Douglas Caddy

Rebekah Brooks and husband appear in court Former News International chief, husband Charlie and four others are charged with conspiracy to pervert course of justice By Sandra Laville, crime correspondent guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 13 June 2012 06.36 EDT The former chief executive of News International, Rebekah Brooks, and her husband, Charlie, have appeared at Westminster magistrates court on charges of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by allegedly concealing evidence from the police. Brooks arrived with her husband in a black cab outside the court shortly before 10am. The entrance was flanked with photographers and television crews, and as Brooks was led by police to the doors of the court cameras flashed repeatedly. Wearing matching navy blue suits – Rebekah Brooks's distinguished by a flash of a sage green scarf and high-heeled black shoes – the couple appeared in court one shortly afterwards, where the benches were filled with lawyers representing the six defendants, the press and a few members of the public. She was led into the glass-fronted dock with her husband and sat flanked by him on one side and Cheryl Carter, her former personal assistant, on the other. Alongside Carter sat Paul Edwards, Brooks's former chauffeur, and Mark Hanna, the head of security at News International, and behind the five was Darryl Jorsling, who was a security consultant for Brooks provided by News International. The former News International chief executive, who has edited both the News of the World and the Sun, was asked to stand by the court clerk along with the five other defendants. The six were asked to give their addresses and dates of birth before being asked to sit. Brooks is charged with three counts of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice by allegedly hiding material from police investigating phone hacking at the News of the World. The other five defendants face one charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Nigel Pilkington for the crown said: "I don't propose to say anything about the facts. The court was served with a summary of the case." Senior district judge Howard Riddle said he had received the summary and Pilkington read out bail conditions for the five. They were all told not to communicate directly or indirectly with each other – except for Charlie and Rebekah Brooks, on whom no such ban on communication as a couple was imposed. No plea was entered by any of the six. After a hearing lasting no more than five minutes Riddle addressed the six defendants. "Could I ask you to stand?" he said. "Your case is sent for trial at Southwark crown court. The first hearing will be on 22 June. You should be there no later than 9.30am. "You have heard the bail conditions read out … If you don't turn up on time you commit an offence and could lose your bail." Riddle then adjourned the hearing, stood and walked out. A few minutes later, to shouts from photographers of "Rebekah, Rebekah", a smiling Brooks and her husband walked out of the court – him with his hands in his pockets. They got into a black cab and were driven away. Brooks is charged on count one that between 6 July and 19 July 2011 she conspired with Charles Brooks, Hanna, Edwards, Jorsling and persons unknown to conceal material from officers of the Metropolitan police service. On count two she is charged with Carter between 6 July and 9 July 2011 of conspiring together to permanently remove seven boxes of material from the archive of News International. In the third count Brooks is charged with her husband, Hanna, Edwards and Jorsling and persons unknown of conspiring together between 15 July and 19 July 2011 to conceal documents, computers and other electronic equipment from officers of the Metropolitan police service. The other five defendants face one charge of conspiracy to pervert the course of justice each.

Coalition at war over Jeremy Hunt and BSkyB Nick Clegg has opened a major split in the Coalition by demanding that Jeremy Hunt face an independent investigation into whether he misled Parliament over his handling of the BSkyB takeover bid. The Conservatives privately concede that Mr Hunt may have "technically breached" the Ministerial Code as his adviser’s communications with a News Corporation lobbyist were inappropriate. By Rowena Mason, Political Correspondent The Telegraph 9:41PM BST 12 Jun 2012 The Deputy Prime Minister has repeatedly confronted David Cameron about the refusal to order an inquiry into the Culture Secretary, it emerged yesterday. Sources close to Mr Clegg took the unusual step of providing details of the Liberal Democrat leader’s concerns over the Prime Minister’s handling of the issue. Mr Cameron has refused to refer the Culture Secretary to the independent adviser on ministerial interests after it emerged that Mr Hunt and his advisers had privately communicated with News Corporation executives when the company was attempting to take over BSkyB. Within minutes of Mr Hunt finishing his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry last month, Downing Street ruled out a Whitehall inquiry into his conduct. Last night, Downing Street sources insisted that no investigation would be ordered, although that position is likely to be tested today. Although Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron have disagreed on policy in the past, the latest row threatens to be the most personal disagreement between the Coalition partners. It is also being waged on an issue close to the Prime Minister, which threatens his own integrity. The Deputy Prime Minister has instructed his MPs to abstain from a parliamentary vote called by Labour today on whether Mr Hunt should face an independent investigation. The decision is sure to be used by Ed Miliband, the Labour leader, in the Commons. Last night, a source close to Mr Clegg said: “Nick Clegg went in and instructed his MPs to stay away from the vote and not support the Tories. He asked whether anyone disagreed with this and there wasn’t a single dissenting voice. We can be fairly confident there will be a mass abstention.” The source said the Liberal Democrats were not calling for Mr Hunt to resign nor “jumping on his corpse”, simply that he should be investigated. “This is about answering questions, not calling for people to resign,” the source said. “There are questions about the Ministerial Code and on-the-record comments in Parliament. The decision to refer to Alex Allan [the independent adviser on ministerial interests] or not is one made by the Prime Minister. However, it’s not a decision endorsed by the Liberal Democrats.” Labour MPs have accused Mr Hunt of misleading the House of Commons about his contact with News Corporation. He told Parliament in April that his only contact with Fred Michel, a News Corporation lobbyist, was at formal meetings, where minutes were taken by officials. It later emerged that he exchanged a number of personal text messages with Mr Michel, as well as sending a “sympathetic” text message to James Murdoch in favour of the bid, despite legal advice not to have “any external discussions” about the deal. The Conservatives privately concede that Mr Hunt may have “technically breached” the Ministerial Code as his adviser’s communications with a News Corporation lobbyist were inappropriate. Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron are understood to have had a private meeting last week in which the Liberal Democrat leader criticised the Prime Minister’s decision to effectively clear Mr Hunt of wrongdoing immediately after his appearance at the Leveson Inquiry. “Nick had previously made his views clear,” a source close to the Deputy Prime Minister said. “They [the Conservatives] went ahead knowing full well it wasn’t something Nick or Liberal Democrats would endorse. The two [Mr Clegg and Mr Cameron] had a face-to-face meeting last week and yesterday in which Mr Clegg made it clear that Mr Hunt still has questions to answer.” The Deputy Prime Minister will give evidence to the Leveson Inquiry today and is expected to repeat attacks on Mr Cameron and other political leaders for getting too close to the Murdoch empire. The Prime Minister will come under pressure over his links when he appears tomorrow. He has been criticised for becoming too close to Rebekah Brooks, the former News International boss. Last night, the Deputy Prime Minister’s intervention in the BSkyB affair infuriated senior Conservatives. “The Murdoch issue is totemic for them [the Liberal Democrats],” said one party source. Downing Street sources said they were relaxed about the Liberal Democrats’ decision to abstain in today’s parliamentary vote. Conservative MPs will be forced to vote in support of Mr Hunt despite several also publicly expressing concern over the affair. Mr Cameron should win the vote but the issue threatens to continue to overshadow his premiership. Bernard Jenkin, a senior Conservative MP, said civil servants should decide whether Mr Hunt was investigated, not the Prime Minister. The chairman of the public administration select committee said there had been a “breakdown of good process and good governance”. “We have a new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood, and he should demonstrate his independence and advise the Prime Minister,” said Mr Jenkin. “If he thinks there has been prima facie case of breach of the Ministerial Code, it should go straight to the independent adviser.’’ Mr Jenkin said his committee was preparing to “consider the matter again”. The treatment of Mr Hunt has been contrasted to that of Baroness Warsi, the Conservative co-chairman, who has been referred for investigation over accusations that she failed to register relevant business interests.

