How big a role did disgraced CIA officer have?

[babylonsister]

How big a role did disgraced CIA officer have?
Prouty was assigned a sensitive post in Baghdad, NBC News has learned

Nov. 14: The young Lebanese woman who managed to fool both the FBI and the CIA had a much bigger role than officials first acknowledged. Andrea Mitchell reports.

By Andrea Mitchell and Robert Windrem
NBC News
updated 8:21 p.m. ET Nov. 14, 2007


There’s new information about the young Lebanese woman who pleaded guilty Tuesday to charges she lied about her background to get jobs at the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Central Intelligence Agency.

Current and former intelligence officials tell NBC News that Nada Nadim Prouty had a much bigger role than officials at the FBI and CIA first acknowledged. In fact, Prouty was assigned to the CIA’s most sensitive post, Baghdad, and participated in the debriefings of high-ranking al-Qaida detainees.

A former colleague called Prouty “among the best and the brightest” CIA officers in Baghdad. She was so exceptional, agree officials of both agencies, the CIA recruited her from the FBI to work for the agency’s clandestine service at Langley, Va., in June 2003. She then went to Iraq for the agency to work with the U.S. military on the debriefings.

“Early on, she was an active agent in the debriefings,” said one former intelligence official. “It was more than translation.”

On Tuesday, she pleaded guilty to conspiracy to illegally search FBI computers for classified information about Hezbollah and to naturalization fraud — a sham marriage to a former husband just to become a U.S. citizen. As the Justice Department noted, she needed to be a U.S. citizen to join the CIA and thus had defrauded the agency. (Prouty first came to the United States on a student visa in 1989 and after overstaying her visa paid an acquaintance in Detroit to marry her so she could get U.S. citizenship. She later divorced the man.)

Although no one claims Prouty worked for Hezbollah, her computer searches led U.S. officials to question her. She looked up files on her sister, Elfat El Aouar, and brother-in-law, Talal Khalil Chahine, both of whom attended a Hezbollah fundraiser in Lebanon — alongside Hezbollah spiritual leader Sheikh Muhammad Hussein Fadlallah, designated by the United States as a terrorist.

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21796035/

[leveymg]

1. Andrea Mitchell is Judith Miller with a few more years of experience behind her.

Prouty has not been charged with anything related to Hezballah, and her duties did not involve Hezballah. The DOJ press release yesterday is quite explicit about that.

The OSP-AIPAC case, in the other hand, is quite clearly a major espionage prosecution. Yet, it's gotten nearly zero coverage by the domestic MSM.