Monthly Archives: July 2011

James Murdoch misled MPs, say former NoW editor and lawyer

Testimony by James Murdoch about Britain’s phone hacking scandal came under renewed scrutiny on Friday with Prime Minister David Cameron saying Mr. Murdoch still had “questions to answer” and a lawmaker calling for the police to open a new inquiry.

The pressure on Mr. Murdoch built a day after two former executives of News International [Colin Myler and Tom Crone] — the British subsidiary of News Corporation — publicly contradicted evidence he gave on Tuesday to a parliamentary panel seeking to unravel the tangled story of phone hacking at the now defunct Murdoch tabloid, The News of the World.

“Clearly James Murdoch has got questions to answer in Parliament and I’m sure he will do that,” Mr. Cameron said during a visit to an auto plant in the British Midlands. “And clearly News International has got some big issues to deal with and a mess to clear up. That has to be done by the management of that company. In the end the management of the company must be an issue for the shareholders of that company, but the government wants to see this sorted out.”

The Guardian reports:

Colin Myler, editor of the paper until it was shut down two weeks ago, and Tom Crone, the paper’s former head of legal affairs, said they had expressly told Murdoch of an email that would have blown a hole in its defence that only one “rogue reporter” was involved in the phone-hacking scandal.

This contradicts what Murdoch told the committee when questioned on Tuesday.

The existence of the email, known as the “for Neville” email because of its link to the paper’s former chief reporter Neville Thurlbeck, is thought to have been critical in News International’s decision to pay out around £700,000 to Taylor in an out-of-court settlement after he threatened to sue the paper.

James Murdoch is standing by his version of events. A statement issued by News Corporation said: “James Murdoch stands by his testimony to the select committee.”

In their statement, Myler and Crone challenged this: “Just by way of clarification relating to Tuesday’s Culture, Media Select Committee hearing, we would like to point out that James Murdoch’s recollection of what he was told when agreeing to settle the Gordon Taylor litigation was mistaken.

“In fact, we did inform him of the ‘for Neville’ email which had been produced to us by Gordon Taylor’s lawyers.”

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal reports:

The U.S. Justice Department is preparing subpoenas as part of preliminary investigations into News Corp. relating to alleged foreign bribery and alleged hacking of voicemail of Sept. 11 victims, according to a government official.

The issuance of such subpoenas, which would broadly seek relevant information from the company, requires approval by senior Justice Department leadership, which hasn’t yet happened, the person said.

The issuance of subpoenas would represent an escalation of scrutiny on the New York-based media company. While the company has sought to isolate the legal problems in the U.K., it has been bracing for increased scrutiny from both the Justice Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission, according to people familiar with the company’s strategy.

The Justice Department has said it is looking into allegations that News Corp.’s now-defunct News of the World weekly in the U.K. paid bribes to British police. It has been unclear whether the Justice Department or the SEC have begun formal probes.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation separately has begun an inquiry into whether News Corp. employees tried to hack into voice mails of Sept. 11 victims, people familiar with the early-stage probe have said.

A person close to News Corp. said the preparation of subpoenas is “a fishing expedition with no evidence to support it.”

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Yemen on the brink of hell

The New York Times reports:

On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was wearing thin. Maqtari had been one of the first and most fearless leaders of the movement. She is a remarkable figure: a 31-year-old university administrator and fiction writer, she is also a childless divorcee who refused, until recently, to wear the abaya, the all-covering gown that is practically mandatory for women in Yemen. Tiny and frail, she has a round, lovely face, with level brows and tranquil brown eyes.

On that afternoon, Maqtari was standing in a crowd gathered around the city’s General Security building — an imposing six-story edifice flanked by guards — when she heard cracking sounds. She looked up and saw that the officers on the building’s roof were not just throwing rocks, as they had in the past. They were firing straight down into the crowd below. Within minutes, at least four people were dead and about 60 were wounded. Maqtari began running back toward “Freedom Square,” the intersection where thousands of protesters had been camped out for months demanding the resignation of Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen’s strongman president. Then the real assault began. Armored vehicles, tanks and bulldozers began converging on the protesters’ tent city from all sides. They fired tear gas and water cannons into the square and began shooting protesters at point-blank range. They doused the tents, which extended for hundreds of yards in every direction, with gasoline and lighted them on fire. None of the protesters had weapons. “People were dying all around us, and there was nothing we could do,” Maqtari told me. Some were burned alive. At around 11 p.m., Maqtari fled to her sister’s house, about 200 yards uphill from the square. There, she and other protesters watched as flames engulfed the entire square, raging for several hours. Officers stormed through the local hospital and several field clinics where protesters were being treated, firing tear gas down the corridors, shooting up the ceilings and arresting doctors and nurses. Some thrust their gun butts into patients’ wounds. Others were laughing hysterically, as if they were on drugs, Maqtari and others told me, and shouting into the darkness, “Ali is your god!” The next morning, amid the charred remains of the tents, someone had scrawled a sardonic reversal of the protesters’ chants on a wall. “The regime wants the fall of the people,” it said.

