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

article/phone interview on dc madam case & account at internet chronicle

This is the very first article on the case and the book, among other topics. I spoke with their correspondent Tyler Bass today, and it was a pretty fruitful discussion on the case and its known and unknown aspects and meanings. I feel my perspective on the case was honestly represented and that he made a number of interesting observations, a few I'd never considered before.

That's typical of the case: some aspects of it look one way to one observer, another to someone else, and what you have is a patchwork that frequently defies explanation. There are always going to be a lot of mysteries swirling around this case, because it involved the secret world of intelligence. To what extent, I don't know, but it did.

As I told Tyler, were I to summarize the DC Madam case simply, I'd say that it was a branch of Hookergate, most likely the Randy Cunningham/Brent Wilkes/Kyle Foggo "Poway mafia," all of whom were busted over activities surrounding influence peddling, getting that pork back to San Diego and into their pockets first. How big is all of this? I don't know. What I do know is that there was a strong motive in sensationalizing the case to divert away from the real corruption staring us all in the face.

"Matt Janovic Opens Up Hookergate," The Internet Chronicle, January 26th, 2013: http://www.chronicle.su/news/matt-janovic-opens-up-hookergate/

an open letter to former pamela martin & associates escorts

Ladies, if I may be so forward, or so foolish, to address you as such:


You turned your back on Jeane. Maybe she wasn't the nicest human being to work for, but she was a human being, and you either knew or should have known what you were getting yourselves into. The fact that somewhere in the range of fifteen of you turned snitch to save your skins was despicable in light of how well you were paid. Admittedly, I only know so much about how you were treated, yet none of you were willing to come forward to educate me and others on any of the details but one, the woman who courageously attempted to establish contact with Ken Silverstein when he was an editor at Harper's. That woman was a hero and she has my deepest regards and respect.

As for the rest of you, the others that went into hiding, believe it or not, I get it. That being said, it doesn't excuse your kicking the late Ms. Palfrey to the curb. Many of you had moved on after more than a few years, and that's a good out, it's fair. Nonetheless, a number of you, the ones who testified against her, are scoundrels. You own a piece of her death, you are rats, scum, filth, indirect killers. I despise you. 

You see, what a number of you did helped bring PMA to its knees and Jeane to hang at the end of a rope. You are Judases. Not a lot of you were in any specific need to become escorts--there was little desperation involved in it, more a desire for a soft, materialistic life that you felt entitled to. That doesn't make you much different from the rest of the entitled whores that overpopulate this country, but it makes you lower than a streetwalker who's run out of options and finds themselves in the profession. Yes, I don't want to see the government and some of the elements you serviced victimizing you further, there's no point to that, and there's been enough suffering in all of this. But the fact remains that some of you, some of the over one hundred and thirty escorts that worked for PMA over the years, are going to have to live with what you did.

I was fair to you in my book, maybe too fair. But don't expect that I was letting you all off-the-hook completely, because I didn't. For the dozen-plus of you who turned informant, you have no sense of honor. It pleases me that this will cause you a certain degree of pain for the rest of your natural lives. A woman died, as you know, as we all know, and there's no going back from what happened. My hope is that some of you learned something from this and changed, but I'm not an optimist about people and their ways. My assumption is that this will haunt some of you psychologically in some way, yet it won't result in any real shift or transformation in who and what you are, selfish pigs, and that you're going to continue on your merry, indifferent ways just as before. How lovely for you.

Some idiot claiming to be one of you, Andrea Detty, made a limp attempt at undermining the book by suggesting that I hadn't contacted you, therefore, how solid could my attempt to chronicle what happened. That wasn't my job. My job was to tell what I experienced and learned, my part of the puzzle and to try to make as much sense of that as I could. That included obtaining more information. A lot of this was so that I was able to move on from my role in the last year of Jeane's very short life. That kind of an attempt is the act of a scoundrel, a liar, and a psychopath, exactly what I'd expect out of a genuine informant. There's nothing lower than that. Who is this magical person or persons that was able to speak extensively with the former escorts? If they exist outside of a government job, they're sitting on it, and at this point, now that a lot of the smoke has cleared, their behavior is incredibly unethical. I put out requests long ago on this blog for information from you women with no results whatsoever. The onus is on you. It wasn't even a nice try, "Andrea."

