The Enemy Within

Lately, the U.S. government has had more success breaking up convoluted conspiracies and terrorist plots than controlling the scandals caused by the indecent behavior of its security forces outside the battlefield.

While President Barack Obama spent this week using as a campaign slogan the fatal attack on Osama bin Laden, and the FBI disarmed a band of young anarchists who attempted to blow up bridges and roads in Ohio, the Secret Service was finalizing a new internal code of ethics as a response to the international embarrassment caused by their agents at the Summit of the Americas.

Eleven agents and ten soldiers condemned their professional luck and the Secret Service’s reputation by entangling themselves in a foolish party with prostitutes, hours before President Obama arrived at the Summit in Cartagena. Now, the inclusion of chaperones in presidential trips – to make sure that agents don’t mess with alcohol and prostitutes – is more similar to the precautions taken for high school trips or for the Mexican youth soccer team who was involved in the same shenanigans in Lima last year, than something worthy of an agency that saved Ronald Regan’s life in 1981. Though it still looks back at its responsibility in the assassination of John Kennedy in 1963 as the biggest mistake in its 147 years of history.

The indecent behavior is not limited to the U.S. security forces; many presidential candidates have to end their ambitions due to skirt chasing problems. Just like the issues that cost the French ex-director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Khan, his position, or what made the Italian ex-prime minister Silvio Berlusconi history, or the issue that was called into question with the recent African trip of the Spanish King Juan Carlos, who is rumored to have gone hunting for princesses and commoners more than for elephants.

The Secret Service’s scandal, which could still increase in magnitude if Dania Suárez manages to recount her story to Playboy after complaining that she had not been paid for her sex work, is not shocking enough to rend one’s garments, but it does throw away the efforts of a government that preaches to the whole world about ethics and anti-corruption.

Even if all the revelry will make for a good story, the subject remains serious because it exposes the government’s vulnerability at the hand of its own people in cases that compromise everything from the president’s security to national security. The scandals are many and hardly funny; one only has to remember private Bradley Manning who, after leaking millions of classified documents to Wikileaks relating to American diplomacy, compromised relations with ally and enemy governments alike.

Even worse were the pictures that surfaced in 2004 from the Iraqi prison Abu Ghraib, which showed soldiers terrorizing the detainees with dogs or posing among naked dead bodies as if they were hunting trophies – scenes that were even immortalized by the Colombian painter Fernando Botero. Or the recent pictures of soldiers in Afghanistan making obscene gestures around victims and Muslim symbols, or the prison guards in Guantanamo who flushed copies of the Quran down the toilets.

Despite the assured strikes against al-Qaida, the U.S. government has revealed many grave failings, from their mistakes in failing to anticipate 9/11 in New York, or justifying the existence of weapons of mass destruction is Iraq, to its inability to stop an epidemic of suicides among its soldiers and veterans. Or from their unfulfilled promises to shut down Guantanamo to promises of ending torturous methods of interrogation, be it during secret flights or in secret prisons run by the CIA in Thailand, Afghanistan and several European countries.

Maybe the best lesson to come out of the misconduct of a few Secret Service agents, just like the aforementioned corrupt acts that work from within against the government itself, is that in an open society where information and condemnations are allowed to flow freely it is much easier to search for and apply corrective measures.