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.

Wayne Madsen & Me

Where to begin with this guy? OK, I'm not going to, but at some point this well known crank got involved with the DC Madam case doing--I have no idea what the hell he did for Jeane, frankly, but it couldn't have been much since he wasn't hired by her to do general research for her defense. For several months I did this work for Jeane at her request (I had a co-researcher who had also been tapped for this work). 

Initially, we looked into what was then known as the "Poway Mafia," that is, former-and-convicted California congressman Randy Cunningham, convicted-and-former defense contractor Brent Wilkes, the convicted-and-former "number three" guy at the CIA, Kyle Foggo, and a few other players who Jeane felt were related to he case. There was a lot smoke there, but we were only able to go so far with limited resources and time. At the end of the project, we, that is me and my co-researcher, made reports as to the aforementioned--how these players related to her and the escort service and why she was being prosecuted in such a manner. Also, we looked deeply into subpoenaed Verizon phone records that went far deeper than the scanned copies that were and still are online, basically who had a specific phone number, and when, numbers that were in her records as potential client-callers. I was paid by the federal defender's office, normal for indigent defendants, then did the rest pro bono.

Jump to two weeks ago: the UK's paper the Guardian/Globe, without vetting his wacky, rumpled self mistakenly quoted Wayner in an article about an EU deal with the NSA allowing them to conduct massive surveillance. I don't even care about the details, because, yes, he was an NSA analyst at once time, ages ago, claims to still have "sources" inside, or in the intelligence community, writes crappy, baseless articles about it, and is generally ignored as a nut in DC and the rest of the sane, civilized world, and for good reason. If you're a normal, well-balanced human being, go read his writing and tell me he's not nutty as hell. I don't see it happening.

The Globe had to pull a front page article quoting Wayner. Of course, it being the UK, the rest of the press there swarmed around the publication and wrote about it, gleefully. I was a little shocked, but unsurprised, when Damian Thomspon wrote a pretty scathing blog piece at the Telegraph about Madsen and the Globe. I won't recount it and leave it to the reader to check it out and decide for themselves, but in my humble opinion, it's spot-on. 

I left this comment two weeks ago after reading it: 

Madsen tried to attach himself to the DC Madam case for a time as well. Where do I think he got the "Obama is gay" theory? From Larry Sinclair. Ironic that you have Moynihan's Twitter quote on here since he quoted me out of context in one of his inane editorials back in 2008 when Ms. Palfrey was still a name in the news.

I did general research for her on the case & was told by a few sources about a "big party" that Larry Flynt was holding for Jeane, to assist her in some way, and who was there but Wayne Madsen. One of my sources (author Bill Keisling) remarked at how slovenly & disheveled he was, wearing a rumpled suit and sounding like the nut described in this story. He also said it kept him awake at night thinking that someone like Madsen had been working for the NSA, ostensibly competent people hired to "protect" the security of the United States, scary.

Indeed, Mr. Madsen once wrote an article claiming that a "shadowy source (it's almost always that way, hence why no one credible listens to him) that the DC Madam had a CIA controller, something of that nature, but so inane and absurd it doesn't warrant further mention.

Then there's Montgomery Blair Sibley, who, as is generally known in DC, is an unhinged scion of old Beltway aristocracy, the Blairs & the Sibleys--they once owned and inhabited the Blair House before Truman's renovation of the White House, it was expropriated. That, I think, created some long-term crusade by Sibley and his late father to be a thorn in the side of the US Courts, one reason why he's currently disbarred.

But just over five years ago, he was representing the DC Madam, who abruptly fired him in January 2008. Not long after that, he was representing Larry Sinclair, the Obama accuser who claims that he & the now-president had sex and imbibed in cocaine in the back of a limo in Chicago in 1999, all a patent lie by a career-liar of another stripe.

I assume that Sibley and Madsen struck up a relationship during the DC Madam proceedings and that the connection between Sinclair probably emanates from that relationship, however, Sinclair got a lot of ink back in 2008 and is still trotted out by uninformed GOP occasionally to smear the current president, to no avail. 

And there it is, my opinion.Whatever this guy gets involved with loses its credibility. He has a negative-Midas touch--everything he touches turns to shit.
 Luckily, none of this wiped-off onto Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden.

