The Justice Department wanted to deport Bosch because, according to the FBI, he had "repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death." Freeing Bosch at a time when Washington was condemning terrorism abroad would obviously be hard to explain -- had someone asked.

But Miami's leading Republican contributors and politicians persistently lobbied Bush to free Bosch, insisting that the former pediatrician was really a noble freedom fighter. And in 1990, when Bosch was eventually released and permitted to reside in Florida under an extraordinary deal with the Bush Justice Department, much of the credit went to the alleged mass murderer's best-connected White House lobbyist -- a budding local politician named Jeb Bush. The Bush son who would be elected governor of Florida eight years later had, by 1990, already become wealthy in real estate and other deals with the same Cuban exile businessmen who wanted Bosch to be freed. Among Jeb's business partners active in the Cuban-American National Foundation, the institutional advocate for Bosch, was one Armando Codina, also a regular GOP donor and activist. (Codina, however, tells Salon that he neither supported the release of Bosch, nor ever lobbied his business partner, Bush, on the issue.) According to the administration's spokesmen, however, all those personal and financial ties were just a set of happy coincidences. Anyway, nobody in the mainstream media or on Capitol Hill got upset because the president's son had opened prison doors for an unrepentant terrorist.

Flash forward to the very end of Poppy's presidency, a few weeks after his Christmas Eve 1992 pardons of Weinberger and the other Iran-Contra defendants. On Jan. 18, 1993, the soon-to-be-former president signed a clemency order freeing Aslam Adam from Butner federal prison in North Carolina. A Pakistani national, Adam had by then served eight years of a 55-year sentence for smuggling $1.5 million worth of heroin into the United States. He wouldn't have been eligible for parole for another two years.

Stunning as the commutation of Adam's sentence was, even more bewildering was the lack of press interest or congressional concern about his case. It was mentioned in a single paragraph on an inside page of the Washington Post; the New York Times didn't cover it at all; and nobody except the Charlotte Observer asked why. There was no further investigation until 1994, when Eric Nadler examined the Adam matter for Rolling Stone. All that Nadler could establish for certain was that Sen. Jesse Helms, R-N.C., a stalwart friend of the Pakistani military regime and its domestic lobbyists, had interceded on Adam's behalf with the Justice Department and prison officials.

It was worth mentioning, of course, that Bush, a former CIA director, may have had his own occult foreign policy or national security reasons for releasing Adam -- but none ever came to light. And no one in Congress or the media ever demanded that Bush explain why he had freed a narcotics trafficker. Adam was sent home to Karachi, where his mother reportedly exclaimed, "God bless Bush! God bless Bush!"

Aside from Weinberger and company, Bush's few pardons attracted little notice, but several of those he gave were as questionable as the most controversial Clinton pardons: a Watergate felon who donated huge amounts of money to the president and hired well-connected GOP lawyers; a Cuban exile terrorist whose case was advocated by the president's son and the son's business partners; and a Pakistani heroin dealer befriended by Jesse Helms.

So if and when Bill Clinton goes up to the Hill to testify on the subject of pardons, then perhaps his predecessor should be invited to discuss the same sore topic. The political influence of money and access is always troubling -- but that influence isn't much different in the pardon process now than when George H.W. Bush exercised those powers. The difference is that today, for reasons that have nothing to do with morality, we are suddenly paying attention.

This story was modified since its original publication.

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