Sunday Must-Read: The Real Story of the Khobar Towers “Investigation”

This was in the subcription side of The Wall Street Journal a few days ago, and we should be grateful that The Journal put in OpinionJournal.com today.

It’s former FBI Director Louis Freeh’s read-the-whole-thing column on the Khobar Towers bombing 10 years ago. The ineffectualness and obstructionism that followed that attack should offend everyone, but especially the families of those who died.

And it all happened because of the rose-colored foreign-policy outlook of the previous administration towards a country that has been making a lot of news these days — Iran:

….. The Khobar victims, along with the courageous families and friends who mourn them this weekend in Washington, deserve our respect and honor. More importantly, they must be remembered, because American justice has still been denied.

Although a federal grand jury handed up indictments in June 2001–days before I left as FBI director and a week before some of the charges against 14 of the terrorists would have lapsed because of the statute of limitations–two of the primary leaders of the attack, Ahmed Ibrahim al-Mughassil and Abdel Hussein Mohamed al-Nasser, are living comfortably in Iran with about as much to fear from America as Osama bin Laden had prior to Sept. 11 (to wit, U.S. marshals showing up to serve warrants for their arrests).

….. It soon became clear that Mr. Clinton and his national security adviser, Sandy Berger, had no interest in confronting the fact that Iran had blown up the towers. This is astounding, considering that the Saudi Security Service had arrested six of the bombers after the attack. As FBI agents sifted through the remains of Building 131 in 115-degree heat, the bombers admitted they had been trained by the Iranian external security service (IRGC) in Lebanon’s Beka Valley and received their passports at the Iranian Embassy in Damascus, Syria, along with $250,000 cash for the operation from IRGC Gen. Ahmad Sharifi.

We later learned that senior members of the Iranian government, including Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Intelligence and Security and the Spiritual Leader’s office had selected Khobar as their target and commissioned the Saudi Hezbollah to carry out the operation. The Saudi police told us that FBI agents had to interview the bombers in custody in order to make our case. To make this happen, however, the U.S. president would need to make a personal request to Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah.

So for 30 months, I wrote and rewrote the same set of simple talking points for the president, Mr. Berger, and others to press the FBI’s request to go inside a Saudi prison and interview the Khobar bombers. And for 30 months nothing happened. The Saudis reported back to us that the president and Mr. Berger would either fail to raise the matter with the crown prince or raise it without making any request. On one such occasion, our commander in chief instead hit up Prince Abdullah for a contribution to his library. Mr. Berger never once, in the course of the five-year investigation which coincided with his tenure, even asked how the investigation was going.

….. Finally, frustrated in my attempts to execute Mr. Clinton’s “leave no stone unturned” order, I called former president George H.W. Bush. I had learned that he was about to meet Crown Prince Abdullah on another matter. After fully briefing Mr. Bush on the impasse and faxing him the talking points that I had now been working on for over two years, he personally asked the crown prince to allow FBI agents to interview the detained bombers.

After his Saturday meeting with now-King Abdullah, Mr. Bush called me to say that he made the request, and that the Saudis would be calling me. A few hours later, Prince Bandar, then the Saudi ambassador to Washington, asked me to come out to McLean, Va., on Monday to see Crown Prince Abdullah. When I met him with Wyche Fowler, our Saudi ambassador, and FBI counterterrorism chief Dale Watson, the crown prince was holding my talking points. He told me Mr. Bush had made the request for the FBI, which he granted, and told Prince Bandar to instruct Nayef to arrange for FBI agents to interview the prisoners.

Several weeks later, agents interviewed the co-conspirators. For the first time since the 1996 attack, we obtained direct evidence of Iran’s complicity. What Mr. Clinton failed to do for three years was accomplished in minutes by his predecessor. This was the breakthrough we had been waiting for, and the attorney general and I immediately went to Mr. Berger with news of the Saudi prison interviews.

Upon being advised that our investigation now had proof that Iran blew up Khobar Towers, Mr. Berger’s astounding response was: “Who knows about this?” His next, and wrong, comment was: “That’s just hearsay.”

….. The Khobar bombing case eventually led to indictments in 2001, thanks to the personal leadership of President George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. But justice has been a long time coming.

No kidding, and it still hasn’t arrived.

So in the last 4-1/2 years of the Clinton Administration, the Khobar investigation was essentially blown off, and would have stayed that way had Bush 41 not agreed to intervene for Mr. Freeh.

Now we have the former Secretary of Defense and Assistant Secretary of Defense of that administration lobbying Bush 43 to “do something” about Iran (HT Redhawk Review), possibly including some kind of military action. That sounds an awful lot like “Please clean up the mess we made” — just as Freeh indicated the two Bushes did with the Khobar investigation. Just as Bush 43 did by going into Afghanistan to oust a regime engaging in unspeakable oppression and destroying priceless antiquities of the “wrong” religions. Just as Bush 43 did by going into Iraq (with the approval of huge congressional majorities) to do something the previous administration had promised to do in 1998 if UN resolutions continued to be ignored (they were ignored, but nothing was done). Just as …..
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UPDATE: Michelle Malkin has more on those who were killed, including a link to an overview of the attack and to PDFs of the actual indictments (14 people on 46 counts, none brought to justice).
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