The massacre in Taiz received little attention in the West, blending in with the larger chaos and violence enveloping the Arab world. In Syria, tanks were rolling through the streets of several cities, as months of protest evolved into a bloody national insurrection. In Libya, the civil war was festering into a grim status quo, with NATO airstrikes unable to dislodge Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi from his Tripoli stronghold. Even Egypt and Tunisia seemed endangered, with fresh violence breaking out and their economies in tatters.

Yet the events in Taiz took on a tragic dimension that went beyond the numbers of dead and wounded. Taiz is Yemen’s least tribal city, home to the highest number of educated people, professionals and traders. The city was “the heart of the revolution,” in one popular refrain, and its protesters were less politicized and more rigorously nonviolent than elsewhere in Yemen. The attack on May 29, with its deliberate cruelty and excess, confirmed what many Yemenis feared: that Saleh sees the democratic uprising as a greater threat to his power than Al Qaeda.

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Syrian forces ‘surround Damascus suburb’

Al Jazeera reports:

Troops commanded by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s brother have surrounded the Damascus suburb of Harasta, residents say.

The move appears to be part of an ongoing crackdown on urban centres that have experienced protests on a daily basis.

“Hundreds of Fourth Division troops have sealed off all of Harasta’s dozen entrances,” a resident of the large suburb, who works as an engineer and managed to leave Harasta, told the Reuters news agency by telephone.

“They are wearing combat fatigues, helmets, ammunition belts and carrying assault rifles. Water, electricity and phones have been cut.”

Anthony Shadid reports from Hama:

In this city that bears the scars of one of the modern Middle East’s bloodiest episodes, the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad has begun to help Syrians imagine life after dictatorship as it forges new leaders, organizes its own defense and reckons with a grim past in an uncertain experiment that showcases the forces that could end Mr. Assad’s rule.

Dozens of barricades of trash bins, street lamps, bulldozers and sandbags, defended in various states of vigilance, block the feared return of the security forces that surprisingly withdrew last month. Protests begin past midnight, drawing raucous crowds of youths celebrating the simple fact that they can protest. At dusk, distant cries echo off cinder blocks and stone that render a tableau here of jubilation, fear and memory of a crackdown a generation ago whose toll — 10,000, 20,000, more — remains a defiant guess.

“Hama is free,” the protesters chant, “and it will remain free.”

Freedom is a word heard often these days in this city, Syria’s fourth largest, though that freedom could yet prove elusive. Hama rebelled last month, and the government withdrew the soldiers and security forces seemingly to forestall even more bloodshed, ceding space along the Orontes River that is really neither liberated nor subjugated.

In the uncertain interregnum, punctuated by worry that the security forces might return and fear of informers left behind, Hama has emerged in the four-month revolt against Mr. Assad as a turbulent model of what a city in Syria might resemble once four decades of dictatorship end. In skittish streets, there are at least nascent notions of self-determination, as residents seek to speak for themselves and defend a city that they declare theirs.

The sole poster of Mr. Assad in the city hangs from the undamaged headquarters of the ruling Baath Party. Gaggles of residents gather on the curb to debate politics, sing protest songs and retell the traumas of the crackdown in 1982, when the government stormed Hama to end an Islamist uprising. For the first time in memory, clerics and the educated elite in Hama are negotiating with the governor over how to administer the city, in a country long accustomed to a monologue delivered by the ruler to the ruled.

Meanwhile, “Nour Ali” reports from Damascus:

Brute force has been the main weapon of the Syrian regime as it has sought to crush growing protests, killing at least 1,500 people and torturing hundreds more. But Syrians have also been besieged by relentless propaganda.

