Whores and Agendas

 I'll make this short: Not so long ago, I was contacted once more by an unreliable narrator who was a marginal player in the DC Madam case, someone who Jeane consulted briefly before her trial in the spring of 2008, a long time ago. I am not and will never be willing to compromise with the factual-and-objective information I experienced and uncovered before, during, and after, the DC Madam's legal proceedings. 

This is never going to change. Not for money, or any other reason. I know what happened and what happened to me during the legal proceedings. The sad reality in the United States today is the complete ditching of context by some along with a fundamental disrespect for the truth. Unless it serves someone's personal or political agenda, they don't want to know, and we're  talking about an all-ages club here, a pervasive American attitude. This is nothing new in American history; we've been running from the truth since well before Lexington and Concorde, which is running from your problems. I think we decided a long time ago as a nation that these very real social problems aren't problems at all, but just one more way to turn a buck, the original point of Anglo-America. Fine at least if one admits it from the onset and remains consistent on the point. Everyone knows that we were founded by a corporation.

I knew when I began assisting the late Ms. Palfrey that it wasn't about money, and it wasn't. There's no way that I will have ever profited from my involvement in the case. Insisting on the truth of the matter precludes that in a culture which has and is hostile to truth, whatever it may be, in whatever context...that dirty word again, that abomination to would be tyrants everywhere. The case was and will continue to be a barometer for this climb backwards into the darkly peculiar history of the United States. 

We've been here before, in the 1830s and 1840s, when the kind of demagoguery was being pioneered by Andrew Jackson whose shadow looms over the current mess that is the U.S.; it's no secret that it's particularly evident in the southern states and those whose formation came about as a result of the Mexican-American War. Money is all in this, the final white supremacist holdout. I wrote over a decade ago that America is an oligarchy; we have a contemporary aristocracy, and the DC Madam case was just an expression of that fact. These congressmen generally live above the law.

     Hardly being alone, the U.S. is a lawless nation and has yet to become fully civilized. In this context, I always have and will consider Palfrey more akin to a 19th century madam than anything, curious anachronism in a former colonial jerk-water, one that became a world power for a time. That time is over. One day, perhaps, young people will want to learn the truth about this and many other events and stories of the first decade of the twenty-first century. If others were serious about portraying the DC Madam case either dramatically or in a documentary, I would know about it. There have none up to the time of this writing. What will young people think about the case in the future? 

If there's one message that I would send them, it is this: understand that the people who often govern your lives are lesser than you are, that they can sometimes be beaten, they are human, and, therefore, fallible. More often you'll begin to see as you grow older that the bastards undo themselves with their moronic and self-destructive behavior. The best cure for all of this is heading them off at the pass by filtering them out of politics. Get involved in taking down the local Goliaths, forget national politics, start at the bottom...but don't think you're not corruptible, you are.

What was the DC Madam case about?

With the blessed passing of yet another election cycle, we might reflect on another one from the recent past which resulted in a significant routing of the GOP by the Democrats: the deeply contentious 2006 national midterms. There's at least one major political sex scandal that takes down a significant politician in the United States every election cycle, generally speaking, two years, with overlap for higher office.

After the fall of the Director of the CIA at the hands of the surveillance state, we might reflect on the DC Madam case and look at the same themes and actions at play.

Jeane got this, maybe more towards the end:

On 3/15/08, Jeane Palfrey <jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com> wrote:

Bil… yes, I saw it. This further supports my belief that escort and adult services – which cater to powerful and influential clients – are being used as the new "hunting grounds" in American politics. –Jeane PS if interested, I will be on Geraldo and Coast to Coast Radio (10:30pm PDT) tonight. Newsweek also has done a piece on me, that is coming out in Monday's edition. It should be available online, by late tonight/tomorrow.

Yet, it appears that the GOP practically brought their own scandal to the attention of the American public. This kind of calculated stupidity is completely in character for them. I walked away from this train wreck a few days after this email. This all began with a leak by federal prosecutors to Bill Bastone and the Smoking Gun, they wanted it out there.

Why do this? Damage control knowing that you can redefine a problem. 2006 had a lot to do with corruption, how much the public will take of it, and damage control rather than the willingness to change or to take responsibility like adults. There are no adults, don’t kid yourself. You look at events differently once you’ve been on the inside of them. Whether others like it or not, Jeane allowed me to take in a lot for a purpose. She invited me to sneak a peek behind the curtain, and indeed, some impotent clowns resembling the Wizard of Oz were incompetently pulling levers that affect people’s lives, tripping, falling over each other, and they were just as blunderingly human and frail as I expected them to be. What the case was about is right in front of your eyes, every day, therefore invisible. It wasn’t a mistake that defense and intelligence technology contractor SAIC and the CPU giant Qualcomm were in Jeane’s phone records, or that they were visiting my website any more than it was that so many arrows pointed to San Diego and numerous military personnel, many of them officers. It wasn’t coincidence that put Lockheed Martin in her phone bills for her escort service, that a World Bank executive was in them, that a major league GOP operative like Jack Burkman was too, and there were many others, others I haven’t even included in my account of what I believe happened and what the case meant. Judge Kessler saw no coincidences when she granted Jeane subpoena power over the intelligence community.

This was a tale of partisan politics and statism, but also where the lines blur in those constructs, because interests overlap, making for the strangest bedfellows of all. Why the 2006 midterms? I believe this election is the key to understanding why an interim-appointed U.S. Attorney named Jeffrey A. Taylor decided to move on Deborah Jeane Palfrey, the press-dubbed “DC Madam,” only one month after she’d shuttered her escort service. I’m assuming here that someone tipped her off. Why waste millions on a small escort service like that? This was first of all about damage control for the part of the public that can be reached when presented with stupid things like facts and corroborated evidence, empiricism, stuff that's not entertainment. Without wanting to, I have no faith in the rank-and-file of either major party, and I think Palfrey’s own apathy about politics and her ignorance of it was instrumental in her undoing, word to the wise. Being the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind doesn’t elevate you to the throne.

