They’re Monitoring Falafels but Not Their Own Agencies
Via Noah Shachtman, I see that a woman with potential ties to Hezbollah got a job in both FBI and CIA.
How good are the FBI and CIA’s background checks? Each agency requiresits own separate investigation and polygraph before people are signedup to sensitive jobs. Each agency missed an absolute whopper…
A 37-year-old woman who previously worked as an FBI agent and a CIA analyst, pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges involving improper access of information…
Sources say Nada Nadim Prouty,a Lebanese national and resident of Virginia, entered the United Stateson a student visa and earned citizenship through a sham marriage.
While officials say there is no evidence of actual espionage andno evidence that she was working as a spy, she used her access as anFBI agent to look up information about herself and her relatives, someof whom may have ties to Hezbollah. She also is accused of improperlytaking classified information home with her.
This revelation follows closely on the news that the FBI itself was scouring lists of falafel joints in hopes of identifying Iranian agents (which may mean they were looking for Hezbollah agents with ties to Iran).
Call me crazy, but it strikes me that they’re looking in the wrong place for Hezbollah infiltrators.
B-I-N-G-O!!!!
BTW…It is not a surprise that Putin honored George Koval, WWII Manhatten Project Spy, with Russia’s highest honor. What Putin is telling the US is see how easy it is? It is a subtle hint at Putin’s current success in Middle East policy. My guess is, his policy is made easier with gathered MEast US intelligence.
If I were a bureau chief and Putin gave out such an award, I would be looking internally quite a bit…
Geez, our law enforcement is becoming more like the keystone cops every day. Can they just enforce existing law and find the real bad guys? Please?
what a joke.
NSA, if you’re monitoring us here at Marcy’s, I’ll have one falafel, hold the hubris.
Does this mean that the FBI will be interviewing Bill O’Reilly?
You know if these jokers just did their jobs competently within what the law currently allows, they wouldn’t need all the extralegal avenues they keep whining about. I swear Grover must be a one man HR department for the GOP — are you competent? Nope? Perfect, you’re hired. Now pardon me while I go fill my tub.
Kind of reminds me of an old joke about when you need a cop. â€Don’t call 911!!! Call Winchell’s Donuts, THAT’S where they’re all AT!!!
Considering the fact that Iranians don’t eat or make falafels, I doubt that is a good place to start looking. My wife is from Iran, I’ve had thousands of meals made by every type of Iranian, I’ve been to many Iranian restaurants, no falafels! I even asked them last week about this, nobody fessed up to this being an Iranian food.
But I suppose if they find someone calling themselves an Iranian, and they eat falafels, maybe they are lying about something.
Just in case the FBI is listening in on this, just head over to the local ’Pars Market’. Or just find some place which sells the spices they use, or those delicious pickles, or ice cream with rose water, or maybe find a group of engineers, lawyers, doctors, or in general anyone who appears to have a little more respect for themselves than the average American.
The woman was also the sister in law of the owner of La Shish restaurants in the Detroit area. The owner was charged last year by the DoJ of skimming something like $16 million from the company that was sent off to Lebanon (and presumably funneled to Hezbollah).
I wonder how they can do an investigation into the brother in law (the woman also worked at the restaurant at one time), and NOT realize that she worked in the CIA/FBI and check into her background at that time. They brought charged against the bro in law last May and they are only now finding out about her ties?
GG FBI/CIA….
At least the ATF & U Michigan rent-a-cops quickly apprehended a Turbocharger kit that was masquerading as a â€suspicious package†on a UM bus today. They had North University Ave shut down for over 2 hours this afternoon. At least it gave Channel 4 an 7 an excuse to have their news choppers circle aimlessly over the UM campus this afternoon.
zAmboni – the restaurant part is just the cherry on top, isn’t it?
La Shish does have delicious falafel.
Falafel is to Israel as hamburgers and French freedom fries are to the USA.
Do we have an iconic national staple? Peanut butter and jelly on white bread, maybe? I made a delicious vegetarian chili that had chickpeas in it for a tailgate party this fall (aka garbanzo beans – the main ingredient in falafel.)
I’m still smarting about the *ss-kicking the Jeffs took Saturday at the hands of the Ephs. The Amherst defense played well in the first half but they spent most of the game on the field. The offense couldn’t move the ball. What is more troublesome is that the Ephs have done it consistently for two decades. They are 17-4-1 against Amherst in football since 1986. Here’s the timeline… I didn’t include the Williams’ victories.
2004AMHERST13Williams10
2002AMHERST45Williams35
2000AMHERST20Williams12
1986AMHERST10Williams7
Short list, huh? On the whole, Amherst athletics are competitive and successful. Last year, men’s basketball won the DIII national championship. Women’s Volleyball has advanced to the quarterfinal round of the NCAA Tournament, having won the New England NCAA DIII title. Women’s cross country is the top rated DIII team in the nation and will compete for a national championship this Saturday at St Olaf College. Men’s Soccer is playing in the semi-finals of the NCAA DIII Sectionals.
I think football is the only sport in NESCAC that is not permitted to participate in post-season play not that I want them to be so authorized, just that I’m unclear on the rationale that singles out this sport. Ok, I’ll let it go… The fact is football has been moderately competitive. I think it’s reasonable to expect them to be more competitive with the best in the league Middlebury, Trinity and Williams too.
