Among the relatively few Arabic-speaking spooks among the ranks in the FBI and the CIA in the 1990s is a woman who is now alleged to be a Hezbollah mole:

A suspected Hezbollah mole who penetrated the ranks of the FBI and CIA pleaded guilty Tuesday to falsely getting U.S. citizenship and snooping in FBI terrorism files.

Former waitress Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, of Vienna, Va., admitted arranging a sham marriage with an American in Michigan to win U.S. citizenship. She parlayed that into sensitive jobs as an FBI special agent and a CIA operations officer, sources said.

Sources told The News that Prouty is believed to be a double-agent planted in the agencies by Hezbollah or its supporters,

Here’s the place where your dollars are really working for you:

Prouty’s plea deal to relatively minor citizenship fraud and computer intrusion charges includes pledging to cooperate with the CIA - but the agency is not treating the case as espionage.

“This was a naturalization case with a few inappropriate computer searches,” a U.S. official said. …

Law enforcement sources said the State Department had done extensive interviews of Prouty’s associates in Lebanon before the FBI hired her. “She’s not a member of Hezbollah,” one law enforcement official insisted.

Hmmm. If they were so thorough in their “extensive interviews,” how come they didn’t figure out that she had a sham marriage?

Not exactly confidence-inspiring on the part of our national security agencies.

More about this at the New York Times, where the story sounds a little more sober, though it reaches the same conclusion—that our security agencies are totally incompetent:

A Lebanese-born C.I.A. officer who had previously worked as an F.B.I. agent pleaded guilty on Tuesday to charges that she illegally sought classified information from government computers about the radical Islamic group Hezbollah.

The plea agreement by the defendant, Nada Nadim Prouty, appeared to expose grave flaws in the methods used by the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to conduct background checks on its investigators.

Ms. Prouty, 37, who also confessed that she had fraudulently obtained American citizenship, faces up to 16 years in prison.

Well, that’s a comfort.
But … is anybody at home?
I want a president who is going to light a fire under the ass of the bureaucrats in Washington, who are invested in doing everything the same way they’ve been doing it forever.

Eric Boehlert isn’t too happy with Brian Williams’s 30+-minute schmoozefest—oops!—interview with Rudy Giuliani:

I watched the Giuliani interview last week and was busy taking notes when I wasn’t picking my jaw up off the floor. That was partly because of the forced, old-friend vibe that permeated the interview, but mostly because Williams never asked Giuliani a single uncomfortable question. The treatment stood in stark contrast to the relentless and often factually challenged grilling Williams and his NBC News colleague Tim Russert unleashed on the Democratic front-runner at the Philadelphia debate two weeks ago. Not to mention the type of loaded, contentious questions Williams posed to Democrats when he moderated their debate (solo) in South Carolina in April.

Sitting down with Giuliani though, Williams suddenly lost his edge and was content with lobbing vague questions, refraining from meaningful follow-ups, and allowing Giuliani to attack Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton at length for being on “the defensive” in fighting the war on terror and for promoting “higher taxes for the whole country.”

Yet another stellar performance by the gravitas-emanating anchor of NBC Nightly News, who, Boehlert reports, was flattered by Rudy’s attention:

And did I mention the buddy-buddy vibe? Here’s how Williams, on his blog, described meeting up with Giuliani just prior to the interview. The backslapping is practically audible:

I greeted Rudy Giuliani in the hallway of the Capitol Hill Club in Washington. Right in front of some gathered onlookers, he walked up to me and enthusiastically blurted out, “You were GREAT!” After hesitating for a bit, I asked, “At WHAT?” And then he smiled and it dawned on me: our interview today was more than the usual reporter/newsmaker interrogation. It was a meeting of former hosts of Saturday Night Live. (Giuliani’s turn came on November 22, 1997).

I’m not suggesting that every extended interview that a candidate grants to a TV personality has to be a 10-round boxing match, a gotcha-fest. That’s not even appropriate. But there needs to be a balance between the conversational and the consequential.

Oh well. I wouldn’t worry too much if I were Brian Williams. The TV networks are on the way out, according to Rupert Murdoch:

Calling broadcast television a “highly challenged industry in America,” he said that big events such as the Super Bowl can still prosper, but ho-hum-rated series that fill prime time are at risk for generating declining interest among audiences and advertisers alike.

“I think we have to be a little sensible about this–and realize that free-to-air television faces a lot of challenges, just from the sheer fragmentation of the audience,” Murdoch told shareholders in Australia, citing many homes with hundreds of channels. And that comes, he said, despite broadcasters “probably [offering] the best programs (with) the most excitement about them.”

Cozy at the top, isn’t it?