A half dozen Saudi Arabians involved in the terrorist attack targeting U.S. Air Force personnel housing 19 years ago, killing 19 of our servicemen and injuring hundreds, told the FBI they got their passports from Iran and reported to a high-ranking Iranian general, according to the Washington Times.
Former FBI Director Louis Freeh confirmed to the paper that when he presented the evidence implicating Iran to the White House, they brushed it aside, calling it mere "hearsay." He was asked not to disseminate the information because the administration sought closer relations with the terrorist regime in Tehran.
Like President Obama today, "They were looking to change the relationships with the regime there," Freeh told the Times.
The newspaper cited a now-declassified top-secret cable from 1999 in which Clinton told then-Iranian President Mohammad Khatami of "credible evidence that members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps along with members of Lebanese and Saudi Hizballah were directly involved in the planning and execution of the terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia of the Khobar Towers military resident complex."
President Clinton had altered U.S. policy toward Iran in the hope that the new president would change Tehran's terrorist ways, and his White House publicly suggested Iran's role in Khobar was uncertain.
In 2006, there was enough evidence publicly available for families of Khobar victims to win a U.S. civil suit holding Iran liable for hundreds of millions of dollars.
Wayne White, a State Department intelligence officer from 1979 to 2005 who was investigating Khobar, told a diplomatic oral history project that intelligence on the attack "had been cut off by Sandy Berger," Clinton's national security adviser. Berger was later convicted in an attempt to smuggle classified documents regarding terrorism out of the National Archives.
This tops off a long list of failures for Bill Clinton in combating terrorism. They include:
a. The 1993 World Trade Center bombing, killing six and injuring about 1,000, which brought jihadists' attention to the twin towers as targets, prefiguring the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
b. The 1995 Riyadh, Saudi Arabia bombing of a U.S. military training center, killing five Americans and two Indians.
c. The 1998 al-Qaida bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, killing 224 people and wounding about 5,000.
d. The failed U.S. bombing of sites in Afghanistan in an effort to kill Osama bin Laden, which many at the time suspected was merely an attempt to distract from Clinton's Monica Lewinsky sex scandal.
e. The 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors and injuring 37 others. Richard Miniter, in his book "Losing Bin Laden," documents how, during the Clinton administration, then-Rep. Bill McCollum, a Florida Republican, founded and chaired the House of Representatives' Taskforce on Terrorism. He eventually gathered evidence from the Mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan, and who knew bin Laden when he fought with them.
"They emphasized that he wanted to murder Americans," Miniter wrote, and that he was tied to assassinations and terror operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen.
And, they said, the wealthy Saudi terror master was becoming more powerful and well-connected.
"We knew that it was just a matter of time before we saw a major terrorist attack on America," McCollum said. But "McCollum couldn't believe that the Clinton administration would ignore such serious intelligence that he had developed about a real and present threat."
It's fair to ask: How much different would a Hillary Clinton war on terror be?