Web Letters: The Porn Plot Against Prosecutors

O"nce Bush began his second term in the White House, Gonzales declared the prosecution of pornography portraying sex acts between consenting adults "one of the top priorities" of his department. He signed off on an FBI headquarters memo that recruited agents for an anti-porn task force. That memo stated that prosecutions would focus particularly on material depicting "bestiality, urination, defecation, as well as sadistic and masochistic behavior."

Sounds a lot like how prisoners were treated by the US Military at Abu Ghraib.

Richard Riewer

Norrth Hollywood , California

There is a very interesting twist concerning the "obscenity case that Charlton did file – United States v. Five Star Video, LC, et al – [..] and it's one that the Justice Department may have found so embarrassing that Charlton's firing may simply have been another casualty in the cover-up surrounding it." This quote is from Mark Kernes, ‘Attorney Says Justice Dept. Sold Same 'Obscene' Material As His Client’, posted March 16, 2007 on an "not safe for work" website.

Apparantly, the attorney for Five Star and others, filed a Motion to Dismiss on Aug. 31, 2006. The defendants are accused of selling and distributing adult videos. It turns out that another company in Arizona had sold had distributed the very same adult videos. That company however is under the supervision of the U.S. Trustee's Office of the Department of Justice, and the United States Bankruptcy Court of the District of Arizona (because it had gone bankrupt earlier).

In Kernes words: "How can it legitimately argue that the four features under indictment violate Arizona's community standards for obscenity when other stores in the same state, all under the control of U.S. government employees, have been selling those same features – and in two instances, sold one of the features in two different locations several days after the indictment came down?"

Mark Kernes has written several articles about this case.

Wim Prange

Nijmegen, Netherlands

The effort of the Attorney General to eliminate all pornography would be well-received in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Yemen, and other places with strong family values.

The book, The Enemy at Home accurately captured the shared values of foreign terorists and American fundamentalists; let our fundamentalists seek more fertile ground in the more moral parts of the world.

Todd Peterson

Washington, DC

Max Blumenthal writes: "The other e-mail contained a weirder charge: that Charlton refused to prosecute obscenity cases. Written by Ward to Sampson on (September 20, 2006), the e-mail leveled the same allegation against Dan Bogden, the US Attorney for Nevada, who was also dismissed in the prosecutor purge, despite positive performance reviews. "We have two US Attorneys who are unwilling to take good cases we have presented to them. They are Paul Charlton in Phoenix (this is urgent) and Dan Bogden in Las Vegas," wrote Ward. "In light of the AG's [Attorney General's] comments...to 'kick butt and take names,' what do you suggest I do?"

I'm on a mission. I'm looking for any e-mails in the "document dump" that cover the months before the November elections last year. Why?

One story dominated the airwaves and the front pages of newspapers in the months before last November's elections: MARK FOLEY and the House page scandal, with news that House Republicans had been hiding Foley's activities from everyone, especially the Democrats.

So, what would Rove and Gonzales have done? They would have counterattacked, to try to dig up dirt (or even fabricate dirt) on the Democrats, in an attempt to push the Mark Foley scandal off the front pages, replacing it with "scandals" about Democrats or pet issues appealing to the Republican's religious base like pornography indictments/convictions. Or maybe even trumped-up voter fraud cases against Democrats?

It is my contention that Rove and the White House enlisted the help of "friendly" US Attorneys (USAs) to execute this plan and any USAs who didn't go along with the plan ended up being fired one month after the election. And this Ward guy was in on the plan, trying to get USAs to go after local "pornographers" to try to bump coverage of the Mark Foley scandal off the front page of local newspapers and off local airwaves.

Of course, the plan didn't work, but remember when Karl Rove, two weeks before the election, proclaimed with 100 percent certainty that Republicans would retain control of Congress? Because he'd seen "the numbers"? Even with the Mark Foley scandal hogging the news for weeks on end?

Paul Sorrells

Austin, TX