And so, here we are, two weeks later, and the Wayner responds with a predictably feeble "I know you are, but what am I?":

It would seem that it was Mr Janovic, who lives in Indiana far from the DC environs, who interjected himself on the Palfrey story and my investigation. The late Palfrey contacted me and this guy Janovic, who apparently blogs from a basement, decided to involve himself from afar and tried to obtain my sources and records as the following email will attest:

-----Original Message-----
From: Matt Janovic [mailto:myboigie@earthlink.net]
Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2007 6:56 PM
To: jeanepalfrey@sprynet.com
Subject: RE: Today's piece

Jeane:

They would have to tell us this, definitely, but that's about all they would tell us. Perhaps I can just ask them ourselves? Perhaps Mr. Madsen could direct me to the resources, links, directories. There are those who would know, it could accelerate this particular research.

warm regards, Matt Janovic

The email is real, by the way. His take on it is not. His take on my life is also inaccurate and childish, but that's Wayner for you.

I responded, and this piece will be my final one on this:

Mr. Madsen's reputation speaks for itself, however, besides his poor grammar, he's wrong: the late Ms. Palfrey approached me and the email there--which is one I sent to her--is being re-contextualized. This is how he works normally, to take information and to recast it as something else. He's a laughingstock in DC and rarely, if ever, reveals his sources because they're as bogus as he is.

As for me "trying to obtain" his sources, read the last sentence, I wouldn't want them. Also, I assume that Montgomery Blair Sibley supplied him with the email, fine, but Google his name for what he's been up to recently and you'll understand the sheer nuttiness I experienced having just nominal contact with these people. Right now, the disbarred Mr. Sibley is still trying to wrong-headedly obtain another fifteen minutes of fame doing more pointless court filings to "prove" that President Obama's birth certificate is fake. I wish I could make this up. Mr. Madsen is a conspiracy nut's conspiracy nut, I doubt he was especially good at his NSA analysis job, and what he writes is paranoiac drivel.

The fact is, Jeane approached me first, not the opposite, a week earlier. The above email wasn't an especially relevant one and I believe it was about her prosecutors--doesn't matter, it was a minor issue and isn't even remotely what he's saying it is. I would never want his research materials because he's not good at it, not good at analysis, and as this article makes plain, he has a roundly bad reputation as a crank.

Again, his contention that I "interjected" myself into the case is a bald misrepresentation of fact. His inaccurate personal attack is also a misrepresentation of what really happened, something he's well known for as this article makes plain. Most of his audience is mentally unwell. Frankly, this guy is making me laugh at such an incompetent response, but that's Wayner for you. 

I could go on about what a pain in the ass he's been over the years. In one case, he poisoned the well with Siegelman case in Alabama and maybe even sent other cranks my way to cause me problems, like Andrew Krieg, but it's not worth my or your time, rest assured.

Where it all ends:  http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/damianthompson/100224022/guardianobserver-pulls-front-page-nsa-story-after-source-turns-out-to-be-a-fruitloop-who-thinks-obama-is-gay/#comment-966678938

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.

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…

let the dead bury the dead release date & other issues surrounding the text

This is still up in the air. I'll be prepping a standalone site for the book. It should have an excerpt, no you cannot quote from it or republish without permission, period. Written requests will be fine, and granting use will be completely at the author's discretion. There is no middleman here.

On the media, interviews, reviews copies, etc.: There will be no advance copies, period, and serious inquiries only. Not to be a dick (or to be one to the right people), but I'm not made of money. No free rides, I would if I could. Also, the idea of someone reviewing a book on something so personal seems pretty laughable to me outside of the technical side--style, format, depth, things that are logical and sincere rather than someone playing games. You'll be kicked to the curb immediately the moment I detect you're fucking me around, it's not going to play. That written, I expect the mainstream media to go out of their way to ignore this book because so much of it is about them and how disgusting they truly are, you have no idea.

Even in death, they keep killing her, mark this. CNN is one one of the major offenders: they will occasionally throw a blurb out there on the case either in a crappy documentary on prostitution (often upscale, with the rich & powerful), and the results speak for themselves: a willfully superficial misrepresentation of the case to protect what it was really about, their usual mercenary MO.  For this reason, even were they to somehow contact me, they'd have an uphill battle on their hands, and that's putting it mildly. I don't expect to hear from any of them no matter how well the books sells.