She knew some significant things about her predicament and her place, but clearly, not enough. What still surprises me is that before I brought the timing of the search of the Vallejo residence to her attention, she, her counsel, and others assisting her, hadn’t considered it—not even journalists she was encountering were expressing their observations of this. For an openly partisan Republican prosecutor to move on a suspect who, perhaps unknowingly, holds information damaging to his party and other related interests, is an unmistakable political act. Breaking the law to achieve damage control and to protect the defense and intelligence contracting game was implicit to their theater and the media was only too happy to play along.

Not even a nearly unprecedented economic crisis was going to overcome the racist backlash over the 2008 election of Barack Obama and it temporarily breathed new life into an ashen GOP, perhaps for the final time, since it was coming from a demographic of angry, aging white Americans whose political significance has been rapidly eroding over the last few decades. In their bigotry, they fear this massive influx of Hispanic refugees, most of them desperate Mexicans fleeing social chaos, generations of poverty, the militarization of the drug war, corrupt federales, goons, police, the cartels, and enslavement in the maquiladora factories that line the Free Trade Zone along the border, and now, private security, the CIA and drones. Such a happy family relationship between nations brought the dictator Porfirio Diaz to remark, “Poor Mexico, so far from God, and so close to the United States.” Yet, thanks to this ruthless repression and exploitation, there were some unexpected results: a new dynamic where Latin Americans are now heading towards being the future of politics, and possibly the labor movement, in the United States. And with this realization among the nativist rabble element came the inevitable Know-nothing reaction of hounding immigrants, which, like lynching, is a time-honored American tradition. Does the public ever truly learn? Which one would that be in a divided nation when these racists are becoming the minority? They're also the staggering idiots who tolerate an emergent police state and runaway defense spending while at the same time painting themselves inaccurately as rebels. That's called a fool. This is why it wasn't surprising to me that these same people--if you want to call them that--run to conspiracy theories that never truly touch on those power centers. Chasing ghosts and being ineffectual is the safest thing in the world. 2006 wasn't especially different from now.

At this, the halfway mark of the second and unfortunate term of George W. Bush, when the future Tea Party members were cheering the illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan and police state tactics in the war on terror, Republican Party officeholders were paying the price for more skeletons in their closet than the Marquis de Sade or Al Capone. The litany of corrupt acts, antisocial behaviors, and general high weirdness, was widespread enough in their elected ranks to warrant decades of inquiries, yet, no, according to President Obama, we must “continue to look forward,” sounding as much like Scarface as the Republicans. Of great note, one of the cappers that went over the line was Florida congressman Mark Foley, who was accused of pedophilia. This is all about breaking the law and surviving through until the next ever-tightening election cycle. Controlling the DOJ never hurts. Besides, you can always fire your Attorney General and appoint another one the public can grow to hate as an arch-criminal the more they get to know about them. Almost a year earlier the profoundly illegal warrantless wiretapping program that bypassed the judicial oversight of the FISA court (housed at the DOJ, and I suspect they knew), initiated by the White House, was no longer being sat on by the traditionally submissive New York Times. (They had done this for a full year, so that the 2004 elections could pass by safely for the GOP, at least regarding that particular skeleton.)

You know that there’s a political crisis going on when the culture of politics has shifted so far to the right, that all the partisan hacks can talk about is a non-existent center. Most of what you’re going to be hearing from the official channels when a system ossifies is unbridled crap and lies, more obfuscations, apologies to power, ignoring the growing herd of elephants (the only one), until this game no longer works. Rather than looking at all of what we’re learning about rampant corruption as an excuse to cop-out (pun very much intended) and run to the temporary safety of jaded apathy, we should be glad that we know about these crimes at all, because knowledge really is power. But then the problem is that you’re forced to decide to do something about it. I made that decision getting involved in this case, hoping that I could bear witness to history and to accumulate whatever materials I could for the record. I was successful in that endeavor. Too often, the residue of events is lost to the ages. Collecting these materials was done so that the information could be out there and the public has the option to discover, more generally, how the private sector and government collude, and I've put it out there, with more to come.

An incredible effort was mounted to neutralize the destructive potential of what the charges against the late Ms. Palfrey were really about. To re-frame a story, and by doing so, redefining it, is a common practice in, ours, the most propagandized modern society outside of the former Soviet Union and China under Mao. "Sunlight is the best disinfectant." This is why corrupt government contractors need to operate in the dark, and that’s what the DC Madam case, a branch of Hookergate, was about: to hide their criminal behavior and bury the evidence of their much greater crimes. When you keep raising this glaring discrepancy between how Palfrey was treated under the law on the one hand and how her privileged clients were on the other, and it’s never addressed in any substantial sense by government prosecutors, career spokesmen like P.J. Crowley, those clients like Senator Vitter, law enforcement, the hierarchy at the DOJ, you begin to realize the fix is in. Mind you, this was being said by many of us during the proceedings very loudly, and to no avail, because the mainstream press did its best to let it die by its own hand, and I mean that literally, because they also knew that Jeane was suicidally inclined. Brecht couldn't have dreamed this nightmare up. That's not murder, it's willful negligence

There had been a very serious scandal in 2006—one of many—that eventually fizzled-out named “Hookergate,” the standard cigar and hooker parties that are held in and around the Beltway for hungry contractors, to obtain coveted, high dollar jobs and assuage the seething addictions of sociopath Republican horndogs (as opposed to Democratic ones) with a taste for the high life on your dime. Yes, this is all about the war on terror and the moronic, runaway militarization of America, the biggest buyer of unnecessary, clunky military hardware in the entire world, six hundred times the spending in this area than of all the other nations of the world combined. That’s pretty stupid—nay—exceptional. We not only have the right to blow our balls off in this manner, but we still somehow have the right to speak about it thanks to a historical accident that began during the Colonial period, freedom of speech and the press. Things working out will never be good enough for the species. In our meanness and selfish tendencies that have been fostered into the emotional equivalents of plutonium, another poison we’ve refined, so as to illustrate our collective wretchedness, we have contaminated the world with our greed. From the moral rot of John Jacob Astor, to the senseless greed of the speculator Jay Gould, America’s first millionaires, on down to the Robber Barons like Carnegie, Rockefeller, and Morgan, men who childish fools have emulated ever since, we compromised with the bad guys and lost our way long ago as a nation, and we’re finally running out of road for the last time. This is our last chance. All of this is what the DC Madam case was about, the culmination of generations of baseness and barbarity. Either this is the beginning, the end, or both, but we’ve undoubtedly come full circle, which is rarely a good sign for the little people out there, the rest of us out here in television land.