In a week that has seen at least 40 die and escalating violence in Homs, the country’s third largest city, state radio and private stations owned by regime cronies have been blaring out songs exalting Bashar al-Assad as “Abu Hafez”, suggesting his son Hafez could succeed him, or anointing him president for “all eternity”.

Baseball caps, T-shirts and flags adorned with the president’s face are sold around Damascus. Billboards show him surrounded by pink hearts – in stark contrast to the sterner, more militarised pictures of his father, Hafez, the former president.

Television programmes show residents shopping and driving, portraying calm and order while regime supporters chant that they would shed blood for their leader.

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Problems with logistics, coordination and rivalries hamper Libya’s rebels

C J Chivers reports:

Ahmad Harari, a Libyan rebel fighting to overthrow Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, recounted how he was almost killed last week.

He was part of a small group of fighters assigned to defend a front-line position in Qawalish, a village in Libya’s arid western highlands. Then Colonel Qaddafi’s military attacked, rushing forward in pickup trucks.

Mr. Harari said he had only 18 cartridges for his rifle, roughly the same amount of ammunition carried by everyone in his group. Within minutes he ran out.

“Every man lost all of his bullets and tried to escape,” he said. A friend was captured, killed and mutilated, he said, but the others managed to get away.

While the Libyan rebels have carved out an enclave in the west, the dearth of ammunition in Mr. Harari’s group points to one of the continuing drains on their military strength — an absence of coordination, even on matters as basic as making sure that ample ammunition is provided to the front-line fighters.

As Libya’s uprising-turned-desert-war enters its sixth month, the rebels in the mountains have assembled into small bands of local fighters. These groups — often named for the towns the fighters come from — have demonstrated both an eagerness to fight and a willingness to work with almost anyone who can help them reach their goal of ousting the Qaddafi family from power.

But coordination between them, as well as logistical help from their higher commands and foreign supporters, has not developed in important ways. In eastern Libya, the rebel authorities talk of making a national army; here in the west, the state of official disorganization makes the prospects for such a force unlikely in the near term.

Meanwhile, The Guardian reports:

Libyan rebels claimed to have made significant advances against Muammar Gaddafi’s forces on Thursday amid signs that the regime is feeling the strain of offensives backed by Nato air power.

Rebels in the western city of Misrata said they had captured the chief of operations of government forces in Zlitan on the first day of their attack.

General Abdul Nabih Zayid was caught late on Wednesday after advancing fighters overran his command post at Souk Talat, a small village on the outskirts of Zlitan, opposition commanders said.

“We have him in custody. He is being well looked after,” said Mohamed Frefr, in charge of detainees for the rebels. “After three days talking with him, we will hand him to the military prison.”

Growing confidence was also expressed by rebel officials from Misrata, who met Nicholas Sarkozy, the French president, and reportedly told him that with help, they could be in Tripoli within days.

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Drugs and money: Obama puts myth over science

Paul Rosenberg writes:

In December 2007, officials in the Bush White House refused to open an email from the Environmental Protection Agency that concluded that “greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled”. If they didn’t open the email, then the facts didn’t exist, according to their pseudo-logic – much like a child who thinks that if he closes his eyes, he becomes invisible to whatever scary monsters might be hunting him. There’s no similar smoking gun with the Obama Administration – at least not yet – but a strikingly similar denial of scientific knowledge from within the executive branch has just been announced by the Obama Administration.

On Friday, July 8, Obama’s Drug Enforcement Administration Administrator, Michele M. Leonhart, decreed in the Federal Register that marijuana “has no currently accepted medical use in treatment in the United States”, thus keeping it in the same category as heroin, as it has been since 1970. This despite the fact that the National Cancer Institute, part of the cabinet-level Department of Health and Human Services, cites marijuana’s potential helpfulness with nausea, loss of appetite, insomnia and pain.

It’s not just the National Cancer Institute, of course. Sixteen states and the District of Columbia have laws saying exactly the opposite – that marijuana does have an accepted medical use, and that doctors are free to prescribe it. There are, in fact, thousands of such prescriptions written every day, no matter how hard Leonhart and Obama try to deny it. Are some of those prescriptions bogus? Undoubtedly. But it’s the specific claims of individuals that are questionable, not the underlying medicine.