Ex-British PM denies Murdoch claim to inquiry By Guy Faulconbridge and Kate Holton LONDON | Mon Jun 11, 2012 1:01pm EDT LONDON (Reuters) - Former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown on Monday contradicted testimony by Rupert Murdoch to an inquiry into press ethics in which the media tycoon said Brown had threatened war against his company. Murdoch had told the government-sponsored inquiry that Brown phoned him in September 2009 after the Sun newspaper switched its allegiance to the Conservative Party. Brown responded by vowing to wage war on Murdoch's company in revenge, Murdoch said. "This conversation never took place. I am shocked and surprised that it should be suggested," Brown, who served as prime minister from 2007 to 2010, told the Leveson inquiry. "This call did not happen. The threat was not made." "I find it shocking," Brown said, adding that Murdoch's claim was damaging the tycoon's company. "This did not happen. There is no evidence that it happened other than Mr Murdoch's, but it didn't happen." A former British leader accusing Murdoch of misleading the inquiry under oath could further tarnish the reputation of the world's most powerful media tycoon in a country which is home to some of his biggest newspaper and broadcasting interests. When pressed on how a serving prime minister could make such a threat, Murdoch had told the inquiry: "I don't think he was in a very balanced state of mind." "We were talking more quietly than you or I are now - he said, 'Well, your company has declared war on my government and we have no alternative but to make war on your company,'" Murdoch told the inquiry in April. Following Brown's evidence, a News Corp spokeswoman said: "Rupert Murdoch stands behind his testimony." Brown said that Murdoch was wrong about both the date and the contents of the phone call. Statements submitted to a media watchdog by five of Brown's advisers, and seen by Reuters, show none of the five heard Brown threaten Murdoch on the call. Aides to Brown, including his special adviser, director of strategy and deputy chief of staff, said in statements submitted to the Press Complaints Commission last year that Brown made no such threat on the call, which took place in November, not September as Murdoch had said. "I listened to the phone call between Mr Brown and Mr. Murdoch in November 2009," Stewart Wood, special adviser to the Prime Minister's office, said in a statement dated October 2011 that Reuters has seen. "At no point in the conversation was threatening language of any sort used by either Mr Brown or Mr Murdoch," Wood said. A British parliamentary committee which investigated allegations of illegal phone-hacking by Murdoch publications has already deemed the Australian-born tycoon unfit to manage a major global company. BROWN'S SON During his testimony, Brown also challenged a version of events given by Murdoch's lieutenant, Rebekah Brooks, about a Sun report that Brown's four-month-old son Fraser had been diagnosed with cystic fibrosis. Brooks, who was charged last month with interfering with a police investigation into the phone hacking scandal, told the inquiry the Browns had given their backing to the story. "I have never sought to bring my children into the public domain," Brown said. He denied his consent had been given to publish the story. "I find it sad that even now in 2012 members of the News International staff are coming to this inquiry and maintaining this fiction." Analysts said the Sun's treatment of Brown's son would likely garner sympathy for the former prime minister but they said the issue of who was telling the truth between Murdoch and Brown was still unclear. "I think there is also a question about Brown's credibility on this," media consultant Steve Hewlett, who has covered the inquiry closely, told Reuters. The former prime minister had questioned whether the paper hacked into his son's medical records to get the story. Brooks has denied this and Murdoch has said the story was broken when a father of another child tipped off the newspaper. Brown said a local National Health Service branch in Fife had apologized to his family because information about his son came from NHS staff. "There were only a few medical people who knew that our son had this condition," Brown said. He said the NHS in Fife "now believe it highly likely that there was unauthorized information given by a medical or working member of the NHS staff that allowed the Sun through this middle man to publish this story," Brown said. Murdoch described a relationship with Brown - whose political career effectively ended when he lost an election to incumbent Prime Minister David Cameron in 2010 - that included meals which their wives attended and conversations on topics ranging from charity to the war in Afghanistan. Brooks told the Leveson inquiry she formed a friendship with Sarah Brown and that they had had a "pyjama party" at the prime minister's official country residence, Chequers, with Murdoch's daughter, Elisabeth, and his wife, Wendi. But Murdoch said their relationship worsened after his media companies opposed Brown ahead of the 2010 election

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/gordon-brown/9324291/Leveson-Inquiry-Gordon-Browns-evidence-five-key-points.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jun/10/lyndon-b-johnson-robert-caro-biography

Scotland Yard launches investigation into Tory 'cash-for-access' affair Police act on fundraiser's offer that donations would buy No 10 meetings By James Cusick The Independent Saturday, 9 June 2012 Scotland Yard has begun an investigation into the Conservative Party cash-for-access scandal that saw its chief fundraiser claim a £250,000 donation would buy private meetings with David Cameron in Downing Street. Peter Cruddas resigned as the Tories' co-treasurer in March after he told undercover reporters that paying the party £250,000 would buy "premier league" access to the Prime Minister, including intimate dinners with Mr Cameron and his wife Samantha in their flat above No 10. The Metropolitan Police probe is particularly bad timing for Mr Cameron. He and the Chancellor, George Osborne, have been called before the Leveson Inquiry at the Royal Courts of Justice next week. They will be grilled over their links with Rupert and James Murdoch and the appointment of Andy Coulson to No 10 as the Prime Minister's media director, without customary security checks. Both may have to hand over text messages and emails for publication. The Electoral Commission, which has been conducting its own review of potential offences committed under party political laws, confirmed last night that the allegations against Mr Cruddas "are being dealt with seriously by the police". The commission has offered the Met team its expertise should it be required. Mr Cruddas, a City billionaire and, until his resignation, the Tories' largest donor, giving them £215,000 in the first three months of this year, resigned his party post earlier this year following a "sting" operation in which he was covertly filmed telling undercover reporters that donations of "200 grand to 250 is premier league" and could mean dinners with the Camerons in the PM's private apartment in Downing Street. Access to Mr Osborne was also promised. Mr Cruddas's claim that donations of £250,000 and more would be "awesome for your business" was made despite him being told the money would be coming from a Liechtenstein-based fund. Under electoral law it is illegal to accept donations from foreign funds. Options alleged to have been discussed in the sting operation are said to have included the creation of a British subsidiary front company and also the potential use of UK employees who would act as financial conduits. Mr Cruddas said afterwards that he regretted "any impression of impropriety" arising from his "bluster". The public relations executive Mark Adams, who called for an investigation into the actions of Mr Cruddas, has now been told in a letter from the Electoral Commission's chief executive, Peter Wardle: "If you have any concerns about the police investigation, you can of course raise those concerns with them." Mr Cruddas claimed following his resignation that he had acted without the knowledge of the leadership of his party. Tory headquarters subsequently said that no donation was ever accepted or even formally considered and Mr Cameron called his former fundraiser's promises "completely unacceptable". Mr Cameron's own internal party inquiry into the scandal faces an uncertain future. With a police investigation in progress, questions will be asked about the validity and effectiveness of the Conservatives' probe into cash-for-access, which is currently being conducted by the Tory life peer Lord Gold. The terms of reference of the Gold inquiry, ordered by Mr Cameron, have already been criticised as intentionally limited. Although Mr Cruddas's promises involved the Prime Minister, Lord Gold's remit makes no mention of Mr Cameron, other than to state that the report will be handed directly to him. A senior Conservative Party source told The Independent that given Scotland Yard's decision to mount a criminal investigation, the party would now have little choice but to put Lord Gold's exercise "on hold". Labour's shadow Cabinet Office minister, Michael Dugher, said: "Allegations that David Cameron's chief fundraiser was attempting to solicit illegal donations and selling access to the Prime Minister called into question the whole integrity of the Government. So it is right that the Metropolitan Police are taking them seriously. "It's vital that their investigation is allowed to take its course and that they receive the fullest support from both Downing Street and the Conservative Party." Scotland Yard last night declined to discuss the matter, with a spokeswoman saying that its position had not changed since the resignation of Mr Cruddas in March. The spokeswoman said that the Met had been liaising with the Electoral Commission and that its detectives "continued to assess the allegations" made. A Conservative Party spokesman said: "The Conservative Party has launched a full inquiry led by Lord Gold and will co-operate fully with the police."