This has happened before. Our out of control defense spending is doing to American democracy what it did to that system in Athens, first, by bankrupting their Treasury, then the inevitable collapse into anarchy and dictatorship, wrought by irrational military adventurism. Ask the Greeks how long it’s taken to come back from that one. And, so today, we have a similar situation in place thanks to the same kinds of criminals bent on power at any cost: a crisis on several fundamental levels—political, economic, social, cultural, and environmental. Not so long after Jeane died I conveyed to her former counselor Montgomery Blair Sibley that she may as well have stayed alive since, what with the encroaching economic catastrophe, she could have walked out of prison once there was no money to house her anymore (it elicited no response). What was the DC Madam case about? The fall of America by militarized self-immolation and general greed, nihilism.

Trying to Get the Word out on the DC Madam case: Am I Being Hacked?

Ed.--This has been going on for more than a few months: I attempt to send an email to a journalist at one of their articles, say at The Telegraph, Disnfo.com, Huffington Post, Mother Jones, Talking Points Memo (this one took, no response--did it ever make it?), and numerous other progressive web sites and news publications. Either I cannot successfully send the filled-out form/message, or I get no replies, having no idea if they ever got the national security information about the DC Madam case I was apprising them of. I'm sure a few of them got it and reflected on their mortgages, sure. I've even had a semi-retired journalist who covered the intelligence beat who told me they contacted some of their other colleagues who are still working with no responses, no apparent interest. This, of course, is going on their word, a person I've never even spoken to on the phone, so there it is, I have only their word, and in these times, that ain't enough.

Do I know that I'm being hacked, can I prove it? No, but I was during the case and was surveilled, unquestionably, and it followed me onto Facebook and maybe now onto to Twitter, although it seems far more blunted. Now that we know Facebook was giving the NSA direct access, some of the harassment I was subjected to on there could be viewed in a new light. But like the victims of COINTELPRO and all the other government/private harassment programs targeting dissent in the US, I cannot prove it without herculean effort. We're talking numerous filings of FOIAs (Freedom of Information Act requests for documents on myself, whether I was being watched), but anyone with even a rudimentary knowledge of this knows the Government isn't going to cough it up without one hell of a fight.

What I'm asking my readers is this: I need your help in sending out this form email that I'll paste-in below. I just attempted to send it to the journalist James Fallows at The Atlantic without any luck. It could be nothing, it could be a glitch on their part, there could be a cookie in my browser doing it, but I cannot get to the bottom of it, there seems to be no other solution then to have others send these emails on my behalf. There's nothing in this email message that I haven't written or published here on this blog, it's generalized. If you know a serious journalist covering national security issues, or you simply read on the subject a lot and have a reasonably secure email account, I need you to submit this letter to news sites, blogs, journalists, progressive web sites, and so on, I need your help and would appreciate it greatly. Thank you.

And without being too prolix, here's the text of the letter. Anyone who sends it off in my name, unredacted and unaltered has my full permission:  

Good day, I was a member of the DC Madam's defense team back in late 2007, early 2008. We were granted wide-ranging subpoena powers over the telecoms as well as the intelligence community by Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler, who, I might add, was shortly after that replaced without any explanation by a board of judges (a board she was on!) by former FISA Court judge James Robertson. He quashed all of that once on board for reasons that I think were obvious: the case involved surveillance, most likely of her escort service which had a large percentage of defense/intelligence contractors, military and intelligence officers, and a whole lot more. No one seems to want to touch this element of what was erroneously defined by the MSM as a simple sex scandal--it was not, it was far more. I don't expect you to answer because I'm always meeting a wall of silence on this.

I was hired as a general researcher by the late Ms. Palfrey in December 2007 and paid by the federal defender's office for my work, but I did far more pro bono after that month. Indeed, we were going through the subpoenaed phone records that had been provided by one of her carriers, Verizon, but AT&T and Sprint had yet to comply when Judge Kessler was abruptly replaced in the middle of the night in late November. But, we had the records that went much deeper into who had a phone number and a cell or landline--the whens and wheres--and came up with a stunning array that represented the national security state and their contractors and employees on both fronts. One of them was Ret. Col. Ron Roughead, brother to now-retired CNO Gary Roughead. The former worked for SAIC the last I knew and that firm came up in materials and outside of them so many times as not to be coincidental. I could go on and on with the very solid connections between players, but I will leave you with one example: there was one call, and one call only, from a former Verizon engineer with a Muslim name who was also an early war on terror arrest, in the DC area. I won't name him here, but his story was in the press and articles can be found online.

I should also add that we found some indications of intelligence activities in a hack of her email account going back to fall of 1998--yes, it could have been anyone, but they were being forwarded all of the ingoing and outgoing items in it, beyond the sophistication of the average internet user that year. It was a Yahoo.uk account. We got bounce-backs that I identified when the surveillance account was closed. Oddly, the bounce-backs contained the text of a 419 scam, a Nigerian one that's well-known, a fake barrister's note. This wasn't directed at us and was a clear glitch. It has been written that--and I cannot speak to the veracity of it--419 scams have been known to be used as covers for intelligence operations. And there is more, much more. I wrote an account on the case that's heavily-detailed and contains literally hundreds of emails between the late Ms. Palfrey, myself, and others, primary documents, court filings, etc., down to her autopsy report. The story's not cold, incidentally, since no one ever got to the real dynamics of it, other than myself and a few others. The press was ill-equipped to do so, or unwilling, but I cannot say decisively.

