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SEX, LIES, SPIES, AND EXPLOITATION:
The D.C. Madame Case
Let the Dead Bury the Dead
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When this trial was going on, we were aware of something like “business as usual,” another hooker with influential clients as a source for titillating news coverage. Matthew Janovic, in his well-documented and honest account of the entire situation (and “entire” is accurate) indicts our entire political system to excellent effect.
There are places where one can either contradict or clarify what the author says, and I am not sure which I am doing (believe me, I’ve corresponded with him enough to know that it is always tenuous to make assumptions or jump to conclusions about what point he is making.
That being said, let me proceed and I am sure he will let me know if and when I’m misrepresenting things. First of all, most important is his pointing the finger at “Conspiracy Theorists.” Today, this is a term that should be used with great care. In fact, it is the reason that SCAD (State Crimes Against Democracy) was coined. “Conspiracy Theorists” was first invoked with vigor in the immediate aftermath of the JFK assassination to discredit those who correctly suspected a mixture of the intelligence, military, and corporate interests deliberately killed JFK and then fabricated the Warren Report to obfuscate it.
At the risk of already having said too much, I would add that the term manages to discredit accurate observation by association of those groups think that area 51 proves extraterrestrial visitation and government cover-ups, Harry Truman as a communist, world government and black helicopters, and so on. Yes, there are drones used in the United States to spy on its citizens, but to think that the corporate interests would allow world authority in decision-making is ludicrous.
Indeed, this is why our government was so happy to see the conspiracy about aliens in area 51 as it helped deflect interest in the military research going on in that area. How thrilling it must be for NSA to have people suspecting United Nations surveillance as it deflects from reality.
Still, I am far from what is going on in this book (which deserves much wider interest than it has so far attained). Jean Palfrey emerges as one more example of how things are buried. Matt mentions Wikileaks as emerging at about the same time, but how much more exciting for the American public is the D. C. Madame case? Sex, Politics, Power, as always. Think of Palfrey and her case as an exemplar, if you will, of what is going on in our name.
That is to say, the Bradley/Chelsea Manning leeks to Wikileaks simply confirmed for most of us what we already knew about what was going on in Iraq – their publication simply proved it or provided more facts. Jeremy Scahill’s expose of Blackwater proved what we had always expected and, indeed, written about here, but he gave substance to it. His Dirty Wars supplied more facts to what we had already asserted here. There are numerous other examples, John Pilger included.
Matt’s investigation of the D. C. Madame case in another example but, since we only have a single individual involved, Palfrey, and attacked by all the same forces at work, the culprits become more clear, the focus can shift to them more easily. The work is more detailed and exact than anything you have read or heard about the case as well.
Here, with his kind permission, in his own words, unexpurgated and unedited by us, is his preface. I would simply add that if the preface can generate this much thought and insight, you can imagine how valuable the book is as a whole. So far I have permission to reprint other sections, six pages at a time, and if there are questions or requests, I will reprint more. However, I must say that the permission was granted before the review above, so he may have second thoughts. (I’m being humorous there, folks, in case you wonder, but I also do mean it.)
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Preface
With the right signifiers in the right context you can take down an empire, with the provision that it’s already tottering on the brink. The DC Madam scandal began as a media construct during the fall of 2006 at a precipitous political moment: the national midterm elections that routed the Republican Party were coming, inevitably, smashing their hold on Congress. Their sliver of a majority had endured for over a decade and with it came a rapid acceleration of the dismantling of the social contract. Before 1993-94 the GOP had only left their minority status as a party twice in sixty-two years. With power comes the inevitable perks of the alpha: this was the very same moment that the DC Madam (Deborah Jeane Palfrey) set up shop in and around the nation’s capital—the “Beltway”--running her operations from northern California via cell phones, later the Internet, and received her cut of the take through the U.S. Postal system. The end of her prostitution ring came with the demise of this Republican majority. There is no coincidence to this. The mainstream press wouldn’t remark on such facts. This was only one example of their abysmal failure as public watchdogs. There were, and are, too many to recount because it’s systematic.