You didn't just walk into McDonald's, and no, you cannot have fries with that. I don't value most of your opinions, because you weren't involved. I don't even value those of many others who were, as the book will make plain as day. Yes, they're my opinions, and they're more educated than yours about the case. The only people who probably know more are the former prosecutors and judges, and they're compromised. Don't expect anything honest out of most of them, and many of them cannot tell you anyway thanks to confidentiality agreements. My role was far looser, so I can tell more, much more. But, you don't care about the truth anyway, my whole point here and in the book...

On the cult of personality & writers: When I was a kid, over a generation ago in the 1970s, there was no access to the Internet by the general public. You frequently didn't know what an author looked like, what their life was like or where they'd been, and so on, unless you did a lot of looking and research, and that was costly. Now, it isn't, it's all a few keystrokes away. What's the same between then and now is the cult of personality, which I hate and view as part of the disease of this dying culture and nation. People to others for answers are at the top of my shit-list, so, don't come looking to me for any, that's not my job, it's everyone's. The individual has to look within. Fools don't, cowards won't, and I don't have time either, not one moment, so save the effort. I know almost every trolling approach too, so again, don't bother, I will detect it and you will be removed or ignored. If you don't take a hint, if you harass me, for whatever reason is in your head, as compromised as some of them are, law enforcement and the courts will be brought into play. I'm not fucking around ask people who know me, they'll tell you. They'll also tell you that if you cross the line far enough that I'll be coming for you until I'm satisfied.

On Mark Capansky: I believe this little shithead has been harassing me. Any phony or actual cease and desists without a court order will be duly ignored. And, if I have to publish the book out of some Siberian shithole, I will, maybe even out of Iceland if necessary. I will not bow, because, unlike most of you out there, I have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

However, if Mr. Capansky wants to explain why his number (or parents') was in the DC Madam's phone records, I'm all ears, and we can keep it off the record. On the other hand, if the dialog devolves into threats--if you even piss me off--it all goes online unredacted. I'm not fucking around here at all. If you want to fuck around, do it with the stupid women that are attracted to such a retard. By the way, I'm not jealous, as the book will make starkly clear. I don't share your hollow values and view America as a criminal, white supremacist nation, and hence, a large part of why it's crumbling, it's dysfunctional. This country sucks, you definitely suck, and go fuck yourself...

On writing a book that's non-fiction, true crime, & a historical document: I don't recommend it. There are no ground rules. Reconsider if it looks like it will take up a stage of your life. I was in my thirties when this began, now I'm rocketing towards the bad side of fifty, fuck you very much.

On literature: The book is very literary. For me, this isn't the usual approach. I do read a lot of fiction, but most of my reading is historical and non-fiction. I have been more of a student of history than anything else. A lot of reading in my life is packed into this book. The reader might find this not to their liking, or anything in-between--these are not my concerns, and unless it's constructive, I don't want hear your opinions beyond pointing-out factual errors, typos, and so on. The case, as the primary materials in the book will show, was riven through with literary references. I wasn't looking for them. They announced themselves. That brings me to...

Occult references & themes in the DC Madam case: These were also present and announced themselves. I wasn't looking for them. However, as Jesus said, for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear, and I do, and did. Most aren't attuned to this, I am, and once again, I'm not interested in the expressions of your egos, only in fact and truth, which the vast majority of you wouldn't know either were they to bite you in the ass extracting a pound of flesh. You couldn't miss this, especially considering the well-established fact that Jeane was fascinated by American Spiritualism (yes, seances, no, I am not a believer).

The case was archetypal on its own. I didn't see anything that wasn't there or implicit to it. Again, your opinions are irrelevant, and I don't care unless they augment and add something to the story, understanding, illuminate it more, whatever, but other than that, don't care.

On the former Pamela Martin escorts: I don't have a lot of respect for these women. Some wrong-headed types do for reasons that escape me, but I'm sure have to do more with gender and identity politics and wishful thinking. Once again, I don't care what you're opinions are unless you somehow had contact with them, know previously unknown aspects and facts about the case, or you have an angle on it I never considered for some of the aforementioned reasons. Beyond that, I don't care and don't want to hear your ego flexing, it won't play and I'll kick your ass to curb.