This NSA story, I believe, has a direct relation to what happened to Ms. Palfrey and her escort service. I've experienced strange online harassment, visits from contractors to my blog (http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com), hacking of accounts--you name it, outside of physical confrontation and/or shadowing. I implore you to at least consider this story in light of recent events, to look deeper, or to pass some of this along, and this is just the tip of the iceberg here.

Regards, Matt Janovic, writer and private researcher

why every american should read let the dead bury the dead

Too often mislabeled as a “routine” sex scandal by the press, and a prostitution/racketeering/money laundering case by government prosecutors, the charges leveled against the “DC Madam” were a mockery of justice without precedent. This is a tale of institutionalized crony capitalism and the return of aristocracy into a corporate mold. Let the Dead Bury the Dead sheds new light on the investigation, legal proceedings and the phenomenon of the DC Madam, from a witness to history. Drawing from his direct involvement in the case—as well as from a significant array of primary historical materials never before seen by the public--the author will illustrate that there was nothing normal about how the charges against the late Deborah Jeane Palfrey were applied, quite the contrary. From the mainstream media’s attempts at defining and dismissing many explosive facts and patterns in the case to the legal proceedings and show trial, the DC Madam story illuminates textbook examples of prosecutorial misconduct, information warfare, judicial abuse, and political damage control. Possibly a harbinger of things to come, the subsequent death of the DC Madam stands as a shadow testament to the political crisis that ran riot in America under President George W. Bush, and that continues into the present. Media, government and the business sector colluded to bury the story, and for the most part, they have, until now.

              Many Readers Will Learn for the First Time that:

-The DC Madam's phone records are littered with phone calls from defense-intelligence contractors.

-Palfrey claimed to have received multiple calls from Brent Wilkes, the government contractor who bribed convicted California congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

-Palfrey’s legal problems began innocuously thanks to a Postal Inspector, spiraling out of control from
there.

-Deborah Jeane Palfrey “knew” less than she let on and can be counted as an arbitrary victim of power.

-Palfrey was granted wide subpoena powers over the American intelligence community and all Beltway
law enforcement.

-There are more many more “big names” in her legendary phone records yet to be published.

-Porn publisher Larry Flynt assisted Palfrey more than previously thought, promising her a form of asylum in the aftermath of her trial.

-Palfrey was under periodic observation longer than previously reported by federal law enforcement and persons unknown.

-Palfrey was much fairer than the typical American employer by miles.

Qualcomm being sued by NY State Comptroller over political donations

Without any prompting, Qualcomm came around my blog J to the Power of 7 on a word search over Montgomery Blair Sibley. This was around three years ago. I had no idea why they came around, but when I did a little research, I found that they also do intelligence and defense contracting…and they have a revolving door policy between their executives and those at Ernst & Young, a major corporate services firm that specializes in corporate audits, and yes, the books that get cooked.

The latter firm is involved in uncovering such things in corporate institutions, but also have had allegations thrown at them on several occasions that they helped to cover it up. What does that have to do with the DC Madam? It might not be anything specific beyond the fact that her former prosecutor, Jeffrey A. Taylor, a Bush II interim appointee who was never fired by incoming president-elect, Barack Obama, and went on to a cushy legalistic job at Ernst & Young. Now, why would someone at Qualcomm do that word search on Mr. Sibley? I have no idea and have never expected a straight answer out of them–don’t have the resources, or the inclination to bother looking into it, life’s too short. But the fact remains that both firms are very closely-linked, Taylor works for Ernst, and someone felt compelled at the sister firm of Qualcomm to do research over Mr. Sibley. When I brought it to his attention, he seemed pretty interested–as interested as I was. It was just one more bizarre “coincidence” from the case. I don’t know if Taylor is still working at Ernst & Young these days, but I would assume so. What’s of interest to me is the connection not only to computer chips and CPUs made by Qualcomm, but their relationship with the Pentagon and American intelligence community, perhaps one similar to SAIC’s, another major league contractor. Qualcomm was never in Jeane’s phone records, but I believe someone fucked up here and showed their hand, for which I thank them!

And now, the Comptroller of NY State, Thomas P. DiNapoli, a Democrat, is suing Qualcomm over political donations to force transparency. NY State is one of the biggest shareholders in the corporation, and is asserting her interest in the firm. This is reasonable since the risks are very high to public investors, especially when so many were burned in the banking crisis of 2008 thanks to widespread securities fraud. This is a major reason for the economic crisis in countries like Greece, for example, just one of many. Consider that when politicians in DC start screaming for austerity measures because of the deficit. Hundreds of billions were spent to keep a lot of crooks afloat. That's called being robbed twice.

Here’s more at the New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/04/nyregion/new-york-comptroller-sues-qualcomm-for-data-on-political-giving.html?hpw&_r=1&

And my observations on them in relation to the DC Madam case (the earliest are most pertinent): http://chickasawpicklesmell.blogspot.com/search?q=Qualcomm

Let the Dead Bury the Dead cover

RIP Jeane...

This isn't a five year or ten year benchmark, but considerable time has passed now, and I need to make my peace. Jeane, I tried my best to help save you, but as the months and years have passed by, I came to understand that there was no saving you, that you were doomed long before we crossed paths, before you came my way asking for help. I'm sorry you had the life you had, my heart was broken watching them destroy you, a human being, flawed, but not evil, not nearly as "criminal" as the people prosecuting you, who used Pamela Martin. No one is as evil as them, no one.

At least once a week I think about how this all affected your mother, maybe one of the most painful things I have to consider in all of this. That's why I have left her in peace. You did the best you could with a rotten life in a bad culture, a sexist, exploitative nation that appears as doomed as you were. Your case made you a proverbial canary in the coal mine--a victim of the final stages in the construction of a police state in America, the end of a good dream, maybe the end of everything. Perhaps you were lucky to go when you did, I don't know, but the future doesn't appear a bright one for the rest of us, the "survivors".