The corporate media wasn’t alone in their enabling of Republican misbehavior. The “party of the opposition” failed in their oversight duties on all counts as they tend to when labor is weak, when the public is beaten down and apathetic, when the public is complacent, irresponsible. Primary materials in this text make it plain that they did their best to cover their asses trying to create the impression that they made serious oversight inquiries into Palfrey’s case when they didn’t. The participation of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas when he stepped forward to address unique legal issues to the case was also political theater, all to protect themselves from uncomfortable questions. In both instances the issue was whether Palfrey was being granted adequate due process thanks to having all of her assets seized through federal forfeiture. It was the role of the mainstream media to make sure those questions were unthinkable (easy in the US) in the ranks of the public, to put them completely off of the radar. There were more than a few unusual acts that stepped outside of the bounds of normal procedure, whatever that means these days. Something huge was at stake here for all three branches of government to become involved, however lamely or ineffectively they acted to assist the defendant. There was a fear in the air coming from them that should exist at all times.
Coming from a dearth of primary materials and the public record this text should make it plain what was at stake in the prosecution of the DC Madam. While the conclusions are my own opinions—ones that I’m entitled to as a citizen, at least for now—I believe they’re solid ones based on experience within the narrative and thanks to extensive research in the aftermath. I make no bones about it, I’m not a fan of mainstream journalism; but without the work of a few decent journalists who covered the story we wouldn’t know nearly as much as we do about the case. The Madam herself read them and instructed me to keep her posted on what some of them were writing, then to distill it for easy digestion. All of those reporters have my thanks. The same goes for the many sources I’d like to thank here, one of whom is deceased, Deborah Palfrey, “Jeane.” She entrusted me with reams of primary information in our correspondences alone. This case is instructive in the methodology of corruption within the American political process; if anyone bothers, future writers and researchers could have too many directions to go in just as I did. When the information paints a map of so many interconnected-players, when there are frequent cross-corroborations, what you’re seeing is a system that’s ritualized and institutionalized. The players involved think that it’s all normal, when in fact what they’re engaged in is profoundly criminal acts. Because of the natural fact that people have agendas and lie, writing on the DC Madam case can go in many different directions it is so sprawling.
So much has been written on the case, and much of it hopelessly flawed, but there was worse going on. The general tone of mainstream coverage was inappropriate and predicated on disinformation (consciously wrong) and misinformation (unconsciously wrong about the facts) for reasons that this text will delve into more deeply. There’s outright murder, and then there’s the variety of destroying an individual with the courts. While bearing no direct relationship to her case, a fledgling hacker-journalist group named Wikileaks registered its online presence at practically the same moment federal agents searched Palfrey’s Vallejo, California residence, maybe within hours. Their inception was hardly noticed by anyone, certainly not me; Wikileaks was only a minor footnote on the Internet in late 2006. The parallels between Jeane’s and their narrative are sometimes striking: like Palfrey, they were once virtual unknowns who released damaging information about powerful people out into the world via uploads and a sometimes friendly press. I would hope Assange isn’t destroyed in the same way Palfrey was through the courts, but I believe he too is doomed for mocking civilization’s well-positioned gods. (Who still defecate and croak like everyone else…) Out of nothing we come, back to nothing we go. Who had ever heard of Julian Assange in 2006? This could also be said of the early days of the Hookergate/DC Madam scandal itself which metastasized (I cannot think of any other term for it) by the spring of 2007 into not only a national scandal, but an internationally known story of corruption in Washington D.C., not merely a sex scandal. I can state without any sense of exaggeration that there was never one like this one in the annals of American politics, nor is there likely to ever be one like it again. Nothing comes close to it in the realm of the known. Before the sustained attack on Wikileaks by the U.S government, the DC Madam was taken down with some of the same general methods used against terror cells. Would the current administration of President Barack Obama have done the same thing had the clients of Palfrey’s prostitution ring been predominantly Democrats? Yes, absolutely, and he would have been protecting the very same interests that Bush II did when they took her down. Yet, like with any problem created by human beings and a mad god, it all began very simply.
