Phone hacking scandal deepens

[Paul Rigby]

Where are the cops?

More to the point, where was MI5 and GCHQ when all this was going on? Thousands of prominent figures targeted and not a trace of this feverish NoW activity picked up by either of the aforementioned?

Now that really isn't credible.

[Jan Klimkowski]

The real answer to the question Where are the cops? can be found in my post #10.

The cops, at least some of them, are working for Murdoch.

[Jan Klimkowski]

"How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with the private investigators?" former features executive McMullan asked.

Indeed, as a national and international journalist I regard it is absolutely inconceivable that NOTW editor Coulson did not know the type of evidence being used to support investigations which risked potentially multi-million pound libel suits if they were not evidentially robust.

Phone hacking was rife at News of the World, claims new witness

Ex-NoW journalist says Andy Coulson 'must have known'

Speaker paves way for second committee to investigate

Poll finds 52% think PM's communications chief must go

September 8, 2010

A former senior News of the World journalist has gone public to corroborate claims that phone-hacking and other illegal reporting techniques were rife at the tabloid while the prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, was deputy editor and then editor of the paper.

Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper's investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper, and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware this was going on.

"How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with the private investigators?" he asked.

Coulson has always said he had no knowledge of any such activity. News International has maintained that royal reporter Clive Goodman, jailed for hacking phones belonging to members of the royal household, was the only journalist involved in the practice.

McMullan is one of six former News of the World journalists who have independently told the Guardian that Coulson, who was deputy editor from 2000 and editor from January 2003 to January 2007, knew that his reporters were engaging in unlawful acts.

McMullan's decision to speak publicly about illegal techniques at the paper came as the Commons Speaker, John Bercow, paved the way for a second, powerful committee of MPs to investigate the scandal.

The cross-party standards and privileges committee has more powers to summon witnesses than the culture committee which has already reported on the affair, and the home affairs committee which announced on Tuesday that it would examine phone-hacking.

Coulson also faced mounting pressure to step down from his £140,000 post as David Cameron's communications chief as a YouGov poll found that 52% of voters thought he should quit with just 24% saying he should stay in the job.

All six of the former journalists who worked for Coulson at the News of the World paint the same picture of a newsroom where private investigators were used routinely to gather information by illegal means and where some reporters did so themselves. They say senior editors knew about this, because reporters could not commission private investigators without going through their desk editor; because editors routinely demanded to know the source of information in stories; and because executives kept tight control of their budgets.

McMullan, who is now landlord of the Castle pub in Dover, was deputy features editor when Coulson arrived at the paper as deputy editor in 2000 and says he [McMullan] spoke regularly to Steve Whittamore, the Hampshire private investigator who ran a network which specialised in selling confidential information to newspapers from phone companies and government databases, among other services.

"I would speak to Steve nearly every day when I was deputy features editor, and we'd chat about what he'd done and if his bill was too big. Getting information from confidential records, we did that regularly, time and time again. I always hid behind the journalist's fundamental get-out clause that, if it's in the public interest, you can do what you like. Some of what Steve did was legal, like using the electoral register, but if he went a step further, I would not have given a second thought to whether that was illegal, because that's part of your job," said McMullan.

He believes Coulson was right to allow his reporters to invade privacy in order to nail wrongdoers: "Investigative journalism is a noble profession but we have to do ignoble things." He says that at the time, reporters did not believe it was illegal to hack voicemail and were quite open about it. "Most reporters did it themselves, sitting at their desk. It was something that people would do when they were bored sitting outside somebody's house. I don't think at the time senior editors at the paper thought it was an issue. Everybody was doing it.

"Coulson would certainly be well aware that the practice was pretty widespread. He is conceivably telling the truth when he says he didn't specifically know every time a reporter would do it. I wouldn't have told him. It wasn't of significance for me to say I just rang up David Beckham and listened to his messages. In general terms, he would have known that reporters were doing it."

McMullan argues that these techniques are essential to investigative work. "How can Coulson possibly say he didn't know what was going on with [private investigators]? He was the brains behind the investigations department [to which McMullan was transferred by Coulson]. How can he say he had no idea about how it works? It's just a shame that you are not awarded prizes for it. Instead, you are regulated so that wrongdoers can carry on with their corruption."

