So, Like Nobody Ever Charges for it in DC?

Entertaining himself with the Caper in Cartagena, my friend Michael poses an unsettling choice: (a) do they think we are that dumb?  or (b) are they really that dumb?

Some of the agents, caught out, said that they knew the women were prostitutes, others are sticking to their story that they thought they were just women they had met in a bar.

What intrigues me is the hotel system. It appears to be a respectable hotel, patronized by diplomats and other government employees. The rule is that a guest may have a visitor, but the visitor has to leave her name and ID at the front desk, and she is expected to leave before 7 a.m. I understand perfectly well that ladies of the evening occasionally visit hotel rooms in the US, but I don't imagine that hotels up here are so adept at bureaucratizing the practice.

The situation came to light when one lady overstayed her 7 a.m. departure time, and the desk staff went to the hotel room. It then developed that she was ready to leave, but that the man she had been entertaining did not care to pay her. The man in question, it seems, thought she was a charming Colombian lady, no doubt intrigued at meeting an important Norteamericano government official, and they simply moved from the bar to the hotel room to carry on their encounter in more intimate circumstances. He was shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that she expected payment for what he thought was a mutually enjoyable evening.

And I'm thinking -- We hire intellectual giants like this guy to protect our president?

 Idle afterthought:  how many sex scandals erupt in a fight over the bill?