Usually, we don’t pay Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” all that much mind. The talk show world is full of sound bites and screaming matches on both the left and the right. But when a talk show host with a national following begins shilling for the regime at Riyadh, it catches our attention. It’s not that we suspect Mr. O’Reilly of holding sympathies for the Saudi regime, but it does look like he was snookered, as reports William McGurn, the chief editorial page writer of the Wall Street Journal, in yesterday’s edition.

Early last week, Mr. O’Reilly ran a segment on the story of Pat Roush, whose two daughters, Aisha and Alia, were kidnapped as children by their Saudi father and spirited away to the kingdom. Ms. Roush has made it her life’s work to bring her daughters home, but the State Department has deferred to the Saudi regime, and Mr. O’Reilly’s program just handed her another setback, undermining efforts in Congress to win freedom for the Americans.

Rep. Daniel Burton recently traveled to Riyadh to demand the release of captive American women. When he got there, however, he found that the girls, actually now women at the ages of 19 and 24, had been spirited to London for an off-camera interview with Mr. O’Reilly’s producer. Mr. Burton saw clearly what the Saudis were doing, and has since blasted them for their “bad faith” in removing the girls from the country, saying, “It is clear that they purposefully were involved in an effort to undermine” his visit.

Mr. O’Reilly admits that the entire arrangement was made with the Saudi’s point man, Adel al-Jubeir, but he doesn’t want to admit that he was had. Mr. O’Reilly says he is under the impression that he managed to “pressure” the Saudis into having the girls meet with his producer. Predictably, the sisters told the O’Reilly producer that they didn’t want to leave (they also praised Osama bin Laden). The Saudis are counting on the prospect that few will properly discount such statements made by two young women obviously under immense pressure to toe a government line, if they have not been brainwashed outright.

Mr. O’Reilly has been trumpeting as an accomplishment the notion that he was doing Ms. Roush’s daughters some good by getting them out of Saudi Arabia and onto more neutral ground. He sought to make this argument in a broadcast September 5. But as Mr. McGurn pointed out on the show, the Saudi government was still contriving the conditions and able to exert pressure on the women. Mr. McGurn does report that progress has been made by Mr. Burton. Prince Saud went on record saying that American women who want to leave will be allowed to do so, and a 19-year-old American woman who had been held was given a passport and visa that, in theory, will allow her to exit Saudi Arabia.

The next step that needs to be taken, argues the Wall Street Journal, is for the Congress to declare that no American embassy will turn away an American citizen seeking refuge. Mr. McGurn reports that many women in Saudi Arabia have made their way to the American embassy, only to be turned away, and sometimes to have their husbands called, almost ensuring a beating. Most Americans believe that embassies will aid people in such situations, but such is not the case, especially in Saudi Arabia, with whom the State Department does not wish to upset relations.