On the Secret Service scandal in Colombia

Can we say gross incompetence on all fronts? Once again, we have another stellar example of losers with high level security clearances having sex with prostitutes, even drawing attention to themselves because they were stupid enough to think they weren't going to pay the girls. That could be a new low, or a new degree of stupid, hard to say which. We'll go with both, in equal amounts.

If this whole thing says anything, it's that if you're in the bottom rungs of the totem pole, expect to be thrown overboard if you screw up. It doesn't matter that you were encouraged to be an irresponsible asshole because your superiors are doing it to, or that they said you were "covered," you never are. American soldiers stationed in Afghanistan playing with the shattered bodies of dead suicide bombers, insurgents, and so on, had to have felt comfortable enough to take trophy pictures, this was basically encouraged. What difference does it make when they--we--killed many of these people by invading their territory? Defiling their bodies is an afterthought to murder.

Rest assured that these Secret Service and active duty clowns stationed in Colombia for the Americas conference saw a genuine institutional lack of leadership, plenty of bad examples added to the mix, and behaved accordingly, they were encouraged. So, if you think that it was scary over twenty support security for the president are incompetent, you'd better face the fact that their bosses are bigger incompetents with the power to wreck the lives of others. Now, the media "cares" that "they could have created a security breach," when that was never a concern in the DC Madam case. Why? Because losers like Senator David Vitter are privileged to continue fucking up on your dime, they have connections to keep getting away with it.

What we have here is a serious problem of institutional culture, of determinist anthropology, the crisis of hierarchy that baffles because of how unopposed it remains. Cowardice is easy in good times, or when you're living in a bubble, removed from the effects of the economy on everyone else, and once more, we're talking about the privileged here. This process is eating the future, and if it continues to remain unchallenged, forget it, we're done. I wrote numerous observations here and elsewhere that the major players in Jeane's phone records were violating their national security clearances, to no avail, no one listened. I went so far as to bring that to David Corn's case regarding Ret. Col. Ron Roughead--he never wrote back after our initial exchange, he's made his mind up about the case, and that's not only biased, it's incompetent in my opinion. Again, we're talking about privilege, he was more concerned about keeping his hair in place for his next media appearance apparently. I don't entirely blame him: Jeane was her own worst advocate, she screwed up all over the place with her own time in front of the cameras. Being in front of them at all was the problem.

There is one set of rules for some of us, and another for the rest of us, a double standard that has no place in a genuine democracy.  Why was the issue of national security clearances of no consequence (the public line at least) in the DC Madam case? Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler must have thought so or she wouldn't have granted Jeane subpoenaing power over the entire intelligence community. This is about submissiveness to raw power. I wouldn't expect anything less from our corporate owned media.

Why won't President Obama fire the remaining Bush/Cheney loyalists?

Washington D.C.--This has been perplexing me for months now, but recall that when George W. Bush entered office, one of the very first things he did back in 2001 was to fire virtually all of the 93 standing U.S. Attorneys. What was he thinking? He didn't want anyone who wasn't on the same page or loyal to him--that's not legitimate, incidentally, not in the public interest.

That's why President Obama needs to fire every single standing U.S. Attorney now, but he won't. That speaks volumes about him if it continues much longer, that he's no different than George W. Bush and his administration. But it's possibly worse than that.

But why do mass firings and what's the problem? Very simple: It's becoming obvious--for example--that embedded appointees within the DOJ are working against the new president as well as at the Pentagon and even within the confines of the CIA and throughout the federal bureaucracy, working against him, his party, and the public will. This doesn't appear to concern President Obama.

Is he crazy? Is he nuts? Is he stupid? No.

I think the 2008 revelations about Attorney General Eric Holder and his connections to the Chiquita Brands International Inc. corporation as an attorney representing their interests in a recent civil suit states-it-plainly: the Obama administration is riddled with the same kinds of scumbags from the corporate world and the realm of the political operative, the corporate gutter. Oh yeah, and included many of the very same scumbags that were there in the bureaucracy under Bush II. This is unacceptable and shows so far that the Obama administration has no problem with politicizing law enforcement, a very dangerous road to go down in a democracy. But it's all about money, isn't it? Yes it is.

For years, Chiquita was paying off right wing paramilitaries (AUC, listed as terrorists at the time by our government) not to attack their banana plantations in Colombia during their "dirty war" with Marxist guerrillas, FARC. In the interest of fairness, both sides (the paramilitaries are generally allied with the drug-smuggling oligarchs in the North) sometimes run cocaine to fund their activities. So, Chiquita was breaking the law--did I mention there have been allegations that they were also reported running cocaine in some of their shipments? It appears that they wanted to pad their bottom line, but this is still unconfirmed.

At the time--March 2007--I and most of the nation began noticing the DC Madam scandal and her prosecutor, the moronic U.S. Attorney Jeffrey A. Taylor who'd been unethically appointed through a provision of the Patriot Act as an interim U.S. Attorney by George W. Bush while Congress was out of session, sometime in late September 2006. Just a few months later, Taylor was expediting the plea agreement for Chiquita...and bringing an indictment against Palfrey (no, I'm not drawing a connection here). Jeffrey was very busy during those months, covering-up for a gaggle of corporate bigwigs, Bush II appointees, government contractors, and not just with the DC Madam scandal--he had his work cut-out for him, but he's a rock, a skilled sycophant. Well...not exactly: he's also been known to file under the wrong statutes, but that's another story for another time.

And so, many other names that will be familiar from the Bush II years that never really ended were also involved in the Chiquita settlement; even the DOJ's/DHS's Michael Chertoff, but it was Holder and Taylor who brokered the deal that gave Chiquita a very tiny fine considering that they were paying off terrorists for several years, basically giving them material support. Holder has a lot to explain as their former attorney, and fine, he's going to claim attorney-client privilege so he's going to have to be investigated eventually if it ever even happens.

No criminal holding public office has ever been known to allow the prosecution of themselves, other than Richard Nixon, and he didn't go down quietly. Obama isn't going to fire these standing U.S. Attorneys from the Bush II years soon because he answers to the same bosses, and so does his Attorney General. Why fire the appointees after that? The current president is just another fraud. Power concedes nothing without a demand. Beware these businessmen who come at you with knives: they're you're businessmen.

"The Department of Justice, Corporations, Buying the Law-Part II: Strange Bargains," Larisa Alexandrovna and Muriel Kane, Rawstory, 07.21.2009: http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/07/21/buying-the-law/