Woodward and Bernstein: 40 years after Watergate, Nixon was far worse than we thought By Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, Published: June 8, 2012 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/woodward-and-bernstein-40-years-after-watergate-nixon-was-far-worse-than-we-thought/2012/06/08/gJQAlsi0NV_story.html As Sen. Sam Ervin completed his 20-year Senate career in 1974 and issued his final report as chairman of the Senate Watergate committee, he posed the question: “What was Watergate?” Countless answers have been offered in the 40 years since June 17, 1972, when a team of burglars wearing business suits and rubber gloves was arrested at 2:30 a.m. at the headquarters of the Democratic Party in the Watergate office building in Washington. Four days afterward, the Nixon White House offered its answer: “Certain elements may try to stretch this beyond what it was,” press secretary Ronald Ziegler scoffed, dismissing the incident as a “third-rate burglary.” History proved that it was anything but. Two years later, Richard Nixon would become the first and only U.S. president to resign, his role in the criminal conspiracy to obstruct justice — the Watergate coverup — definitively established. Another answer has since persisted, often unchallenged: the notion that the coverup was worse than the crime. This idea minimizes the scale and reach of Nixon’s criminal actions. Ervin’s answer to his own question hints at the magnitude of Watergate: “To destroy, insofar as the presidential election of 1972 was concerned, the integrity of the process by which the President of the United States is nominated and elected.” Yet Watergate was far more than that. At its most virulent, Watergate was a brazen and daring assault, led by Nixon himself, against the heart of American democracy: the Constitution, our system of free elections, the rule of law. Today, much more than when we first covered this story as young Washington Post reporters, an abundant record provides unambiguous answers and evidence about Watergate and its meaning. This record has expanded continuously over the decades with the transcription of hundreds of hours of Nixon’s secret tapes, adding detail and context to the hearings in the Senate and House of Representatives; the trials and guilty pleas of some 40 Nixon aides and associates who went to jail; and the memoirs of Nixon and his deputies. Such documentation makes it possible to trace the president’s personal dominance over a massive campaign of political espionage, sabotage and other illegal activities against his real or perceived opponents. In the course of his five-and-a-half-year presidency, beginning in 1969, Nixon launched and managed five successive and overlapping wars — against the anti-Vietnam War movement, the news media, the Democrats, the justice system and, finally, against history itself. All reflected a mind-set and a pattern of behavior that were uniquely and pervasively Nixon’s: a willingness to disregard the law for political advantage, and a quest for dirt and secrets about his opponents as an organizing principle of his presidency. Long before the Watergate break-in, gumshoeing, burglary, wiretapping and political sabotage had become a way of life in the Nixon White House. What was Watergate? It was Nixon’s five wars. 1. The war against the antiwar movement Nixon’s first war was against the anti-Vietnam War movement. The president considered it subversive and thought it constrained his ability to prosecute the war in Southeast Asia on his terms. In 1970, he approved the top-secret Huston Plan, authorizing the CIA, the FBI and military intelligence units to intensify electronic surveillance of individuals identified as “domestic security threats.” The plan called for, among other things, intercepting mail and lifting restrictions on “surreptitious entry” — that is, break-ins or “black bag jobs.” Thomas Charles Huston, the White House aide who devised the plan, informed Nixon that it was illegal, but the president approved it regardless. It was not formally rescinded until FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover objected — not on principle, but because he considered those types of activities the FBI’s turf. Undeterred, Nixon remained fixated on such operations. In a memorandum dated March 3, 1970, presidential aide Patrick Buchanan wrote to Nixon about what he called the “institutionalized power of the left concentrated in the foundations that succor the Democratic Party.” Of particular concern was the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank with liberal leanings. On June 17, 1971 — exactly one year before the Watergate break-in — Nixon met in the Oval Office with his chief of staff, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, and national security adviser Henry Kissinger. At issue was a file about former president Lyndon Johnson’s handling of the 1968 bombing halt in Vietnam. “You can blackmail Johnson on this stuff, and it might be worth doing,” Haldeman said, according to the tape of the meeting. “Yeah,” Kissinger said, “but Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together for three years.” They wanted the complete story of Johnson’s actions. “Huston swears to God there’s a file on it at Brookings,” Haldeman said. “Bob,” Nixon said, “now you remember Huston’s plan? Implement it. . . . I mean, I want it implemented on a thievery basis. God damn it, get in and get those files. Blow the safe and get it.” Nixon would not let the matter drop. Thirteen days later, according to another taped discussion with Haldeman and Kissinger, the president said: “Break in and take it out. You understand?” The next morning, Nixon said: “Bob, get on the Brookings thing right away. I’ve got to get that safe cracked over there.” And later that morning, he persisted, “Who’s gonna break in the Brookings Institution?” For reasons that have never been made clear, the break-in apparently was not carried out. 2. The war on the news media Nixon’s second war was waged ceaselessly against the press, which was reporting more insistently on the faltering Vietnam War and the effectiveness of the antiwar movement. Although Hoover thought he had shut down the Huston Plan, it was in fact implemented by high-level Nixon deputies. A “Plumbers” unit and burglary team were set up under the direction of White House counsel John Ehrlichman and an assistant, Egil Krogh, and led by the operational chiefs of the future Watergate burglary, ex-CIA operative Howard Hunt and former FBI agent G. Gordon Liddy. Hunt was hired as a consultant by Nixon political aide Charles Colson, whose take-no-prisoners sensibility matched the president’s. An early assignment was to destroy the reputation of Daniel Ellsberg, who had provided the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War, to the news media in 1971. Publication of the documents in the New York Times, the Washington Post and eventually other newspapers had sent Nixon into rants and rages, recorded on his tapes, about Ellsberg, the antiwar movement, the press, Jews, the American left and liberals in Congress — all of whom he conflated. Though Ellsberg was already under indictment and charged with espionage, the team headed by Hunt and Liddy broke into the office of his psychiatrist, seeking information that might smear Ellsberg and undermine his credibility in the antiwar movement. “You can’t drop it, Bob,” Nixon told Haldeman on June 29, 1971. “You can’t let the Jew steal that stuff and get away with it. You understand?” He went on: “People don’t trust these Eastern establishment people. He’s Harvard. He’s a Jew. You know, and he’s an arrogant intellectual.” Nixon’s anti-Semitic rages were well-known to those who worked most closely with him, including some aides who were Jewish. As we reported in our 1976 book, “The Final Days,” he would tell his deputies, including Kissinger, that “the Jewish cabal is out to get me.” In a July 3, 1971, conversation with Haldeman, he said: “The government is full of Jews. Second, most Jews are disloyal. You know what I mean? You have a Garment [White House counsel Leonard Garment] and a Kissinger and, frankly, a Safire [presidential speechwriter William Safire], and, by God, they’re exceptions. But Bob, generally speaking, you can’t trust the bastards. They turn on you.” Ellsberg’s leak seemed to feed his prejudice and paranoia. In response to suspected leaks to the press about Vietnam, Kissinger had ordered FBI wiretaps in 1969 on the telephones of 17 journalists and White House aides, without court approval. Many news stories based on the purported leaks questioned progress in the American war effort, further fueling the antiwar movement. In a tape from the Oval Office on Feb. 22, 1971, Nixon said, “In the short run, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it, to run this war in a dictatorial way, kill all the reporters and carry on the war.” “The press is your enemy,” Nixon explained five days later in a meeting with Adm. Thomas H. Moorer, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, according to another tape. “Enemies. Understand that? . . . Now, never act that way . . . give them a drink, you know, treat them nice, you just love it, you’re trying to be helpful. But don’t help the bastards. Ever. Because they’re trying to stick the knife right in our groin.” 3. The war against the Democrats In Nixon’s third war, he took the weapons in place — the Plumbers, wiretapping and burglary — and deployed them against the Democrats challenging his reelection. John N. Mitchell, Nixon’s campaign manager and confidante, met with Liddy at the Justice Department in early 1972, when Mitchell was attorney general. Liddy presented a $1 million plan, code-named “Gemstone,” for spying and sabotage during the upcoming presidential campaign. According to the Senate Watergate report and Liddy’s 1980 autobiography, he used multicolored charts prepared by the CIA to describe elements of the plan. Operation Diamond would neutralize antiwar protesters with mugging squads and kidnapping teams; Operation Coal would funnel cash to Rep. Shirley Chisholm, a black congresswoman from Brooklyn seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, in an effort to sow racial and gender discord in the party; Operation Opal would use electronic surveillance against various targets, including the headquarters of Democratic presidential candidates Edmund Muskie and George McGovern; Operation Sapphire would station prostitutes on a yacht, wired for sound, off Miami Beach during the Democratic National Convention. Mitchell rejected the plans and told Liddy to burn the charts. At a second meeting, less than three weeks later, Liddy presented a scaled-back, $500,000 version of the plan; Mitchell turned it down again. But soon after, Mitchell approved a $250,000 version, according to Jeb Magruder, the deputy campaign manager. It included intelligence-gathering on the Democrats through wiretaps and burglaries. Under oath, Mitchell later denied approving the plan. He testified that he told Magruder: “We don’t need this. I’m tired of hearing it.” By his own account, he did not object on the grounds that the plan was illegal. On Oct. 10, 1972, we wrote a story in The Post outlining the extensive sabotage and spying operations of the Nixon campaign and White House, particularly against Muskie, and stating that the Watergate burglary was not an isolated event. The story said that at least 50 operatives had been involved in the espionage and sabotage, many of them under the direction of a young California lawyer named Donald Segretti; several days later, we reported that Segretti had been hired by Dwight Chapin, Nixon’s appointments secretary. (The Senate Watergate committee later found more than 50 saboteurs, including 22 who were paid by Segretti.) Herbert Kalmbach, Nixon’s personal attorney, paid Segretti more than $43,000 from leftover campaign funds for these activities. Throughout the operation, Segretti was contacted regularly by Howard Hunt. The Senate investigation provided