Gannongate threatens to expose a huge GOP pedophile and male
prostitution ring
By Wayne Madsen
Online Journal Contributing Writer
February 18, 2005-Now that is has been discovered that "Jeff Gannon"
(real name James D. Guckert), a "reporter" for Talon News Service, a
front operation run by the conservative Republican-oriented GOPUSA.com,
was using an alias as a cleared White House reporter, details are
emerging that threaten to immerse the Bush administration in a major
scandal.
"Gannongate," which is only now being mentioned by the mainstream news
media, threatens to expose a potentially damaging GOP pedophile and
male prostitution ring dating back to the 1980s and the administration
of George H. W. Bush. James D. Guckert, using the name Jeff Gannon and
possibly other aliases, was also running gay porn sites, one with a
U.S. Marine Corps theme that solicited males for prostitution.
White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan said he did not realize
Gannon was using an alias until recently. However, rumors in the gay
community are circulating about McClellan frequenting gay bars in
Austin, Texas.
Gannon bypassed established Secret Service security controls, including
a background check requiring a social security number, to obtain a
White House press pass that identified him by an alias, an action seen
by many seasoned Washington journalists as only being possible if he
had favorable treatment from White House staff, especially McClellan
and his predecessor, Ari Fleischer. One White House reporter expressed
revulsion over the fact that it was Fleischer who took away press
credentials from the late long-time White House correspondent Sarah
McClendon and handed them to Gannon.
GOPUSA.com is run by a right-wing Texan and Bush friend named Bobby
Eberle. In 2003, GOPUSA.com launched a vicious anti-Semitic attack
against international financier George Soros, a leading philanthropist
for progressive causes and a major contributor to the Democratic Party.
In 2003, Gannon was reportedly given access by White House staff to a
classified State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research
memorandum regarding a CIA meeting involving the dispatch of former
U.S. Ambassador Joseph Wilson to Niger to investigate claims, which
turned out to be false, that Iraq had attempted to procure yellowcake
uranium from the West African country. The Wilson case ultimately led
to a leak to the media by unnamed White House staff of Wilson's wife's
name and identity as a covert CIA agent.
It was also revealed that Jeffgannon.com had been registered by the
same Delaware-based company that had registered other
Republican-oriented web sites, along with those catering to
pornographic military gay themes and male escort services.
TalonNews.com and GOPUSA.com are both registered to Endeavor Media
Group LLC, operating from Post Office Box 891354 in Houston, Texas. The
phone number provided is 999-999-9999. The registrant for a series of
web sites, including Jeffgannon.com, Theconservativeguy.com,
Exposejessejackson.com, Militaryescorts.com, militaryescortsm4m.com,
and hotmilitarystud.com is Bedrock Corporation of 4001 Kennett Pike in
Wilmington, Delaware. Bedrock is owned by Jim Guckert, the apparent
real identity of Jeff Gannon. The administrative contact for Bedrock
was listed as "J. Daniels," possibly another alias.
After the Gannon story broke, militaryescorts.com and
hotmilitarystud.com were redirected to a secure log-in site at
Cupertino, California-based www.dividezero.net/, which was registered
to GKG.Net, which had a contact email in College Station, Texas, the
home of Texas A&M University and the George H.W. Bush presidential
library. Dividezero.net had a secure log-in window but no subscription
information. Experts who track illegal content on the web, including
child pornography, report that such sites are common where log-in
information is provided separately by regular mail so that the
identities of subscribers cannot be easily tracked by online enrollment
and entry of credit card information.
Gannongate is reminiscent of a huge political scandal that surfaced in
Nebraska in 1989 when it was learned that Lawrence King, the head of
Franklin Community Credit Union in Omaha and a rising African American
star in the GOP (he sang the national anthem at George H. W. Bush's
1988 nominating convention in New Orleans), was a kingpin-along with
top Republicans in Nebraska and Washington, DC, including George H. W.
Bush-in a child prostitution and pedophilia scandal. King was later
convicted and jailed for fraud but pedophile and prostitution charges
were never brought against him and other Nebraska Republican
businessmen and politicians.
The scandal, investigated by Nebraska State Senator Loran Schmit, his
assistant John DeCamp (a former GOP state senator), State Senate
Committee investigator Gary Caradori, and former CIA Director William
Colby, reached the very top echelons of the George H. W. Bush
administration and GOP. Child prostitutes from Boys Town and other
orphanages in Nebraska as well as children procured from China were
reportedly flown to Washington for sexcapades with Republican
politicians. GOP lobbyist Craig Spence and a number of GOP officials in
the administration and Congress were implicated in the scandal,
including Labor Secretary Elizabeth Dole's liaison to the White House.
Young male members of the military in Washington, DC, were particularly
sought after by the prostitution ring. During the early 1980s, a number
of naval officers were implicated in a child pornography ring that
extended from Oregon to the San Francisco Bay area and to Chicago and
Washington, DC. The story about that ring was covered up by
then-Secretary of the Navy John Lehman.
