USZ secret service faces humiliation; Hit by 64 complaints of sex misconduct

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Washington: A top US senator, leading an inquiry into the recent American Secret Service sex scandal, has revealed some 64 counts of sexual misconduct against the agency over the past five years.

While addressing the first congressional probe into the agency’s Colombia prostitution scandal on Wednesday, Senator Joseph Lieberman said the US Secret Service employees were involved in several “troubling” events.

Many of the 64 complaints involved employees sending sexually suggestive emails, while one was of “non-consensual intercourse,” Lieberman said. The revelations led Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan to apologize for the false behavior of the agency’s employees in Colombia. Some eight agents, including two supervisors, lost their jobs. Four other employees and a dozen military personnel have also been linked to the scandal.

The US Secret Service and military personnel took as many as 21 women back to their hotel rooms on the nights of April 11-12, just before President Barack Obama’s arrival in Cartagena, Colombia, to attend the sixth Summit of the Organization of American States (OAS) last month. The scandal erupted after local police intervened in a dispute over payment between one agent and a female escort at a hotel.

Chairman of the Homeland Security committee Senator Lieberman and the Republican Senator Susan Collins stressed that Colombia’s sexual scandal was far from a one-off, with Lieberman saying if there was not an argument between the agent and the prostitute, “the world would have never known this sordid story.”

Collins also warned that the agents’ move to use their real names to check the women into hotels “unfortunately suggest an issue of culture.” Adding, “Contrary to the conventional story line, this was not simply a single, organized group that went out for a night on the town together.”

Meanwhile, Sullivan claimed that his agents were among the hardest working and most dedicated employees within the federal government. He also rejected a Washington Post report that such acts were unofficially accepted based on unwritten codes, considering it as being “absurd.”

Differences among the US officials have reached a very critical point. Analysts believe that such absurd remarks are only meant to cover up for these scandals.


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