The New York Times last week quoted another former News of the World journalist, Sean Hoare, who said he had played illegally hacked voicemail messages to Coulson when they worked at the Sun and that Coulson had "actively encouraged" him to hack messages at the News of the World. In a BBC radio interview, Hoare accused Coulson of lying. Coulson has continued to deny all knowledge of illegal activity.

None of the former News of the World staffers who have spoken to the Guardian claim to have direct evidence of Coulson's involvement in law-breaking. All of them say that illegal activity, including phone hacking, was so widespread it is inconceivable senior editors did not know.

One former desk editor, who was working for Coulson in August 2006 when police arrested the paper's contracted private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, and the royal correspondent, Goodman, said: "The hacking was so routine that people didn't realise they were doing anything wrong. They were just doing what was expected of them. People were obsessed with getting celebs' phone numbers. There were senior people who were really scared when the Mulcaire story came out. Everyone was surprised that Clive Goodman was the only one who went down."

Former reporters say the newsroom was run with a heavy hand. One veteran who worked for Coulson, said: "Andy Coulson absolutely knew. They all knew. He sat in the newsroom, often on the backbench on Friday and Saturday. It was a regular daily joke in conference: 'say no more'. Andy would ask questions in conference. And he'd be told, 'nudge, nudge'."

Former staff say that tapes and transcripts of voicemail were common in the office but concealed from the outside world. "The News of the World are always very very careful not to use anything that was taped from a phone. We could use it as raw information. You listen to their phone, you know they're going to meet a lover at such a place and such a time, and you're there with the photographer."

One former reporter claimed that Mulcaire was used on almost every story, if not for hacking into voicemail then for accessing confidential databases: "The paper was paying Glenn Mulcaire £2,000 a week, and they wanted their money's worth. For just about every story, they rang Glenn. It wasn't just tapping. It was routine. "Even if it was just a car crash or a house fire on a Saturday, they'd call Glenn, and he'd come back with ex-directory phone numbers, the BT list of friends and family and their addresses, lists of numbers called from their mobile phones. This was just commonplace. He was hacking masses of phones.We reckoned David Beckham had 13 different sim cards, and Glenn could hack every one of them. How could senior editors not know that they are spending £2,000 a week on this guy, and using him on just about every story that goes into the paper?"

The claims by former staff contradict an internal inquiry at the News of the World. Les Hinton, former chair of News International, told the media select committee he had conducted "a full and rigorous internal inquiry" and was "absolutely convinced" Goodman was the only person who knew about the hacking. Scotland Yard and the Press Complaints Commission also found no evidence of the involvement in hacking of anybody at the paper other than Goodman. It has emerged neither the police nor the PCC interviewed any reporter or editor or manager from the paper other than Goodman.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep...ld-witness

[Jan Klimkowski]

Comedy gold hypocritical nonsense from Murdoch's lackeys: "As we have always made clear, we have a zero-tolerance approach to wrongdoing and will take swift and decisive action if we have proof."

Phone-hacking row: government backs new inquiry

Pressure mounts on Andy Coulson, as MPs call on the powerful standards and privileges committee to summon witnesses such as Rupert Murdoch to give evidence

September 9, 2010

Media tycoon Rupert Murdoch should be called to give evidence to a new inquiry into the News of the World phone-hacking row, MPs were told today as they agreed to refer the issue to the Commons' most powerful committee.

Amid calls from MPs of all parties for parliament to stand up to the "red topped assassins" of the media, the government backed a motion for hacking to be investigated by the standards and privileges committee.

Tom Watson, a former Labour minister, told MPs that Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of News International, should both be called as witnesses by the committee following their refusal to appear at a previous inquiry held by the culture committee on the same issue.

The decision to launch the new inquiry piles pressure on David Cameron's director of communications, Andy Coulson, the former News of the World editor, who has repeatedly denied any knowledge of the illegal eavesdropping for which ex-royal editor Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire were jailed in 2007.