more detail about the effectiveness of the covert efforts against Muskie, who in 1971 and early 1972 was considered by the White House to be the Democrat most capable of beating Nixon. The president’s campaign paid Muskie’s chauffeur, a campaign volunteer named Elmer Wyatt, $1,000 a month to photograph internal memos, position papers, schedules and strategy documents, and deliver copies to Mitchell and Nixon’s campaign staff. Other sabotage directed at Muskie included bogus news releases and allegations of sexual improprieties against other Democratic candidates — produced on counterfeit Muskie stationery. A favored dirty trick that caused havoc at campaign stops involved sweeping up the shoes that Muskie aides left in hotel hallways to be polished, and then depositing them in a dumpster. Haldeman, the White House chief of staff, advised Nixon of the Chapin-Segretti sabotage plan in May 1971, according to one of the president’s tapes. In a memo to Haldeman and Mitchell dated April 12, 1972, Patrick Buchanan and another Nixon aide wrote: “Our primary objective, to prevent Senator Muskie from sweeping the early primaries, locking up the convention in April, and uniting the Democratic Party behind him for the fall, has been achieved.” The tapes also reveal Nixon’s obsession with another Democrat: Sen. Edward Kennedy. One of Hunt’s earliest undertakings for the White House was to dig up dirt on Kennedy’s sex life, building on a 1969 auto accident at Chappaquiddick, Mass., that resulted in the death of a young Kennedy aide, Mary Jo Kopechne. Though Kennedy had vowed not to seek the presidency in 1972, he was certain to play a big role in the campaign and had not ruled out a 1976 run. “I’d really like to get Kennedy taped,” Nixon told Haldeman in April 1971. According to Haldeman’s 1994 book, “The Haldeman Diaries,” the president also wanted to have Kennedy photographed in compromising situations and leak the images to the press. And when Kennedy received Secret Service protection as he campaigned for McGovern, the Democratic presidential nominee, Nixon and Haldeman discussed a novel plan to keep him under surveillance: They would insert a retired Secret Service agent, Robert Newbrand, who had been part of Nixon’s protection detail when he was vice president, into the team protecting Kennedy. “I’ll talk to Newbrand and tell him how to approach it,” Haldeman said, “because Newbrand will do anything that I tell him.” “We just might get lucky and catch this son of a bitch and ruin him for ’76,” replied the president, adding, “That’s going to be fun.” On Sept. 8, 1971, Nixon ordered Ehrlichman to direct the Internal Revenue Service to investigate the tax returns of all the likely Democratic presidential candidates, as well as Kennedy. “Are we going after their tax returns?” Nixon asked. “You know what I mean? There’s a lot of gold in them thar hills.” 4. The war on justice The arrest of the Watergate burglars set in motion Nixon’s fourth war, against the American system of justice. It was a war of lies and hush money, a conspiracy that became necessary to conceal the roles of top officials and to hide the president’s campaign of illegal espionage and political sabotage, including the covert operations that Mitchell described as “the White House horrors” during the Watergate hearings: the Huston Plan, the Plumbers, the Ellsberg break-in, Liddy’s Gemstone plan and the proposed break-in at Brookings. In a June 23, 1972, tape recording, six days after the arrests at the Watergate, Haldeman warned Nixon that “on the investigation, you know, the Democratic break-in thing, we’re back in the problem area, because the FBI is not under control . . . their investigation is now leading into some productive areas, because they’ve been able to trace the money.” Haldeman said Mitchell had come up with a plan for the CIA to claim that national security secrets would be compromised if the FBI did not halt its Watergate investigation. Nixon approved the scheme and ordered Haldeman to call in CIA Director Richard Helms and his deputy Vernon Walters. “Play it tough,” the president directed. “That’s the way they play it, and that’s the way we are going to play it.” The contents of the tape were made public on Aug. 5, 1974. Four days later, Nixon resigned. Another tape captured discussions in the Oval Office on Aug. 1, 1972, six weeks after the burglars’ arrest, and the day on which The Post published our first story showing that Nixon campaign funds had gone into the bank account of one of the burglars. Nixon and Haldeman discussed paying off the burglars and their leaders to keep them from talking to federal investigators. “They have to be paid,” Nixon said. “That’s all there is to that.” On March 21, 1973, in one of the most memorable Watergate exchanges caught on tape, Nixon met with his counsel, John W. Dean, who since the break-in had been tasked with coordinating the coverup. “We’re being blackmailed” by Hunt and the burglars, Dean reported, and more people “are going to start perjuring themselves.” “How much money do you need?” Nixon asked. “I would say these people are going to cost a million dollars over the next two years,” Dean replied. “And you could get it in cash,” the president said. “I, I know where it could be gotten. I mean, it’s not easy, but it could be done.” Hunt was demanding $120,000 immediately. They discussed executive clemency for him and the burglars. “I am not sure that you will ever be able to deliver on the clemency,” Dean said. “It may just be too hot.” “You can’t do it till after the ’74 election, that’s for sure,” Nixon declared. Haldeman then entered the room, and Nixon led the search for ways “to take care of the jackasses who are in jail.” They discussed a secret $350,000 stash of cash kept in the White House, the possibility of using priests to help hide payments to the burglars, “washing” the money though Las Vegas or New York bookmakers, and empaneling a new grand jury so everyone could plead the Fifth Amendment or claim memory failure. Finally, they decided to send Mitchell on an emergency fundraising mission. The president praised Dean’s efforts. “You handled it just right. You contained it. Now after the election, we’ve got to have another plan.” 5. The war on history Nixon’s final war, waged even to this day by some former aides and historical revisionists, aims to play down the significance of Watergate and present it as a blip on the president’s record. Nixon lived for 20 years after his resignation and worked tirelessly to minimize the scandal. Though he accepted a full pardon from President Gerald Ford, Nixon insisted that he had not participated in any crimes. In his 1977 television interviews with British journalist David Frost, he said that he had “let the American people down” but that he had not obstructed justice. “I didn’t think of it as a coverup. I didn’t intend a coverup. Let me say, if I intended the coverup, believe me, I would have done it.” In his 1978 memoir “RN,” Nixon addressed his role in Watergate: “My actions and omissions, while regrettable and possibly indefensible, were not impeachable.” Twelve years later, in his book “In the Arena,” he decried a dozen “myths” about Watergate and claimed that he was innocent of many of the charges made against him. One myth, he said, was that he ordered the payment of hush money to Hunt and others. Yet, the March 21, 1973, tape shows that he ordered Dean to get the money 12 times. Even now, there are old Nixon hands and defenders who dismiss the importance of Watergate or claim that key questions remain unanswered. This year, Thomas Mallon, director of the creative writing program at George Washington University, published a novel called “Watergate,” a sometimes witty and entirely fictional story featuring many of the real players. Frank Gannon, a former Nixon White House aide who now works for the Nixon Foundation, reviewed the book for the Wall Street Journal. “What emerges from ‘Watergate’ is an acute sense of how much we still don’t know about the events of June 17, 1972,” Gannon wrote. “Who ordered the break-in? . . . What was its real purpose? Was it purposely botched? How much was the CIA involved? . . . And how did a politician as tough and canny as Richard Nixon allow himself to be brought down by a ‘third rate burglary?’ “Your guess is as good as mine.” Of course, Gannon is correct in noting that there are some unanswered questions — but not the big ones. By focusing on the supposed paucity of details concerning the burglary of June 17, 1972, he would divert us from the larger story. And about that story, there is no need to guess. In the summer of 1974, it was neither the press nor the Democrats who rose up against Nixon, but the president’s own Republican Party. On July 24, the Supreme Court ruled 8 to 0 that Nixon would have to turn over the secret tapes demanded by the Watergate special prosecutor. Three of the president’s appointees to the court — Chief Justice Warren E. Burger, Justice Harry Blackmun and Justice Lewis Powell — joined that opinion. The other Nixon appointee, Justice William Rehnquist, recused himself. Three days later, six Republicans on the House Judiciary Committee joined the Democrats in voting, 27 to 11, to recommend Nixon’s impeachment for nine acts of obstruction of justice in the Watergate coverup. By August, Nixon’s impending impeachment in the House was a certainty, and a group of Republicans led by Sen. Barry Goldwater banded together to declare his presidency over. “Too many lies, too many crimes,” Goldwater said. On Aug. 7, the group visited Nixon at the White House. How many votes would he have in a Senate trial? the president asked. “I took kind of a nose count today,” Goldwater replied, “and I couldn’t find more than four very firm votes, and those would be from older Southerners. Some are very worried about what’s been going on, and are undecided, and I’m one of them.” The next day, Nixon went on national television and announced that he would resign. In his last remarks about Watergate as a senator, 77-year-old Sam Ervin, a revered constitutionalist respected by both parties, posed a final question: “Why was Watergate?” The president and his aides, Ervin answered, had “a lust for political power.” That lust, he explained, “blinded them to ethical considerations and legal requirements; to Aristotle’s aphorism that the good of man must be the end of politics.” Nixon had lost his moral authority as president. His secret tapes — and what they reveal — will probably be his most lasting legacy. On them, he is heard talking almost endlessly about what would be good for him, his place in history and, above all, his grudges, animosities and schemes for revenge. The dog that never seems to bark is any discussion of what is good and necessary for the well-being of the nation. The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise. On the day he left, Aug. 9, 1974, Nixon gave an emotional farewell speech in the East Room to his staff, his friends and his Cabinet. His family stood with him. Near the end of his remarks, he waved his arm, as if to highlight the most important thing he had to say. “Always remember,” he said, “others may hate you, but those who hate you don’t win unless you hate them, and then you destroy yourself.” His hatred had brought about his downfall. Nixon apparently grasped this insight, but it was too late. He had already destroyed himself. contactform@carlbernstein.com woodwardb@washpost.com Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward are the co-authors of two Watergate books, “All the President’s Men,” published in 1974, and “The Final Days,” published in 1976. This is their first joint byline in 36 years. Woodward and Bernstein, along with other central figures in Watergate, will be speaking at a Washington Post Live forum Monday evening. Watch the livestream starting at 6:15 p.m. at www.washingtonpost.com/watergate.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2156429/Do-I-Murdoch-scandal-set-engulf-Cameron-appear-Leveson-Inquiry-week.html

