Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists digs out a directive from Adm. Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, making it easier for people with noncitizen relatives to join the intelligence community. Dense, I know, but it’s a real issue — we need a lot of people in the intelligence world who, say, speak Farsi or Pashto or Arabic. Oftentimes, such crucial-language speakers have family members who aren’t citizens and up till now — crazy, I know — it was difficult to impossible for them to get hired by the CIA or NSA because Aunt Fatima was still waiting on her papers.

Here’s the relevant paragraph of the new directive, dated Oct. 1:

“Subjects who have immediate family members or other persons who are non-United States citizens to whom the subject is bound by affection or obligation may be eligible for access to SCI and other controlled access program information as the result of a condition, deviation, or waiver from personnel security standards.”

So, yeah, you can see, the hiring policy still isn’t without restrictions. There remains a curious paranoia inside the intelligence community about shady foreign-connected ne’er-do-wells infiltrating the arteries of national security, even though the most notable agents of internal subversion have been lily-white real Americans like Aldrich Ames and Robert Hanssen. Still: step in the right direction.

OK, enough of me — Ted Stevens has just been found guilty …