Labour's Chris Bryant, who tabled the motion after discovering his own phone had been hacked, urged MPs not to be "supine" in the face of allegations that their voicemails were illegally intercepted.

Earlier this week, the home affairs select committee launched its own inquiry into the practice of phone hacking. But Bryant said a separate investigation should be held by the standards and privileges committee because of the power it wields to subpoena witnesses to attend.

The committee should use that power and refuse to let witnesses get away without answering questions, said Bryant.

Earlier this year, the culture, media and sport select committee published a highly critical 167-page report condemning the "collective amnesia" and "deliberate obfuscation" of News of the World executives who gave evidence to them.

The report said it was inconceivable that only a few people at the paper knew about the practice of illegally hacking the phones of public figures.

Watson told MPs said the committee should call the "DCMS select committee refuseniks – the people associated with News International who flatly rejected our invitations to give evidence to our own inquiry."

He issued a critique of the media and urged MPs to stand up against it.

"There is one more tiny little shame that we all share – the truth is that we, all of us in this house, are scared," he said.

"If you fear passing this resolution, think of this: it's almost laughable. Here we sit in parliament, the central institution of our sacred democracy, between us some of the most powerful people of the land, and we are scared...

"They, the barons of the media with their red-topped assassins, are the biggest beasts in the modern jungle. They have no predators, they are untouchable, they laugh at the law, they sneer at parliament, they have the power to hurt us and they do with gusto and precision."

He went on: "We are afraid, and if we oppose this resolution it is our shame. That is the tawdry secret that dare not speak its name.

"The most powerful people in the land – prime ministers, ministers and MPs of every party – are guilty in their own way of perpetuating a media culture that allows the characters of the decent to be traduced out of casual malice, for money, for spite, for sport, for any reason they like. "

Today's motion received the backing of the government, after Sir George Young, the leader of the Commons, told MPs in a brief statement that the government accepted that the issue was a matter for the Commons.

Bryant, who was told by police he was on Mulcaire's list, said that hacking into MPs' phones was "a contempt of parliament, a severe breach of parliamentary privilege" which could compromise their right to speak freely, which "stems in essence from the 1689 Bill of Rights".

New material has come to light over the past two weeks by former members of Coulson's staff, whose allegations have cast doubt on Coulson's repeated claim that he was completely unaware that the practice was going on during his tenure.

Today, the Guardian revealed that another former News of the World journalist has come forward to say that phone hacking was rife at the paper when Coulson was editor.

Paul McMullan, a former features executive and then member of the newspaper's investigations team, says that he personally commissioned private investigators to commit several hundred acts which could be regarded as unlawful, that use of illegal techniques was no secret at the paper, and that senior editors, including Coulson, were aware this was going on.

Downing Street has stood firmly behind Cameron's most senior aide.

But today, the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, failed to give Coulson his full backing by ducking a question of whether he should resign.

In an interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, he said: "If there are claims and counter-claims everyone is entitled to both ask questions and make inquiries."

"I believe that the most important thing of all is that the police now, since new allegations have been made, should look now as quickly and thoroughly as possible at these new allegations."

Though the row centres on the period Coulson edited the Sunday tabloid newspaper, Bryant insisted that his call for the committee to investigate was "not about one man".

"This is not about the one honourable member whose case has already been to court," he told MPs. "It is, however, about what kind of investigative journalism we want in this country. Searching, yes. Critical, caustic, aggressive and cynical, maybe, but not illegal. And it is about whether this house will be supine when its members phones are hacked, or about whether it will take action when the democratic right of MPs to do their job without illegal let, hindrance or interception has been traduced. We have taken action before as a house. We should take action today."

Jack Dromey, MP for Birmingham Erdington, said he hoped for "full cooperation from Downing Street, not least because the lesson of Watergate is that the cover-up is worse than the crime".

News International has issued a statement in response to the debate, which read: "This matter, which largely relates to alleged behaviour five years ago, has become intensely partisan.

