India News and Travel Times Provides India-centric and other News and Features

The Secret Service has said that it is investigating if its employees had hired prostitutes before President Barack Obama's visit to El Salvador last year. The Secret Service Spokesman Edwin Donovan said the agency is investigating allegations raised in news reports about unprofessional behavior of agents that have emerged after the Colombian prostitution scandal. The disclosure came after the Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano assured senators that a separate prostitution scandal in Colombia was an isolated incident, CBS News reports. CBS affiliate KIRO-TV quoted anonymous sources in Seattle as saying that Secret Service employees received sexual favors from strippers at a club in San Salvador and took prostitutes to their hotel rooms before Obama's visit in March 2011. A KIRO-TV reporter spoke to a U.S. Government sub-contractor in El Salvador who claimed that he accompanied a group of Secret Service agents to a strip club before Obama's trip to that country. During an oversight hearing on Capitol Hill, senators struggled to reconcile the image of courageous agents assigned to protect the lives of the president and his family in the wake of the latest seedy revelations. At the same hearing, Napolitano said there is no evidence of similar behavior, based on a review of complaints during the past 2.5 years to the agency's Office of Professional Responsibility. Reports of immoral behavior by the Secret Service in El Salvador represents another stigma against an agency that has already been tarnished by the Colombia prostitution scandal. The Defense Department has briefed senators about its investigation, but Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona said that he was dissatisfied with what the Pentagon has told lawmakers.

It's raining sex scandals for US Secret Service agents