All I can hope is that you're at peace, and that hope is hardly in vain. Whether there's something after this (I find this doubtful) is irrelevant: you are free, they can no longer harm you, and you won, you beat the "bastards," as you referred to them so accurately. Jeffrey Taylor, Cowden, Butler, Connelly, Rakestraw--everyone involved in investigating and prosecuting you--will have to carry this around with them for the rest of their lives. If it doesn't bother them, they have bigger problems, like being a deranged psychopath, like the people they serve, and that's not the public, hardly. One day the entire truth will be known and people will gasp at the horror of what was done to you.

Rest in Peace, Jeane, you earned it. Soon, they're going to get a taste of payback simply by my telling the truth.

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.

DuHS

Get a life. Get a real job. We never needed a Department of Homeland Security, and we never will. Fuck you. Quit spying on and harassing me online. Stop sending web bots and AI profiles at me wasting my very valuable time. Fuck you. I want my money back, assholes. Why do you love Christopher D. Baker and Shirlington Limo so goddamned much, huh? America could survive one hundred 9/11s, I'm no pussy. Fuck you assholes. Go away nepotists, criminals. Building a corporate castle system isn't going to save that old money. DHS, you're the best argument for smaller government (and birth control) that there is.

DC Madam book update

We're in the home stretch here folks. The cover design is nearly in place with back cover copy and design close to completion. This has been a long road. I'm certain that the book will never be quite to my satisfaction. If there are future editions count on them being revised extensively with additional materials from the case/event. Making a book has been more direct than I assumed it would be, but the effort is extraordinary in meeting some reasonable level of quality and internal consistency, and on all fronts. This comes down to page formatting, playing serif off of sans serif fonts, revising, editing, design, ISBN registration, spell-checking, everything. Writing a book was nagging at me ever since I graduated from college along with the desire to chronicle an historic event. Be careful what you wish for. I don't see a release of any later than April. Buckle-up. This is going to be quite a ride, even for participants in the event.

Down to the last updates on the DC Madam book...

Work is about done: the final touches to the index--yes, index--have been expedited, it's finished and makes the book searchable. I don't understand why more non-fiction texts omit this feature. Perhaps the authors don't want anyone being able to fact check them easily? Yes, it requires some very detailed and time consuming work, no question, but it should go without saying that not to have one undermines the credibility of the work, the research, and if there is any, the analysis within it.

On proofing, revision and suffering: this has been a learning experience in every aspect. The book is an account. It's not going to be perfect. Yet, enough effort has been expended to make it something approaching a very polished text and it will be an easy reading experience for the curious. This is a work on true crime, an historical event the author was a party to, and it contains the author's take and analysis. It makes no claims at being the last word on the DC Madam event which was a branch of the "Hookergate" scandal, of that I'm adamant about. I am hardly alone in this assertion.

The amount of effort involved can never be justified economically. Even were this book to make well over $100,000 USD, it would only begin to pay for the time, resources and actual labor involved. This has always been about servicing the historical record and setting things straight from the point of view of the author. The assertions are my own and it's my right to publish on them, primary materials inclusive. I've interacted and analyzed the data for five years now. I know it better than almost anyone else, and I have access to materials that individuals like Alex Jones never had, never will, not merely the public record. This has been a kind of a labor of love, my love of the truth, however painful it may be to express it.

No one will ever know the pain this project brought to my life, it has been an ordeal. I haven't experienced overt harassment, albeit there has been some online incidents that weren't accidental or my paranoia--that's now legal, what was once necessary to hide, the harassment of dissidents in the United States. None of it has been significant or impaired this text or its writing. In fact, it's only added to the richness of it and confirmed many of my own hunches, going so far as to prove them outright. Draft after draft has come, and in the interim, I have to assume that government contractors within the text have come around to cause problems. Occasionally, they've succeeded, but in the end all they did was expose themselves and their methodology.

There has never been and will never be a book like this one. I wish that was comforting, but it's not. Take the DC Madam narrative as a kind of a "canary in the coalmine," an indicator of where we're heading as a nation. From my conclusions, the future doesn't look bright at all. The only prognosis I can in fact see as hopeful is collapse of the current system. As my account makes plain, we're looking an awful lot like the former Soviet Union these days, and not in the sense that those on the far right are constantly contending. You can learn a lot from a microcosmic event like the DC Madam saga. The macrocosm, the bigger picture, becomes apparent in the details that form an overall mosaic. 

As weak as their beginnings have been, I think the Occupy Wall Street crowd in NYC have shown us part of the way out. We have a new context without all the past effectiveness of red-baiting. Along with the Occupy movement we have an opening to renew the growth of labor unions. Americans seem to thrive best when their backs are up against the wall. Let the Dead Bury the Dead will speak to all of this, the dark political moment we're in right now, poised for disaster as the irrelevant 2012 elections come, then pass. The DC Madam narrative unfolded publicly right before the 2006 midterms. The GOP appointed prosecution team worked overtime to limit the damage to Republican incumbents when they moved on Deborah Jeane Palfrey. The charges were always political, let's be frank for a change. Expect nothing but brutal frankness in my account of a political travesty that played out before our eyes. The reality-bending machine known as the mainstream media worked overtime to make sure we couldn't see what was right in front of our faces: solid evidence of widespread influence peddling in Washington D.C. with all three branches of government involved in papering over it, defending it, preserving it.

On media inquiries: I expect this book to be ignored all across the media landscape, in nearly all mediums. Why? It's not digestible, it cannot be explained away and absorbed. It stands factually in defiance of the assertions of "conventional wisdom," the standard lines, the empty memes, the safe talk mistake for actual discourse in American life.

I will speak with independent media. You will not be allowed to service your own agendas. I will not expend resources or effort in this endeavor besides my time. The rest is up to you if you want a story or content emanating from me as a subject and a source. Rest assured that I know when someone's serious and when they're pulling my leg or out of their depth. You'll be dealt with accordingly and kicked to the curb. I will not communicate with right wing media without very definite conditions. All that written, I don't expect to be approached by almost anyone. I have in the past, perhaps there will be follow-up, but I am not concerned about this in the end other than getting the primary information within the text out to the public.As a student of history I always wanted to one day be a chronicler to a major event. Be careful what you wish for.

