In a must-read Wall Street Journal op-ed yesterday, attorney Debra Burlingame laid out the story of how Bill Clinton pardoned a group of 16 terrorists — just before his wife’s run for U.S. Senate. The convicts were members of FALN, a clandestine group that during the 1970s and 80s waged war on America with arson, kidnappings, and bombings, including the 1975 lunch-hour detonation of a Manhattan tavern in which four people were killed, including one who was decapitated.

Mr. Clinton justified the clemencies by asserting that the sentences were disproportionate to the crimes. None of the petitioners, he stated, had been directly involved in crimes that caused bodily harm to anyone. “For me,” the president concluded, “the question, therefore, was whether their continuing incarceration served any meaningful purpose.”

His comments, including the astonishing claim that the FALN prisoners were being unfairly punished because of “guilt by association,” were widely condemned as a concession to terrorists…The prisoners were convicted on a variety of charges that included conspiracy, sedition, violation of the Hobbes Act (extortion by force, violence or fear), armed robbery and illegal possession of weapons and explosives — including large quantities of C-4 plastic explosive, dynamite and huge caches of ammunition. Mr. Clinton’s action was opposed by the FBI, the Bureau of Prisons, the U.S. attorney offices that prosecuted the cases and the victims whose lives had been shattered. In contravention of standard procedures, none of these agencies, victims or families of victims were consulted or notified prior to the president’s announcement…

Further, at least two of those Clinton said were being unfairly punished had been videotaped firing weapons and making bombs. Seven hundred hours of similar surveillance led federal agents to six safe-houses, where they recovered 24 pounds of dynamite, as well as weapons, disguises, fake IDs and thousands of rounds of ammunition.

Congress viewed Clinton’s terror clemencies as a dangerous abuse of presidential power and passed resolutions condemning his actions by a vote of 95-2 in the Senate, 311-41 in the House.

But isn’t all this old news? Burlingame, the sister of “Chic” Burlingame III, the pilot whom Al Qaeda terrorists forced to fly American Flight 77 into the Pentagon, doesn’t think so. It turned out that the FALN pardons were likely traded for votes — and at a time when Bill Clinton publicly claimed to be “obsessed” with efforts to protect the public from terrorists. Now the couple is running for the White House again.

“If Bill and Hillary Clinton were willing to pander to the demands of local Hispanic politicians and leftist human-rights activists defending bomb-makers convicted of seditious conspiracy,” Burlingame wonders, “how might they stand up to pressure from other interest groups working in less obvious ways against U.S. interests in a post-9/11 world?”

Read Burlingame’s op-ed here.