By David, with a lot of quotations from Gawker.

We’ll let you know which bits we added at the end.

You’ve probably never heard of Marty Martin. He spent most of his life as an anonymous CIA operative. But he very recently came out of the closet as the man George Bush put in charge of finding Osama bin Laden in the aftermath of 9/11, and guess what? It turns out the man Bush put in charge of finding bin Laden is an extremely shady and allegedly corrupt war profiteer. Who would have thought?

Martin, of course, never succeeded in catching bin Laden. He ran the CIA’s bin Laden unit from 2002 to 2004, a fact that we now know only because he emerged to grab some credit for bin Laden’s death and celebrate the agency’s discontinued torture program: “We got beat up for it, but those efforts led to this great day,” he told the Associated Press three weeks ago. Prior to that, he was just a nondescript former agency official who went into the security consulting business after retiring. The closest hint to just how key an official he was came from references to a “Marty M.”—described as a sort of Jack Bauer of the bayou—in former CIA director George Tenet’s memoir.

Now that we know who Martin really is, we can get a sense of what kind of guy George Bush turned to for arguably the most crucial job in the war on terror.

1. The Kind of Guy Who Bilks Taxpayers for His Own Enrichment

In 2007, after leaving the CIA, Martin joined International Oil Trading Company, a Florida company that delivered fuel to U.S. forces in the Middle East. In 2008, congressional investigators accused it of ripping off the Pentagon to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars. This year, the Pentagon’s own audit found that the company overcharged the government by as much as $204 million on a series of massive Iraq war fuel contracts.

2. The Kind of Guy Who Bribes Foreign Officials

According to a Florida lawsuit against International Oil’s owner Harry Sargeant III, Martin paid a $9 million bribe to the head of the Jordanian intelligence service back in 2007 to secure his company’s exclusive rights to ship fuel across Jordan to U.S bases in Iraq. (That allegation comes from the Jordanian king’s brother-in-law, Mohammad al-Saleh, who is suing Sargeant for purportedly screwing him out of a $100 million stake in the company.)

3. The Kind of Guy Who Helps Launder Illegal Political Contributions

In 2008, the Washington Post reported that Sargeant, a billionaire, raised funds for John McCain’s presidential campaign with help from an unnamed “former head of the bin Laden unit” who worked for him. The men reportedly skirted campaign finance laws by funnelling the money through Arab-American “straw donors.” McCain quickly returned $50,000 of Sargeant’s lucre. The Post never named the ex-chief of the CIA bin Laden unit involved in the fundraising, but unless two former heads of the bin Laden unit were working for Sargeant at the time, that man was Marty Martin.

4. The Kind of Guy Who Gets Totally Psyched When People Die In a War He Profits From

In a court filing last week, attorneys for al-Saleh quoted from an e-mail that Martin wrote to Sargeant in 2008 in which he appeared to gloat over the escalation of violence in Iraq:

“Fyi, word of a ‘re-surge’ is floating around amidst shit hitting the fan in Iraq today. ☺”

The “shit hitting the fan” was the Battle of Basra, the Iraqi Army’s attempt in March 2008 to finally roll up militias loyal to Moqtada al Sadr. It was widely seen as a debacle and victory for al-Sadr, and many feared the conflict threatened to reignite the civil war. That month, 40 Americans died in Iraq. ☺!

5. The Kind of Guy Who Has a Daughter Who Swam In My Last Swim Club and Whose Wife Was the Club Secretary

Believe it or not that’s right. I did wonder why he spoke fluent Arabic on the phone while other parents watched their Bronze Squad offspring attempt the 25 metres butterfly. What did he do to afford a $2.6 million house and an international business jet? At a swim meet in Jupiter he brought me up to date on several ways of killing a human being without needing a weapon. That too seemed a bit different from other swim team parents. His ex-British diplomat wife, Carla, was very picky about where the swim team’s money was spent. So picky, she once questioned whether I could have used French side roads instead of paying motorway tolls when I took our club’s best swimmers to Mare Nostrum. For the sake of a few Euros, she made a hell of a fuss. Aware of the concern about the growing Euro toll booth bill, paid to get swimmers from Canet, France, to the tour’s last stop in Monaco, the swimmers paid several of the toll booths themselves. Still, when they got home, Carla didn’t care. The expenditure from the club was still unacceptable.