You women are the past, and what's past is prologue. I you want to clarify things, great, then do it, otherwise, shut the fuck up, forever, you have no legs to stand on, no credibility.

I could go on endlessly about you, but let me sum it all up: life is short, and the truth will one day come to light. One day we'll know precisely who the worst were, who were the heroes, who at least tried under terrible circumstances to do what was right at the time, and really, who the fucking animals were. Jeane is dead, and I am one of the caretakers of her legacy, one of the few who can bring her voice back from the grave, one of the only people in the world who can at least begin the process of allowing her to point her dead hand at the guilty. There never be a place to run. There is no place to hide from a sun that never sets. Dwell on that for the holidays.

Matt Janovic

what to expect from let the dead bury the dead

Ed.–There will be some excerpts on this site, coming soon.

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 diligent Postal Inspector…and it spiraled out of control from there.

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

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

-There are 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, which isn’t difficult in an oligarchy…

Definite September release of DC Madam account

Ed.--This has been a long time coming. The book is ready. There will be a standalone site for it. There will be a brief except, some background, a bio, and various links.

A Few Words on Writing a Non-Fiction Book: expect to lose at least a few years of your life if it's going to be worth a shit on any level. When artists in a variety of mediums refer to their works as their children, they aren't fucking around. It's accurate, the unvarnished truth. Never envy writers, not even the wildly successful ones, because most of them are doing it to keep the Devil from biting their ass. I share that with them now, and life certainly won't ever be the same.

You ask yourself, "Am I telling too much about myself, or too little?" and because of how personal it all is, no one can tell you the answers, you're it, you're on your own.

This kind of an undertaking requires incredible care, more time than you ever imagined possible, keeping you up nights, bringing worry, even illness, it's terrible. But, if you've been involved in an event of significance, invested so much of yourself in it that it hurt, there's no other option but to get it out of your system, and that's why this book was going to be written and slaved over until it reached a state that brings with it closure. That was the main reason to write this account.

On the Title and Cover Art: I'm only giving you part of the title. It's Let the Dead Bury the Dead, with a subtitle to be revealed later on, for security reasons. The title comes right from Palfrey's, yes, the little horse's mouth (look up the origin of her surname) and from a comment by my former co-researcher when we were working for Jeane's defense. Both were stated in a context that rendered it incredibly callous, cold, just more of the joys that involvement in the case inflicted on me, I'm Mark Twain now.

The cover will be posted on the book's website. It's based on a medieval woodcut of a hanged woman being tormented by demons. In the original, the expression is dour, slack in the mouth a little. I gave the woman a bit of a grin to underscore the very real perversity of the case and its conclusion. I've had to include significant social, cultural, and historical context so that my involvement makes some kind of sense. This was an international story with many different players, too many. Insofar as I've been able to ascertain, no one has established meaningful contact with any of the former escorts from Pamela Martin & Associates, not even Ken Silverstein last time I asked him within the last couple years. Someone posting her claiming to be Andrea Detty asked why I wasn't talking to any of the girls, which is a loaded question if ever there was one. You tell me. See how that works, or rather doesn't? I've posted comments and statements on here several times asking some of the former escorts to come forward, but we're talking hookers here folks, so what do you expect? A lot of bullshit yammering, nothing constructive.

None of these women have much motivation to talk. If they do, they're going to find themselves in a world of shit, that is, if they're not there already. The new and old fixers, the appointees wrecking our government and negating the rule of law, these AUSAs, these scum at the DOJ, would nail their asses to the floor on some trumped up charges. Then again, they might just harass them until they cry uncle, make their lives hell, like Brandy Britton's.

They're not talking, get over it and yourself, whoever the commenter was. I don't believe it was Detty, but if it was, her question was calculated in a way that's very suspicious. Was she Jeane's Judas? I have no idea. But I think there was one, it wasn't just the stupidity of mailing USPS Money Orders at a Postal Station--laundering it that way, through the mails, and using all their services. They ever hear of Western Union or 7-11s? Jesus, people, I'd be a better criminal than that shit, you gotta be kidding me, but that's the truth, from the trial transcripts. These girls should have bypassed Jeane's instructions to buy and send like that, gone and gotten a Slurpee, a Playgirl, and mailed it from anywhere else. You can't tell me that Palfrey wasn't protected in DC, no way, she wasn't even a good criminal. You see, USPS Inspectors busted her ass in San Diego that first time around, in the early 1990s. Get the drift? You will after reading my book.