Of course it’s true that rigorous drug trial-type tests are lacking, but that’s largely a result of the government’s refusal to admit there’s anything to investigate, as Dr. Igor Grant, director of the Center for Medicinal Cannabis Research at University of California-San Diego, explained to the LA Times. He told them that state-supported clinical trials have shown marijuana helps with neuropathic pain and muscle spasticity, but that the federal government’s position discourages further research needed to test the drug’s medical effectiveness.

“We’re trapped in kind of a vicious cycle here,” Grant told the Times. “It’s always a danger if the government acts on certain kinds of persuasions or beliefs rather than evidence.”

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The Murdoch pushback: attacking the press

Ryan Chittum writes:

There have been a number of efforts lately—obnoxious efforts—to say News Corporation’s hacking scandal is some kind of “piling on” by opponents with a “commercial or political agenda.” The implication, not least from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal editorial page and his “Fox & Friends” show, being that the level of coverage is unfair, somehow, that the story isn’t that big a deal, or that the scandal hasn’t touched Rupert Murdoch as a CEO or News Corp. as a whole—confined as it was to ”the tabloid excesses of one newspaper.”

Perhaps then it would be a good exercise to run through all the wrongdoing—including rampant, institutionalized criminal activity—that is already in the public record as having been committed in the hacking scandal.

For starters, executives, editors, and reporters at News Corp.’s UK unit have: bribed the police; illegally hacked thousands of people’s phones, including a 13-year-old then-missing murder victim’s; tampered with evidence while the victim was still missing. They interfered with a second murder investigation; misled police and Parliament, repeatedly, when questioned about these activities; knowingly employed an ax-murder suspect who had been convicted and imprisoned for planting cocaine on an innocent woman in a divorce case; paid millions of dollars to victims explicitly in exchange for their silence; paid large sums to former employees after they had been convicted of crimes committed at the behest of News Corporation employees; continued to pay for convicted former employees’ high-powered lawyers.

It has further been revealed that a senior News International executive deleted millions of emails in an “apparent attempt to obstruct Scotland Yard’s inquiry”; hid the contents of a top journalist’s desk after he was arrested; stuffed documents into trash bags and took them away as detectives came into the office to investigate; put the scandal’s lead police investigator, whose inquiry was a bad joke, on the News Corp. payroll with a plum columnist job.

Here’s some of what we know of corrupt activities undertaken by government institutions at News Corp.’s behest or which, at a minimum benefited, News Corp.

The police: stuffed thousands of pages of convicted hacker Glenn Mulcaire’s notes in plastic bags, leaving them unexamined (or at least uncataloged) for years; did so while insisting publicly, and before Parliament, that the scandal was limited to two people and, crucially, that a full investigation had been performed; hired Neil Wallis, who was News of the World’s deputy editor while the crimes were committed, to advise the police on how to handle their own PR problems stemming from the hacking scandal; Wallis ferried information back to News Corp.; the police notified just a handful of people that their phones might have been hacked despite having evidence that in fact thousands had been; concealed their payments to Wallis for a year. Meanwhile, top police officials dined repeatedly with News International executives during the investigation.

Political elites: Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron hired the News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who oversaw a newsroom in which criminal activity was commonplace, to be a top aide, despite warnings that Coulson was personally implicated in the scandal; Labour leader Ed Miliband hired a Murdoch journalist to be top flack, and he promptly told the party to tiptoe around the scandal; regulators came very close to approving a massive TV deal for News Corp. that would have furthered its stranglehold on Britain’s private media, all while the scandal was continuing to worsen.

Phew!

Now that we have all that background, enter The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page, which this week has gone into full-on Murdoch mode, defending its parent company from the ”commercial and ideological motives of our competitor-critics.” It has unleashed no fewer than seven defensive editorials and columns this week, reports Bloomberg News, and it’s only Wednesday.

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Where are the next News Corp whistle-blowers?

Does the death of Sean Hoare suggest that anyone who exposes wrongdoing inside the Murdoch empire is putting their life at risk? I don’t think so.

Hoare’s health had been compromised by alcohol and drug addiction. A few days before he died he got accidentally whacked on the head by a relative carrying a heavy pole as they took down a marquee at a children’s party. Reporters for the New York Times who dined with him in his last days described him as “ailing.”