Forty years after Watergate, investigative journalism is at risk By Leonard Downie Jr., Published: June 7, 2012 The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/forty-years-after-watergate-investigative-journalism-is-at-risk/2012/06/07/gJQArTzlLV_story.html?hpid=z2 Investigative reporting in America did not begin with Watergate. But it became entrenched in American journalism — and has been steadily spreading around the world — largely because of Watergate. Now, 40 years after Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote their first stories about the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in Washington’s Watergate office building, the future of investigative reporting is at risk in the chaotic digital reconstruction of journalism in the United States. Resource-intensive investigative reporting has become a burden for shrunken newspapers struggling to reinvent themselves and survive. Nonprofit start-ups seeking to fill the gap are financially fragile themselves, with their sustainability uncertain. American investigative journalism has historically ebbed and flowed. It evolved from revolutionary-era pamphleteers, who harassed both the British and the founding fathers, to early 20th-century muckrakers, whose newspaper, magazine and book exposés of exploitative business monopolies and government corruption helped spur Teddy Roosevelt’s trust-busting, the creation of the Food and Drug Administration and the popular election of the Senate. Investigative journalism went into hibernation during the two world wars, the Great Depression and the suppression of dissent in the McCarthy era. But beginning in the 1960s, it gradually revived amid the upheaval of the civil rights, counterculture and anti-Vietnam War movements. I was among a small but growing number of investigative reporters at newspapers around the country at the time. My 1966 series in The Washington Post about the incompetent judges, rapacious lawyers and skid row atmosphere in the old D.C. Court of General Sessions played a role in its abolition and replacement by the present D.C. Superior Court. The Pulitzer Prize board created an annual award for investigative reporting in 1964. The three television networks of the era expanded their evening news shows from 15 to 30 minutes starting in 1963 and began airing prime-time investigative documentaries. The 1964 Supreme Court decision in New York Times v. Sullivan made it much more difficult for public officials being scrutinized by the press to sue successfully for libel, and the Freedom of Information Act, passed by Congress in 1966, made it much easier for reporters to find vital information. Yet, for several months after the Watergate burglary in 1972, Woodward, Bernstein and their colleagues on the local news staff of The Post were alone on the story. We were ignored and doubted by the rest of the news media and most of the country, and under heavy fire from the Nixon administration and its supporters. It was a tense time for those of us working with Bob and Carl, with our credibility and our newspaper’s future on the line. We worried over every word of every story before putting it in the paper. Finally, toward the end of the year, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and CBS News began to provide almost welcome competition. Eleven days before President Richard Nixon’s reelection in November 1972, Walter Cronkite devoted an unprecedented 15 minutes of his “CBS Evening News” broadcast to Watergate, prominently featuring The Post’s stories. He described “the Watergate affair” as a “high-level campaign of political sabotage and espionage apparently unparalleled in American history.” By the time Nixon resigned in 1974, a federal judge, FBI investigators, special prosecutors and Congress had all played significant parts in holding him and his White House accountable for Watergate crimes. But, even after decades of second-guessing by others of the details, mysteries and meanings of Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein’s role remains crucial. For journalism, their Watergate stories and “All the President’s Men” (the book and the movie) have had an enduring impact. Inspired by Watergate, generations of young journalists have entered the profession to become investigative reporters. Newspapers and television networks and stations formed investigative teams and showcased their work. National magazines published long investigative pieces. Led by “60 Minutes,” television news magazines featuring investigative reporting proliferated for years. Harking back to the original muckrakers, more journalists, including Woodward, expanded their reporting to book investigations of issues from environmental dangers to Wall Street wrongdoing to the conduct of American wars from Vietnam to Iraq. Citizen journalists eventually joined in on the Web and social media with blogs, crowdsourcing contributions and tweets that have sometimes become the leading edge of the next investigative story. Investigative reporting has taken on every aspect of American society — from government, politics, business and finance to education, social welfare, culture and sports — and has won the lion’s share of each year’s journalism prizes. No matter how unpopular the news media may sometimes be, there has been, ever since Watergate, an expectation that the press would hold accountable those with power and influence over the rest of us. As Jon Marshall wrote last year in “Watergate’s Legacy and the Press,” Watergate “shaped the way investigative reporting is perceived and practiced and how political leaders and the public respond to journalists.” Woodward and Bernstein’s techniques were hardly original. But, propagated by “All the President’s Men,” they became central to the ethos of investigative reporting: Become an expert on your subject. Knock on doors to talk to sources in person. Protect the confidentiality of sources when necessary. Never rely on a single source. Find documents. Follow the money. Pile one hard-won detail on top of another until a pattern becomes discernible. Just a few years ago, Dana Priest of The Post used similar methods to reveal the CIA’s secret overseas prisons in which terrorism suspects were aggressively interrogated. Watergate also transformed some investigative reporters, led by Woodward, into marketable brand names. They appeared on television, won lucrative book and magazine contracts, and were paid for speeches. For a time, too many reporters rushed too quickly to find their own Watergate. They made notable mistakes and often gave each new scandal, no matter how trivial, the “-gate” suffix. Governments, public officials, corporations, executives and courts pushed back with public relations campaigns, lawsuits, subpoenas, the jailing of some journalists and leak investigations of suspected sources. But the best investigative reporters became more sophisticated, aided by computers, the Internet, and the training and resources of the Investigative Reporters and Editors group, which I helped found in 1975. Their journalism went deeper, explaining while revealing, sometimes illuminating solutions while exposing problems. Investigative reporting in the pages of The Post has helped reduce police shootings in the District; reform the treatment of helpless wards of the government, change practices of the United Way, the Nature Conservancy and the Smithsonian; expose corruption in Congress; and improve the rehabilitation and living conditions of severely disabled veterans at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Perhaps the surest sign of the endurance and importance of Watergate-legacy investigative reporting is the questioning of whether the news media should have more aggressively and quickly exposed the underlying causes of recent national crises. Could the rationale and military plans for the invasion of Iraq have been more vigorously scrutinized in the run-up to the war? Was enough done to examine risky Wall Street manipulations before the 2008 financial meltdown? We continue to live in perilous times, making investigative journalism as essential to our democracy as the Watergate stories were. However, the impact of digital media and dramatic shifts in audience and advertising revenue have undermined the financial model that subsidized so much investigative reporting during the economic golden age of newspapers, the last third of the 20th century. Such reporting remains a high priority at many financially challenged papers, which continue to produce accountability journalism that matters to their communities — but they have far fewer staff members and resources to devote to it. Meanwhile, much of the remaining investigative reporting on television stations and networks, which also are struggling to maintain audience and revenue, consists of consumer-protection and crime stories that drive ratings. Into this breach have come a variety of nonprofit, Web-based, local, regional and national investigative reporting organizations started by journalists who left commercial news outlets: ProPublica in New York, the Texas Tribune in Austin, California Watchwith offices throughout the state, and the Voice of San Diego, among many others. They have been funded by charitable foundations, philanthropists, other donors and some university journalism schools. Most of them have small staffs and budgets, but their zeal for their mission reminds me of the Washington Post reporters and editors who chased after Watergate four decades ago. Some of their journalism already has had significant local and even national impact. Their Web traffic is relatively small, but a number of them have reached much wider audiences by having their stories published and broadcast by numerous newspapers, television and public radio stations, and their Web sites. Investigative nonprofits are being started all the time. But many of the fledgling sites are struggling to survive. Foundations that provide seed money seldom are interested in helping with long-term sustainability. Fundraising and membership drives must compete with other causes. Some start-ups have already failed. Others have had to cut costs and staff to stay alive. This Watergate anniversary will surely elicit where-are-they-now stories, more reminiscences by those key players who are still with us and yet more second-guessing about what happened and why 40 years ago. Journalism and the American people would be best served if it were also an occasion for widespread recognition of the importance of accountability journalism in our democracy — and the need to ensure that it survives and flourishes in the digital cacophony. downiel@washpost.com Leonard Downie Jr. is the Weil family professor of journalism at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and vice president at large of The Washington Post, where he worked for 44 years. He was The Post’s executive editor from 1991 to 2008.