I will not do a speaking tour. Who am I? I'm not known to the public which ends that question before it's put out there. What I do expect is a certain level of interest, but of the level I cannot predict, it's impossible to. There is no literary agent. There is no big house publisher. There is me and CreateSpace and the book. One of my hopes is that it will be seen online by university library acquisitions across the United States and made a part of those collections for the historical record. I never thought that I'd finally write a book, but there it is, I have. I never in my wildest imagination thought it would be on this subject matter. Some of this was experienced reluctantly, but once you open a door...you know. Wish us all luck. We're going to need it in the intervening years before the big event.

Addendum: There has been talk coming from some quarters requesting signed copies of the text. This would be costly to the author. In that case, if there is enough demand, I'll attempt to make this possible. However, there will be an additional charge as this will require having copies printed, shipped to me, then the recipient, and so on, more cost involved. If the demand is there I'll make some signed copies available.

The book will be trade paper, no illustrations, no photographs. It clocks in at 505 pages at this point including blank pages, the title page, the preface and the index. At this point I don't expect the price to exceed $27.95 USD.The book is 99% finished. For those interested in the scandal it won't disappoint and could well be the first accessible, free-standing work on the subject. This isn't a book filled with legalese. It's present, but explained, and doesn't dominate the text. It tells a narrative, a story, from the perspective of a participant. It's not the last word, but it does reach some conclusions that the author feels will endure.

Some recent reflections on former DC Madam civil attorney Montgomery Blair Sibley

I've been torn about this man for some time. I don't believe him to be dishonest. Perhaps referring to him as "eccentric" or even "off-the-hook" is accurate, but I never experienced any dishonest or dishonorable acts at his hand. His representation of Obama accuser and homosexual hustler and con artist Larry Sinclair wasn't to my liking, but then, I think I understand what that was about (more on that one day). His attempts to reopen the DC Madam case for a retrial was appropriate as well as brave, it was what gentlemen do under such deplorable circumstances and Sibley is a unique kind of an aristocrat to put it mildly.

Maybe he's Don Quixote, maybe his behavior has been peculiar. Maybe his fixation on his Scottish heritage is archaic. Yes, his behavior has sometimes been peculiar.

However: He was zealous in the defense of Deborah Jeane Palfrey. His constitutionally-based suits against the Supreme Court were principled. His love for his son is clearly genuine, sincere. His humanism is apparent. He has been a threat to established power that's corrupt as well as sadistic and has inflicted itself on the American public via the power of the state. He's not getting rich from charging windmills and I suspect that he's not even remotely how he's been portrayed in the mainstream press, notably by the Washington Post. Indeed, he's drawn to the spotlight like a moth and his being driven from the legal profession could have had merit to it, but that wasn't valid based on his actions in the DC Madam case, albeit that it was probably the main reason for it in the end.

His recent attempts at co-founding a medical marijuana growing space in the nation's capital has my moral support. Other actions by him do not, but what do I know about all of them? What does the press? They don't appear to know very much in any detail. Yes, he "wore a kilt" (traditional, no underwear and he also plays the bagpipes) at his appearance with Larry Sinclair to the National Press Club when his "client" was supposed to present his evidence that he'd snorted coke and had sex with the future presidential candidate in a limousine in Chicago over a decade ago. Sinclair had no evidence. Yet, I cannot come to any conclusions about the man. He's part of our history, for better or worse, and he's terrifically complicated to the extent that he defies one. What would his ancestors like Hiram Sibely be like now? Probably a lot like him, and I leave it at that. He's an anachronism. There are far worse things to be these days.

DC Madam book update

Things are wrapping up: Work is about to commence on a cover design as well as a stand alone website or the book, separate from this blog. At this point, the book is clocking in at 504 pages+ an  index and a table of contents. The length is based primarily on the fact that it's packed with primary information related to and from the case from correspondence, the public record, court documents, and more, much more. This is a view into the case that--other than in Montgomery Blair Sibley's Why Just Her--no one has ever seen. I was in a privileged position to experience, view and analyze information that few outside of the defense have ever seen let alone heard of.

The primary data isn't so much as explosive as my own own take, my analysis of it. While these are my opinions, they're the opinions of someone intimately involved in the case, therefore, this is a historical accounting as well as opinion and analysis. There will never be a book quite like it, rest assured, and it might just stand as a clear-eyed testament to this troubled era in ways that many of the observers of the case at the time never quite grasped, hindsight being everything of course. You would never want to experience what I and others did. While he's been quite reviled in relation to the case, I can only imagine the hell that counselor Sibley experienced. I was fortunate not to get too close and still got my wings singed.

 
The prosecution of Deborah Jeane Palfrey was a nightmare case if there ever was one. It was without any legal precedent in American jurisprudence. No one can recall anything like it ever happening, and I doubt there will ever be one quite like it ever again, power nailed that lid shut as thoroughly as possible. Incredible forces were marshaled to shut her down, to prevent more exposure of influence peddling related to defense/intelligence contracting by members of Congress, the executive branch, and yes, even the judiciary who enabled them. As this book should make clear, we're in a lot of trouble as a nation with no hope of actual reform. I believe we're headed in the same direction as the Soviet Union. Perhaps after that there can be a real chance at rebuilding American democracy. That's at least my hope. As it stands, under the current order, there can be no reform and we will continue to push towards the brink of what could be major catastrophe.

Ironically, only government can fix these things. This wasn't just a story about a sex scandal, it was about institutionalized corruption by officeholders who are in fact criminals. The media lied, and lied, and lied, and fulfilled their usual role of protecting power from public scrutiny. Small wonder no one wants to pay to be lied to anymore. More than a few institutions will be put under scrutiny in this account. The picture's not a pretty one and the myth of democracy is revealed as just that. It's one thing to assume, it's another to have your worst fears and cynicism confirmed. Expect a spring release.