I don't say this about my writing often and am my own worst critic. But I have to say that this is a good book, a solid account done with incredible effort to get things right. If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, but I have to lay all my cards on the table. After I got involved, there was no other choice, it was always waiting at the end. No one can be 100% correct about these kinds of things, the criminal underworld and the secret world of spycraft.

DC Madam account: "Why don't you...?"

Ed.--I was recently contacted by one of Jeane's former escorts, a first I might add, since most of them have kept a low-profile for years now. I know all of their names, every single one, because several lists are in my possession from defense materials. That doesn't matter to me. Many of those names came out in the research of the phone records from numerous writers and sites, no one really gives a shit from what I can gather.  A French documentary team might be speaking with some of them, but I seriously doubt that they're being that thorough.

Also, this being America, there seems to be some confusion/conflation over what a historical account or a chronicle is, and what a book about an event by a non-participant constitutes. Because of the nature of the case, you would have to be God and been everywhere at once to have truly experienced, maybe possible at the NSA, not possible for the rest of us mortals. Hey, not everybody had a course in historiography, so let me make it clearer for those who haven't: the book is an account by someone who was a participant in other areas of the story. At one point there was only Jeane, me, and my co-researcher. After the firing of Montgomery Blair Sibley there was no one for a time, then she proceeded pro se with Preston Burton, her court appointed counsel who came back for seconds (he won out and got to travel to the estate salad bar for limitless trips in the end).

Around five days ago I got this comment from the someone claiming to be one of Palfrey's former escorts (see my responses):

Andrea Detty said...

I very much hope that your book is not filled with conspiracy theories. I worked for her and was in the trial. I'm so sick of people that know nothing, come to these "of[f] the wall" ideas. I was not the biggest fan of her. The only thing I agree with everyone, is that the trial was a complete waste of time, money, and resources. But if you were writing a book about her and the trial, shouldn't you have contacted people that were actually involved with it?

Friday, May 4, 2012 3:11:00 AM EDT

Yeah, you don't have to hope, there won't be any of that bullshit in it and do your homework some time. And really, that's all great Andrea...so why not drop me a line and fill me in on what you know? All of it, for truth, for the historical record, for the future. 

Or is setting the record straight unimportant here? Detty testified at Palfrey's trial in her favor, that Jeane was unaware of her soliciting, but to be blunt, the defendant was "guilty as shit" as one inarticulate Los Angeles attorney put it, the fact. The truth is, I have no idea if this is Detty at all. If they want to contact me, go through TOR, some third party service, encrypt it, do it, or forever hold your peace. Were they serious I'd have gotten an email from them and that's yet to happen, will almost certainly never happen. This is possibly someone trying to cause confusion about a book they've never read, that's not even out. Angela, I never heard of you either until I read the trial transcript. There was no need for me to spend good money to have someone lie to me, they can do that via cell phones, Blackberrys, iPads, email, etc., the upside of the technology and common sense. Yes, the trial was a "complete waste of time, money, and resources," and so was going to speak with her in person for reasons I'm sure you're familiar with if you are who you claim to be.

Put up, or shut up, spread 'em, now, not later. No? I thought so.

As I told this person in my responses in comments, I've put appeals out to the former escorts of PMA years ago with no response whatsoever. Am I alone? Are you fucking kidding me? No one has gotten to speak with any of them outside of a handful like Abby Cather ("Jennifer"), Detty, but nothing tangible. One escort attempted to contact journalist Ken Silverstein back in the spring of 2007 about Shirlington Limo that she'd been taken to appointments by them, information that could have linked Jeane and Pamela Martin & Associates to Chris Baker, maybe Mitchell Wade and Brent Wilkes, then to Hookergate itself. 

If any of the former escorts had anything to say to me or to others they would have by now (serious inquiries only). They haven't because most of them are scared shitless from legal harassment. You could write twenty books on this case and never get close to describing it fully. That's how writing about an event goes. Additionally, the public isn't going to sit through thousands of pages. The account contains literally hundreds of pages of primary information from the case. Beyond that, I suppose I need to write about who the attending janitorial staff was during the trial. 