Poster's Note: There is a lot of valuable information and analysis in this important article: The Economy Comes Unglued by PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS www.counterpunch.org June 06, 2012 http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/06/06/the-economy-comes-unglued/ Ever since the beginning of the financial crisis and Quantitative Easing, the question has been before us: How can the Federal Reserve maintain zero interest rates for banks and negative real interest rates for savers and bond holders when the US government is adding $1.5 trillion to the national debt every year via its budget deficits? Not long ago the Fed announced that it was going to continue this policy for another 2 or 3 years. Indeed, the Fed is locked into the policy. Without the artificially low interest rates, the debt service on the national debt would be so large that it would raise questions about the US Treasury’s credit rating and the viability of the dollar, and the trillions of dollars in Interest Rate Swaps and other derivatives would come unglued. In other words, financial deregulation leading to Wall Street’s gambles, the US government’s decision to bail out the banks and to keep them afloat, and the Federal Reserve’s zero interest rate policy have put the economic future of the US and its currency in an untenable and dangerous position. It will not be possible to continue to flood the bond markets with $1.5 trillion in new issues each year when the interest rate on the bonds is less than the rate of inflation. Everyone who purchases a Treasury bond is purchasing a depreciating asset. Moreover, the capital risk of investing in Treasuries is very high. The low interest rate means that the price paid for the bond is very high. A rise in interest rates, which must come sooner or later, will collapse the price of the bonds and inflict capital losses on bond holders, both domestic and foreign. The question is: when is sooner or later? The purpose of this article is to examine that question. Let us begin by answering the question: how has such an untenable policy managed to last this long? A number of factors are contributing to the stability of the dollar and the bond market. A very important factor is the situation in Europe. There are real problems there as well, and the financial press keeps our focus on Greece, Europe, and the euro. Will Greece exit the European Union or be kicked out? Will the sovereign debt problem spread to Spain, Italy, and essentially everywhere except for Germany and the Netherlands? Will it be the end of the EU and the euro? These are all very dramatic questions that keep focus off the American situation, which is probably even worse. The Treasury bond market is also helped by the fear individual investors have of the equity market, which has been turned into a gambling casino by high-frequency trading. High-frequency trading is electronic trading based on mathematical models that make the decisions. Investment firms compete on the basis of speed, capturing gains on a fraction of a penny, and perhaps holding positions for only a few seconds. These are not long-term investors. Content with their daily earnings, they close out all positions at the end of each day. High-frequency trades now account for 70-80% of all equity trades. The result is major heartburn for traditional investors, who are leaving the equity market. They end up in Treasuries, because they are unsure of the solvency of banks who pay next to nothing for deposits, whereas 10-year Treasuries will pay about 2% nominal, which means, using the official Consumer Price Index, that they are losing 1% of their capital each year. Using John Williams’ (shadowstats.com) correct measure of inflation, they are losing far more. Still, the loss is about 2 percentage points less than being in a bank, and unlike banks, the Treasury can have the Federal Reserve print the money to pay off its bonds. Therefore, bond investment at least returns the nominal amount of the investment, even if its real value is much lower. ( For a description of High-frequency trading, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_frequency_trading ) The presstitute financial media tells us that flight from European sovereign debt, from the doomed euro, and from the continuing real estate disaster into US Treasuries provides funding for Washington’s $1.5 trillion annual deficits. Investors influenced by the financial press might be responding in this way. Another explanation for the stability of the Fed’s untenable policy is collusion between Washington, the Fed, and Wall Street. We will be looking at this as we progress. Unlike Japan, whose national debt is the largest of all, Americans do not own their own public debt. Much of US debt is owned abroad, especially by China, Japan, and OPEC, the oil exporting countries. This places the US economy in foreign hands. If China, for example, were to find itself unduly provoked by Washington, China could dump up to $2 trillion in US dollar-dominated assets on world markets. All sorts of prices would collapse, and the Fed would have to rapidly create the money to buy up the Chinese dumping of dollar-denominated financial instruments. The dollars printed to purchase the dumped Chinese holdings of US dollar assets would expand the supply of dollars in currency markets and drive down the dollar exchange rate. The Fed, lacking foreign currencies with which to buy up the dollars would have to appeal for currency swaps to sovereign debt troubled Europe for euros, to Russia, surrounded by the US missile system, for rubles, to Japan, a country over its head in American commitment, for yen, in order to buy up the dollars with euros, rubles, and yen. These currency swaps would be on the books, unredeemable and making additional use of such swaps problematical. In other words, even if the US government can pressure its allies and puppets to swap their harder currencies for a depreciating US currency, it would not be a repeatable process. The components of the American Empire don’t want to be in dollars any more than do the BRICS. However, for China, for example, to dump its dollar holdings all at once would be costly as the value of the dollar-denominated assets would decline as they dumped them. Unless China is faced with US military attack and needs to defang the aggressor, China as a rational economic actor would prefer to slowly exit the US dollar. Neither do Japan, Europe, nor OPEC wish to destroy their own accumulated wealth from America’s trade deficits by dumping dollars, but the indications are that they all wish to exit their dollar holdings. Unlike the US financial press, the foreigners who hold dollar assets look at the annual US budget and trade deficits, look at the sinking US economy, look at Wall Street’s uncovered gambling bets, look at the war plans of the delusional hegemon and conclude: “I’ve got to carefully get out of this.” US banks also have a strong interest in preserving the status quo. They are holders of US Treasuries and potentially even larger holders. They can borrow from the Federal Reserve at zero interest rates and purchase 10-year Treasuries at 2%, thus earning a nominal profit of 2% to offset derivative losses. The banks can borrow dollars from the Fed for free and leverage them in derivative transactions. As Nomi Prins puts it, the US banks don’t want to trade against themselves and their free source of funding by selling their bond holdings. Moreover, in the event of foreign flight from dollars, the Fed could boost the foreign demand for dollars by requiring foreign banks that want to operate in the US to increase their reserve amounts, which are dollar based. I could go on, but I believe this is enough to show that even actors in the process who could terminate it have themselves a big stake in not rocking the boat and prefer to quietly and slowly sneak out of dollars before the crisis hits. This is not possible indefinitely as the process of gradual withdrawal from the dollar would result in continuous small declines in dollar values that would end in a rush to exit, but Americans are not the only delusional people. The very process of slowly getting out can bring the American house down. The BRICS–Brazil, the largest economy in South America, Russia, the nuclear armed and energy independent economy on which Western Europe ( Washington’s NATO puppets) are dependent for energy, India, nuclear armed and one of Asia’s two rising giants, China, nuclear armed, Washington’s largest creditor (except for the Fed), supplier of America’s manufactured and advanced technology products, and the new bogyman for the military-security complex’s next profitable cold war, and South Africa, the largest economy in Africa–are in the process of forming a new bank. The new bank will permit the five large economies to conduct their trade without use of the US dollar. In addition, Japan, an American puppet state since WW II, is on the verge of entering into an agreement with China in which the Japanese yen and the Chinese yuan will be directly exchanged. The trade between the two Asian countries would be conducted in their own currencies without the use of the US dollar. This reduces the cost of foreign trade between the two countries, because it eliminates payments for foreign exchange commissions to convert from yen and yuan into dollars and back into yen and yuan. Moreover, this official explanation for the new direct relationship avoiding the US dollar is simply diplomacy speaking. The Japanese are hoping, like the Chinese, to get out of the practice of accumulating ever more dollars by having to park their trade surpluses in US Treasuries. The Japanese US puppet government hopes that the Washington hegemon does not require the Japanese government to nix the deal with China. Now we have arrived at the nitty and gritty. The small percentage of Americans who are aware and informed are puzzled why the banksters have escaped with their financial crimes without prosecution. The answer might be that the banks “too big to fail” are adjuncts of Washington and the Federal Reserve in maintaining the stability of the dollar and Treasury bond markets in the face of an untenable Fed policy. Let us first look at how the big banks can keep the interest rates on Treasuries low, below the rate of inflation, despite the constant increase in US debt as a percent of GDP–thus preserving the Treasury’s ability to service the debt. The imperiled banks too big to fail have a huge stake in low interest rates and the success of the Fed’s policy. The big banks are positioned to make the Fed’s policy a success. JPMorganChase and other giant-sized banks can drive down Treasury interest rates and, thereby, drive up the prices of bonds, producing a rally, by selling Interest Rate Swaps (IRSwaps). A financial company that sells IRSwaps is selling an agreement to pay floating interest rates for fixed interest rates. The buyer is purchasing an agreement that requires him to pay a fixed rate of interest in exchange for receiving a floating rate. The reason for a seller to take the short side of the IRSwap, that is, to pay a floating rate for a fixed rate, is his belief that rates are going to fall. Short-selling can make the rates fall, and thus drive up the prices of Treasuries. When this happens, as the charts at Market Oracle illustrate, there is a rally in the Treasury bond market that the presstitute financial media attributes to “flight to the safe haven of the US dollar and Treasury bonds.” In fact, the circumstantial evidence (see the charts in the link above) is that the swaps are sold by Wall Street whenever the Federal Reserve needs to prevent a rise in interest rates in order to protect its otherwise untenable policy. The swap sales create the impression of a flight to the dollar, but no actual flight occurs. As the IRSwaps require no exchange of any principal or real asset, and are only a bet on interest rate movements, there is no limit to the volume of IRSwaps. This apparent collusion suggests to some observers that the reason the Wall Street banksters have not been prosecuted for their crimes is that they are an essential part of the Federal Reserve’s policy to preserve the US dollar as world currency. Possibly the collusion between the Federal Reserve and the banks is organized, but it doesn’t have to be. The banks are beneficiaries of the Fed’s zero interest rate policy. It is in the banks’ interest to support it. Organized collusion is not required. Let us now turn to gold and silver bullion. Based on sound analysis, Gerald Celente and other gifted seers predicted that the price of gold would be $2000 per ounce by the end of last year. Gold and silver bullion continued during 2011 their ten-year rise, but in 2012 the price of gold and silver have been knocked down, with gold being $350 per ounce off its $1900 high. In view of the analysis that I have presented, what is the explanation for the reversal in bullion prices? The answer again is shorting. Some knowledgeable people within the financial sector believe that the Federal Reserve (and perhaps also the European Central Bank) places short sales of bullion through the investment banks, guaranteeing any losses by pushing a key on the computer keyboard, as central banks can create money out of thin air. Insiders inform me that as a tiny percent of those on the buy side of short sells actually want to take delivery on the gold or silver bullion, and are content with the financial money settlement, there is no limit to short selling of gold and silver. Short selling can actually exceed the known quantity of gold and silver. Some who have been watching the process for years believe that government-directed short-selling has been going on for a long time. Even without government participation, banks can control the volume of paper trading in gold and profit on the swings that they create. Recently short selling is so aggressive that it not merely slows the rise in bullion prices but drives the price down. Is this aggressiveness a sign that the rigged system is on the verge of becoming unglued? In other words, “our government,” which allegedly represents us, rather than the powerful private interests who elect “our government” with their multi-million dollar campaign contributions, now legitimized by the Republican Supreme Court, is doing its best to deprive us mere citizens, slaves, indentured servants, and “domestic extremists” from protecting ourselves and our remaining wealth from the currency debauchery policy of the Federal Reserve. Naked short selling prevents the rising demand for physical bullion from raising bullion’s price. Jeff Nielson explains another way that banks can sell bullion shorts when they own no bullion. Nielson says that JP Morgan is the custodian for the largest long silver fund while being the largest short-seller of silver. Whenever the silver fund adds to its bullion holdings, JP Morgan shorts an equal amount. The short selling offsets the rise in price that would result from the increase in demand for physical silver. Nielson also reports that bullion prices can be suppressed by raising margin requirements on those who purchase bullion with leverage. The conclusion is that bullion markets can be manipulated just as can the Treasury bond market and interest rates. How long can the manipulations continue? When will the proverbial hit the fan? If we knew precisely the date, we would be the next mega-billionaires. Here are some of the catalysts waiting to ignite the conflagration that burns up the Treasury bond market and the US dollar: A war, demanded by the Israeli government, with Iran, beginning with Syria, that disrupts the oil flow and thereby the stability of the Western economies or brings the US and its weak NATO puppets into armed conflict with Russia and China. The oil spikes would degrade further the US and EU economies, but Wall Street would make money on the trades. An unfavorable economic statistic that wakes up investors as to the true state of the US economy, a statistic that the presstitute media cannot deflect. An affront to China, whose government decides that knocking the US down a few pegs into third world status is worth a trillion dollars. More derivate mistakes, such as JPMorganChase’s recent one, that send the US financial system again reeling and reminds us that nothing has changed. The list is long. There is a limit to how many stupid mistakes and corrupt financial policies the rest of the world is willing to accept from the US. When that limit is reached, it is all over for “the world’s sole superpower” and for holders of dollar-denominated instruments. Financial deregulation converted the financial system, which formerly served businesses and consumers, into a gambling casino where bets are not covered. These uncovered bets, together with the Fed’s zero interest rate policy, have exposed Americans’ living standard and wealth to large declines. Retired people living on their savings and investments, IRAs and 401(k)s can earn nothing on their money and are forced to consume their capital, thereby depriving heirs of inheritance. Accumulated wealth is consumed. As a result of jobs offshoring, the US has become an import-dependent country, dependent on foreign made manufactured goods, clothing, and shoes. When the dollar exchange rate falls, domestic US prices will rise, and US real consumption will take a big hit. Americans will consume less, and their standard of living will fall dramatically. The serious consequences of the enormous mistakes made in Washington, on Wall Street, and in corporate offices are being held at bay by an untenable policy of low interest rates and a corrupt financial press, while debt rapidly builds. The Fed has been through this experience once before. During WW II the Federal Reserve kept interest rates low in order to aid the Treasury’s war finance by minimizing the interest burden of the war debt. The Fed kept the interest rates low by buying the debt issues. The postwar inflation that resulted led to the Federal Reserve-Treasury Accord in 1951, in which agreement was reached that the Federal Reserve would cease monetizing the debt and permit interest rates to rise. Fed chairman Bernanke has spoken of an “exit strategy” and said that when inflation threatens, he can prevent the inflation by taking the money back out of the banking system. However, he can do that only by selling Treasury bonds, which means interest rates would rise. A rise in interest rates would threaten the derivative structure, cause bond losses, and raise the cost of both private and public debt service. In other words, to prevent inflation from debt monetization would bring on more immediate problems than inflation. Rather than collapse the system, wouldn’t the Fed be more likely to inflate away the massive debts? Eventually, inflation would erode the dollar’s purchasing power and use as the reserve currency, and the US government’s credit worthiness would waste away. However, the Fed, the politicians, and the financial gangsters would prefer a crisis later rather than sooner. Passing the sinking ship on to the next watch is preferable to going down with the ship oneself. As long as interest rate swaps can be used to boost Treasury bond prices, and as long as naked shorts of bullion can be used to keep silver and gold from rising in price, the false image of the US as a safe haven for investors can be perpetuated. However, the $230,000,000,000,000 in derivative bets by US banks might bring its own surprises. JPMorganChase has had to admit that its recently announced derivative loss of $2 billion is more than that. How much more remains to be seen. According to the Comptroller of the Currency the five largest banks hold 95.7% of all derivatives. The five banks holding $226 trillion in derivative bets are highly leveraged gamblers. For example, JPMorganChase has total assets of $1.8 trillion but holds $70 trillion in derivative bets, a ratio of $39 in derivative bets for every dollar of assets. Such a bank doesn’t have to lose very many bets before it is busted. Assets, of course, are not risk-based capital. According to the Comptroller of the Currency report, as of December 31, 2011, JPMorganChase held $70.2 trillion in derivatives and only $136 billion in risk-based capital. In other words, the bank’s derivative bets are 516 times larger than the capital that covers the bets. It is difficult to imagine a more reckless and unstable position for a bank to place itself in, but Goldman Sachs takes the cake. That bank’s $44 trillion in derivative bets is covered by only $19 billion in risk-based capital, resulting in bets 2,295 times larger than the capital that covers them. Bets on interest rates comprise 81% of all derivatives. These are the derivatives that support high US Treasury bond prices despite massive increases in US debt and its monetization. US banks’ derivative bets of $230 trillion, concentrated in five banks, are 15.3 times larger than the US GDP. A failed political system that allows unregulated banks to place uncovered bets 15 times larger than the US economy is a system that is headed for catastrophic failure. As the word spreads of the fantastic lack of judgment in the American political and financial systems, the catastrophe in waiting will become a reality. Everyone wants a solution, so I will provide one. The US government should simply cancel the $230 trillion in derivative bets, declaring them null and void. As no real assets are involved, merely gambling on notional values, the only major effect of closing out or netting all the swaps (mostly over-the-counter contracts between counter-parties) would be to take $230 trillion of leveraged risk out of the financial system. The financial gangsters who want to continue enjoying betting gains while the public underwrites their losses would scream and yell about the sanctity of contracts. However, a government that can murder its own citizens or throw them into dungeons without due process can abolish all the contracts it wants in the name of national security. And most certainly, unlike the war on terror, purging the financial system of the gambling derivatives would vastly improve national security. PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS was an editor of the Wall Street Journal and an Assistant Secretary of the U.S. Treasury. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached through his website

