You can't say Jane Harman doesn't have a sense of humor.

The California Democrat, besieged all last week by revelations of a wiretapped conversation with a suspected Israeli agent, has dubbed tomorrow's road race team, "Tapped Out."

A light-hearted piece in Sunday's New York Times, "Tips for the Sophisticated Fugitive," reminded me that Jacob "Kobi" Alexander, an Israeli businessman at the center of the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program, is still on the lam.

Many people would be shocked to learn that the two biggest contractors in the ultra-sophisticated NSA eavesdropping program are owned and run by Israelis, many of whom came from their country's own electronic spying services.

The Marines stationed at Beirut airport in 1983 could have had plenty of time to prepare for the suicide bomber that struck with devastating consequences 25 years ago this week, their commander says.

But the eavesdropping National Security Agency's intercept of an Iranian telephone call that gave the order got stuck "in the intelligence pipeline."

In all, 241 Marines, soldiers and sailors died in the Oct. 23, 1983 attack.

"Unknown to us at the time, the National Security Agency had made a diplomatic communications intercept on 26 September ...  in which the Iranian Intelligence Service provided explicit instructions to the Iranian ambassador in Damascus (a known terrorist) to attack the Marines at Beirut International Airport," says Marine Col. Colonel Timothy J. Geraghty, writing in the latest issue of Proceedings, a publication of the U.S. Naval Institute.

"The suicide attackers struck us 28 days later, with word of the intercept stuck in the intelligence pipeline until days after the attack."

The two bombings - French paratroopers would be struck two minutes later, with the loss of 58 lives  - will be marked with a candlelight vigil at dawn Thursday in North Carolina, where a Beirut memorial is etched with the names of the fallen.

A different kind of ceremony will mark the bombings in Tehran, writes Geraghty, who also spent seven years in the CIA's Special Operations Group.

"In the Iranian Behesht-E-Zahra cemetery in southern Tehran, there will also be a ceremony at a monument erected in 2004 to commemorate the Beirut suicide bombers. In attendance will likely be some dressed as suicide bombers, chanting the standard 'death to America' and 'death to Israel.'"

In paying solemn tribute to the fallen men of his 24th Marine Amphibious Group, Geraghty also rues that President Ronald Reagan had abandoned America's military neutrality in the raging Lebanese civil war.

"It is noteworthy that the United States provided direct naval gunfire support -- which I strongly opposed for a week -- to the Lebanese Army at a mountain village called Suq-al-Garb on 19 September and that the French conducted an air strike on 23 September in the Bekaa Valley," he writes.

"American support removed any lingering doubts of our neutrality, and I stated to my staff at the time that we were going to pay in blood for this decision."

The attacks, which went unanswered by U.S. military action, "became a turning point in the unbounded use of terrorism by radical Islamic fanatics worldwide," Geraghty writes.

On March 18, 2008 interception systems were discovered on the telephone lines of the Spanish, German, French and British delegations to the Council of Europe, a gathering of the heads of European Union governments. Ever since that date, the permanent R Committee, which oversees the operations of Belgian intelligence, has been trying in vain to find the eavesdroppers.

If lying to FBI agents was enough to send Scooter Libby to jail, why isn't it enough to prosecute Alberto Gonzales?

Despite strong evidence in a today's Justice Department report that the former attorney general lied to federal investigators probing his careless handling of highly classified documents, the department declined to prosecute.

Indeed, initial news reports on the Inspector General's findings didn't even mention the evidence of perjury, focusing instead on Gonzales's "mishandling" of notes and more-than-Top Secret documents relating to the administration's secret wiretapping and terrorist detention programs,

Who's going to get upset about that?

Who doesn't "mishandle" -- i.e., misplace, loose, forget where they left -- the tuition check, the gas bill, keys, glasses, the grocery list, and yes, even take-home work  -- at least once in awhile?

To be sure, the kind of information Gonzales was shlepping between his office, home, limousines, airplanes and, for all we know, the local Safeway and the dry cleaner (or maybe he left it in the car?) was so sensitive its loss "could cause irreparable injury to the United States or be used to advantage by a foreign nation," according to the IG report.

At one point, according to White House counsel Fred Fielding, quoted in the IG report, Gonzales "wasn't sure where they were."  The AG duly confessed to the IG that he was "a little confused about where the notes were."  His briefcase wasn't always locked, he told investigators, and he didn't use a government safe in his house because . . .he had forgotten the combination.
    
He's only human.

For such trifles, the Justice Department "scolded" Gonzales, as the Associated Press characterized the IG's finger-wagging, and left it at that.

But the IG report shows that Gonzales did more than "mishandle" his notes, which included operational details on what he himself, somewhat ironically, called -- after it had leaked -- "one of the most highly protected [programs] in the United States ... a very, very secretive, protected program," and correspondence between congressional Intelligence Committee leaders and CIA chief Gen. Michael Hayden. 

In a statement that doesn't pass the laugh test, Gonzales told IG investigators he didn't know the documents were secret.

Gonzales said that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes. Gonzales also stated he did not recall thinking that the notes themselves were classified.

But the IG found the smoking gun -- in Gonzales's hand, no less.

The envelope containing documents related to the NSA surveillance program bore the handwritten markings, "TOP SECRET - EYES ONLY - ARG" [the attorney general's initials] followed by an abbreviation for the SCI codeword for the program.

Inside the envelope, moreover, were "documents relating to a detainee interrogation program," which were all classified with cover sheets and markings in the top and bottom margins, as Top Secret/Sensitive Classified Information.

And yet Gonzales told the IG investigators "that he was unaware of the classification level and compartmented nature of the NSA program he referenced in the notes."

That is patently absurd.

Poor Scooter Libby, the national security aide to Vice President Cheney, who suffered million-dollar legal bills and lifetime disbarment for a perjury conviction related to the relatively trifling Valerie Plame affair, only to be snatched from the jaws of prison by a pardon from President Bush.   

Today, the Justice Department revealed that it had saved everybody the bother in the case of Alberto Gonzales.

It just let him skate.

(UPDATE: Inspector General Office spokesman Paul Martin called back late Wednesday afternoon after this blog item was filed and left a voice mail message to call back. Because of a medical appointment, I was not able to retrieve his message for almost 24 hours. When I finally reached him Thursday, he said he would have "no comment" for this story. I regret the delay, which had left the misimpression that the department had not bothered to reply.-js) 

Lots of spook literature these days: Especially noteworthy are two new ones -- two! -- by former CIA operative Gary Berntsen, whose memoir of leading the first agency team into Afghanistan after 9/11 and cornering Osama bin Laden, Jawbreaker,  read like a true-life thriller.  

Now comes The Walk-In (written with novelist Ralph Pezzullo), a fictional thriller involving an Iranian defector that seems awfully close to reality, even as it follows conventional plot lines -- renegade CIA agent saves the world and all that.  Pub date is Aug. 12.