"Amidst a swirl of untethered allegations, there should be no doubt that the News of the World will investigate any allegation of wrongdoing when presented with evidence. As we have always made clear, we have a zero-tolerance approach to wrongdoing and will take swift and decisive action if we have proof."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/sep...ew-inquiry

[Paul Rigby]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/blog/201...ris-bryant

We pick up the transcript as Bryant, who led today's Commons debate on the News of the World phone hacking story, tells Burley that phone hacking and other illegal techniques were "endemic" in the newspaper industry in the past.

Burley: Do you have evidence for that?

Bryant: Sorry, for what?

Burley: Do you have evidence that it is endemic not only at the News of the World but other newspapers? Pretty strong claim if you don't.

Bryant: Well, the Information Commissioner produced a report which if you had listened to the debate earlier yourself then you would know, or if you had read that report then you would see that he referred to more than 1,000 cases in various different newspapers. I think it was something like 800 – I've not got the figures with me now – 800 incidences in the Mail alone.

Burley: So you are in a position to have listened to the debate and read the report and as a result you are content to say that on telly.

Bryant: I have just said that. You seem to be a bit dim, if you don't mind me saying so.

Understatement makes come-back.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Bryant also calls Burley a liar in the grabbed YouTube clip here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDYalpZhG_8

"Don't lie, madam."

He should have gone for a full house and described her as a dim, lying, Murdoch lackey.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Democracy in action.

With Murdoch's lackey Coulson now Director of Communications for the British government.

MPs 'backed off' over phone-hacking probe

By Cathy Newman
Updated on 10 September 2010

Exclusive: Channel 4 News has learned that members of the committee set up to investigate the phone hacking scandal shied away from forcing News International chief executive and former Sun editor Rebekah Brooks to attend a meeting with them.

After Mrs Brooks had repeatedly avoided being interviewed, four MPs on the Commons culture, media and sport committee wanted to ask the Serjeant at Arms, the Commons official in charge of security, to issue a warrant forcing her to attend.

In an exclusive interview, former Plaid Cymru MP, and a member of the committee, Adam Price says he was warned by a senior Conservative committee member that if the committee pursued this plan, the tabloids might punish him by looking into his personal life.

"We could have used the nuclear option. We decided not to, I think to some extent because of what I was told at the time by a senior Conservative member of the committee, who I know was in direct contact with NI execs, that if we went for her, called her back, subpoenaed her, they would go for us - which meant effectively that they would delve into our personal lives in order to punish them and I think that's part of the reason we didn't do it. In retrospect I think that's regrettable," price said.

"It's important now that the new inquiry stands firm where we didn't. Politicians aren't above the law but neither are journalists including Rupert Murdoch's bovver boys with biros."

Another MP on the committee makes similar claims, who also sat on the committee, talked of being intimidated.

He told Channel 4 News: "A former Labour cabinet minister has confirmed to me this week that News International talked to my former colleagues in No. 10 Downing St to ask them whether I would withdraw my aggressive line of questioning and their lawyer tried to have me removed from the committee on the grounds that I was suing them for libel and may have a potential interest so yes they did try and stop me conducting my enquiries.

"I felt it was undue influence, yes. I felt very frightened and intimidated."

In a statement to Channel 4 News, the committee chairman John Whittingdale, said: "When it was suggested by Labour members to force Rebekah Brooks to attend, I recall a conversation with Adam Price in which the repercussions for members' personal lives were mentioned.

"But that had no bearing on my own decision to oppose bringing in the Serjeant at Arms. Nor do I have any reason to think there was any suggestion that News International would target our private lives."

MPs have this week approved a new parliamentary inquiry into the phone hacking scandal following fresh allegations that the News of the World repeatedly hacked into celebrities' phones when the prime minister's communications director Andy Coulson was editor.

Mr Coulson has repeatedly denied he was aware of the practice.

http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/po...on/3764177

[Jan Klimkowski]

Strong evidence in the article below that the "radio hams bugged Diana" story is complete tosh.

However, Tina Brown's interpretation that Murdoch's hacks may have been responsible, is probably misdirection.

The most likely primary buggers, and primary leakers, of the "Squidgygate" tapes of Diana are surely British intelligence.