CounterTerrorism blog wants to shoot all the foreign borns.
slightly O/T. . . but
tonight the FBI has ALSO
let us know what we all
likely already knew — at
least 14 of the 17 people
gunned down by blackwater
on september 16, 2007, were
killed without any justification,
and outside the use-of-deadly-
force-protocols applicable to
blackwater in iraq. . .
this should lead to a new round
of hearings — ones aimed at tacking
false-statements-under-oath-before-
congress, onto erik prince’s resume. . .
i thought you’d want to know. . .
p e a c e
zAmboni
Damn!!
I knew I should look for her Detroit ties, but I was lazy. And yes, I think La Shish is a front. How else to explain a Middle Eastern place that is so popular even when other, smaller places serve better food??
For example, how can La Shish survive in what is basically an Ann Arbor market, when Jerusalem Garden is the undisputed leader?
Plame. She can’t talk about anything before FISA. So, i guess the files she accessed at NSA had nothing to do with the FISA law or what she accessed before NSA FISA at DoJ, not that DoJ would allow it and it’s not a big deal anyway, just plea. Iguess it would be wrong for DoJ to ’miss’ that she accessed those files and they might get fired, but they couldn’t even follow the changes made in Congress laws as they were investigating IIPA, not that it was IIPA and Plame to begin with and that’s how we get free.
nolo – I agree that there are a lot of grounds for new hearings and likely for some prosecutorial actions from the antics at prior hearings; I indeed hope they come. I read the article on this in the Times and found the conclusions contained therein on the part of the FBI to be amazing, sloppy and questionable. How they came to conclude that three of the killings were justified is beyond me. The statements of Democratic Rep. Price were also abhorrent. I am glad they are doing something, but i don’t like what they are doing if this is representative.
OT, but something I hope we’ll hear more about:
CIA admits to recording interrogations of top al Qaida captives
I worked on some projects, and they went back and interviewed people from my past, from school, etc., and I never worked for the CIA or the FBI. I think that it was because I belonged to two organizations in College they didn’t like, though I belonged to two dozen or more they did like, over those school years.
One of the two at least had someone as a member they didn’t like.
They also verified my identity with my father, and older brother. I thought that was standard. (Now I feel picked on.)
Young Republicans no doubt. Trust them Jodi. They’re just protecting us from the bad guys.
pass the falafels..
Hi Marcy — wondering if you saw Jason Leopold’s video interview with Valerie Plame published today to YouTube?
If not, here’s a line to those videos (via daily kos). Seems to me Valerie Wilson is very comfortable with Leopold… and given Leopold also interview Joe Wilson on camera some 5 months ago, they obviously find Leopold credible, despite the reputational hit Leopold took when he reported Rove was set to be indicted. This is discussed in the interview.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2007/11/14/05049/134
hope all is well. (I bailed out on Democrats, so rarely active in blogosphere any more. But I did do a first-pass edit on that YearlyKos interview a while back, and one of these days I’ll complete it and send it to you, as promised)
emptywheel,
I saw in the DoJ/FBI/whatever release, that they learned of her searching in Dec ’05, Chahine and his wife were charged several months later….so it doesn’t look like it is something that just recently popped up on their radar.
I also noticed in the release that: â€Last month, Chahine was also charged in the Eastern District of Michigan, along with a senior ICE official in Detroit and others in a bribery and extortion conspiracy in which federal immigration benefits were allegedly awarded to illegal aliens in exchange for money.â€
I wonder if this is how Prouty ended up getting her citizenship waived through….I also wonder if Chahine had some connections in getting her the FBI gig. This smells like there is something else going on (corruption within ICE and possibly the FBI) that is not being told here. Also, seeing that she seemed to be checking up on the FBI/CIA into possible investigations regarding the Chahine scheme, I wonder why she wasn’t charged with conspiracy in the IRS fraud that Chahine was charged with? Maybe her cooperation bought her a free pass on that.
Funny side light via google search on Prouty. She bought a house in Vienna VA in October 2004 for $385K, and sold it 8 months later for $435K, nice $50K profit for living in a house for 8 months. The guy who bought the house appears to be Lawrence Carnegie who has spent 30 yrs in the CIA/DIA/DoD/Air Force.
As for La Shish in Ann Arbor, I’m not too much into the middle eastern food, but I do have to question how something can survive at the location on Carpenter Rd. NOTHING has ever survived as a restaurant at that location. Those two hotels, one on that corner, and the one on the other side of 23 seems to change ownership and name every other year.
This smells like there is something else going on (corruption within ICE and possibly the FBI)
zAmboni- they actually discovered her situation duing an ICE corruption investigation.
Hey, I sure she signed a loyalty oath to Chimpy. Isn’t that good enough to work in Cheney/Chimpy government?
Hey, I sure she signed a loyalty oath to Chimpy. Isn’t that good enough to work in Cheney/Chimpy government
She was hired by the FBI in 1999, not by the Bush administration.
I love Felafals!
(Neil did you mean Iran or Israel?)
Background check…hmmm they did not do a very good job, I have seen that form at work and man oh man if that isn’t like having a colonoscopy.
If La Shish is a front for crime, I suspect that they need to uncover a couple more criminals.
Shish kebab is six (shish) items on a skewer. It is one of the number words which made it into English. Punch (five ingredients in a mixed beverage) is another. If you make a drink from 4 items, it is not a punch, no matter what sort of bowl you use to serve it.
If I was part of a criminal ring naming a front business, I wouldn’t emphasize number six, unless six was significant.