your terrorism-fighting dollars hard at work

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.