The police force that ordered Hoare’s autopsy is the Hertfordshire force — not the Metropolitan police where officers accepted bribes from News International. The type of autopsy conducted was one ordinarily used in cases of suspicious death, even though investigators have not identified suspicious circumstances.

But now that News International has pulled the plug on its financial aid for Glenn Mulcaire and the world waits for him to break his silence, if he too suddenly dies then of course both deaths would be massively suspicious. Absent such an extraordinary turn of events, I think the reason other News Corp employees don’t speak out has more to do with fears for their wealth than their health.

In 2009, Fox News anchor Stuart Varney set the standard when it comes to the proposition that anyone on his payroll should dare challenge Emperor Murdoch.

Should we be surprised that a Fox journalist would assume such a supine position in relation to his boss? Only if we imagine News Corp attracts employees who are more interested in practicing journalism than they are in the size of their pay checks.

Consider the example of the editors of Murdoch’s Times of London. Today they assumed the posture of having greater concern about starvation in Somalia than they do about the phone hacking story and so they ran this cartoon:

Does the situation in Somalia deserve greater media attention? Of course. But if the Times actually thinks its competitors’ priorities are skewed, how come they couldn’t find space for a single paragraph on Somalia on their own front page?

If a few of Murdoch’s employees are now having sleepless nights wondering whether they should speak out and risk losing their jobs, they must also know that the decision of any whistle-blower is one of the loneliest. Anyone who jumps off the Murdoch ship is unlikely to be quickly offered a lifeline from another.

The corporate media world of which the Murdoch empire is merely one part, does not foster a culture that rewards integrity. Team players are an asset; individuals with an unshackled conscience are risky. Those whose job it is to report, know that there are times when nothing is more highly prized by their employers than their silence.

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Phone hacking: Met police to investigate mobile tracking claims

The Guardian reports:

Scotland Yard has been asked to inspect thousands of files that could reveal whether its officers unlawfully procured mobile phone-tracking data for News of the World reporters.

There were half a million requests by public authorities for communications data in the UK last year – of which almost 144,000 were demands for “traffic” data, which includes location.

A Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) member has asked the force to investigate allegations that News of the World reporters were able to purchase this data from police for £300 per request.

The claims were made by Sean Hoare, the News of the World whistleblower, days before he was found dead at his home on Monday. His disclosure about the purchase of illicit location data was first made to the New York Times, which said the practice was confirmed by a second source at the tabloid. Police have said Hoare’s death was not suspicious.

Mobile phone location data, which is highly regulated, would give tabloid reporters access to a method of almost total surveillance, arguably even more intrusive than hacking into phone messages.

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News Corp and the hacked Climategate emails: time for an independent investigation

Joe Romm writes:

There have been countless independent investigations into the scientists whose e-mails were hacked in November 2009. And the scientists have been (quietly) vindicated every time (see “The first rule of vindicating climate science is you do not talk about vindicating climate science“).

But we still don’t know who hacked the emails! And now we know that one of the key investigative bodies tasked with tracking down the hackers — Scotland Yard – were compromised at the time.

How were they compromised? Neil Wallis — the former News of the World executive editor — became a “£1,000 a day” consultant to Scotland Yard in October 2009. Last week he became the ninth person arrested in the metastasizing News Corp scandal “on suspicion of conspiring to intercept communications, contrary to section 1(1) Criminal Law Act 1977.”

Certainly Wallis had plenty of motive to join Scotland Yard just to keep an eye on the investigation into the phone-hacking scandal. Indeed, the NY Times reports Wallis “was reporting back to News International while he was working for the police on the hacking case.” But this also suggests how corrupt Wallis was — and how corrupted Scotland Yard was.

In the light of the News Corp phone-hacking scandal, it is clear that Murdoch’s outfit had means, motive, and opportunity for the Climategate email hacking. News Corp certainly has a history of defaming climate scientists and a penchant for hacking.

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LulzSec claims to have News International emails

The Guardian reports:

One of the members of the LulzSec hacking group has claimed on Twitter that the group has got 4GB of emails taken from the Sun and the “royal family” which may be released as soon as lunchtime on Thursday.

The claim follows a hacking attack against News International on Tuesday night during which members of LulzSec apparently broke into computer systems there and redirected readers of the Sun’s website to a faked page claiming News Corp chief executive Rupert Murdoch had been found dead.