I repeat: this book isn't like Tom Wolfe where he wasn't a part of the story, where everything was second-hand. There is that--a lot of that--because so much of this case took place in cyberspace, where an information war was fought against the defendant, for starters. Have you noticed that almost everything is mediated these days, indirect, because of the technology? No, of course not, that would be to understand the nature of the historical moment we live in. You know, I'm sorry, it's true, I was unable during the proceedings to go post-human and have my mind encoded on a microchip, then uploaded onto the web, sorry, my mistake there. Put up, or shut up, don't fuck me around. I'm absolutely sure it's going to be the latter. "I would have talked with you, but you got up in my shit"--bullshit, you have no serious intention of setting the record straight, none of you former PMA escorts have but a small handful. I'm very serious, as a heart attack, as the club of a riot cop crashing down on a dissident's skull. No one needs to remind me that I learned the true meaning of "lying whore" from all of this.

 "Why don't you blah-blah-blah?" Kiss my ass? Why yes, yes you should.

James Dobson, Jack Burkman & the DC Madam

The Rev. James Dobson, former founder of Focus on the Family, former human being, has been telling evangelicals that if they don't vote to the right that God's going to be angry at them, some such bullshit flowing from his sewer-shaped orifice. Normal people don't take to this swill, but then, there's Republicans, evangelicals, the Aryan Nations crowd, the Tea Party demographic (a very tiny one comprised mostly of middle-aged small business owners), and the Klan. In the backdrop of all this are the lobbyists, war profiteers, criminal banks, criminal management subcultures, speculators, lawyers--the criminals who have hijacked the system--doing their do while the rubes think they're accomplishing something. OK, they are: the dismemberment of their own rights, so there.

I've written on Jack Burkman more than I cared to. He's a good argument for sterilization. What I have concluded is that as a golden tiered lobbyist, media pundit for the right, and whatever hat he's wearing this week attached to his utility-belt, this guy is no good for America or the world. He's not just typical folks, he's up there at the summit, part of the problem, a threat to the Republic. We're all entitled to freedom of association, but these fuckers take it to the breaking point into organized crime. I don't really give a shit if it gets a free pass from all the other criminals in office, it's a subversion of the rule of law. Dobson is telling his flock and anyone foolish enough to listen to him seriously that if they don't vote Republican, forget it, God's going to be angry, watch out, eek, oh, aw. Does this shit ever get tired for these jackapes? Do they think with the primeval part of the brain underneath the cerebellum more often than not? Hey, were it not affecting the rest of the world, fuck if I care, but it is. Burkman is just one more cheerleader on the runaway train called Western capitalism. These clowns have taken us to the edge of the cliff now, whatever's coming is coming sooner rather than later, and it will be big, nothing will ever be the same again. Their reaction? To try to clamp down on the rest of us because they know intuitively that they're the problem, a source of dysfunction, and that this dysfunction is going to wash them out of power soon. They send out the usual clods like Burkamn to distract, divide, to demoralize.

Nothing he or they have to say is going to wash with the majority, however, so they wrap it in religion and patriotism, nationalist iconography, so the rank tasting pill will go down for the slack-jawed crowd. Rawstory had a recent blurb on Dobson, his recent utterances on how we're all supposed to be voting. I posted a comment relating to the cynicism of the Burkman/Dobson relationship since the former has spoken as a representative to the phony preacher man, the founder of Focus on the Family, which in turn created the Family Research Council. It's more right wing attacks on the separation of church and state, but also to get evangelicals to vote stupidly, to vote Republican.

Burkman is a well-known pussyhound who loves fucking almost anything in sight. He's not exactly the model of behavior that Dobson's advocating either. Why would he care? Burkman has promoted him and his agenda, a mutually beneficial one with the GOP, he gets results. Caring about the behavior of others is for the flock--with exceptions like these. Dobson has never come out criticizing Burkman for this behavior.

To believe in nothing is nihilism:

Dobson only cares about temporal power, he's ashen inside. His mouthpiece Jack Burkman was found by multiple researchers in the DC Madam's phone bills--he did a callback to her escort service, so it wasn't a mistake, especially with each instance years apart.