http://lewrockwell.com/orig13/horne-d2.1.1.html

Long-Sealed Watergate Documents May Be Released By JESSICA GRESKO WASHINGTON Government won't oppose release of some long-sealed court documents from Watergate case The Associated Press June 2, 2012 The U.S. Department of Justice says at least some materials sealed as part of the court case against seven men involved in the 1972 Watergate burglary should be released. The agency responded Friday to a request by a Texas history professor who is seeking access to materials he believes could help answer lingering questions about the burglary that led to President Richard Nixon's resignation. Luke Nichter of Texas A&M University-Central Texas in Killeen, Texas, wrote the chief judge of the federal court in Washington to ask that potentially hundreds of pages of documents be unsealed. The judge said in a letter made public earlier this year that the professor had "raised a very legitimate question" about whether the material should remain sealed, and he ordered the Department of Justice to respond with any objections. Justice attorney Elizabeth Shapiro wrote in a court document filed Friday that the office would not oppose the release of at least some documents. "Forty years after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee that began the chapter of U.S. history known as Watergate, no good reason exists to keep sealed many of the judicial records created during the trial of the Watergate burglars," she wrote. But Shapiro said three categories of documents should remain secret: certain documents containing personal information, grand jury information and documents about the content of illegally obtained wiretaps. In particular, Nichter wants access to records of at least two court hearings held behind closed doors and interviews and testimony given by Alfred Baldwin III, a former FBI agent who was hired to listen to and transcribe conversations from a phone the burglars wiretapped at the Democratic National Committee during a burglary on May 28, 1972. The burglars were caught when they returned to the office on June 17, 1972. There is some precedent for unsealing Watergate documents. In 2011 the same judge, U.S. District Chief Judge Royce Lamberth, ordered that a secret transcript of President Nixon's testimony to a grand jury about the Watergate break-in be made public. Lamberth agreed with historians that arguments for releasing the 297-page transcript outweighed arguments for secrecy, because the investigations are long over and Nixon died in 1994. Nichter, who also runs a website cataloging secret recordings made by President Nixon in the White House, said the government's reply is somewhat encouraging, though it's hard to tell from it what documents he might get access to. "I'm obviously going to get something, but I don't know what that something is," he said Saturday. Nichter said he would consult the judge to see how to proceed now that the government has responded.

What Rupert Hath Wrought! June 21, 2012 Reviewed by Geoffrey Wheatcroft The New York Review of Books Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain by Tom Watson and Martin Hickman Blue Rider, 360 pp., $26.95 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2012/jun/21/what-rupert-hath-wrought/

David Cameron 'cannot block Jeremy Hunt conduct investigation’ Jeremy Hunt is facing the prospect of a Whitehall investigation into his conduct after a committee of MPs warned that David Cameron cannot block such an inquiry. By Robert Winnett, Political Editor The Telegraph 8:51PM BST 01 Jun 2012 The Prime Minister has refused to refer Mr Hunt to the independent adviser on the ministerial code of conduct, despite senior government sources admitting that the Culture Secretary may have “technically breached” Whitehall rules. It emerged at the Leveson Inquiry this week that Mr Hunt had defied legal advice and discussed his opinion of News Corporation’s bid for BSkyB with James Murdoch. The Culture Secretary’s special adviser has already been forced to resign after dozens of private “inappropriate” text messages with a News Corp lobbyist were released. The ministerial code of conduct stipulates that ministers are responsible for their aides. However, within minutes of Mr Hunt having finished giving his evidence to the Leveson Inquiry, Downing Street cleared him of breaking the ministerial code. Sir Alex Allan, a Whitehall official whose role is to advise the Prime Minister on breaches of the code, may be forced to investigate by MPs after the intervention of the Commons public administration select committee (PASC). Bernard Jenkin, the chairman of the committee, said: “PASC has made clear . .  . that the Prime Minister’s adviser on ministerial interests should not have to depend on a referral from the Prime Minister in order to determine whether or not there has been a breach of the code.” He said PASC could consider the issue again when Parliament resumes after the Whitsun recess. Labour has also successfully demanded a parliamentary vote on whether Mr Hunt should be investigated