Significantly, the group also seems to have broken into the email database at News International.

Some accounts belonging to Anonymous also began tweeting email addresses and passwords for staff at News International, including what seemed to be an email account and password for Rebekah Brooks under her previous married name of Wade while at the Sun.

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Murdoch: This scandal has exposed the scale of elite corruption

Seumas Milne writes:

The Tory operation to bury the phone-hacking scandal in spin and official inquiries is now in full flow. On his way back from Africa, David Cameron declared it was essential to get the whole business into perspective, echoing Rupert Murdoch’s insistence that his competitors had got up “this hysteria”. Today, the prime minister chided Ed Miliband for “chasing conspiracy theories” and claimed it was really Gordon Brown who had been in the pocket of the global media billionaire.

Meanwhile, News International pundits and others with their own reasons to stem the flood of revelations have been loudly insisting that the political clout of Murdoch’s corporate colossus has been exaggerated. The hyper-regulated BBC is the real media monopoly, they say, and in any case the current fixation with phone hacking has meant no one is discussing bankers’ bonuses and the threat of another financial meltdown. This is a “frenzy that has grown out of control”, the Daily Mail complained.

But the real frenzy isn’t the exposure of the scandal – it’s the scale of corruption, collusion and cover-up between News International, politicians and police that the scandal has revealed. As the cast of hacking victims, blaggers and blackmailers has lengthened, and the details of the incestuous payments and job-swapping between News International, government and Scotland Yard become more complex, it’s easy to lose sight of the bigger picture that is now emerging.

If it were not for the uncovering of this cesspit, the Cameron government would be preparing to nod through the outright takeover of BSkyB by News International, taking its dominance of Britain’s media and political world into Silvio Berlusconi territory. But what has been exposed now goes well beyond the hacking of murder victims and dead soldiers’ families – or even the media itself. The scandal has lifted the lid on how power is really exercised in 21st-century Britain – in which the unreformed City and its bankers play a central part.

Murdoch’s overweening political influence has long been recognised, from well before Tony Blair flew to Australia in 1995 to pay public homage at his corporate court. What has been less well understood is how close-up and personal the pressure exerted by his organisation has been throughout public life. The fear that those who crossed him would be given the full tabloid treatment over their personal misdemeanours, real or imagined, has proved to be a powerful Mafia-like racket.

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News Corp’s three wise monkeys knew nothing

Roy Greenslade, who was a senior executive at two News International titles, The Sun and the Sunday Times, says that Rupert Murdoch’s testimony in Britain’s House of Commons yesterday, where he essentially plead ignorance about wrongdoing inside News of the World, clashes with Greenslade’s own experience of the way Murdoch oversees the operations of his companies.

At both newspapers, I was close enough to the editors – sometimes standing in as editor myself – to witness how Rupert Murdoch operated. Despite living in the United States, he ensured that he knew everything that happened at his British papers.

In phone calls marked by a mixture of abrupt questions and periods of intimidating silence, he elicited information from his editors and managers about intimate details of both editorial and commercial affairs.

It was impossible to conceive that anyone would lie to Murdoch either by commission or omission. He was street smart. He saw through bluster and he was not above testing the veracity of what he was told by one executive by running it past another.

His cross-referencing of his internal company sources was journalistic. He wanted to hear the minutiae; who had said what to whom? He relished the gossip.

In those days he was already running a giant company, with a Hollywood film studio, a burgeoning US TV network and media outlets across the world. It is fair to say that, by the turn of the millennium, it had grown bigger still, most noticeably due to News Corp’s global pay-TV interests.

It is also undeniable, as his faltering performance yesterday illustrated, that as Murdoch’s company expanded so he grew older. So he may well have been altogether less hands-on in the past decade than he was during the time I worked for him.

Then again, it beggars belief that he didn’t smell a rat in 2006 when the News of the World‘s royal editor Clive Goodman was arrested along with a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, who was being paid more than £100,000 a year under a contract with the paper.

That was the moment I would have expected him to ask searching questions of the editor and the chief executive of his News International division in Wapping. Did he really accept the public stance about voicemail interception being confined to a single rogue reporter?

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Israel lobby’s evangelical Christian foot soldiers gather in Washington

Haaretz reports:

Over 5000 Christians, mainly Evangelicals, gathered this week at the Convention Center in Washington for the annual conference of the organization CUFI, Christians United For Israel.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the Christian Zionist conference via satellite, telling them, “When you support Israel, you don’t have to choose between your interests and your values; you get both.”

