In this CBS video, Nada Prouty explains her case, and how she helped apprehend the mastermind of the hijacking of Pan Am flight 73. Proty got his confession and now he's spending 160 years in jail.
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But a 2007 Bush Administration effort to stop terrorist financing led investigators to Michigan, and a Lebanese-American restaurant owner named Talal Chahine, who happened to be Nada Prouty's brother in law. Then, prosecutors found a photo of Chahine with a spritual leader connected to Hezbollah, so the charge from Detroit prosecutors was that Nada Prouty saw classified documents about the terrorist group Hezbollah.
Prouty said she had little to do with Talal Chahine, and considered him "a womanizer who was cheating on her sister." But even with that, prosecutors stuck with a weak case based on classified documents that according to CBS News, were never produced. In other words, because the prosecutors said the documents were classified, they claimed they could not show them. Which is a weird trick to get around the appearance that they actually had no evidence to back their claim.
But determined to "get something" they kept digging, and what the "Detroit prosecutors" then found was that 18 years earlier, Nada Prouty was party in what's commonly called a "green card" marriage.
But somehow - for some reason - what's all too common was used to paint Nada Prouty as a person plotting to enter America as an illegal alien and pass secrets to terrorist groups; the same groups that have people Nady Prouty has apprehended or in some cases killed in defense of her country.
It's an obvious case of over-zealous prosecutors trying to connect un-connectable dots in Nada Prouty's past. If the U.S. Government went around looking at the marriages of every foreign born American citizen, and then finding those marriages to be "green card" associated and looking the current occupations of those persons, they could make a case, albeit a spurious one, for filing thousands of charges.
In Nada Prouty's case the CIA cleared her of any wrongdoing. Still Prouty pled guilty because, as she told 60 minutes, she was literally spent into a corner. The legal fees were too much for her to bear. CBS News reports that under pressure, Prouty:
...agreed to waive the 10-year statute of limitations on immigration fraud and plead guilty to two felonies related to the sham marriage. She also pled guilty to one misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of an FBI computer, a charge she now denies.
With all of this, where are American Conservatives to defend Nada Prodty? Well, being alarmist, idiotic, and ill-informed, that's where. By now it's logical to suspect the involvement of Michelle Malkin, who would be defending Nada Prouty if her name were Nathan Pride. But no.
Instead we get what in 2007 was Malkin's ill-informed blog rant, which fails to report any of the made-for-movie efforts this American Patriot has done in defense of America. Nada Prouty's Syrian-Lebanese background are the perfect target for Malkin's anglophilic blogging tendencies. But interestingly, Malkin backed off any further attacks on Nada Prody after 2007.
Well, the week is young.
And then we have Debbie Schlussel, who makes brazen accusations without looking at the case and brags about making up the name Jihad Jane for Nada Prouty in 2007 and in what has to be one of the most intellectually sloppy columns ever written in the New York Post.
Debbie Schlussel continues her baseless attacks in a new blog post not in the New York Post. Debbie Schlussel writes:
This woman is anything but an American patriot. She’s part of an Islamic terrorist gang who infiltrated this country at the highest levels and financed our enemies to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. It’s beyond nauseating that “60 Minutes” would take her side, fall for her BS.
("This woman?" Interesting.)
Since Nady Prouty is not part of "an Islamic terrorist gang" we can't take Debbie Schlussel's blog entry as anything more than mindless ranting by someone who, as an attorney, should know better.
Conservative Couch Potato blogging aside, President Obama should order Nada Prouty's case to be reopened at the very least, and should the investigation confirm what the CIA has already stated, that Nada's innocent, all charged dropped.
Then President Obama should pardon Nada Prouty. It would be a fitting apology for how she has been treated as well as all of the efforts she has taken to defend America.
Defintely, stay tuned.
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