I'm sure most of my sources have withheld things from me--that's normal, human behavior. I'm not a believer in human nature or unicorns. We have tendencies. Those tendencies come out under certain circumstances and conditions. I'm intolerant of mythmakers and believers of myths. None of these women were saints. Yes, they were paid inadequately--welcome to the contemporary world, welcome to the United States and a world that's primarily ordered along patriarchal lines. I didn't make this world, you didn't, most of us didn't, and I'm not a supporter of it. In fact, I'm one of its victims, fuck you very much. You can beatify these ladies all you want, but when the truth came out, you'd look like the genuine fools with an opinion that you really are. Welcome to the human jungle, now think more often before you open your trap, or when you post something online. We all make mistakes. None of us is made of light, we all shit every morning, if we're lucky. That gut you have going is all the proof you should need that you're not a god. We're all imperfect, we all die one day, and the rest is games, lies, deceit, and horrendous, tragic, stupidity.

Insofar as I have been able to ascertain, no one, and I mean no one, has been able to find and interview these women and get some new relevant information from them, and to publish on it, nary a soul. Only one of them has come my way--allegedly, Andrea Detty who's alleged to be an alleged journalist now--and they may not even be one of them, perhaps a fake online identity, and of course, they weren't willing to convey anything of value whatsoever that I didn't already know. That's because, and this should be no surprise to anyone with their higher functions still intact, they were prostitutes and there's a reason why the term "lying whore" came into being, which I learned from direct experience in the case. Not one of them has had the courage and credibility to come forward and to follow through. One of them approached journalist Ken Silverstein during the proceedings, his moronic secretary lost the phone number they left (why not search of the phone calls that day at Harper's?), and they never reestablished contact. Thanks for fucking us, lady, but at least you tried. The rest stand as rats as far as I'm concerned, the real whores, not Palfrey, and they have earned this derision. Ever heard of confidentiality agreements with journalists, ladies? Quit kidding yourselves that you have credibility. Your silence speaks volumes.

On Jack Burkman of Focus on the Family & a lot more: There's an entire chapter devoted to dear Jack, as a template for the average Republican player in Palfrey's phone records. Expect fireworks. Expect what you suspected and knew--that he's a pathetic asshole, a scumbag, and a hypocrite.

On SAIC's presence in the phone bills and elsewhere: They're key to whatever was behind the case and the charges moving forward, not the actual solicitation by Jeane and the girls, which was what was really the incidental side of it. They're emblematic of the crisis in government today of runaway spending and war profiteering by contractors and politicians. They're connected to so many players in all this that it does have meaning to the case in ways that I never expected, not was looking for, but once again, there it was, winking at me over and over.

On the CIA's role in the case: This will get more of a factual airing than previously, although, regardless of what you might think of him, Montgomery Blair Sibley, Jeane's longest running counselor during the proceedings, has done a good job addressing in his own text, Why Just Her. I recommend it and consider both our accounts complimentary of each other. I'm not going to defend his public behavior. Federal District Judge Gladys Kessler granted wide-ranging subpoenaing power to the Palfrey defense that covered virtually the entire intelligence establishment. Ask yourself why the mainstream media never covered this, then go ask them, over and over again, until they cry uncle.

I'll have more to say later. Search the labels on this article for more. I cannot see a release date of later than late November, but no later than some time in December. That is all.

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.

An interesting analog in the age of digital hacking

Ed.--A recent spate of cyberattacks on Google's Gmail system (originating in China) reminded me of a some similar techniques employed against Deborah Jeane Palfrey (the DC Madam), perhaps by the United States Government or non-governmental actors--contractors of one variety or another. The Chinese attacks ensnared several hundred individuals, some of them high level American government officials, presumably some working for the State Department.

Some whose Gmail accounts were breached were American military personnel as well as a few Chinese dissidents, perhaps included as a diversion or as overlap from other hacking operations originating from the same actors. Whoever they were, they were looking for specific types of people doing specific types of work for the U.S. Government; specific individuals were targeted for hacking.

Do no evil?

