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Olson Book's Chilling Warning: Clinton's Terrorist Pardons Sent Signal Crime/Corruption In a bone chilling chapter of her new book "The Final Days," late heroine-author Barbara Olson warned that ex-president Bill Clinton's pardons of terrorists who had repeatedly bombed buildings in New York City "send a signal" that the U.S. isn't serious about fighting terrorism. In words that now seem like a harbinger of her own Sept. 11 death at the hands of the Middle Eastern terrorists, Olson cited example after example of how U.S. officials strenuously warned Clinton that pardoning FALN Puerto Rican separatists who had waged their own bombing jihad on America posed a threat to national security. In August 1999 Clinton pardoned 16 FALN terrorists without even being asked, in a move that was widely seen as a cynical ploy to win Hispanic votes for his wife's New York senate bid. The group had planned and executed 130 bombing attacks on New York, Chicago and Washington, D.C. from 1974 to 1983. Miraculously, the FALN managed to kill just six Americans. But hundreds more were seriously wounded. Law enforcement officials were stunned when Clinton decided to pardon the FALN bombers. "The FBI's assistant director of national security, Neil Gallagher, said that the people turned loose by Clinton 'are criminals, and they are terrorists, and they represent a threat to the United States,'" Olson wrote. In a subchapter eerily headlined "Pardons for Terrorists Send a Signal," she reported: "President Clinton had not bothered to consult with relatives of victims of FALN terrorism. In fact, the survivors of those murdered and those whose lives had otherwise been destroyed by the terrorists were not even informed that their attackers were being released." Olson continued: "Deputy Attorney General Eric Holder.... conceded that the nation owed much greater consideration to the victims. And Holder's boss, Janet Reno, explicitly acknowledged that groups aligned with the FALN still posed a threat to national security." In comments turned gut-wrenching in light of last month's attacks, former Justice Department pardon attorney Margaret Love told the late author that Clinton's terrorist pardons should have set off alarm bells. "We should have seen a big flashing red light because of the FALN cases.... That was a foreshoadowing of what happened later." Love was referring to Clinton's January 2001 pardons of drug dealers and international fugitives, not the attacks on the U.S., which no one foresaw. But it's nearly impossible now to read those words as anything but prophesy of the terrorist acts that murdered Olson and nearly 6,000 others last month. In a moment of now legendary heroism, the late author telephoned her husband, Solicitor General Ted Olson, from American Flight 175 to warn that terrorists had hijacked her plane. Mr. Olson had the terrible task of telling his wife that two planes had slammed into New York's World Trade Center minutes before. Barbara Olson's phone call was the first warning the government had that Washington, D.C. had come under similar attack. In comments sure to irk those who argued for eight years that Bill Clinton's private life was nobody else's business, the late author contends that the terrorist pardons were payback for Mrs. Clinton indulging her husband's decades of rampant philandering. "Hillary had done a lot of heavy lifting for her husband, much of it, such as the various bimbo eruptions, that required her to hold her nose. She had to cover for her husband and lie." Olson called the FALN pardons Bill Clinton's "first return on her investment." Though a lively debate has raged ever since Sept. 11 over whether the ex-president did as much as he could to stop Osama bin Laden, the one-time congressional Clinton investigator is the first to raise the FALN pardon question at any length. Perhaps now Sen. Clinton, who has made herself newly available on the TV talk show circuit since the World Trade Center attacks, will be asked whether she agrees with Olson that her husband's terrorist pardons "sent a signal."
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"My client had nothing to do with the low-rent, trailer-park trash politicians who infested our country for the past eight years."
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--Michael Rosen, lawyer for Thomas Gambino, son of late Mafia boss Carlo Gambino
New York Post via The Wall Street Journal
(Michael Rosen was understandably eager to distance his client, a convicted loan shark, from the clintons. Another Thomas Gambino reportedly paid $50,000 to roger clinton in an unsuccessful effort to get a pardon for his father, Rosario Gambino.),
- It's not easy to play fair against Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, who, in the words of the authors, "operated like a crime family, expecting friends and aides to protect them even against their own best interests." What's amazing, of course, is that's exactly what Clinton friends and aides have always done, from Susan McDougal to Webster Hubbell to flocks of nameless White House special assistants. Even Jim McDougal died just in time to deprive the independent counsel of a key witness against Mrs. Clinton, thus derailing what the authors report to have been her likely indictment for perjury and obstruction related to the Whitewater investigation....
Reading the tumultuous events of the Lewinsky probe in a comprehensive narrative is unlike attempting to make sense of it in daily doses. Something different comes through the heavy accumulation of detail of, for example, the duplicity of the Justice Department, or the sharklike behavior of the White House. One begins to get a choking sense of the atmosphere of corruption and ruthlessness the Clintons inhabit -- and, worse, have forced the rest of us to inhabit. Taken in one piece, the habitual, even casual abuse of power on display begins to resemble conditions one normally associates with a state of totalitarianism, where such concepts as truth and justice are only paid lip service. In the end, then, it makes you wonder when there will be fresh air again.
- -----Crime-family values
"I did not have any involvement in the pardons that were granted or not granted," insisted Sen. KnowNothing, seeming to forget her presence at the New-Square/Oval-Office schmooze that secured pardons for the four Hasidic felons who set up a phony school in Brooklyn to swindle the government out of millions intended for the poor.
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