On a February morning in 2006, as Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, was jolted awake by the calls to prayer from the city’s mosques, 23 Yemeni prisoners crawled their way to freedom.

They had spent weeks patiently digging a 140-foot tunnel that would extend from their basement prison cell to a nearby mosque. Among the escapees were Jamal al-Badawi, the alleged mastermind of the 2000 USS Cole bombing that killed 17 American sailors, and Jaber al-Banna, a Yemeni with U.S. citizenship who was counted among the FBI’s 26 most wanted.

Laura Rozen reports on a troubling report from retired general Barry McCaffrey and commissioned by Centcom commander David Petraeus:

"The international civilian agency surge will essentially not happen ---although State Department officers, US AID, CIA, DEA, and the FBI will make vital contributions. Afghanistan over the next 2-3 years will be simply too dangerous for most civil agencies."

No, this post will have nothing to do with Sarah Palin. It concerns the hearing held this morning by the Senate Homeland Security Committee regarding the terrorist attack carried out by Maj. Nidal Hassan against his fellow soldiers at Fort Hood, a hearing called by that Committee's chairman, Joe Lieberman.

On Friday, TNR Contributing Editor and Washington Times national security reporter Eli Lake published a blockbuster scoop about the National Iranian American Council, (NIAC), and it's founder, Trita Parsi. I recently wrote about Parsi's appearance at the J Street conference, where he waived away concerns about the Iranian regime's warnings about destroying Israel and compared such invocations to statements issued by the United States about Iran's nuclear program. Over the past several years, Parsi has built up quite the impressive profile in Washington, earning himself frequent appearances on cable television and on the pages of the nation's top op-ed pages, as well as the kudos of countless "progressive" bloggers, who relish his message of "engagement" with Tehran. In person and in writing, Parsi comes across as serenely reasonable even if the policies for which he advocates -- the lifting of any sanctions on Iran and the striking of a "grand bargain" with the Mullahs -- are actually quite extreme.

Well, it turns out there's a lot more to Parsi than what most people knew (or suspected). First, he isn't even American, which is strange considering the fact that the organization he heads is called the National Iranian American Council and claims to speak on behalf of America's 1 million Iranianis. Furthermore, Parsi admits that his group only has 2,500 to 3,000 members. Internal documents, uncovered by Lake, show that less than 500 people responded to a membership survey that the group put out last year. So, far from representing the views of any appreciable number of Iranian Americans, it is far more accurate to say that NIAC represents the views of Trita Parsi.

But what may really get Parsi into trouble is the accusation that he has been acting for years as an unregistered foreign agent for elements in Iran and, in doing, "may be guilty of violating tax laws, the Foreign Agents Registration Act and lobbying disclosure laws," according to law enforcement authorities whom Lake interviewed. Specifically, Parsi had worked to arrange meetings between Iran's ambassador to the United Nations and U.S. Congressmen:

Perhaps in responding to Jason, I wasn’t clear about why I don’t think we have grounds yet for calling Nidal Hassan’s act an act of terrorism. Let me try once more, and let me make one thing clear: I am not ruling out that it was, and I don’t require that he admit it was.

On July 25, Najibullah Zazi, a lanky man in his mid-twenties, walked into the Beauty Supply Warehouse in Aurora, Colorado, a suburb of Denver. The visit was captured on a store video camera. Wearing a baseball cap and pushing a shopping cart, Zazi appeared to be just another suburban guy.

Of course, not many suburban guys buy six bottles of Clairoxide hair bleach, as Zazi did on this shopping trip--or return a month later to buy a dozen bottles of "Ms. K Liquid," a peroxide-based product. Aware that these were hardly the typical purchases of a heavily bearded, dark-haired young man, Zazi--who was born in Afghanistan and spent part of his childhood in Pakistan before moving to the United States at the age of 14--kibitzed easily with the counter staff, joking that he had to buy such large quantities of hair products because he "had a lot of girlfriends."

The AP reports that it wasn't until late August (just a few weeks before his arrest) and that it wasn't from any domestic law-enforcement agency but from the CIA:

The CIA learned about Zazi through one of its sources and alerted domestic agencies, including the FBI, intelligence officials said.

Among those who know me well, few can remember when I covered any subjects other than Al Qaeda and the global jihad. I wrote about Osama Bin Laden when he was "Usama bin Ladin." And so since September 14, all anybody's been asking me are questions about a young Afghan immigrant named Najibullah Zazi and his alleged involvement in the first Al Qaeda cell uncovered in America since the 9/11 attacks. Here are my answers to the four most common questions I've been getting.

So this is what Matt Damon has been keeping bottled up during all those taciturn hours playing Jason Bourne. In Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!, Damon plays--and plays very, very well--a character in every way the opposite of his efficient, amnesiac superspy: a babbling bumbler who goes undercover for the FBI to gather information against his own employer but winds up exposing mostly himself. Forget Soderbergh's earlier Erin Brockovich; this is a portrait of the whistleblower as pipsqueak.