Burkman was given incredible cover by the mainstream press, it was extraordinary, suggesting a media campaign to contain the scandal generally, to contain the damage to the GOP. They couldn't keep a lid on Larry Flynt with Senator Vitter, but they could with Jack. Burkman goes out spouting the same family values garbage as Dobson--for Dobsons in fact. Vitter got an award from the FRC for his work in promoting family values in the Senate, in hotels, with hookers, you know...

Bill Maher had him on his shows so often I question whether they might be friends, something over two dozen. He's not just spouting GOP swill on Fox, hardly. He's all over the place as a "voice of the right." He was a high level campaign adviser to the 2004 Bush/Cheney campaign. The media ignored his presence in the phone records because of his other job, a pattern you will find in the phone records: lots of lobbying related entities, individuals, most in defense/intelligence or related contracting, like SAIC or Qualcomm. SAIC is all over the phone records. I think the whole scandal was about influence peddling being uncovered in Hookergate with investigations turning up a lot of stones with the escort services in DC., finally accelerating the investigation in Palfrey. It didn't help that the November 2006 midterms were coming, so someone interim appointed (for other reasons too) Jeffrey Taylor...now at Ernst & Young, who have a revolving door relationship with their executives and those at Qualcomm. There's something major there with Burkman for almost all of the press to uniformly go silent on it. That's because they could with him, not Vitter, not Tobias, etc.

There are more phone records out there, she didn't release all of them. It's possible I have everything, however, as I was a member of the defense as a general researcher, hired at Palfrey's request. I've seen Dan Moldea's findings. There are quite a few more names in them of significance, but patterns are what matter most. That doesn't really fit Flynt's format, he wants hypocritical office holders, they're the ones in his sights. Burkman isn't an elected official, he wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny--probably wouldn't know he was doing something wrong, heh. Word in the Beltway is that he's chasing women all of the time. Then there was the anecdote about him walking around DC (he's a gimp) coming to a Gay Pride parade and propositioning a lesbian couple for sex. The girl put story up on her Myspace page with a scan of his business card, but it was yanked. Wonkette's story on it was also taken down, or at least one or two of them, and so on.

I've communicated with a few of the girls that Jack has...well, fucked. He's not remotely in the Dobson mold in his real life, a very sexual one at that, and he has purchased birth control for at least one of them, the morning after pill. Does James Dobson give a shit? Of course not, Burkman is his hire, his media mercenary, his spokesman, his lobbyist. Burkman cut his teeth working as a congressional staffer during the GOP's endless assault on the also corrupt Bill Clinton, another political operative. Now he's a golden tiered lobbyist. Results. Those are what Dobson wants, gets, and so, he would never admit Burkman was this way unless he had no choice. These people are the lowest form of life on the planet, below the amoeba, lethal mutations. There's a presidency on the cancer...

Expect more on Mr. Burkman in my upcoming account on the DC Madam.

http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/08/dobson-we-are-in-serious-trouble-with-god-if-we-vote-wrong-in-2012/

More recent "breakthroughs" in the DC Madam account

Things are proceeding nicely, if not endlessly, with the text and the interested should know that a release date within the year is a strong possibility, no later than early 2012. Hey, let's wish us all luck with that one, we're going to need it in the coming months, and that ain't hay, brother--we're in the thick of it.

I told Jeane's former counselor, Montgomery Blair Sibely, back in late 2008 that she should have stayed alive since things were going to collapse anyway--she might have been able to walk right out of her cell. This was at the onset of the economic crisis, or rather, when it began affecting the American middle class, the only time it's "important."

There have been some "new" developments during the writing, revising, and editing process: most writers and researchers know that sometimes you can go back and look at the information with new eyes, a different context, more information, and so on, and notice something you might have missed the first time around. This wasn't a case of that entirely, since I had some terrifying suspicions during my time doing research for Jeane's defense. They point right back to the CIA and defense-intelligence contractors. Some of it relates to Brent R. Wilkes and Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, former-and-convicted Executive Director of the Central Intelligence Agency and what I consider to be an elephant in the room: their involvement in air operations with the Agency's SAD (Special Activities Division), yes, the section that does what you think they do.

They also run the drone program in AFPAK, killing maybe thousands (who's counting?) of people who were never in their sights. Why didn't all of this get more play? You tell me, they must have a Red Bat Phone to all the editors.

