Sex antics no secret on tour, panel told

A United States Senate panel investigating how members of the Secret Service came to be caught with their pants down, as it were, on a mission to Colombia heard yesterday of a wider history of allegations of sexual misdeeds inside the elite agency.

Senator Joseph Lieberman, chairing the panel, cited 64 instances since 2007 of agents being accused of sexual misconduct, including one complaint of "non-consensual intercourse".

Asking insiders to come forward, he said: "We can only know what the records of the Secret Service reveal."

Lieberman and the Senate Homeland Security Committee are investigating the biggest scandal to hit the agency, in which a dozen Secret Service staff were accused of misconduct for bringing women, some of them prostitutes, back to their hotel rooms in Cartagena before a presidential trip last month.

At least 11 Secret Service men, including two supervisors, were identified as participants and eight have lost their jobs. About 12 other military personnel have also been implicated.

"It is hard for many people, including me, to believe that on one night in April 2012 in Cartagena, Colombia, 11 Secret Service agents - there to protect the President - suddenly and spontaneously did something they or other agents had never done before," Lieberman said.

According to the Washington Post, four of those sacked or forced to resign will fight to get their jobs back on the grounds that men misbehaving, particularly while travelling overseas, had been tolerated by agency heads.

During such trips, the agents sometimes called themselves members of the "Secret Circus", and what happened in foreign climes should stay in foreign climes, they claimed.

For some on the Senate panel, however, there is no such thing as innocent shenanigans where the Secret Service is concerned. Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, said any such behaviour by agents opened them to the possibility of blackmail, which could put the President at risk.

"This was not a one-time event," said Collins. "The circumstances unfortunately suggest an issue of culture. I want to hear what the Secret Service is doing to encourage people to report egregious behaviour when they see it."

Independent