My working hypothesis would be that British SIS taped Diana, created the cover story of the radio hams, and certain newspaper journalists - witting or unwitting - then "laundered" the material into the public domain.

Did Murdoch's Hacks Bug Diana, Too?
By Tina Brown
The Daily Beast
September 6, 2010


The New York Times’ revelations about phone-tapping at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World sound eerily reminiscent of a phone scandal involving Princess Di.

I’m shocked, shocked to learn from yesterday's New York Times Sunday magazine that the voice mail messages of celebrities have been bugged for tidbits of gossip—can you believe it?—by the Murdoch press in London. And that the bugging wasn’t, as previously thought, the activity of one lone hack, Clive Goodman, the royal snoop for Murdoch’s scandal sheet, the News of the World. Goodman, known by his colleagues as The Eternal Flame because he never left the office, went to jail in January 2007 for hacking into Prince Harry’s voice mail. The NOW’s congenial editor at the time, Andy Coulson, who insisted he knew nothing of his reporter’s disgraceful tactics, resigned in January 2007 but is currently riding high as PM David Cameron’s communications director. For how long?

Thanks to The New York Times sending in a heavy mob of Pulitzer Prize-winners for their story, a stone has been lifted on a whole squirming zoo of low life in the News of the Screws (as it is known in the U.K.).

The Times story tallies with the outrageous antics chronicled in one of my favorite memoirs of Fleet Street, the 2005 Piers Morgan diaries covering his era as editor of the News of the World from 1994 to 1995. Piers, soon to take Larry King’s seat as CNN’s prime-time celebrity interviewer, recalls dispatching a reporter, Rebekah Wade, disguised as a cleaning lady in a uniform white hat, to steal for the News of the World all of the scoops in the serial extract of Jonathan Dimbleby’s 1994 biography of Prince Charles appearing in that Sunday's more respectable sister paper, The Sunday Times. “She headed down to the room where the Sunday Times inserts their sections into the main paper," Morgan wrote, "and hid in the loo for two hours waiting for the presses to start. The plan worked like a charm. As the Sunday Times started clicking off the press, Rebekah emerged from her hideaway, ran over, helped herself to a copy, then raced back to the NOW, with her hat falling off to reveal she may not be who they thought she was.” Dimbleby’s serial was ripped off wholesale for NOW, copyright be damned.

All fun and games, this anarchic, backstabbing behavior, except it wasn’t
.
The New York Times exposé shows Coulson, the News of the World’s editor from 2003 to 2007, was fully cognizant of what his newsroom was doing at the time of the Goodman phone-tapping incident and has found to corroborate it many shamefaced hacks who were inside the paper and now feel bad that Goodman took the fall. But it’s also clear to me that bugging at Murdoch newsrooms probably went further back even than Coulson’s era, back as far as the febrile coverage of Princess Di, when things went really vicious, in the early '90s.
The princess, you recall, kept insisting she was being bugged, a refrain that got her portrayed as loony and paranoid. “She had all kinds of theories about who was doing the tapping and who was listening to her,” her American boyfriend, Theodore Forstmann, told me when I was researching my biography, The Diana Chronicles, in 2006.

Diana’s New York girlfriend, the late Harper’s Bazaar editor Liz Tilberis, told her husband Andrew that she was often aware of an “intrusive click and seashell noise on the line” that suggested an eavesdropper. “Diana would say, ‘It’s the Secret Service, don’t worry,’” Andrew told me. “I heard examples of it myself. I’d pick up the phone and hear the line being opened.” So convinced was Di of eavesdroppers that she twice had her rooms at Kensington Palace swept for bugs. She was convinced she was being spied on by the enemies in her husband’s camp, but it now seems more likely it was the Murdoch press who’d figured out how to tap her private line, or paid off one of those awful whispering butlers to do so.

It would explain, for instance, a mystery I spent much time trying to nail down in the chapter in The Diana Chronicles titled “Sex, Lies and Audiotapes.” The chapter discussed the provenance of the notorious phone call—known thereafter as the "Squidgygate" tapes—between Diana on her private line at Sandringham and James Gilbey, the man who tenderly called her “Squidgy,” and emerged clearly from the call as her lover. The conversation took place on New Year’s Eve 1989 and was published to scandalous uproar and princessly mortification. I never bought the explanation of how the Squidgygate tape came out from a pair of nosy radio hams and having read the New York Times I believe it even less today.

