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/

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

The 7 CIA KIAs in Afghanistan: When revenge really means reprisal

Occupied Afghanistan--Remember all those WWII movies where the Nazis are being attacked by partisans and members of the resistance? This is what's happening in Afghanistan.
This doesn't mean the Afghans are "good guys," they're just reacting naturally, and they have their own issues. We're worse in our behavior at this historical moment.

The CIA are calling for "revenge" in an illegal war and remembering that this is an illegal occupation is the key (wars of aggression are illegal under international law): they're already kidnapping, torturing, and even slaughtering Afghan nationals, and now, someone they thought was going to be their "snitch" (informant) got into a military facility knowing seven of them were going to be there and blew himself and them up with a bomb strapped to his torso. That's desperation under a bloody occupation, not some arbitrary act for the hell of it, and it's not even necessarily extreme. It's what happens under bloody occupations.

What the CIA should have used was the term "reprisal," the one that the Nazis and their victims frequently used when they retaliated for deaths within their own ranks. The problem in their logic at Langley--and our own if we accept such arguments--is obvious. We're the wrong side, and we're the aggressors, not the Afghans. This kind of wrong-headed thinking is only going to keep us digging our own hole, and eventually, we're probably going to get our own Stalingrad in some form or another. This "revenge" is really reprisal, don't kid yourself. We're the bad guys. We're the wrong side. The Afghan that did this killed people who might have been there to torture in his mind, and certainly came as bringers of death.

On the "torture flap" and all the waffling in DC: Bust Bush, Cheney, Gonzales, Rumsfeld, Rice, Miers, and the OLC attorneys

WWW--This is getting good. To say that I'm enjoying the shit storm created over the release of these torture memos, the narratives coming from former participants, and the formation of a coherent time line, would be an understatement. This could have a good effect on reining-in our intelligence community, and more. Reactionaries of every stripe are going to complain that this is "going to hamper the CIA, et. al.," which misses the point: actions defined as internationally illegal and barbaric behavior by them isn't necessarily going to make us any safer, quite the opposite.

But the the public has to be engaged in this, and so far, they are in a major way that's not showing any signs of cresting.

We could be seeing the radical reformulation of our foreign policy dialog inside and outside of the State Department and the executive branch. Why? Because the Bush II administration was so incompetent, so blustery in their criminality, that they didn't think that they had to cover their tracks much--not that they cared to most of the time, they thought the fix was on permanently. Who and what made them think that? Who gave them that blank check? Few buy the justifications these days. However, there still seems to be an increasingly isolated segment of the public that thinks George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, and the rest of the Bush II administration were somehow protecting us through methods that were proven useless in obtaining information centuries ago.

Torture doesn't work.

My advice to concerned members of the public who find the use of torture by our government unacceptable: sign any petition (once!), call your elected representatives, and make one hell of a lot of noise about your concern over this until we see some real action, some real justice. Until then, all bets are off, so keep hammering!

Why is the Obama administration waffling back-and-forth on this? Some of the torture memos came out because they knew a whistle-blower was going to leak them to the press and watchdog groups. Nonetheless, it was a brave move to release them in unredacted form, and I applaud it. But the Obama administration doesn't yet know what to do about it, and the reasons are simple and complicated: yes, they have qualms about how the Bush II administration implemented torture against individuals captured in the field (oftentimes just taken off of the streets of another nation), but I think they want to keep this gun in their pockets for a rainy day.

Does it matter? It might not. This whole scandal is broader than just one incident: it's an internationally sprawling and seemingly endless string of incidents that constituted official policy under Bush II, a secret one. Interestingly, the former president isn't taking any potshots at President Obama on torture...only the factions of Karl Rove and Richard Cheney are. This speaks volumes as to who was the genesis of the policy, it could be isolated primarily to the last vice president.

However, none of this matters. George W. Bush was our standing president, regardless of whether he abdicated his responsibilities to Vice President Cheney. For this reason, there must be accountability because we are a nation of laws and precedents. If the Bush II precedents stand on torture and numerous other matters, we're no longer a democracy. Motivation enough for you now?

One thing's certain: There's a war for the minds of Americans on this issue being fought by Rovian operatives within the mainstream media, and they and the Obama administration are losing control of the debate to the public. This can only be a good thing. The groundswell is here, now.