Rupert Murdoch … legal department ‘paid 1 million pounds to phone hacking victims’. (File photo) (Reuters: Pascal Lauener)

Audio: Murdoch newspapers accused of massive phone hacking cover-up (PM) Britain’s Guardian newspaper says it has uncovered a trail of so-called phone hacks done by or on behalf of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid The News of the World, involving the phones of up to 3,000 people.

Former deputy prime minister John Prescott was one of those whose phones were reportedly hacked, and he is furious.

“I find it staggering that there could be a list known to the police of people who’s had their phone tapped – I’m named as one them,” he said.

“For such a criminal act not to be reported to me and not for action to be taken against the people who’ve done it is… reflects very badly on the police, and I want to know their answer.”

The Guardian says Mr Murdoch’s papers have paid out more than 1 million pounds ($2 million), to phone hacking victims.

The reporter who broke the story in The Guardian is Nick Davies. He spoke with PM’s Mark Colvin.

Nick Davies: “What we’ve uncovered is systematic activity by Rupert Murdoch’s journalists on the Sunday newspaper here, The News of the World, using illegal techniques of one kind or another to uncover information,” he said.

“One bunch of illegal techniques is to do with using private investigators to do what’s called blagging; that’s conning their way into confidential databases – things like your bank statements, credit card statements, itemised telephone bills, tax records, all that kind of stuff.

“That’s all illegal and they’ve been doing it. The second kind of illegal activity is using private investigators to do what’s called phone hacking, which just means that they can get into other people’s mobile telephone networks and hear messages which have been left on the target’s mobile phone.

“They’re not getting the live conversation; they’re getting the messages which are left. This started to emerge a couple of years ago when one particular journalist on this Murdoch paper, The News of the World, was busted and sent to prison when he was discovered using a private investigator to hack into the mobile phone of staff at Buckingham Palace who were working with Prince William.

“At that time the Murdoch executives said ‘ well, he was a really bad guy, that reporter, and he was doing that secretly, we had no idea it was going on’. ‘It was a bad apple we never knew was there’, all that kind of stuff.

“So what then happened was that a completely different person – a guy called Gordon Taylor who’s the head of the footballers union in this country, the Professional Footballers Association – he suspected that his phone had been hacked by journalists looking for sports stories from The News of the World.

“So, he sued them and The News of the World said ‘well, that’s all rubbish, we never touched your phone’. So, Gordon Taylor’s lawyers succeeded in getting what’s called discovery – that’s to say they got a court order which compelled the police to handover any part of their investigation into the first reporter, Clive Goodman, which mentioned this man Gordon Taylor.

“And lo and behold, there was all this paperwork which showed that they had indeed been hacking into his mobile phone. And it wasn’t just the private investigator doing this on his own; there was clear evidence of News of the World journalists, including a middle ranking executive handling the raw material that was coming through from these intercepts.

Mark Colvin: How many phones were hacked?

Nick Davies: “So then they seized… the police seized masses of paperwork from this investigator and some of that has surfaced, but a lot of it hasn’t. my understanding is that that paperwork shows us that The News of the World were hacking the phones of 2,000 or 3,000 public figures of one kind or another

“And some of these are very soft, Sunday paper targets, like actors and reality television program stars, but some of it… touched on senior politicians.

“So our former deputy prime minister John Prescott is one of those who is certainly listed as a target for this private investigator who was engaging in all the mobile phone hacking – while he was deputy prime minister, and I mean he’s talking to the intelligence services, he’s engaged in all kinds of sensitive political stuff.”

Mark Colvin: Why, if the police knew this, did they not take it further?

Nick Davies: “It’s a question that needs to be answered. I mean in two different senses. One is the police didn’t go and warn all the people who had been targeted that they had been targeted, so that they could think ‘well, christ, what else has come out’.

“And secondly, they didn’t pursue charges against the Murdoch journalists. I don’t know the answers to these questions, but it raises the worrying possibility – and it’s only a possibility at this stage – that the police at New Scotland Yard didn’t want to get into a fight with powerful Rupert Murdoch.

“He’s politically very powerful and that sounds [like] a bit of dark conspiracy theory but you remember I was saying that at an earlier stage they raised another private investigator and got information about blagging into confidential records like bank statements and the rest.

“The private investigator who was raided, whose paperwork disclosed all that, was raided by an organisation here called the Information Commission, and it’s their job to protect confidential databases.

“Now I know for sure that in that case they had evidence of Murdoch journalists and other journalists commissioning illegal acts. And on that occasion they decided that the newspaper groups were too powerful and too rich.

“Their fear was that if they tried to take them to court they newspaper groups would hire very expensive lawyers and have masses and masses of preliminary hearings to argue legal points and it would simply bust the budget of the Information Commission’s legal department.

“So they said they’re just too big a target; we’re not to touch them. So, with that stuff they busted the private investigators who were involved and never touched the newspaper groups. So, you begin to get this alarming picture of the newspaper groups drifting beyond the reach of the law because they’re just too powerful.”

Mark Colvin: This has a political dimension too because the editor of The News of the World at the time of some of this is now the spokesman for the man who quite possibly will be the next Prime Minister of Great Britain, David Cameron. Could he not have known about this?

Nick Davies: “Well we don’t know the answer to that question either. I’ve asked him over the last few days by email and he’s not given me an answer. But his position now is quite difficult because if you look at it historically, when that first reporter, Clive Goodman – the royal reporter who was sent to prison – Andy Coulson, then his editor, resigned.

“He said ‘I didn’t know that this was going on, but I take responsibility’. Now, if he resigned over the isolated bad behaviour of one reporter, should he now resign over the systematic bad behaviour, illegal behaviour, of numerous reporters against numerous targets?