The prime minister encouraged the conference attendees to not only think of Israel as an ally of the Unites States, but as indistinguishable from it. “Our enemies think that we are you, and that you are us,” added Netanyahu. “And you know something? They are absolutely right.”

Ambassador to the U.S. Michael Oren compared the participants’ support of Israel to British military officer Orde Wingate’s training of Jewish paramilitary units before the establishment of the State of Israel. “We thank you for carrying out this vision,” Oren told the CUFI conference participants.

News commentator Glenn Beck worked the audience into a frenzy, decrying the historical persecution of Jews, insisting that Israel cannot cede control over territories it controls, and calling upon the conference attendees to declare that they, too, are Jewish.

“Jews have been chased out of every corner of this planet,” said Beck. “Enough is enough.” Beck said that new states can be established, but not at the expense of other states, and that Israel is historically the ‘Land of the Jews’, implying that Israel should not relinquish control over the West Bank in order to create a State of Palestine.

Beck repeated a refrain that Netanyahu had introduced earlier, appealing to audience members to self-identify as Israelis and Jews themselves. He exhorted, “When we see Israelis not as part of us, but as us, we can move to the next level as human beings,” adding, “Let us declare ‘I am a Jew,’ they cannot kill all of us”.

The conference attendees learned that Pastor John Hagee, the founder of CUFI, would be joining Beck for his planned rally in Jerusalem in August.

Hagee told the audience, many of whom were waving both Israeli and American flags, “We gathered here with one message: Israel today, Israel tomorrow, and Israel forever.” He added, “President Obama is no friend of Israel”.

“The truth is not what you think that it is – it’s what the Bible says”, Hagee proclaimed. “There are two ways to live your life – the Torah way and the wrong way.”

“If the US Administration forces Israel to divide Jerusalem – God will turn his back to the United States of America. The G-d of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob is watching America,” Hagee continued. “Mister President, go tell Russia and the Chinese what to do.”

“Iran will soon become nuclear. Our President is waiting for Iran to extend a friendly hand, and it’s not going to happen,” Hagee added. “Mister Ahmadinejad, don’t threaten Israel. What you do to the Jewish people, history proves, will be done to you.”

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Amid Murdoch scandal, Israel backers worry about muting of pro-Israel media voice

Ron Kampeas reports:

Pro-Israel leaders in the United States, Britain and Australia are warily watching the unfolding of the phone-hacking scandal that is threatening to engulf the media empire of Rupert Murdoch, founder of News Corp.

Murdoch’s sudden massive reversal of fortune — with 10 top former staffers and executives under arrest in Britain for hacking into the phones of public figures and a murdered schoolgirl, and paying off the police and journalists — has supporters of Israel worried that a diminished Murdoch presence may mute the strongly pro-Israel voice of many of the publications he owns.

“His publications and media have proven to be fairer on the issue of Israel than the rest of the media,” said Malcolm Hoenlein, the executive vice-chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations. “I hope that won’t be impacted.”

Murdoch’s huge stable encompasses broadsheets such as The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Australian, as well as tabloids, most notably The Sun in Britain and the New York Post. It also includes the influential Fox News Channel in the United States and a 39 percent stake in British Sky Broadcasting, or BSkyB, a satellite broadcaster. Murdoch founded the neoconservative flagship The Weekly Standard in 1995, and sold it last year.

Jewish leaders said that Murdoch’s view of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians and with its Arab neighbors seemed both knowledgeable and sensitive to the Jewish state’s self-perception as beleaguered and isolated.

“My own perspective is simple: We live in a world where there is an ongoing war against the Jews,” Murdoch said last October at an Anti-Defamation League dinner in his honor. “When Americans think of anti-Semitism, we tend to think of the vulgar caricatures and attacks of the first part of the 20th century. Now it seems that the most virulent strains come from the left. Often this new anti-Semitism dresses itself up as legitimate disagreement with Israel.”

Murdoch, 80, has visited Israel multiple times and met with many of its leaders. In 2009 he was honored by the American Jewish Committee.

