Posted on 11/13/2007 11:25:45 PM PST by america4vr
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.
Court papers do not specifically say why Ms. Prouty sought information about Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant group that is based in southern Lebanon, from the F.B.I.’s computer case files in June 2003, the month she left the bureau to join the C.I.A.
There is no accusation in the documents that she passed information on to Hezbollah or any other extremist group.
The plea agreement noted, however, that Ms. Prouty’s sister and her brother-in-law attended a fund-raising event in Lebanon in August 2002 at which the keynote speaker was Sheikh Muhammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual leader of Hezbollah. Sheikh Fadlallah has been designated by the United States government as a terrorist leader.
The plea agreement said that in 2003 Ms. Prouty specifically went searching for computerized case files maintained by the F.B.I.’s Detroit field office in an investigation that centered on Hezbollah although she “was not assigned to work on Hezbollah cases as part of her F.B.I. duties and she was not authorized by her supervisor, the case agent assigned to the case, or anybody else to access information about the investigation in question.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Foreigners and first generation Americans are entrusted with information vital to our nation's national security while other American citizens are viewed with suspicion.
I'm aware of a case here in Southeast Asia where the member of a foreign government has access to information that he should not have. He has even been given the names of US intelligence officials working in the region in the spirit of "intelligence cooperation". For American citizens to have such access both a need to know and a security clearance is in order, but for foreign nationals that is not always the case.
Just un-friggin'-believable. Frightening.
Well, at lest the agency met it’s workplace diversity goals.
I did not post this without first checking whether it had already been posted submitting the title of the article ‘C.I.A. Officer Admits Guilt in Seeking Hezbollah Files’ to FR search. As nothing remotely similar turned up in the results I felt free to post it.
And Valerie Plame worked where?? Wonder if there was ANY communication between these two.
Plame married Wilson in 1998. Her 5 years was up in 2003. Wilson came out as the secret envoy when? Burger pants'd the archives when?
Plame wasn't the secret...Joe was!!
From '06, a related link....?
SCHLUSSEL EXCLUSIVE: NYC Tunnel Qaeda Plotter Had Strong Detroit Hezbollah, Palestinian Ties
To top it off, she is an ILLEGAL ALIEN. She paid a man to marry her.
I know the FBI and CIA were hard up for Muslim and Arabic speaking agents but.......
Oh, I know. I did the same search with the same results for the version of the CBS News story that I posted.
Well, come to think of it, Val’s hubbie was involved with Aburdene through Alamoudi’s company - Aburdene does have ties to Lebanon...
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