and his Attorney General, and leaking confidential documents to embarrass the Clinton administration.
The maudlin quality showed up in the second sentence of his prepared remarks. In its first sentence, he announced his intention to retire on June 30. In his second, he thanked "my loving wife, Marilyn and my six sons for allowing me to serve our Nation for over a quarter of a century." He then boasted of his achievements, and some time thereafter, got around to thanking his F.B.I. colleagues. It was like an addled Oscar acceptance speech.
As the F.B.I. director spoke, the Freeh boys were aged between 16 and three. The suggestion is that an eight-year-old boy allowed Freeh to take office in 1993, and one today aged three started extending his permission from the cradle in 1998.
The Walsh story in The New Yorker makes clear that Freeh has an unusual emotional make-up. He accepted the appointment from Clinton in 1993 on two understandings: independent management and allowance of family issues. Independent, not eccentric. The joke within F.B.I. circles soon thereafter became that he was the first-ever presidentially appointed F.B.I. case officer (fairly junior investigator). When he felt like taking time off to go home, he did it, when he felt like taking days off to go into spiritual retreat with families left behind by terrorist outrages, he did that, too. Who was minding the store? The events of last month in New York City and Washington suggest that Louis Freeh wasn't, but these were far from the first evidence of it. Oddly, when he felt like delivering speeches warning fellow Americans against the danger of having a political head of the F.B.I., he did that, too, although reading the Walsh piece makes it clear that the man delivering these speeches was himself an extremely political head of the F.B.I., plus undercover diplomat.
Walsh's lengthy and admiring piece suggests that Freeh, rather like Osama bin Laden, is a man with a troubled view of his religion. A former altar boy, he carries a prayer book at all times, and frequently consults it in prayer - a sight that Walsh may have witnessed. His priorities are extremely personal: in appearances before the US Senate, he referred to the importance of security for the F.B.I. and his nation - F.B.I. first. He was an exceptionally successful F.B.I. director in one field, and possibly only one: he persuaded Congress to increase the bureau's budget by more than $US1.27 billion, a 58 per cent rise. Of course, he then spent large shares of that budget on stealing hundreds of F.B.I. personnel away from domestic investigations for fruitless adventures in Arabia and Africa that resulted in no arrests and apparently poisoned US relations with the countries that unwillingly found themselves host to these foreign armies of unsuccessful Americans.
Clearly, F.B.I. Agents in Yemen do not check out reports that suspicious foreigners are learning how to fly aircraft within the United States.
Imagine for a moment that you are a terrorist hoping to harm a foreign nation: what could be kindlier to your criminal intentions than removing from their duties 150 of the people responsible for detecting and foiling your plans, and sending them abroad. That's exactly what Louis Freeh did after the USS Cole bombing - and after his earlier experience with the Khobar Towers, Kenyan and Tanzanian "investigations" had shown such actions a complete waste of F.B.I. money and skills.
Whether for reasons of embarrassment or ignorance, the news media have done nothing to sheet home to Freeh any responsibility for the lack of appropriate counterterrorism measures that might have forestalled or restricted last month's stupefying terrorist successes. Nobody has yet to pick up and take away Freeh's public welcome mat for world terrorists quoted above, or to recognise that the mat will be out there - if things progress as Freeh said four months ago that he expected them to - until fiscal 2005. United States senators and congresspersons have yet to indicate any public understanding of the picture of incompetence that Freeh painted before them in smug, scripted public appearances. This is despite the fact that F.B.I. failures have been public, many and gross for at least the past two years.
The F.B.I. Website has had amazing stories to tell, but nobody in the news media seems to have been interested in reading them. The site's recent defense of the bureau's failure to hand over needed McVeigh investigation documents boiled down to this: we told our people to send the files to head office, but they just wouldn't do it. Those naughty boys.
This month, the world saw that America was sleeping. Foreign terrorists weren't. In his role as director, Freeh had not been asleep. He was extremely active doing the wrong job. But the US Congress was fast asleep. So were the news media, none more shamefully than the online news service Salon.com, which responded in June last year to a congressional commission warning of terrorism by describing the warning as a con... hype... "like a Robert Ludlum novel".
The basis for Salon.com's tragically mistaken view? Well, there were two. One was Louis Freeh's congressional testimony in April 1999, in which he told America there was no reason to fear foreign terrorists. This is not the testimony quoted at the head of this article. The other was that when the Salon.com national correspondent Bruce Shapiro looked at a foreign student in the US, he always saw a "genial smile." Salon prides itself on the quality of its journalism.