It seems she may have a several million times bigger financial problem that is about to see her husband return to the care of the US Government. Karma – it’s a wonderful concept.

Anyway, that’s Marty Martin, the guy George Bush put in charge of the bin Laden hunt. Glad it worked out for him.

Harry Sargeant’s lawyers couldn’t be reached for comment on this story. The CIA declined to comment. And Marty Martin’s bin Laden-hunting predecessor, Michael Scheuer –- who served for two years as a special adviser to Martin’s unit –- claims to have never heard of Marty Martin (which we can only presume is a CIA first-rule-of-Fight-Club omerta thing). Reached on his phone, Martin said: “No no, man. I don’t want to talk to you, man,” and hung up before we had a chance to ask a question.

Swimwatch thank the American political blog GAWKER for this story – all the bits that is, except the paragraph about Marty and his wife being parents of a swimmer on our Florida swim team. Again, if you want to read the original, you can find it here http://gawker.com/5803556/ .

Somewhat associated with this story – our apartment in Florida was in a complex called the Delray Racquet Club. One of the more infamous residents of an apartment in the floor just above our unit was Mohammed Atta. On September 11 2001 at 8.46am he flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre.

Just… wow.

By Jane

I pose a question to you, dear Internet. How stupid would you have to be to write a hand-written anonymous letter to a party to whom you’d already sent hand-written mail?

I’m going with “fairly dense”. Here are two images of a letter received today by one of our swim team’s sponsors, Oyer, Macoviak and Associates, with whom East Coast Swimming has a referral programme. The letter is a print-out of Swimwatch’s last entry. The entire entry was printed out and included in the envelope; here, I’ve replicated only the pages which were written on. Note, the “sender’s address” is that of a public swimming pool and is, of course, fake. The pool had nothing to do with the note.

We immediately had our suspicions as to who was responsible for the note, and luckily, we had an older correspondence from the person with which we could cross-check the penmanship. When placing certain letters next to each other, it became even more apparent that our guess was correct. Forgive the photographed images of the older letter: someone else scanned today’s letter, and our scanner is broken.

I’m not a handwriting analysis expert, but I’m also not legally blind.

First, let’s look at “A”.

There are three tell-tale signs here. The straight line, extending slightly above the curve of the letter to the left is one; however, far more telling are the small flick backwards at the end of the stroke downwards, and the extended cross-stroke.

Let’s now look at an instance of a double “e”.

Again, a distinctive flick to the left, along with an identical overall shape, most certainly suggest that these were written by the same person.

On to the capital “D”.

Because I don’t doubt the eyesight of any of you, it’s unlikely I need to point out the similarities between these characters. However, it’s worth mentioning the defining point about each D: the bottom-heavy nature of the characters appears somewhat like the letter was filled with something–bullshit comes to mind–which was then left to settle.

There were two varieties of “r” in both letters. The second looks quite a lot like a “v”:

It appears even more convincing that the writer is the same person when two different ways of writing the “r” are included in both letter.

Finally, the writer’s rendition of “Seacrest” is remarkably similar in both instances.

Notice the follow-through from the “e” to the “a” in both words, as well as the similar “r”s. Finally, the fact that the stroke through the final “t” extends far further to the right seems like the perfect seal on the fact that today’s weird attempt to interfere with a local swim team’s sponsor and an earlier letter, written to the same team, were penned by the same person. Only the “t” was not the last shred of evidence: both letters were postmarked West Palm Beach, which is not the town in which the team is based.

I wonder if you also licked the envelope when you sealed it, and the stamp when you attached it? Anonymous trolling: you’re doing it wrong.

It’s obviously tempting to “out” the writer. If we were to print the full image of the older letter, the person’s identity would certainly be clear. But is it really worth it? The second rule of the Internet is not to feed the trolls, after all, and I think this applies, even though the correspondence was largely offline. Since it’s apparent that the person responsible reads this website with some regularity, I’m sure she’ll see this. And she’ll know that she failed.