Postscript: All of the important DC Madam entries from this blog have been extracted and archived. There have been some alarming clusters of activity around the blog and I'd neglected to create copies of some of them. This is no longer the case, and I suspect that some of them faced potential removal in the current political climate. Future editions of the upcoming text could possibly include a DVD-r containing them as well as other primary materials not included in the text from the case.

A very tiny except from my impending DC Madam account

Ed.--I've posted some of this before, but it bears repeating.

This is taken directly from the text of my account and can also be taken as an assertion of intellectual property (the bracketing text and the edit of the transcript). You do not own it. Any copying requires a request as well as citation, no exceptions, and I will come after major offenders in a court of law, bank on it. This applies to everything I have ever generated on this site as well as outside of it.

This exchange was never reported by the mainstream press for doctrinal purposes.

"From day three (April 9, 2008) in the racketeering trial of Deborah Jeane Palfrey, an exchange for the ages that would serve as a fine example for law school students in the Anglo-American sphere, and which came towards the end of a long day of endlessly banal testimony:

 Q [AUSA Daniel P. Butler]. And did you compare the tax returns to the bank records for Ms. Palfrey?

A. Yes.

Q. And what did that show?

A. The comparison of the bank records for this year, 2002, show that there was a greater amount of gross receipts than was reported on this line.

MR. BURTON: Can we approach, Your Honor?

THE COURT: Yes.

(BENCH CONFERENCE ON THE RECORD.)

MR. BURTON: I don't know where this is going.

MR. BUTLER: I'm not going to any tax discrepancy, or anything to that effect.

THE COURT: You just saddled her with basically what is false reporting.

MR. BUTLER: Well, I don't think it's gone that far [Page break] yet, Your Honor. I'm not going any further with this line of inquiry.

THE COURT: Well, now you've put the defense in the position where they have to respond to this. How are they going to do that?

MR. BUTLER: Well, Your Honor, that was not the intent of my question, but I appreciate what the Court is saying.

THE COURT: What was the intent of the question?

MR. BUTLER: My intent of the question, Your Honor, was directed at the gross receipts that were deposited into this and comparing it with the bank records that we have. It was a poorly phrased question. That's all I can say about it. I don't know anything more than that.

THE COURT: Well, where are you going next?

MR. BUTLER: Your Honor, I'm going next with -- can I just have a moment, Your Honor? Your Honor, there's another chart in terms of -- I just need to grab it, just to answer the question more explicitly, if I can have a moment.

THE COURT: How much more do you have with this guy?

MR. BUTLER: Not very much at all, Your Honor.

MS. CONNELLY: I think there's a bunch more documents.

MR. BUTLER: Well, there's other documents we need to admit through him, yes.

THE COURT: Can he come back in the morning? [Page break]

MR. BUTLER: We can do that, Your Honor.

THE COURT: I think I want to instruct the jury that there was no tax charge, no tax claim in this case.

MR. BUTLER: That's fine, Your Honor.

THE COURT: Maybe I'll even instruct them they are to disregard that last answer because it's not relevant to your case.

MR. BUTLER: What I would ask is -- I'll defer to the Court on that, but I think there's no -- that the answer did not say that she has cheated on her taxes. [Even though it actually did say that, but...]

MR. BURTON: I think I have to move for a mistrial because of it, because she's not charged with tax evasion.

THE COURT: I know you have to file that motion, and the motion is denied. But I will give a corrective instruction right now.

MS. CONNELLY: Your Honor, in terms of scheduling, we do have some more civilian witnesses. He may not come back on until tomorrow afternoon, but he'll be available all day tomorrow. We just might put the other witnesses on first.

THE COURT: You've made satisfactory progress today.

(END BENCH CONFERENCE.) ...

I was expecting “Robertson pats AUSA” in brackets in the transcript next. ..."

The inherent clean energy opportunity in Japan

This is not meant as any kind of a cynical-jab at the Japanese people, looking at them as some tool for change. The earthquake and subsequent nuclear accidents that are unfolding are a horrific reminder of how tenuous modern life is: in a matter of just five minutes, everything on the Japanese mainland changed forever.

At this point, we have no idea how many people have died or will die as a result of what's been reported as an 8.4 to 8.9 scale earthquake, possibly the worst in their entire recorded history.

The most recent one on roughly the same scale occurred in 1923, killing as many as 140,000 people. But the Japanese were better prepared for a recurrence...except that you can never truly prepare for one when it comes to a nuclear power plant. Nuclear power will always be vulnerable to natural disasters, social upheavals, and most certainly, inevitable social collapse since all civilizations end one day.

The half-lives of most radioactive byproducts of nuclear power will far-exceed the lifespan of any civilization, reason enough to begin a general decommissioning of all existing plants, the neutralization of the waste ("byproducts," and to the best of our abilities), and a rapid conversion over to a constellation of clean or cleaner energy sources, mainly natural and renewable ones. This nuclear disaster hasn't even played-out yet, but I see very real opportunities that need to be grasped, and immediately, by the Japanese public as well as the world community, outside of the corridors of power.

As the Japanese people and their rescuers from their government and from around the world are exposed to radioactive contamination, we need to realize that we have yet another opening here: the outrage that's inevitably coming on the mainland--perhaps even from neighboring countries--is going to be profound. As always, there are cultural, and therefore, historical reasons for this.

For those with a short memory, it should be remembered that the Japanese are the only nation on earth to have atomic weapons directed upon them. They have not forgotten this by a long-shot, and the terrible irony of this catastrophe-upon-a-catastrophe will not be lost on them as it surely is on most Americans, willfully, since we're the ones who dropped two atomic bombs on them in 1945.

We tend to forget about our own war crimes here in the United States, our victims however, do not.

There will be a very loud cry indeed in Japan to decommission these nuclear plants because they have failed every test. The plants themselves were already strongly opposed, but as it usually happens, times were better and they public will was more neutral and the opposition's warnings were ignored. There was, after all, a lot of money to be made, and power demands were growing and still are. That's fine and well, but events have a way of changing things, and catastrophes borne out of both natural disaster and human incompetence and corruption lead to a perception of misrule. As often is the case, that perception is usually accurate.