Any analysis of the Freeh calamity must incorporate an examination of the dire impact of anti-Clinton malice, so rich a feature of US politics in the last decade. Walsh of the New Yorker quotes Freeh's gloating that the Clinton cabinet was terrified of him. She also says that he sent back his White House pass early in his term, and was difficult for President Clinton to get on the phone thereafter. This is not how things should be between any US president and his or her F.B.I. director.
Clinton now may look on his selection of Louis J Freeh, then a respected federal judge, as his biggest single mistake as president. It is reasonable to suggest that he recognised his error fairly soon after he had made it - Freeh made little secret of his impertinences - but the climate of Clinton hatred and suspicion in Congress throughout Clinton's terms of office, and the never-ending series of official investigations of Clinton behaviour by the F.B.I. and others throughout those years meant that had the president fired Freeh - he could have - Congress would certainly have fired him in turn, probably only a few weeks later. This makes nonsense of any suggestion that the only malice leading to this month's successful attacks, was Islamic.
Freeh has left; the shabby culture he nurtured, thrives. In early days after the events of September 11, 2001, an increasing number of US news reports cited unnamed sources as blaming the C.I.A. for the catastrophe - an viewpoint of considerable value to an F.B.I. potentially at risk of detailed investigation itself. The frequency of these stories was likely behind the decision in late September that President George W. Bush should make an unusual voyage in armored convoy to C.I.A. headquarters to express his faith in the agency.
As September drew to a close, the highly skilled F.B.I. spin machine was working balls-out. Defying the facts as laid out by Freeh in his Senate testimony in May this year and April 2000, the bureau spoke of "the 1998 decision by then-Director Louis Freeh to make terrorism a top agency priority" during what were evidently extensive briefings to reporters from The Washington Post. Unnamed "F.B.I. officials say the agency is vastly better prepared than it was five years ago [to combat foreign terrorism]", the newspaper reported. The spin doctors offered no evidence to support the claim, other than an sharp increase in F.B.I. funds spent on "counterterrorism." The Post reporters apparently did not know enough to ask what share of those extra funds had been spent on hotel accommodations for armies F.B.I. Agents living in Saudi Arabia, Kenya. Tanzania and Yemen. It's an interesting question.
The reporters did however write that in late September 2001, the current F.B. I. director, Robert Mueller, was "pleading for help from Americans fluent in Arabic, Farsi and Pashto." It only took the departure of Freeh and three years of totally failed investigations among Arabic speakers and writers abroad, and the amassing of stacks of F.B.I. documents and taped telephone recordings in these languages - stacks that the F.B.I. has been unable to assess - for the call to be issued. It's interesting to ponder whether the F. B.I., famously concerned by possibly spying risks from the Peoples Republic of China, is satisfied with its ability to understand equivalent documents in written Chinese, and tape recordings in the major Chinese dialects. Even Mandarin would be good.
Its poor understanding of its sworn duty showed up in testimony of Freeh assistant Kenneth Senser early this year: he told a US Senate committee that the arrest of F.B.I. Agent and enemy spy Robert Hanssen showed "there are committed adversaries with the intent and capability to harm the interests of the F.B.I. and the United States." F.B.I. first, as usual. And events in New York City and Washington this month suggest that in recent years, the US hasn't necessarily come second.
Other recent F.B.I. achievements:
The laboratory
The Department of Justice issued a 517-page report in April, 1997, examining allegations of wrongdoing and improper practices within certain sections of the F.B.I. laboratory, principally the Explosives Unit, the Materials Analysis Unit, and the Chemistry-Toxicology Unit. The report issued 40 recommendations for improvement. Freeh's F.B.I. accepted all.
One year later, the DoJ found that the F.B.I. had done a sound and responsible job of making most changes, but also "identified some areas of [continuing] specific concern."
The laboratory, from the bureau's founding by J Edgar Hoover, had formerly been one of its glories. Its current standard is unknown.
The computers
In July this year, F.B.I. Assistant Director Information Resources Division, Bob E. Dies told the Senate judiciary committee: "F.B.I. information technology has had no meaningful improvements in over six years... More than 13,000 of our desktops are four to eight years old. They cannot run today's basic software... Many Agents accessing basic F.B.I. data cannot use basic "ease of use" features that your teenagers have enjoyed for years... The productivity loss and frustration that result are enormous. Agents are unable to electronically store much of investigative information into our primary investigative databases, including photographs, graphical and tabular data. Fundamentally, at the dawn of the 21st century, the F.B.I. is asking its Agents and support personnel to do their jobs without the tools... that you may use at home on your system.
