The murder of an American diplomat in Khartoum, Sudan, John Granville, with roots in New York state, and of a Sudanese embassy employee who was his driver is both a tragedy for the families of the victims and a test for American foreign policy. For if it was not a random attack but a premeditated effort to kill an American diplomat, it falls into a disturbing pattern.

The American ambassador to Sudan, Cleo Noel, and another American embassy official, George Curtis Moore, were killed in Khartoum in 1973. The State Department, years later, after being pressed by Scott Johnson of Powerlineblog.com, acknowledged, “The Khartoum operation was planned and carried out with the full knowledge and personal approval of Yasir Arafat, Chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and the head of Fatah.” Arafat was never held to account for the attack — instead he was received at the White House and Camp David and honored with the Nobel Peace Prize.

In August of 1998, 224 people, including a dozen Americans, were killed in bombing attacks on the American embassies in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. A few terrorists were convicted of the attacks, but the head of the terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, that carried them out, Osama bin Laden, was left unpunished and went on to attack America on September 11, 2001.

In October 2003, three American security contractors, John Branchizio, Mark Parson, and John Martin Linde Jr., were killed in a bomb attack on an armored convoy of American diplomats in the Gaza Strip. They were there to interview Palestinian Arabs who had applied for Fulbright scholarships to study in America. A bill introduced by Rep. Gary Ackerman of Queens requiring the Secretary of State merely to report to Congress on the status of efforts to bring the killers of Branchizio, Parson, and Linde to justice passed the House last year but is now languishing in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where three Democrats on the panel, Joseph Biden, Christopher Dodd, and Barack Obama, were too busy running for president to forward the bill to the full Senate.

The bill expresses the sense of Congress that “it is in the vital national security interest of the United States to safeguard, to the greatest extent possible consistent with their mission, United States diplomats and all embassy and consulate personnel, and to use the full power of the United States to bring to justice any individual or entity that threatens, jeopardizes, or harms them.” That would seem like common sense, and it won the joint backing of influential Congressional Democrats such as Rep. Thomas Lantos and Rep. Brad Sherman and Republicans such as Rep. Michael Pence and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen. Here’s hoping President Bush, who as of early yesterday evening had issued no statement on Granville’s killing, takes the message to heart, and does his utmost to make sure that this case breaks the pattern.