The USPS first conducted surveillance on the madam going so far as to do mail covers, conduct wiretaps, and stakeouts. Treasury tracked her transferring funds overseas through programs intended to track terrorists possibly trigging a chain of bureaucratic events that ramped up the investigation even further and politicizing it once certain uncomfortable facts became known to investigators and prosecutors. Federal USPS and Treasury Department investigators froze all of her assets After shutting down her organizational infrastructure (the escort service’s ability to generate income), they isolated her from the former escorts through legal intimidation and harassment; they also utilized secret grand jury hearings where confidential informants (former, shifty escorts & “testers”) testified against her; federal agents shadowed her; they warred on her with their partners in the mainstream media through official leaks coupling superficial, reductionist coverage with an outrageous bias no one in their right mind would call journalism; but, they didn’t unleash physical violence on Palfrey. That would have been redundant. There was no need to assassinate her in the classic sense of the term. To assert the opposite requires substantial evidence that has yet to be proffered publicly, and has yet to be filed in civil or criminal court by “concerned” (a real laugh) commenters on the scandal. Were the conspiracy theorists serious, and had they any solid evidence, we’d know about it.
The scandal as a historical event runs the gamut: from the intelligence community to information warfare; the Internet as a tool of activism and whistleblowing; information brokering; the presence of military intelligence; legal and investigative procedure (or the lack thereof); the corrosive social effects of a politicized appointment process; and, state-corporate collusion facilitated by war, by commonplace influence peddling. The Palfrey proceedings and trial demonstrate that the damage done to the rule of law by the Bush administration and Congress in the aftermath of 9/11 has been profound. Normally, these scandals at least offer the public some kind of a release or a catharsis rather than bringing about actual reform. Sometimes they prevent terrible agendas: Bill Clinton, his advisers, and the Republican dominated Congress under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, were poised to take down Social Security and move it towards a privatized model, a dream of the right over the decades. Monica Lewinsky made that impossible, but so did a personal animus for the president that had nothing to do with ideology. Occasionally these scandals contain enough potential explosiveness to alter the political calculus. This was such a case with Palfrey, with some differences that made it even more explosive. Thanks to the extraordinary effort of people inside and outside of government, its destructive potential to the political class went unrealized, much to the chagrin of the author and many others. We didn’t quite get the “release” we needed—the washing out of an entire political generation—but it was close, tantalizingly close enough to be tasty. Some of us got far more and were poised to go well beyond that. What we also have here in part is a fresher template of how to hit some of the bastards in the political class where they live when their pants are down.
Contrary to what the mainstream American press has put out there, rather than being a mere “sex scandal” the DC Madam’s legal predicament involved far more than privileged clients getting caught with their pants down. The whole enchilada could have been endangered by a little woman. This was a scandal that the GOP owned: they marshaled their cronies within the federal bureaucracy to shield many of the players found in Palfrey’s phone records from the rule of law, and we’re not merely talking about seeing a hooker here. You don’t go to the effort that they did for nothing, certainly not for a “routine prostitution case.” The Republicans (with Democratic assistance) bent procedure—federal statutes--for reasons that go well beyond procuring a prostitute for the purposes of sexual contact. They did it to cover up evidence of their system of institutionalized corruption in the appropriations process in Congress. At the center of this criminalized feeding at the trough was the GOP, the biggest state capitalists of them all. Think about this the next time they talk about how much Republicans are “against big government,” because they and their socially retarded base couldn’t exist without it. The GOP is comprised of radical statists who covet control of the apparatus of government for narrow interests and have done more in the last twenty years to expand it, most specifically after 9/11. Voting consistently in blocs in Congress and in state legislatures, they no longer resemble an American political party, more a Maoist cult or political commissars in the former Soviet Union. In this malaise they were provided the usual cover by congressional Democrats through inaction and collusion; there were no serious attempts at oversight being made here. This hasn’t changed under the Obama administration.