Our IT infrastructure is in need of repair and our approach to IT planning and funding has been less than adequate... [Improvement] requires a continual commitment to change that has been difficult for the F.B.I. culture in the past."
In the F.B.I.'s Report to the American People on the Work of the F.B.I. 1993 - 1998, Louis Freeh author, the claim was made that "we issue a laptop computer in addition to the traditional Agent equipment (handgun, credentials, badge) to each new Special Agent." The claim was republished in March this year; but it is untrue.
The leaks
Several leaks attacking Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno were described by US news media as coming from the F.B.I.. A separate F.B.I. leak in April last year revealed that a laptop with diplomatic secrets went missing at the US State Department headquarters. It was later revealed that Robert Hanssen, at that time an extremely active spy for a foreign power, was the F.B.I.'s counterterrorism liaison based at State's headquarters.
In late September 2000, then-President Clinton told reporters that another F. B.I. leak was designed to distract attention from evidence of then-current revelations that the F.B.I. had been delinquent for years in reporting its actions at Waco.
"In a normal system, the F.B.I. would do as it is asked to do by the Justice Department," says Carl Stern, a former DOJ spokesman, "but the bureau does not take instruction and direction. If it feels it is going to be on the losing side, it will go to the press or the Hill."
The Los Alamos security investigation
After more than four years' expensive involvement, the F.B.I. still cannot tell America whether anybody has been stealing nuclear bomb secrets, or selling them abroad. Dr Wen Ho Lee spent nine months in jail for taking some files home, a felony, but no suggestion continues that he planned to profit from this, or send them to any foreign power.
The Agent in charge of the investigation has been quoted as saying he was confident there are Chinese spies at Los Alamos, because there are Chinese restaurants in nearby White Sands, New Mexico.
The failed foreign bombing investigations
The F.B.I. did not arrest a single person after investing hundreds of person-years in investigations of attacks on US citizens in Africa and Arabia. The US government has effectively purchased some persons arrested by foreign police for future trial in the US.
Most F.B.I. Agents and colleagues sent to the foreign nations were counterterrorist specialists - who, while abroad, were not available for duty in the US. Any F.B.I. claim that the value of its foreign adventures was that it acquired many valuable documents about international terrorism should be supported by a truthful account of how many of those documents the F.B.I. has read - or can.
The McVeigh documents
Thousands of F.B.I. documents were found to have been mislaid only days before Timothy McVeigh was due to be executed. The F.B.I. offered no sensible explanation.
The Waco documents
The F.B.I. concealed internal documents for six years and misled government lawyers about whether incendiary devices had been used on the fatal day. They had.
The Atlanta bombing
The F.B.I. announced prematurely that local man Richard Jewell was "of interest" in the 1996 Olympics bomb explosion. The Justice Department later concluded that F.B.I. Agents made a major error in judgment. Jewell has never been prosecuted, only slandered by the bureau.
© 2001 Democratic Underground, LLC
Even worse, on May 10 this year, Freeh took action without precedent from any senior security official responsible for combatting terrorist risks. In history, in any nation.
On that day, in sworn public testimony before the US Senate committees on appropriations and armed services, and the select committee on intelligence, he told the world that the United States was not properly equipped for counterterrorism.
So it is Freeh's fault for telling the truth before Senate committees? I'm not disagreeing that Freeh shares in the blame. But noticeably absent in this essay is an exploration of the failures of the CIA and the Clinton Justice Department. And since Freeh and Clinton didn't see eye-to-eye, Freeh is a logical target for the Clintonistas at DU to take the blame away from Slick.
Uh, he was under oath at a Senate hearing. What was he supposed to do - lie? Blame the Senators for this one.
You are totally right and you gave a great example. Notice also how Janet Reno is barely mentioned, but only as a foil to the (ahem)"guilty" Louis Freeh. Freeh may share some of the blame, but this is the legacy of the Klinton administration.
Bill Clinton is a great Democrat.
Once again, he was under oath. The Senators put him in that seat. They asked the questions. He had to answer. Blame them, not Freeh.
I've been around long enough to understand the motives of the type of folks who inhabit DU. They will zero in on Freeh to deflect from Slick. And, once they have determined who the fall guy will be, they will pile on, mixing valid criticism with a bunch of other stuff, all in an effort to deflect blame from their hero. Standard M.O. for those guys. The only time they ever get truthful is when it is useful in burying a bigger lie.
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