President Obama owes Americans a public explanation for why his administration is lobbying Congress to protect Saudi Arabia from lawsuits by families of those killed in the attacks of 9/11. The lobbying was disclosed Friday in a scoop by the New York Times. It reported that the kingdom threatening to sell hundreds of billions of dollars in American assets if Congress exposed it to suits related to the attacks, most of whose perpetrators, including Osama bin Laden, were Saudis.

Mr. Obama’s administration isn’t alone. Its truckling to the Saudis, its siding against Americans, is part of a long scandal going back to the Clinton administration, which fetched up in court on the side of Iran against the estate of Alisa Flatow. She was the Brandeis coed who was slain in 1995 by Iran in a bus bombing at Israel. Her heroic father, Stephen Flatow, pressed her case in an early test of whether American tort law could be used in this war.

The estate of Alisa Flatow won that case, and was awarded something like $247 million dollars. Come time to collect, however, the Clinton administration appeared in court against Alisa Flatow’s estate. In the settlement that followed, the Flatows got a pittance of the court’s award — only $16 million. The government, using taxpayers’ money, essentially bought the Flatows’ claim, giving it the right to keep whatever it can wrest from the Iranians. It’s unclear as yet what that will be.

Saudi Arabia can’t be sued under the same law that the Flatows used against Iran, however; that law, the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act, covered only certain nations officially listed by our State Department as sponsors of terror. The families suing Saudi Arabia tried to pierce its sovereign immunity under more traditional law, but they lost in United States district court and are now appealing. The law the administration opposes would end the sovereign immunity defense for the Saudis.

It may well be that Mr. Obama could make a case for what it is doing. The administration argues that by piercing sovereign immunity in these kinds of cases we would open ourselves and our allies to a reciprocal strategy. It wouldn’t surprise us were the State Department animated by baser instincts, including a notorious pro-Arab bias. In any event, despite the danger of reciprocity State has been warning against, no one has laid a legal glove on us in a generation.

Whatever case the administration wants to make, though, will be difficult to advance while skulking around Capitol Hill — or bowing to Saudi Kings in their opulent tents. Mr. Obama is scheduled to visit Saudi Arabia this week. The measure Mr. Obama opposes passed early tests in the Congress by overwhelming votes. We’d like to think that this reflects growing ire in a Congress the administration has attempted over and over again to sideline from foreign policy.

It’s been more than 20 years since Alisa Flatow was slain, and the only thing Iran has received is Obama’s appeasement. It’s been 15 years since 9/11 and our government still won’t come clean on what it knows about the Saudi role. The bill to which the administration objects is called the Justice Against Sponsors of Terrorism Act. It’s a marker of the American retreat that the battle in the Middle East is being left to the tort lawyers — and that the administration opposes even that.