Prediction: there will be a major groundswell coming against further development and operation of nuclear power on the Japanese mainland. A call for major, wide-scale investment in clean and renewable sources of energy will be heard throughout the island nation. If it reaches the level of mass-production, it will have a global impact since Japan is the third largest developed economy in the world, one of the world's skilled "workshops," like Germany.

Even with this disaster, Japan could be poised to lead the way towards a new and decisive direction, towards the real world implementation of alternative energy sources that are well outside of the box. With China in close-proximity, production in both nations could point to very affordable solar technologies, as just one example.

This is all a wait-and-see, to be sure, since we don't know how bad this nuclear disaster is going get. But I think there are great opportunities here for Japan and the world, coming out of their worst period since WWII, their (and our) greatest challenge. As fate would have it, Wikileaks has uncovered and released one of the cache of American State Department cables, and they purport to contain a passage of Japanese government officials discussing cover-ups of previous nuclear accidents. When-and-if the smokes clears soon, the Japanese people will learn of this; there will be a wide demand for explanations, with the predictable outrage, perhaps even riots.

All we lack is the will since an outraged citizenry that won't have it anymore is an irresistible social force that cannot be held back any longer.

DC Madam teaser: A big "fuck you" to DHS from the grave...

For the curious who really wanted to know what the DC Madam scandal was about: it was about illegal lobbying and appropriations practices, for starters.

From December 2007:

---- Original Message -----

From: Jeane Palfrey

To:

Cc: [...]

Sent: 12/26/2007 9:08:28 PM

Subject: RE: From Verizon records, a DHS member...

Matt… just gotta love it! -Jeane PS if Bil’s suggestion that I was being used as the “fall gal” in the hope, Representative Slaughter’s persistent questioning would stop; thus driving attention away from the likely panorama of corruption the bad actors surely must have been trying to keep hidden – why then would they assume such a strategy would work? Unless of course, they thought I quickly would capitulate and not fight as I have. [Bingo!] Nonetheless, I don’t understand why the ‘gift’ (Pamela Martin’s services) could be seen by Slaughter, as some sort of answer to her investigation into the shenanigans of K Street and the CIA and God only knows who else at this point. After all, I/we were not in c[a]hoots with Wilkes & Company. I was never part of any sort of influence peddling conspiracy. I absolutely had no knowledge whatsoever, of such happenings. And frankly, I suspect neither did any of the women in my employ. Was it perhaps proferred [sic] – by ??? - that I indeed was part of the conspiracy? -Jeane

If you think things have changed since Obama, I have a bridge to sell you...

The deafening silence of the Tea Party demographic over yet another unfunded mandate

Where's all the outrage over the extension of Bush II tax-cuts for the rich? OK, we all saw this coming since Libertarians and the other red-headed stepchildren on the right ditched rational thought and a sense of social responsibility ages ago, but where is it? Where's that traditional conservative force and principle?

The fact is, the tax-cuts are one of the most massive unfunded mandates in our history. Cue the sound of crickets until another African-American makes it to the White House...

They shouldn't worry so much about this president, but being what they are, they're going to keep begging the question since they cannot cope emotionally since we have a Black one, and one I don't even like, trust, or support. Let me be crystal clear: I didn't vote for this asshole. I understand that the lawn jockey was recently stolen from the Bush dynasty's compounds, but no worries--the current president should be attending their next family reunion, so it's good, it's doss.

Meanwhile--back at the ranch--white closet racists will have to cling to what's left of their puerile fantasy while little has changed for the good in America, and that their irrational support for an empty-suit was just one more case of the mirror being held-up to them.

Once again, they failed the test. How are they so different from the Tea Baggers?

Happy holidays Bill Ayers!

On the Wikileaks State Dept. cable controversy

WWW--Make no mistake: The leaking of the State Department cables is--far-and-away--bigger than the release of the Pentagon Papers. Even that scandal's whistle-blower, Daniel Ellsberg, is giving this one a thumb's-up, and so am I and millions. Could we be wrong? I don't think so at all.

I wholeheartedly support their release because crimes are routinely committed in the name of the American public. This is about institutionalized corruption being hidden from the public and the world; the victims of American foreign policy are the first to know, the American public, the last, and for good reason. That's a systematic abuse of power and calls for things like this release to happen just as systematically if we wish to live in a free and open society. Such releases are the best defense we can possibly have since these clowns are risking our lives every single day in the service of anarchic and unregulated power.

These people in the State Department and the national security state are going to get us all killed if we're not careful; they're the great terrorists of our common era.

This last week has brought numerous attacks on Wikileaks, and coming from all kinds of nefarious corners, across the globe. It's coming from an international, criminal power structure that's bent on total domination of the rest of us, the salt of the earth, the average man and woman, everyone outside of the corridors of power. This is, in the words and observations of many of us on the true left in America, the first major information war, a war with incredible stakes: The survival of human civilization and possibly the species itself, not merely the freedom of the average man and woman.

Make no mistake that the mask is off and that this is a global phenomena. It's not just America's mask being ripped-off. Predictably, the shills and lackeys are coming out of the woodwork and exposing themselves to patch things and instate damage control. Amazon.com, Ebay/Paypal, Time Magazine, CBS, CNN, and much of the rest of the American mainstream media as well as corporations are running into the fray. The walls of their Castle system are quaking right now and it's time to take notes on who's part of the problem. It's now obvious who they are.

A national security issue? It is, just not the way it's being presented. We, the people of the world, have a right to know these things--we must know them for our own safety and the preservation of human rights and democracy itself, now under incredible and sustained attack. The stakes couldn't be any higher. Many Internet providers like Amazon are cutting the lines that feed Wikileaks into the United States.

This is mainly to keep the American public where it's usually at: In the dark, the last to know what is being done in their name, and what is being done is systematic crime, make no mistake about it. This is crucial for unaccountable power to succeed, which could mean the end of us all.

Links to Wikileaks mirrors and foreign-subsidiaries: http://czardonic.wordpress.com/