The two supposed eavesdroppers on Diana and Gilbey were Cyril Reenan, a 70-year-old retired bank manager in the country town of Abingdon in Oxfordshire, and Janet Norgrove, a 25-year-old typist from Oxford. Their stories were uncannily similar. They both said they’d bought scanners and just by chance happened to tune in to one of 220 million calls and out of the dozen British papers they’d both chosen to offer their tapes to The Sun.

Reenan was the first to go to the Sun. The story is that the paper responded to a tip from Reenan. He said he was highly nervous on hearing the voices and his impulse was to warn Diana. His second impulse, as a good upstanding Englishman, was to sell all rights to The Sun for £6,000.

The Sun is said to have responded by dispatching Stuart Higgins, then the royal correspondent, later the paper’s editor, to meet the “eavesdropper” at Didcot train station, 10 miles south of Oxford. Higgins recalls that he put the cassette in and listened to it “almost mesmerized” for 20 minutes. “The content was so explosive.” (Diana: "I don’t want to get pregnant." Gilbey: "Darling, that’s not going to happen, alright?” [The Sun, 24 August 1992]) “We knew we had a major, major story,” Higgins told Tim Clayton and Phil Craig in Diana: Story of a Princess.

The Sun got cold feet. Apparently it decided that printing Reenan’s tape might expose the paper to prosecution and that it could be commercially risky to reveal to the British public that their sweetheart was not all she seemed in the virtue department.

So how did the explosive tape get out? In a brown paper envelope with a Central London postmark, distributed by its possessor first to the Daily Mail, which did not publish, and to the National Enquirer which did—in August 1992. Thus laundered by the American press, it was then considered “safe” for The Sun to publish. But the story of the two eavesdroppers doesn’t make any sense. Mobile phone company Cellnet has said that its base site in Abingdon Town, the only one from which Reenan might have picked up Gilbey’s mobile signal, was not commissioned until March 1990, six weeks after this conversation.
Communications expert John Nelson of Crew Green Consulting Ltd. in Shrewsbury analyzed the tape and independently confirmed to me Cellnet’s claim that Reenan could not have recorded the call. Nelson told me he was so puzzled that he went to Reenan’s home in Abingdon—and ended up even more bemused. “I concluded his receiver could not have handled some of the frequency content on the recording,” he said.

Jane Norgrove, the other “eavesdropper,” would not allow Nelson or anyone else to examine her bedroom scanning setup, but Nelson’s conclusion also applies to her. “The recording could not have been made by Mr. Reenan’s scanning receiver or any other scanning receiver tuned to the output frequency of a cellular base station.” (This quote comes from his report “A Technical Analysis of the ‘Dianagate’ Tape,” January 22, 1993.) Inexorably, Nelson told me, “The truth is, Diana’s phone was bugged. That call had to have been recorded off a landline.” The tape, he added, also had telltale marks of having been clumsily doctored to make it sound to an unprofessional ear like a cellular recording. Nelson found it mildly surprising that the media missed that at the time. “Perhaps," he wrote me in an email, "the image of retired bank manager huddled over a scanning receiver and listening in to royal misbehavior was too appealing to abandon.” [All Nelson quotes, bar one highlighted above, come from his email to me November 24, 2006, and one quote from my telephone interview with him on Nov. 20, 2006.]

Or perhaps it was because the British media had their own reasons to believe the accidental ham story. Reenan was most likely just a cut-out for the real snoop in the tabloid wars. Whatever the truth, in 1993, before Reenan died, he said he deeply regretted his role in the whole nefarious business. “I think I was set up… part of a sinister conspiracy.” By the way, the reporter who posed as the cleaning lady, Rebekah Wade, is now chief executive of Murdoch’s News International.