Frequently, the SAD illegally assassinates human targets that they originally set out to, remarkable, I know. They also sometimes grab people, throw them into business jets they've hired-out (contracted would be a more accurate term, but what the hell), and have them interrogated on dubious grounds in some other nation, more often to manufacture false intelligence to justify reckless foreign policy with molding public opinion in mind. Wilkes's ADCS (Automatic Document Conversion Service) was acting as a front company for SAD, as found in the 2009 "sentencing memorandum appendix" for Foggo. Direct knowledge of the rendition program was some of the "graymail" during his legal proceedings, that he would tell all about it if he got hit with too stiff a sentence.

It goes without saying that I believe, and have believed all along, that her case was about Hookergate, that it wasn't separate from it at all. Motions by the prosecution during the proceedings make this patently clear, and The Smoking Gun's Bill Bastone did more than a little tipping-off on the connection between Palfrey and the "Poway Mob," convicted former California Rep. Randy Cunningham, Brent R. Wilkes, Mitchell Wade, and Kyle Foggo, all involved in bribery, influence peddling, abuse of office, corruption, etc., to bilk the public under the banner of national security and the war on terror. Call it what you want, but it's really war profiteering, outright corruption.

I believe that Jeane was correct and sincere when she said to me and others that Brent R. Wilkes had called her "frequently" and had "used his own name." I believe he was calling from the Westin Grand, the Watergate Hotel, or from someone else's residence, someone who might come off as innocuous in her phone records. There's something very, very dark here that I believe leads to the rendition program, it wasn't just about Wilkes ferrying Cunningham and Tom Delay around for free, literally on the public's dime. That's illegal too. Now Wilkes is out on appeal and Palfrey's long dead, perhaps safely so in their eyes. This does not mean that I believe she was murdered or that he's ever going to admit to an association with her.

The other player in procuring prostitutes to acquire appropriations was Mitchell Wade--he was handling a lot of the procuring for Wilkes, per his testimony in the record, and he was going through Christopher D. Baker's Shirlington Limo who still runs his firm out of a hangar at Ronald Reagan National Airport, Hangar 7, another convenient place--at least before all of the attention--to run a front company and SAD air operations out of. There was a lot of "ferrying" going on, apparently, to the point that Wilkes was handling many of the calls, lining things up himself. And that's when I believe he fucked up and used his own name on the phone when he spoke with Jeane, all due to his exaggerated sense of self-importance at the time. Hey, he was rubbing elbows with the CIA's brass, he was in the big time.

Wilkes probably thought that he was impervious, so he walked around with his dick out, just like the Republican lobbyists, former and current GOP incumbents (people like Cunningham), and bureaucratic CIA hacks (like Foggo) he was greasing, greasing to feed on public monies, did. They were all laughing at that very same public with their hooker-and-cigar parties at those two hotels, possibly even at some private homes, playing poker, but really mixing business and pleasure, the hallmark of every fuck up. Wilkes had no prior experience providing aviation services, to anyone, but who really cared? Subordinates who could report it.

In 2003, Foggo wrangled Wilkes a bottled water contract for a CIA field station; some accounts state that the water was headed for Iraq, the record steers clear of exactly where, but it appears that it was Germany. Why would they need bottled water exactly? What was wrong with the local fare? Perhaps it was a case of repeated dysentery, but it's a peculiar contract, that "bottled water" one. Again, no prior experience, and the water was simply purchased off-the-shelf, maybe even from a Wal-Mart, then marked-up 60%, as the court's record states in Foggo's case.

Consider all of the above the next time the Republicans start yammering about the deficit and the national debt.

I've written on some of this before, but there's something here beyond mere profiteering, it's worse, far worse, and the narrowing of the DC Madam scandal to "big names" (everyone but Cunningham, Wade, Foggo and Wilkes) by the mainstream press was both cunning and another pathetic example of their loyalty to established power. They were hiding something very ugly here, it might have had something to do with the rendition program, but it most certainly had to do with defense-intelligence (mis)appropriations, the corrupt contractors who were gaming the system, major league DC lobbyists, political operatives and the seeding of the bureaucracy, and what the decline of an empire looks like.

This text will be a testament to these times, at a threshold moment in world history when above and below temporarily change places.

http://s3.amazonaws.com/propublica/assets/docs/foggo_139_2.pdf

http://www.city-data.com/businesses/639735166-shirlington-limousine-washington-dc.html