“In the West, we are used to thinking that Israel cannot survive without the help of Europe and the United States,” he said at the AJC event. “Tonight I say to you, maybe we should start wondering whether we in Europe and the United States can survive if we allow the terrorists to succeed in Israel. “

Leaders of a number of pro-Israel groups declined to comment for this story because of Murdoch’s current difficulties.

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Boycott the state of Israel, not just the settlements

Yousef Munayyer writes:

Recent legislation passed in the Israeli Knesset, which many people call the “Anti-BDS” bill, has raised a number of questions about a rising tide of “fascism” in Israel. This language is not only used by Palestinian critics, who have long borne the brunt of Israel’s undemocratic policies. Now, many Israeli and Jewish-American writers can no longer ignore the trend.

If something good has come out of the passage of this legislation, it is two things: First, a growing number of people are recognizing that the Zionist aim – the imposition of an ethnocentric majority by force in a territory where the majority of the native inhabitants are disenfranchised – is fundamentally and inherently undemocratic. Second, the passage of this bill has brought discussion of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement to the foreground.

While increased discussion about BDS will only strengthen the movement, a troubling trend has become apparent in some of the commentaries on BDS written in response to the passage of the “Anti-BDS” bill. This is the assertion that boycotting colonies or settlement goods is acceptable, while boycotting the Israeli state or Israeli products outside of the occupied territories is somehow unacceptable.

For many, this argument may be made with consideration for political strategy and not based on moral underpinnings or clarity. There is undoubtedly a hesitation among some who have embraced BDS as a strategy to extend BDS activities beyond products produced in the colonies and settlements.

This attitude is particularly prevalent among Zionists who recognize the danger the occupation poses for Israel, but do not want to be seen as targeting Israel itself. The BDS tent is growing nonetheless, regardless of what part of the occupation system is targeted. This is clearly threatening to Israel. The greatest evidence of the threat this poses is that the state felt threatened enough by the BDS movement to attempt to stop it through legislative repression.

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The method in Netanyahu’s madness

Jonathan Cook writes:

It was an Arab legislator who made the most telling comment to the Israeli parliament last week as it passed the boycott law, which outlaws calls to boycott Israel or its settlements in the occupied territories. Ahmed Tibi asked: “What is a peace activist or Palestinian allowed to do to oppose the occupation? Is there anything you agree to?”

The boycott law is the latest in a series of ever-more draconian laws being introduced by the far-right. The legislation’s goal is to intimidate those Israeli citizens, Jews and Palestinians, who have yet to bow down before the majority-rule mob.

Look out in the coming days and weeks for a bill to block the work of Israeli human rights organisations trying to protect Palestinians in the occupied territories from abuses by the Israeli army and settlers; and a draft law investing a parliamentary committee, headed by the far-right, with the power to veto appointments to the supreme court. The court is the only, and already enfeebled, bulwark against the right’s absolute ascendancy.

The boycott law, backed by Benjamin Netanyahu’s government, marks a watershed in this legislative assault in two respects.

First, it knocks out the keystone of any democratic system: the right to free speech. The new law makes it illegal for Israelis and Palestinians to advocate a non-violent political programme — boycott — to counter the ever-growing power of the half a million Jewish settlers living on stolen Palestinian land.

As the Israeli commentator Gideon Levy observed, the floodgates are now open: “Tomorrow it will be forbidden to call for an end to the occupation [or for] brotherhood between Jews and Arabs.”

Equally of concern is that the law creates a new type of civil, rather than criminal, offence. The state will not be initiating prosecutions. Instead, the job of enforcing the boycott law is being outsourced to the settlers and their lawyers. Anyone backing a boycott can be sued for compensation by the settlers themselves, who — again uniquely — need not prove they suffered actual harm.

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News International ‘deliberately’ blocked criminal investigation

The Guardian reports:

Rupert Murdoch’s News International has been found by a parliamentary committee to have “deliberately” tried to block a Scotland Yard criminal investigation into phone hacking at the News of the World, the Guardian has learned.

The report by MPs from the all-party home affairs committee will be released on Wednesday and its publication has been moved forward in time for today’s statement by prime minister David Cameron on the scandal.

The report’s central finding comes a day after Rupert and James Murdoch testified before the culture, media and sport committee.

The home affairs committee report marks an official damning judgment on News International’s actions.

It finds the company deliberately tried to “thwart” the 2005-6 Metropolitan police investigation into phone hacking carried out by the News of the World.

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