Tina Brown is the founder and editor in chief of The Daily Beast. She is the author of the 2007 New York Times best seller The Diana Chronicles. Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and Talk magazines and host of CNBC's Topic A with Tina Brown.

[Jan Klimkowski]

Scotland Yard's finest still dodging the issues, seeking to bury the copious evidence already in their possession, and intimidating potential whistle-blowers by proposing to interview them under criminal caution.

Murdoch and his hacks still protected.

Police ask Guardian for phone-hacking evidence

Paper's editor, Alan Rusbridger, points out that police already have access to material on practices at the News of the World

October 13, 2010

The Metropolitan police have written to the Guardian asking for any new material the paper holds about phone hacking at the News of the World.

The request follows a Channel 4 Dispatches documentary last week that contained further evidence that the practice was widespread at the tabloid paper.

The programme featured an anonymous ex-News of the World journalist who said the then editor Andy Coulson listened to recordings of voicemails that had been illegally obtained.

Coulson, who is now David Cameron's director of communications, has always insisted he did not know about the practice.

Detective Superintendent Dean Haydon, who is leading the Met's review of the phone-hacking case, has written to the Guardian's editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, asking for any new material that may have come to light.

In his reply, Rusbridger points out that police already have access to evidence that would help with their inquiry, including transcripts of voicemail messages that were intercepted by News of the World employees from a mobile phone belonging to the PFA chief executive, Gordon Taylor.

"[The Guardian journalist] Nick Davies was able to reveal incontrovertible evidence of the involvement in phone hacking of other NoW reporters and executives: the material is sitting in your own files, and was obtained by lawyers acting for Gordon Taylor," Rusbridger wrote.

The Guardian revealed in July last year that the News of the World had paid £1m in out-of-court settlements to three people, including Taylor, after messages left on their mobile phones were intercepted by Glenn Mulcaire, a private investigator on the News of the World payroll.

Mulcaire and the paper's former royal editor Clive Goodman were jailed for listening to phone messages belonging to members of the royal household in January 2007.

Rusbridger said that Davies had been able to publish fresh revelations about the extent of the practice over the past year by "taking the trouble to interview a large number of people who were working at the News of the World at the relevant time". He suggested the police do the same.

"That, it seems to us, would be a more productive route than seeking to interview other journalists who have looked into the story," he said.

"It has been open to the MPS to [interview News of the World journalists] since your colleagues arrested Glenn Mulcaire and Clive Goodman in 2006," Rusbridger pointed out. "But the MPS decided at the time that they would interview no other NoW journalists than Mr Goodman himself."

Rusbridger also criticised the Met for interviewing under caution ex-News of the World journalists who have come forward this year to talk about phone hacking at the paper.

"Many external observers are troubled that the MPS is adopting the intimidatory approach of seeking to interview these whistleblowers under caution – ie treating them as potential defendants as opposed to potential witnesses," he said.

Since the Guardian published its initial revelations last year, a huge amount of new evidence has come to light about the number of journalists who were involved in the practice, and dozens of public figures have spoken out about being targeted by the paper.

Its publisher, News Group Newspapers, a subsidiary of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp, is facing a raft of expensive legal cases.

There have also been several parliamentary inquiries into how much News International executives knew about the practice. One former journalist, Sean Hoare, has said Coulson "actively encouraged" phone hacking and an executive, Paul McMullan, claimed that the former editor must have been aware of it.

The New York Times ran a lengthy exposé into phone hacking at the News of the World in July. A Channel 4 Dispatches documentary on the issue was broadcast last week.

"The fact that three separate news organisations have been able to uncover this story must give you hope that you, too, could got to the bottom of it without too much trouble," Rusbridger told Haydon.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2010/oct...ne-hacking

Text of Guardian editor Rusbridger's letter to Det Supt Haydon as pdf:

http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-files/Me...nreply.pdf

[David Guyatt]

It's nice to know that the Boys in Blue are so "flexible" when it comes to matters of outright media criminality.

After all they wouldn't want to inhibit the comfy tax-free river of "folding readies" destined for the concealed truncheon pocket courtesy of the Fleet-Street-Inspector-Knacker-of-the-Yard tip-off machine now would they...