MORE ON HEZBOLLAH'S FBI SPY

Inside Source at FBI Believed to Have Fed Secret Info to Hizbullah - Josh Meyer
An illegal immigrant from Lebanon who became an agent for the FBI and CIA allegedly used her access to sensitive U.S. government secrets to help her brother-in-law, a suspected major fundraiser for the terrorist group Hizbullah, according to new details concerning a national security breach that emerged Wednesday. In court documents and interviews, federal authorities said Nada Nadim Prouty, 37, illegally accessed top-secret FBI investigative files on five occasions and most likely shared the information with the suspected Hizbullah operative. On Wednesday, prosecutors said Prouty illegally accessed the FBI's Hizbullah investigative files in 2002 and 2003, at a time when she was a Washington, D.C.-based FBI field agent who was not working on Hizbullah cases. At the time, her sister's husband, Talal Khalil Chahine, 51, was under investigation by the FBI in Detroit for suspected ties to Hizbullah.

Authorities now believe Prouty was illegally accessing the FBI files to determine for Chahine and perhaps others what the FBI knew about the group's presence here, and that she accessed an investigative file on Chahine. At the time, Chahine was suspected of raising large sums of money for Hizbullah and of meeting with top Hizbullah leaders in Lebanon. The FBI began investigating Prouty after agents began hearing that Chahine, an influential power broker in Dearborn, had an inside source at the FBI who was feeding him information about its investigations into his activities and into Hizbullah. (Los Angeles Times)

"Arab Street," U.S.A. (Contentions)

An article in today’s Los Angeles Times reports new, sordid details in the investigation of Nada Nadim Prouty, a Lebanese woman—an illegal immigrant—who was nevertheless employed by the FBI and CIA, and is accused of stealing top-secret documents for Hizballah. Her brother-in-law, the paper reports, is a “suspected major fund-raiser” for Hizballah.

If that’s not shocking enough, the penultimate paragraph in the L.A. Times article contains very worrisome information, presumably placed in the article as background. “Hizballah is popular with many Lebanese Americans because of its humanitarian efforts and Middle East political activities.”

I thought the bit about Hizballah’s popularity was hyperbole, and I tried to find polling data that might back the statement up one way or another. Instead, I found this NPR story from last year. In the summer of 2006, it turns out, 15,000 Arab-Americans in Dearborn, Michigan, held a demonstration to declare their loyalties. When the crowd cheered “Who is your army?” The response was “Hizballah!” The editor of America’s largest Arab newspaper, the Arab-American News, chimed in that “the terrorist here is the Bush administration.” At the rally, swastikas were imprinted onto Israeli flags.

The second half of the sentence in the Los Angeles Times piece is terrifying for a different reason: its attempt at “objectivity.” Hizballah’s “political activities”? The old saying is that “war is politics by other means.” For Hizballah, an organization responsible for as many terror attacks against Americans as al Qaeda, terror is not simply “political activities” as other means, it is their only politics and their only means.