Google routinely cooperates with the America national security state, so it's no surprise that they've been targeted by other nations using third party actors to provide a kind of plausible deniability. In the case of the recent attack on Google, it's safe to assume that the encouragement of non-governmental actors was formulated to prevent accountability being directed at the regime in Beijing, a fair assumption. Does the U.S. do this? Certainly--one could argue that we pioneered its use--and some of this echoes the very real world attacks on American soil on September 11, 2001, ushering in a newer form of mercenary where attacks by one state against another are done indirectly by proxy, "non-governmental" agents.

21st Century Brigands?

This is perhaps going to be the Golden Age of the mercenary, with further tech-enhancements.

Mercenary hackers aren't new, but the scale of their activities is growing rapidly. Information warfare itself is an old tactic of political entities, and nation states like the United States or even Turkey are engaged in it all of the time.

...Google said Wednesday that personal Gmail accounts of several hundred people, including senior U.S. government officials, military personnel and political activists, had been exposed. Google traced the origin of the attacks to Jinan, China, the home city of a military vocational school whose computers were linked to a more sophisticated assault 17 months ago on Google's systems." ... ("US says no... ," AP, June 2, 2011)

Most modern nation states are engaging in it at some stage, but like the use of drones in recent conflicts, it remains unofficial policy, often mislabeled as "conspiracy." Cyberwarfare isn't new, but the widening scope of its use by state and "rogue" (using the term without any value judgment) actors is.

The Palfrey defense was under surveillance, period, it's inarguable and I bore witness to it directly. Some will say that it was for legitimate purposes of the enforcement of the law, but how then would any defendant get a fair trial under such scrutiny? What's arguable is who it might have been which one could speculate on endlessly with such a muddied trail. That's how it goes with hacking and cyberattacks, but with enough persistence and even some luck the origins of a hit can sometimes be uncovered. The key is to erase as much of a trail leading to the originator of the attack as possible and it's not rocket science, but not so prevalent or as easy in the stone age days of the Internent back in the fall of 1998 when the madam's account was hacked.

Even at the time what they did wasn't especially sophisticated, but the average Internet user wouldn't have known how to do the breach and what followed from it.

Just shy of ten years later I had a productive exchange with a former attorney of the DC Madam's about the breaching of the her email account:

Jeane and I searched and searched and finally traced the insertion of a email forwarding address in her earthlink account to a Yahoo.uk email address. When I took it up with yahoo.uk, they had no answer how anyone had hacked into Jeane's account and could not identify the owner of the yahoo.uk email account as it was to a string of fictious email accounts. (Correspondence with the Editor, August 2008)

This was to be expected whether it was a state actor or not. It's a very good possibility that this was a former client of Pamela Martin & Associates, but that could just as well mean the arrow points to the state as well as contractors.

What raised a few flags this week for me came from this passage in an AP article on the recent breaches in Google's Gmail infrastructure that compromised some of the personal email accounts of a few high level American officials.

The modus operandi is similar if not identical to the breaches in the DC Madam's Sprynet email account back in 1998:

...While Google said last year's attack was aimed at its corporate infrastructure, the latest incident appears to have relied on tricking email users into revealing passwords, based on Google's description in its blog post.

It said the perpetrators changed the victims' email forwarding settings, presumably secretly sending the victims' personal emails to other recipients. ... ("Google reveals... ," Reuters, June 2, 2011 )

The final sentence is exactly what happened to the DC Madam's email account sometime in October 1998.

It's almost become a cliche that intelligence agencies (and similar institutions and groups) can and have used primitive forms of hacking as a cover for the activities against various actionable targets. Perhaps one day we'll find through declassifications that a government contractor created all of those phony email accounts when Palfrey began to become a "person of interest" to whoever hacked her account and changed her forwarding settings, intercepting all of her emails going in and out (I know from experience as I was receiving bouncebacks once the phony account had been closed). Most likely, she was beginning to become a liability to a privileged former client...but the truth of the case is elusive as ever.

"US says no official email hacked; FBI on case," AP, June 2, 2011): http://enews.earthlink.net/article/top?guid=20110602/39b5ae26-4471-4ea8-b6c5-afbde96ef979

"Google reveals Gmail hacking, says likely from China," Reuters, June 2, 2011: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/us_google

Songs from the Site Meter: NPR comes around for Jack Burkman, Jr. so they can say they tried...