This book was a trial by fire. No one will ever truly know the agony of being involved in this story for nearly a year, but so be it, I opted to assist Palfrey walking through that door. I began writing observations about the case on my small blog beginning in the spring of 2007 ending up finally as a paid researcher for the defense a few months later. Most of the work I did after that was pro bono; moreover, I volunteered my time and effort to help defend the right to due process under the law, one of many rights that are currently under sustained attack in the United States. This was never for the money and this book will in all likelihood never pay for itself—I don’t see how it ever could. That wasn’t the point when I decided to get involved when I ran away and joined the Palfrey carnival. The point is being a responsible citizen who understands that government is an amoral tool, like a hammer, either of the public, private interests, but often some place in-between.
My hope is that my experience and my take on the scandal as a participant will bring a greater understanding of what I believe it was about centrally, namely influence peddling, bribery and money laundering perhaps going into deeper, darker recesses of the secret world. The influence peddling was expedited through the use of prostitutes in the defense and intelligence appropriations process, to name only two areas of interest. Prostitutes were a facilitator just as they are on Wall Street or in other deal making contexts. But along with sex comes baggage—implications--that might include blackmail and coming from a variety of directions. There are elements of the cultural, the political, and the psychological riven through this narrative in a form that can only be described as pathological. That’s what the shadow world of intelligence is all about, that’s what the criminal underworld is about, which is why they intersect so often. That nexus played a significant role in the DC Madam’s legal problems, and maybe beyond that into the black arts of spycraft where no one knows who is who.
Does it have to be said that American politicians on the national level aren’t normal human beings? To Americans who vote like the robotic consumers that they are, it does, or we wouldn’t have political pundits and strategists talking about the “rebranding” of candidates. A large segment of the public is also to blame for the current political crisis, including everyone who doesn’t vote. None of this is healthy. Our political and economic system could best be described as expressions of deep psychological and spiritual illnesses within the body politic. Politicians embody this, and we shouldn’t be shocked: we made this mess, but some of us are sicker than others. Repeatedly having sex with prostitutes in the context that they do is one more example that these people are abnormal, acting out perverse, parallel versions of the lives of essentially normal people. One last observation before the coming storm: Regardless of the presence of the American intelligence establishment in the case, it would be wise for those reading this text to understand that Palfrey wasn’t murdered by “shadowy government operatives.” There isn’t one shred of solid evidence to suggest that, and no, her public comments aren’t what they’ve been painted as at all, the contexts have been consciously removed. This ridiculous murder theory is a conscious lie by some and part of an arch-conservative agenda that’s speaking too loudly these days and would be doing the nation a favor were its adherents in the lunatic fringe to finally shut up. The irony is (or is there any here?) that it serves the interests of the corporatist far right (including the Democrats) in creating a Boogeyman state that’s ubiquitous, murdering entire swaths of its citizens constantly with plans for mass detention camps in the works. What bad government wouldn’t want its citizens to disengage in apathy and fear? When these people confute facts with fiction what you have is a mass hallucination of the unwell.
What would the establishment do without these assholes? A bad corporate dominated government requires conspiracy nuts, and vice versa, just as the state-corporate nexus needs terrorists, and vice versa, it’s all a game, all bullshit. This isn’t empty hippie shit: to see them as separate is the delusion brought about by the Cartesian-split which sees things and systems as isolated and unconnected (don’t tell the Army Corps of Engineers). The objective truth is that everything on this planet—and beyond--is interconnected, there is no separation. There’s also no monolithic state or world government. The conspiracy nuts wish there was someone with that much control. That’s why they cling to their empty theories so tenaciously. The reality that no one is in control is far more frightening to them. Hit them with it in some way and you’ll see what I mean, they’ll go into full meltdown mode or stonewall you in some irrational manner that’s equivalent to a child covering their ears and shouting to drown you out. That’s the level of discourse on the right in the United States along with arch-conservatives in what’s left of the counterculture and the anti-war movement. Almost all of these so-called social rebellions have been mainly cultural in nature, and more about the consumer model than actual social transformation. What you have here are the limitations of selfish individualism finally being revealed for what they really are: another extension of a criminal system and mindset because of how the nation was founded.
