Madness — politically correct madness. The FBI showed it wasn’t anti-Arab by hiring Nada Prouty, and she handsomely repaid them for it, too. Nada Nadim Prouty Update: “Fake citizen worked on major terror cases,” by David Ashenfelter for the Detroit Free Press (thanks to Sr. Soph):
Nada Prouty, the Lebanese immigrant who parlayed a sham marriage into U.S. citizenship and key jobs at the FBI and CIA, worked on several counter-terrorism investigations, including the 2000 bombing of the U.S.S. Cole in Yemen, her lawyer said in court documents Thursday.
“Nada Nadim Prouty accepts full responsibility for her actions and is deeply sorry for her misconduct,” attorney Thomas Cranmer of Troy wrote in a 32-page sentencing memo filed in U.S. District Court in Detroit, for her sentencing May 13. Thursday’s filing offered the first details of what the former Taylor resident did for the government.
“With her language skills and cultural background, Ms. Prouty made invaluable contributions working on highly sensitive and often dangerous counter-terrorism cases,” Cranmer wrote, urging U.S. District Judge Avern Cohn to sentence her to probation rather than 6-12 months in prison as recommended by federal sentencing guidelines.
Seventeen sailors were killed in the Oct. 12, 2000, suicide attack on the Navy guided missile destroyer U.S.S. Cole.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth Chadwell said he couldn’t comment on Cranmer’s filing.
Prouty pleaded guilty in November to accessing a classified FBI computer system to find out whether she or her family members — including brother-in-law Talal Chahine, fugitive owner of the La Shish restaurant chain — were being investigated for terrorist activities and to obtain information about Hizballah investigations.
“At no time did she ever compromise or jeopardize the integrity of her case assignments through improper behavior or inappropriate conduct,” Cranmer said, adding that CIA polygraph tests confirmed that Prouty did not pose a threat to national security….
She also helped investigate the 2002 assassination of U.S. AID diplomat Lawrence Foley in Jordan and helped link the slaying to Abu Musab al-Zarkqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq.
After joining the CIA in 2003, Cranmer said, she worked in Baghdad following the American invasion.
“Through the sixth month of her pregnancy, Ms. Prouty was in the streets of a city at war in order to protect the American forces fighting there,” Cranmer wrote. “On a number of occasions, she was trapped out side the safety of the U.S. Green Zone and was fired on before she was exfiltrated to safety.”
Prouty resigned from the CIA last November before pleading guilty in Detroit. In pleading guilty, she surrendered her U.S. citizenship and agreed to be deported, though she likely will be allowed to stay in the U.S. because of the jobs she held at the FBI and CIA, authorities said.
Although authorities said there was no evidence that Prouty was a Hizballah operative, the episode raised questions about how she cleared multiple federal background checks to acquire U.S. citizenship and land jobs at two of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence agencies without someone discovering that she had engaged in citizenship fraud….
Uh, yeah. Is anyone answering those questions, and making sure this can’t happen again?