Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Magda Hassan]

The central question is whether that failure was in any way connected to the Yard's links with Murdoch's UK company, then known as News International; or to any personal links between Yard officers and Murdoch employees. Fragments of new evidence from the trial and from Guardian inquiries raise more questions. They fall into two timeframes.

At the Old Bailey trial, Goodman told the jury that within 48 hours of his arrest, he saw the start of a campaign to persuade him to say he was a "lone wolf" who had hacked the royal phones without the knowledge of anybody else at the paper and that nobody else from the paper was involved in any other hacking. This "lone wolf" theory was a lie, as the trial exposed in painful detail. It would also have been apointless lie in the event of any risk that Scotland Yard would arrest other journalists. No other journalists were arrested by Caryatid.
During the trial, Goodman claimed that, following his arrest, Andy Coulson on several occasions suggested that he was directly or indirectly in contact with a source who knew what the police were doing and who was suggesting that they did not want to "go any deeper than me and nobody wanted it to end up in a jail sentence." Coulson denied saying this. Even if he did, it is possible that he was misleading Goodman in an attempt to persuade him to plead guilty. The question is whether there really was a source who enabled Coulson to know what the police were planning.

So many lone wolves. Just like the lone nuts of the world. We are all individuals. But everyone else is working together.