With President Bush and the Congress in an uproar over the “intelligence failures” that led up to September 11, one place to start exercising oversight would be the relationship between the Central Intelligence Agency and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. All through the Cold War and after, senators like Robert Torricelli and Christopher Dodd could be heard denouncing the CIA for dealing with corrupt, authoritarian dictators in Latin America. A whole network of victims, advocacy groups, reporters and laws sprung up to advance this campaign to discredit America’s intelligence agencies and to hamstring them in countering Communist influences. Raymond Bonner of the New York Times wrote about El Salvador, Jennifer Harbury and Senator Torricelli on Guatemala, the National Security Archive on Pinochet and Chile — the list goes on and on.

Today, the war against America is coming not from Latin America but from the Middle East, where Jews are dying in bombing after bombing for which Israel holds responsible a corrupt, dictatorial quasi-government with which the CIA has been working. It’s not even a secret. The director of Central Intelligence, George Tenet, is on a publicly announced mission to meet Yasser Arafat and help “upgrade” the Palestinian “security” forces. Funny thing, but despite bombing after bombing — and Americans have been among the victims — we haven’t heard a single leftist pipe up to demand to know why the CIA is working with the corrupt regime to start with.

Of the recent collaboration, one Palestinian Arab businessman recalls, “You’d see the CIA agents go into restaurants with the officers from the Preventative Security Service.” One such lunch, a little over two years ago at a Ramallah restaurant called Al Bardouni, cost a wildly inflated $5,500. Those Palestinian security forces are headed in Gaza by Mohamed Dahlan, who has a piece of the lucrative petroleum distribution deal for the West Bank and Gaza. In the West Bank they are headed by Jibril Rajoub, who has a piece of the once-lucrative casino in Jericho. The CIA took Mr. Rajoub on introductory trips to Arab capitals. He spent at least three weeks in Amman meeting with Jordan’s then-intelligence chief Batikhi, and he also visited Bahrain. Earlier this year, Mr. Dahlan bought a house in Gaza for his family for $1 million in cash, our sources tell us.

A CIA spokesman, Paul Nowack, wouldn’t comment on whether Mr. Rajoub or Mr. Dahlan are on the American payroll, and he notes that for all the criticism of the CIA for associating with unsavory types, the agency has also been criticized in the wake of Sept. 11 for not associating with enough unsavory types. If you’re seeking intelligence about evildoers, sometimes you have to deal with folks who are not Boy Scouts. Fair enough. But this has gone way beyond intelligence gathering. Messrs. Rajoub and Dahlan are more than just stool pigeons. America entered into a bargain with them that failed irreparably. As Senator Kyl put it on CNN last month, “We pumped literally hundreds of millions of dollars into the PLO for a police force that was supposed to be able to keep the peace and instead was used to create a terrorist army, in effect, at Arafat’s disposal. That we cannot do again.”

Somehow, when the people being killed by or on the watch of the CIA-backed thugs are not communists or “human rights activists” but Israeli bus passengers or American Jewish tourists and students like Alisa Flatow, the outrage among the Dodds and Torricellis of the world over the CIA’s role is a little less audible. And what about the Palestinian Arabs who question the situation; imagine the outrage on the left if a right-wing Guatemalan government, whose “security forces” had been trained by the CIA, had been lynching “informants” in the street. We called Mr. Dodd, Mr. Torricelli and the National Security Archive, and none of them wanted to comment on these ironies. Ms. Harbury said she wasn’t sure why the CIA’s dealings in the Palestinian territories have attracted so much less scrutiny than those in Latin America. “I think it’s a very underreported story,” she said. The point of some better oversight now would not be to hamstring America’s intelligence officers in the current war against terror but to make sure that they are fighting on the right side.