On the advice of my physician, I do not watch or listen to Glenn Beck, preferring to follow his exploits via the serial bouts of hysteria he inspires in his fans. So it was news to me to learn that he spends a lot of time hawking the works of the late W. Cleon Skousen, an extremely sketchy right-wing character who lived on the far fringes of the conservative movement and of Mormonism.

In a fascinating piece on the subject in Salon today, Alexander Zaitchick explores Beck's near-apostolic advocacy of Skousen's work, which serves as a sort of intellectual framework for the highly paranoid worldview of the Tea Party movement that Beck has done so much to promote. In his very colorful career, which earned him a big fat "dangerous extremist" file with his former employers at the FBI, Skousen gained most notice in the early 60s as a fellow traveler and stout defender of the John Birch Society (after Birch founder Robert Welch had been read out of the conservative movement for contending that Dwight D. Eisenhower was a communist).

When former Democratic Rep. Jim Traficant was released from prison yesterday after 7 years behind bars, the AP reported that he "had his famously wild hair pulled back." Well, yes and no. The piled-high pompadour that had long been the congressman's calling card--the technical term for the style was, I believe, the "artichoke," and Traficant often joked that he trimmed it with a "weed-whacker"--was famous and wild, but it was not in fact his hair. When Traficant was incarcerated in 2002, it was revealed that his signature 'do was, in fact, a toupee, which came as a considerable shock, not because it looked like anything less, but because it seemed remarkable that anyone would pay money to perch such a thing on his own scalp.

Traficant's release offers the opportunity to revisit his career and that of the town, Youngstown, Ohio, whose less-than exemplary character he embodied. David Grann wrote about both back in 2000 in what was, if memory serves, the first piece I ever edited at TNR, "Crimetown, U.S.A." (Yes, I know this is two links to Grann pieces in a week, but these things sometimes happen.) Though Traficant would ultimately be nailed on bribery and racketeering charges, one of the more astonishing sections of the piece concerns an episode far earlier in his career when, appearing as his own attorney, he avoided conviction on corruption charges despite a signed confession and an audio tape of him conspiring with mobsters:

Congressman John Murtha passed away today. Below, you'll find a recent magazine feature that we ran on him--and the town he represented for 36 years.

Over the past few days, there’s been much speculation over whether Attorney General Eric Holder will launch an investigation into the CIA’s use of torture after 9/11.

It's taken countless hours of TV crime-drama ("Crime Story," "Miami Vice") and nearly a dozen feature films (Heat, Collateral, Miami Vice again), but in John Dillinger, Michael Mann may finally have found an ideal vessel for his particular vision of masculine cool: stylish, charismatic, unflappable, adept at violence but not hungry for it.

Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America

By John Earl Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev

(Yale University Press, 637 pp., $35)

Well, that wore off fast. When Barack Obama strode into town in January, he brought with him a great wave of idealism. Inspired by the president and his "call to service," America's best and brightest mused aloud in their faculty lounges, law office suites, and investment banks about how they would gladly sacrifice their financial interests to serve their country.

I fully realize that few complaints are more tiresome than "your party's scandal is worse than my party's scandal." But indulge me for a moment. I can't think of a good reason why Rod Blagojevich has become the most hated man in America while Norm Coleman still walks the streets with his head held high.

The first thing I learned from driving around Nevada with Ron Paul for a couple of days: People really hate the Federal Reserve. This became clear midway through a speech Paul was giving to a group of Republicans at a community center in Pahrump, a dusty town about 60 miles west of Las Vegas. Pahrump is known for its legal brothels (Heidi Fleiss lives there), but most of the people in the audience looked more like ranchers than swingers. They stood five deep at the back of the room and listened politely as the candidate spoke.

Last week, I wrote about The Hunting Party, a film that tried (and failed) to integrate geopolitics into a black comedy. This week, The Kingdom attempts the only slightly less daunting task of integrating geopolitics into an action film. (Rather see a movie that leaves out the geopolitics altogether?

As the Senate took aim this summer at private equity firms, dragging hedge fund managers and other Masters of the Universe to the Hill to explain why, exactly, they needed tax breaks, one senator stood out for his degree of outrage.

I DEAD IN ATTIC
By Chris Rose
(Chris Rose Books, 158 pp., $13)

BREACH OF FAITH: HURRICANE KATRINA AND THE NEAR DEATH OF A
GREAT AMERICAN CITY
By Jed Horne
(Random House, 412 pp., $25.95)

THE STORM
By Ivor van Heerden and Mike Bryan
(Viking, 308 pp., 25.95)

THE GREAT DELUGE: HURRICANE KATRINA, NEW ORLEANS, AND THE
MISSISSIPPI GULF COAST
By Douglas Brinkley
(William Morrow, 716 pp., $29.95)

PATH OF DESTRUCTION: THE DEVASTATION OF NEW ORLEANS AND THE
COMING AGE OF SUPERSTORMS
By John McQuaid and Mark Schleifstein
(Little, Brown, 386 pp., $26)