Report: Rampant Secret Service drinking, sex in 2011 trip
By Douglas Stanglin, USA TODAY
A Seattle TV station is reporting that a Secret Service team in El Salvador last year to prepare for President Obama’s visit allegedly engaged in heavy drinking and sexual activity similar to escapades in Colombia last month.
In an exclusive report for KIRO-TV, investigative reporter Chris Halsne quotes a U.S. government subcontractor in San Salvador as saying he worked extensively with a dozen members of the Secret Service advance team and found that the majority regularly visited a popular strip club and were “wasted” and “heavily intoxicated.”
The unidentified subcontractor says agents paid extra for access to a VIP section of the club where they were provided “a number of sexual favors in return for their cash,” KIRO-TV reports.
The subcontractor, according to KIRO-TV, says he told the agents that taking prostitutes back to their hotel rooms was a “really bad idea” but that several agents bragged that they “did this all the time” and “not to worry about it.”
The KIRO-TV reporter says the owner of the club confirmed that a large number of U.S. Secret Service agents, and some military escorts, had “descended on his club” a week before the Obama visit.
KIRO-TV says it has the name of some of the agents allegedly involved and has viewed records which, the reporters says, add credibility to the subcontractor’s eyewitness account. KIRO-TV promises a longer series of reports later today.
The Secret Service announced this week that all 12 implicated officers or supervisors in the Colombia scandal had been dealt with: eight forced out, one stripped of his security clearance and three cleared of wrongdoing, all within two weeks of the night in question, the Associated Press reports.
A dozen military personnel have also been implicated, and Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said they have had their security clearances suspended.
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About vincepalamara
Vincent Palamara was born in Pittsburgh and graduated from Duquesne University with a degree in Sociology.
Although not even born when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, Vince brings fresh eyes to an old case. In fact, Vince would go on to study the largely overlooked actions - and inactions - of the United States Secret Service in unprecedented detail, as well as achieving a world's record in the process, having interviewed and corresponded with over 80 former agents (the House Select Committee on Assassinations had the old record of 46 with a 6 million dollar budget and subpoena power from Congress), not to mention many surviving family members, White House aides, and even quite a few Parkland and Bethesda medical witnesses for a corresponding project. The result was Survivor's Guilt: The Secret Service & The Failure To Protect President Kennedy.
Vince is also the author of the books JFK: From Parkland To Bethesda, The Not-So-Secret Service, Who's Who in the Secret Service, and Honest Answers about the Murder of President John F. Kennedy: A New Look at the JFK Assassination.
All told, Vince has been favorably mentioned in over 140 JFK and Secret Service related books to date (including two whole chapters in Murder in Dealey Plaza, The Secret Service: The Hidden History Of An Enigmatic Agency by Philip Melanson, and the Final Report of the Assassination Records Review Board, among many others), often at length, in the bibliographies, and in the Secret Service - and even medical evidence - areas of these works.
Vince has appeared on the History Channel's THE MEN WHO KILLED KENNEDY (VHS and DVD), C-SPAN, Newsmax TV, A COUP IN CAMELOT (DVD/BLU RAY), KING KILL '63, THE MAN BEHIND THE SUIT (DVD), National Geographic's JFK: THE FINAL HOURS (including on DVD), PCN, BPTV, local cable access television, YouTube, radio, newspapers, print journals, at national conferences, and all over the internet. Also, Vince's original research materials, or copies of said materials, are stored in the National Archives (by request under Deed Of Gift by the ARRB), the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Harvard University, the Assassination Archives and Research Center, and the Dallas Public Library.
Vince Palamara has become known (as he was dubbed by the History Channel in 2003) "the Secret Service expert." As former JFK Secret Service agent Joe Paolella proclaimed: "You seem to know a lot about the Secret Service, maybe even more than I do!" Agent Dan Emmett calls Vince a Secret Service expert in his new book.
Vince Palamara 