Site Meter--They don't have to remind me why I never give them money. This is from NPR in DC. They won't do anything about him or look any deeper. Do-nothings, know-nothing careerists (tell us something we don't know, Matt).

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Then there's someone possibly trying to cover their tracks... Domain Name georgetown.edu ? (Educational) IP Address 141.161.133.# (Georgetown University) ISP Georgetown University Location Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : District of Columbia City : Washington Lat/Long : 38.8933, -77.0146 (Map) Language English (U.S.) en-us Operating System Macintosh MacOSX Browser Firefox Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.1.5) Gecko/20091102 Firefox/3.5.5 Javascript version 1.5 Monitor Resolution : 1280 x 800 Color Depth : 24 bits Time of Visit Dec 2 2009 11:14:23 am Last Page View Dec 2 2009 11:14:23 am Visit Length 0 seconds Page Views 1 Referring URL http://www.google.co...Afm5f3RBQ&usg=AFQjCN Search Engine google.com Search Words jack burkman jm burkman and associates Visit Entry Page http://chickasawpick...-gop-pundit-and.html Visit Exit Page http://chickasawpick...-gop-pundit-and.html Out Click Time Zone UTC-5:00 Visitor's Time Dec 1 2009 11:14:23 pm Visit Number 64,705 And now NPR is data-mining my site: Domain Name in-addr.arpa ? (Unknown) IP Address 205.153.36.# (National Public Radio) ISP National Public Radio Location Continent : North America Country : United States (Facts) State : District of Columbia City : Washington Lat/Long : 38.9097, -77.0231 (Map) Language English (U.S.) en-us Operating System Microsoft WinXP Browser Internet Explorer 7.0 Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; FunWebProducts; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.648; .NET CLR 3.5.21022) Javascript version 1.3 Monitor Resolution : 1024 x 768 Color Depth : 32 bits Time of Visit Dec 3 2009 5:53:16 am Last Page View Dec 3 2009 5:53:16 am Visit Length 0 seconds Page Views 1 Referring URL http://chickasawpick...-gop-pundit-and.html Visit Entry Page http://chickasawpick...05:00&max-results=50 Visit Exit Page http://chickasawpick...05:00&max-results=50 Out Click Time Zone UTC-5:00 Visitor's Time Dec 2 2009 5:53:16 pm Visit Number 64,743

...And yet, there's even more songs from the Site Meter: Bloomberg on Vitter

Site Meter--I sometimes post comments on Rawstory and yesterday was one of those days. David Vitter has been leading the charge on attacking ACORN. Yes, that detestable activist group that successfully registers the poor and disenfranchised (meaning many of them are probably VETERANS) so that they--brace yourselves--can vote in elections. I know, what an obvious threat to democracy.

But Davey's having problems with being able to trumpet over the "fake pimp and whore" who entrapped an incompetent ACORN employee since he undeniably called a prostitution service on multiple occasions over multiple years. It's unknow whether there were any multiple orgasms, but we can safely assume that none were experienced by Pamela Martin & Associates employees. Vitter's going to have a dead prostitute and madam to drag around for the rest of his life. He and the scumbags in D.C. used her up and threw her away and even threatened her with civil actions for defending herself in court against them and their dogs.

Her prosecution was politically motivated, period, to coverup for their sins. It had nothing to do with enforcing the law. Are you listening Postal Inspector Hines? You were used too, to hide the misbehavior of a corrupt moron like David Vitter, someone with their lips permanently-attached to the Devil's ass. Mr. Hines, you were actually used to protect a frat boy who couldn't--and we can presume nothing has changed here--control his dick. Things are heating up in Washington alright, even with autumn coming.

When I saw that Vitter didn't even vote on defunding ACORN, hadn't even shown up for it, I knew it was pretty telling and that this whole issue of a dead madam really does instill fear in him for his prospects next year. I'm not so sure he should worry considering the redneck idiots who keep electing him and twits like Bobby Jindal. Someone had sex with a prostitute? So long as Davey keeps bringing in the money to Louisiana for his rich, often pseudo-evangelical constituents who are so bad at business that they need to feed at the public trough, yet yell about people on welfare, so mote it be. The pirogue paddlers will come, and so will Davey. Send the fuckers to Angola State.

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