“And the thing gets worse because if there’s any suggestion that he did know about this and did sanction it, then it really is very difficult to imagine a man who has that history going right into the centre of power in this country.

“If David Cameron is elected prime minister next year, Andy Coulson would be at his right-hand… he’d be involved in all kinds of the most sensitive work that a Government can be involved in.

“Can you have a man there if it turns out that he’s been commissioning criminal behaviour in his previous job?

Mark Colvin: Mr Murdoch apparently has told Bloomberg that if it had happened, if these payments had happened, he would know about it. Do you believe that?

Nick Davies: “Well then there’s going to be a hell of a row inside Rupert Murdoch’s company because there’s no question his legal department paid out more than 1 million pounds to Gordon Taylor, who I’ve mentioned, and to two other people from the world of football who sued.

“So Murdoch’s money went to those people’s pockets in damages and in costs. If that was done without Rupert’s knowledge then he’s going to be pretty furious and want his million quid back. But it definitely happened.”

Tags: information-and-communication, journalism, law-crime-and-justice, united-kingdom, england

B’Tselem, The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights

Torture: The Facts
Since the beginning of the Occupation in 1967, over 650,000 Palestinians have been arrested by Israel. Almost 95% of them have been subjected to some form of torture or cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.
Since 1967, over 105 documented torture techniques have been used by Israel. At least 66 Palestinians have been tortured to death.
To date, no Israeli official has ever been charged and sentenced for torture-related crimes.
Israel justifies torture by designating the Palestinian Territories as being under?‘exceptional circumstances’. But this is a direct violation of the 1984 Convention Against Torture, ratified by Israel in 1991. Article 2(2) states that ‘no exceptional circumstances whatsoever… may be invoked as a justification of torture’.
The right of every person not to be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment is one of the few human rights that are considered absolute. It is forbidden to balance this right against other rights and values, or suspend or restrict this right, under any circumstances.

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“The ‘vast majority’ of these cases, she testified, were linked to KBR, which accounts for a staggering 43 percent of the dollars the Pentagon has spent in Iraq.”

In one instance, KBR was charging an average $38,000 apiece for “prefabricated living units” on bases in Iraq; another contractor offered to provide them for $18,000. But of a questionable $553 million in payments to KBR that the DCCA blocked or suspended, the Pentagon has gone ahead and agreed to pay $439 million, accepting KBR’s explanations.

KBR, Halliburton and the private security firm Blackwater have come to symbolize the excesses of outsourcing warfare. So you’d think that with a new sheriff like Barack Obama in town, such practices would be on the “Things Not to Do” list. Not so.

According to new Pentagon statistics, in the second quarter of this year, there has been a 23 percent increase in the number of private security contractors working for the Pentagon in Iraq and a 29 percent hike in Afghanistan. In fact, outside contractors now make up approximately half of our forces fighting in the two countries.

“This means,” according to Jeremy Scahill, author of the book, Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, “there are a whopping 242,647 contractors working on these two US wars.”

Scahill, who runs an excellent new website called “Rebel Reports,” spoke with my colleague Bill Moyers on the current edition of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS.

“What we have seen happen, as a result of this incredible reliance on private military contractors, is that the United States has created a new system for waging war,” he said.

By hiring foreign nationals as mercenaries, “You turn the entire world into your recruiting ground. You intricately link corporate profits to an escalation of warfare and make it profitable for companies to participate in your wars.

“In the process of doing that you undermine US democratic policies. And you also violate the sovereignty of other nations, because you’re making their citizens combatants in a war to which their country is not a party.

“I feel that the end game of all of this could well be the disintegration of the nation-state apparatus in the world. And it could be replaced by a scenario where you have corporations with their own private armies. To me, that would be a devastating development. But it’s happening on a micro level. And I fear it will start to happen on a much bigger scale.”

Jeremy Scahill’s comments come just as Lt. General Stanley McChrystal, the man slated to be the new commander of our troops in Afghanistan says the cost of our strategy there is going to cost America and its NATO allies billions of additional dollars for years to come.

In fact, according to budget documents released by the Pentagon last month, as of next year, the cost of the war in Afghanistan – more and more known as “Obama’s War” – will exceed the cost of the war in Iraq.

The President asserted in his Cairo speech on Thursday that he has no desire to keep troops or establish permanent military bases in Afghanistan.

But according to Jeremy Scahill, “I think what we’re seeing, under President Barack Obama, is sort of old wine in a new bottle. Obama is sending one message to the world,” he told Moyers, “but the reality on the ground, particularly when it comes to private military contractors, is that the status quo remains from the Bush era.”

Maybe that’s one more reason Dick Cheney, private contractor emeritus, won’t go away.

Michael Winship is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Bill Moyers Journal, which airs Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at the Moyers Blog at http://www.pbs.org/moyers.

The sudden reappearance of former Vice President Dick Cheney over the last few months – seeming to emerge from his famous undisclosed location more frequently now than he ever did when he was in office – does not mean six more weeks of winter.

But it does bring to mind that classic country and western song, “How Can I Miss You When You Won’t Go Away?” Or, maybe, “If You Won’t Leave Me, I’ll Find Someone Who Will.”

In his self-appointed role as voice of the opposition, Mr. Cheney has been playing Nostradamus, gloomily predicting doom if the Obama White House continues to set aside Bush administration policy, setting the stage for recrimination and finger-pointing should there be another terrorist attack on America.

Cheney’s grouchy legacy is the gift that keeps on giving. Just this week, The Washington Post reported for the first time that while vice president, Cheney oversaw “at least” four of those briefings given to senior members of Congress about enhanced interrogation techniques; “part of a secretive and forceful defense he mounted throughout 2005 in an effort to maintain support for the harsh techniques used on detainees…