The Nebraska pedophile scandal was similarly covered up on orders from
the highest levels of power in the senior Bush White House. Caradori
and his young son were killed in a suspicious plane crash in Illinois
in 1990. Colby was found floating dead in the Chesapeake Bay, near his
home, in 1996. Craig Spence allegedly committed suicide in 1989.
Witnesses, many of whom were abused themselves, were intimidated and
subsequently jailed in Nebraska and the investigation of the pedophile
scandal eventually collapsed. The entire military aspect of the
King-Spence scandal is now being repeated in Washington in Gannongate.
Last year, a senior source on the Washington Times editorial staff (the
same paper that broke the GOP pedophile scandal in 1989) linked White
House Deputy Chief of Staff Karl Rove to gay activities involving top
Republican political strategists in Washington, DC.
Gannon (Guckert) has been a major player in GOP and fundamentalist
Christian politics in Washington and around the country. In 2004, "Jeff
Gannon" was a featured speaker at a Capitol Hill Bible reading
sponsored by anti-abortion Operation Rescue head Reverend Rob Schenk.
In 1995, Schenk was the spokesman for the American Center for Law and
Justice, an anti-abortion group funded by Pat Robertson. Schenk was
also a major supporter of former Alabama Supreme Court Justice Roy
Moore, who was removed from office for refusing to comply with a
federal court order.
Schenk, who attended prayer meetings at John Ashcroft's Capitol Hill
apartment after Ashcroft came to Washington in 1994, established his
Pentecostal National Community Church at the dilapidated Giddings
School in a crime-ridden neighborhood in Southeast Washington. One of
his congregants was Ashcroft. The Hill newspaper ran an article on July
30, 2003, about a controversy surrounding plans by the community
development Eighth Street Main Streets Project to place park benches in
a small triangular park at 8th and I Streets in Southeast Washington,
opposite the U.S. Marine Corps Barracks. The paper reported that a
"community activist" named Jeff Gannon vehemently opposed the park
bench plan claiming it would attract "vagrants, alcoholics, and other
'problem personalities.'" The park is located just five blocks from the
school where "reporter" Gannon's friend Schenk first located his
Pentecostal church.
Gannon hosted a web-based radio program called "Jeff Gannon's
Washington," broadcast on his own web site, Jeffgannon.com, and
Righttalk.com, a conservative GOP site whose registrant is based in
Watsonville, California. Gannon's only journalism credentials were his
attendance at a two-day seminar at the Leadership Institute's Broadcast
School of Journalism in Arlington, Virginia. The head of the Leadership
Institute is Morton Blackwell, a former Reagan administration official
and a one-time head of the College Republicans, a post that Karl Rove
also filled.
Gannon seemed particularly interested in South Dakota politics. GOP
Senate candidate John Thune appeared on Gannon's radio webcast program.
On February 4, 2004, while being served softball questions by Gannon,
Thune called Daschle an "obstructionist and antagonist to President
Bush."
According to Roll Call, Gannon also served as an official of the Free
Speech Foundation, an organization that helped defend ProBush.com from
a lawsuit by former South Dakota Democratic Senator James Abourezk. The
web site features a "Traitor's List" that includes Abourezk. The former
senator and Navy veteran sued ProBush.com for defamation. Abourezk
asked for $5 million in damages and a public apology after sending a
cease and desist letter to the web site owner, a 21-year old suburban
Philadelphia resident named Mike Marino, who registered the site using
a post office box address in West Point, Pennsylvania. After Abourezk's
lawsuit threat, Gannon came to Marino's assistance. Other names on the
Traitor's List include President Jimmy Carter, Susan Sarandon, Viggo
Mortensen, Al Gore, Hillary Clinton, Howard Stern, John Kerry, Edward
Kennedy, Martin Luther King III, Rep. Cynthia McKinney, Michael Moore,
The Dixie Chicks, and former Democratic Rep. Gary Condit of California.
Gannon was also wired into the neo-conservative American Enterprise
Institute (AEI). He wrote a pro-Iraq war article for the March 1, 2004,
issue of their magazine, American Enterprise. AEI employs such ardent
neo-conservative figures as Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and Lynne
Cheney. Ironically, many of Gannon's articles were anti-gay rights,
such as one that insinuated that John Kerry's "pro-homosexual platform"
would make him the nation's "first gay president."
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Wayne Madsen is a Washington, DC-based investigative journalist,
author, and columnist. He is the author of the forthcoming book, "Jaded
Tasks: Big Oil, Black Ops & Brass Plates" and wrote "Genocide & Covert
Operations in Africa: 1993-1999" (Mellen Press).
<http://www.onlinejournal.com/Media/021805Madsen/021805madsen.html>
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