With all the events happening at the moment with the defeat of regressive bills put forward by republicans who were heady with victory last year and mistakenly took a vote from people desperate for jobs as a mandate to put forward instead a christianist agenda something may have slipped under the radar in the US and that is the fact that on Thursday James Murdoch returns to face the Commons Committee he "misinformed" when he last answered their questions earlier this year.
Other here such as Brit and ceebs have done most of the sterling work on these pages to document the disgraceful actions of News Corp, News International, the now defunct News Of The World, James Murdoch and its various editors, "reporters" and investigators.
On thursday James murdoch returns to face the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee and the questions they have about the contridictions between the staements he made and the recollection of Colin Myler and Tom Crone when he denied he’d been told in 2008 about an e-mail that showed hacking had gone beyond a single reporter at News of the World.
This was going to make things difficult enough but in the past few days other things have happened. Firstly a reporter from the News Of The World sister paper "The Sun" Jamie Pyatt was arrested by detectives investigating illegal payments to police officers.
This is not the worst thing to happen. Yesterday on BBC Newsnight they reported that The News Of The World hired an ex-police officer early last year to carry out surveillance on two prominent lawyers representing victims of phone hacking. This was done to dish up any dirt on the lawyers to see if they were having "an inappropriate relationship", no doubt in order to weaken their case or get them to back off.
But not only the two lawyers. They have evidence that for over eight years private investigator Derek Webb followed over 90 people including Prince William the Duke Of Cambridge, former attorney general Lord Goldsmith, the parents of actor Daniel Radcliffe and Labour backbench MP Tom Watson who has been a major thorn in the side of News Corp including going to the AGM in Los Angeles last month to make shareholders aware to the continued illegality of the company.
Tom Watson is also on the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee so we can expect his questions to James Murdoch to be very pointed adn aimed directly at what he did or didn't know.
My personal viewpoint, apart from obvious disgust, is that some very high-ups in the Murdoch empire need to face some serious criminal investigations. As the story has evolved and more and more malfeasance has been shown to have happened taking this from the "lone gunman" the right wing in both the UK and US try to always claim it is to the criminal conspirisy it has turned out to be l cannot imagine that people in the top level of News corp and News International can try to claim that they had no idea what was going on. The large amounts of monies paid out, the actions taken by reporters and editors, the correspondence from lawyers all lead to people being in the know.
These people need to be stopped as there can be no doubt now about how distructive their influence is.
Thu Nov 10, 2011 at 4:26 PM PT: I'm not sure why but yet another Newscorp editor was sent out like a lamb to slaughter in a vain attempt to deflect and obfiscate but to no avail Liike all others he came across as desperate and whiny.
If you can access the BBC news website there's a great rundown of events. People may try and focus on the soundbite from Tom Watson (who in my view was correct in his description of News Corps scilence with the Omerta used by the Mafia) but the most important point made was by MP Philip Davies who used to work for Asda (the supermarket chain in the UK owned by Wal-Mart) who said., "I used to work for Asda... I guarantee that if somebody had gone to any chief operating officer of Asda and said we're going to have to pay half a million pounds, he would have said 'My God, let me have a look at that'."
People at Colin Myler's level within Newscorp were authorised to make payments up to £10,000. James Murdoch failed to be curious about Myler authorising a payment of half a million pounds. Think on that for a while.