Even with the rollback of civil liberties under Bush II and the Obama administration this isn’t the case; as bad as things have become (thanks greatly to people like the conspiracy nuts, them included) their contention of a totalitarian federal government is nuttiness on a half-shell. Are we heading in that direction? That’s the real question at hand not this wacky idea that we’ve been there since the New Deal and 1913 that fateful year (huh? Is it about unions, the Populists? Nope, but you’re getting warmer: it comes from their descendants) when the federal income tax and the Federal Reserve were created, crazy contentions that have no basis in objective reality. The fringe right is a serious threat, yet they’ve got nothing on Wall Street and merely serve as their pawns, whether they know it or not. It helps if not. What these morons so often praise about this country could bring about the nightmare that they’re always yammering on about--exactly what you would expect out of complete fools. Again, that’s not the point.
The role of the celebrity conspiracy nuts in the DC Madam case was, and is, to muddy the waters and create diversions away from the heart of the story (and other examples of corruption), and to consciously sow disinformation. The people parroting it spread misinformation, because they’re misinformed, wrong. Who else is there? There are the legions of willfully ignorant Americans with no connection to the case who default to conspiracy thinking, because that kind of mindset is a religious one reliant on faith rather than on actual facts, and the same goes for the conspiracy nuts who sincerely believe that garbage. “No,” says the attitude of a large segment of the American public, “none of this is my fault, it’s the big, bad government. I’m not responsible for this mess.” That contention couldn’t be more wrong when we’re all to blame. There’s the laity, and there’s the priests and clerics, masters and slaves, and only the names change, while hierarchy, being perhaps no more than eleven thousand years old, seems to be playing out. I think some stories—some lives—can tell us something about where the rest of us are heading.
Distilled, the most basic fact of the case is this: the GOP’s prosecution team and U.S. Courts ran a suicidal woman to her death to hide criminal activities by the privileged and their handlers, to which they admitted to in court. This was one of many canaries dying in the coal mine. Class and gender issues littered the narrative as the American experiment faltered, perhaps for the last time. What will people think of all this a century from now? My guess would be that we were all basically crazy, what else? What do we say about the people before us? How many times have you heard this: “Why did people put up with it at the time?” I ask the reader the same question: Why are you putting up with it? How we treat women is fundamental to the “anthropological crisis,” which is a crisis of leadership. What happens when the belief in that’s gone? How would we order our society after the fall? Without women in the equation, making decisions, there can be no actual balance to social relations. A male-dominated world is a central problem, yet, as you’ll see, this is really about a general absence of values after traditional morality has collapsed. Revolution means the turning of the wheel, the passing of generations, and the rise of new ones, and hopefully they’re not going to be looking to leaders, but to themselves for answers. It takes oceans of willing followers to create bad leadership; they’re a symptom of our collective disease. You can’t miss the telltale signs in the culture, that is, if you’re able to step outside of it for another look from a different angle, and everyone’s got one in America.
The Republicans have “a problem with women” alright. As with any predator they prey on the weakest. The rhetoric of capitalist, bourgeois prosperity = democracy is a free market hallucination, a dumbshow habit of Western apparatchiki, utter bullshit, someone’s comfortable, deluded political mythology that is wrecking a nation and most of the world. To the people of tomorrow: this case was symptomatic of all of the madness of this era. All I can say is to learn as much as possible about human history, to try not to repeat our easily avoidable mistakes, and to forgive us for what were our weaknesses, because we were human, we were frail, we were weak like you. I never set out to become involved in this case and never would have imagined in my life that I’d be writing something like this book. There was no choice once I got involved.
--Matt Janovic, October 2012.
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