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/05/31/the-story-of-my-arrest-for-disrupting-tony-blair/

May 31, 2012 The New York Times British Minister Concedes Sympathy to Murdoch TV Bid By JOHN F. BURNS and RAVI SOMAIYA LONDON — With his career in the balance, Culture Minister Jeremy Hunt said at a judicial inquiry into the British media on Thursday that he had been personally sympathetic to a bid by Rupert Murdoch to take over Britain’s most lucrative pay- television network but that he did not act with any favorable bias. Mr. Hunt, 45, was the minister responsible for overseeing the regulatory processes involved in assessing the $12 billion Murdoch bid for the British Sky Broadcasting network, or BSkyB, and had the ultimate authority to approve it. In July, Mr. Murdoch withdrew the bid under pressure from the phone hacking scandal that has enveloped two tabloid newspapers in his British stable and shaken his global media empire to the core. Mr. Hunt faced intensive questions at the inquiry, headed by Lord Justice Sir Brian Leveson, over a series of e-mails, phone calls, text messages and other communications with the Murdochs and their executives that suggested sympathy for the bid. He sought to justify an apparent contradiction: his predecessor in assessing the bid, Business Secretary Vince Cable, had been removed for telling undercover reporters that he had “declared war on Mr. Murdoch.” In the face of the frequent and intimate communications, Mr. Hunt admitted that he had been sympathetic to the Murdochs but said he had set aside his own bias when taking on the “quasijudicial” decision. “As I understand it,” he said, “the point of a quasijudicial role is not that you approach it with a brain wiped clean, but you set aside any views you have and decide objectively.” Another central question pursued by Robert Jay, the lead lawyer for the inquiry, was whether Mr. Hunt had subtly adapted the bid process to suit the Murdochs. Mr. Hunt prevented a potentially time-consuming and costly assessment of the bid by British regulators by striking deals known as “undertakings in lieu” to address their concerns. But in the wake of the phone hacking scandal, he wrote to one of his advisors that “it feels like the world doesn’t trust the Murdochs further than they can be thrown”. He added that there had been 40,000 objections to the undertakings in lieu. The Hunt testimony is being closely watched in Britain for anything that might bring the scandal closer to Prime Minister David Cameron, who appointed Mr. Hunt and has himself faced questions about private discussions about the bid with Murdoch executives, which he has said were not inappropriate. Mr. Cameron, who has so far avoided serious political fallout from six months of forensic examination of the scandal at the inquiry and elsewhere, is expected to make his own appearance before the Leveson panel, perhaps as early as mid-June. Separate police inquiries into the tabloid scandal have resulted in the arrests of about 50 editors, reporters, and other staff members from the Murdoch papers, and the first criminal charges — for obstructing justice — were filed against six of those individuals earlier this month. More than 150 detectives and support staff members are engaged in police investigations into the alleged wrongdoing at the tabloids, which is said to have involved widespread phone hacking and bribing public officials, including police officers, to obtain information. With the criminal cases flowing from the scandal expected to continue for months, if not years, the Leveson inquiry, to avoid prejudicing the legal proceedings, has steered clear of any detailed examination of the wrongdoing at the tabloids. Instead, its focus has been on the ethical, cultural and political factors that engendered what happened at the tabloids, which have emerged during the scandal as beneficiaries of close interrelationships that involved journalists, politicians and police officers in what Mr. Cameron has described as a “cozy” world of complicity. At the Leveson hearings, the BSkyB bid, one of the largest corporate takeover moves in British history, has become a test case of that complicity. And the central question has been whether the Conservatives who dominate Mr. Cameron’s coalition government — through Mr. Hunt or through Mr. Cameron himself — sought to usher the bid to approval through personal and political relationships with Mr. Murdoch and his British executives, who had swung the support of the Murdoch-owned newspapers to the Conservatives in the 2010 election that brought them to power. Mr. Hunt and Mr. Cameron, as well as senior government officials involved in overseeing the bid, have denied any improper interference with the process in statements in Parliament and elsewhere. But their roles in the affair have attracted widespread criticism, some of it within the ranks of the ruling Conservative Party, where disquiet about the handling of the BSkyB bid and a range of other issues, including a deeply unpopular budget earlier this year and what has been seen as a mishandling of controversial reforms in the realms of justice, health and welfare, have led to rumblings about Mr. Cameron’s competence. One former Conservative cabinet minister, David Mellor, regarded in some quarters as a bellwether for grass-roots opinion among Conservatives, said in a broadcast interview earlier this week that Mr. Hunt would probably have to resign over the BSkyB furor, and that Mr. Cameron’s own future had been compromised. “He won’t have to resign, but his credibility is blown away — he appears to be rather a shallow, callow sort of guy who doesn’t have too many aims and ambitions and who can’t even get basic judgment calls right,” Mr. Mellor said. The Leveson inquiry has uncovered an archive of hundreds of e-mails and text messages dealing with the bid that have revealed an embarrassing familiarity — and, critics of the Cameron government have said, complicity — between Mr. Hunt and one of his closest aides, on the one hand, and the chief lobbyist for the Murdoch empire in Britain on the other. The aide, Adam Smith, resigned last month after the inquiry revealed that the Murdoch lobbyist, Frédéric Michel, made 191 telephone calls and sent 158 e-mails and texts to Mr. Hunt’s team, 90 percent of them exchanges with Mr. Smith, during the period when the BSkyB bid was under review. There was a heavy flow of messages in other direction, too, the vast majority of them written by Mr. Smith, and the picture they gave was of avid support for the takeover bid in Mr. Hunt’s office, and by Mr. Hunt personally. But Mr. Smith, in quitting, said he had exceeded his authority in the exchanges and Mr. Hunt had played no part in them. Awkwardly for Mr. Hunt, another batch of text messages, between Mr. Hunt and Mr. Michel, showed a close familiarity between the two men, who knew each other well enough to pepper their exchanges with nicknames. Those texts made no reference to the takeover bid but left little doubt of the closeness between the men and their families. In some exchanges, at a time when both men were new fathers. Mr. Hunt addressed Mr. Michel as “Papa,” and Mr. Michel responded by addressing Mr. Hunt as “Daddy.” But the larger questions that hang over Mr. Hunt and Mr. Cameron at the inquiry center on their own attitudes toward the BSkyB bid, and whether they remained impartial as the review process unfolded. Mr. Cameron has come under heavy criticism from the opposition Labour Party and from influential political commentators for giving Mr. Hunt the oversight role in December 2010 — after stripping Mr. Cable of the role — when he knew that Mr. Hunt was a strong supporter of the bid. Mr. Hunt’s attitude had been underlined only a month before the appointment, when he sent Mr. Cameron an e-mail urging that the government back the bid and warning that Britain would “suffer” for decades if it was rejected, since that would deny the country the benefit of the innovative plans Mr. Murdoch and his son James, then the head of Murdoch operations in Britain, had for achieving synergies between their print and television operations in the country.

Andy Coulson arrested and charged with perjury David Cameron's former communications chief Andy Coulson has been arrested and charged with perjury. The Telegraph 10:32PM BST 30 May 2012 The former News of the World editor was detained for questioning at Govan police station in Glasgow on Wednesday by officers from Strathclyde Police. The force said a report will be submitted to the Procurator Fiscal which will decide whether Mr Coulson is to face court proceedings. Coulson was detained in London on Wednesday morning by Strathclyde Police and arrived at Govan Police Station in the south side of Glasgow later that afternoon. The 44-year-old gave evidence in Sheridan's perjury trial at the High Court in Glasgow in December 2010. Operation Rubicon detectives have been looking at whether certain witnesses lied to the court during Sheridan's trial as part of a "full" investigation into phone hacking in Scotland. Sheridan was ultimately jailed for three years in January last year after being found guilty of perjury during his 2006 defamation action against the News of the World. He had been awarded £200,000 in damages after winning the civil case but a jury at the High Court in Glasgow found him guilty of lying about the now-defunct tabloid's claims that he was an adulterer who visited a swingers' club. The trial, which lasted almost 12 weeks, was one of the longest of its kind in Scottish legal history. The former Scottish Socialist Party (SSP) leader represented himself after parting company with QC Maggie Scott. He was convicted of five out of six allegations in a single charge of perjury relating to his evidence during the civil action at the Court of Session in Edinburgh. His wife Gail was on trial along with him but was acquitted of lying to the court during his successful defamation action against the News of the World in 2006. He was released from jail in January after serving one year of his sentence and vowed to continue the fight to clear his name.

http://lewrockwell.com/rep3/us-internment-camp-plan.html

http://www.alternet.org/story/155622/on_jfk's_95th_birthday,_stephen_king_--_like_many_writers_before_--_has_a_theory_about_kennedy's_assassination

http://mysite.verizo...tu5kb/id12.html http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2151188/Fidel-Castro-supreme-unchallenged-spymaster-double-agents-duped-CIA-decades-according-new-book.html

Martin Hickman: A silken performance from Blair the master escapologist Blair achieved everything he had set out to do at the Leveson Inquiry By Martin Hickman The Independent Monday, 28 May 2012 Tony Blair earned his Teflon tag today. Assured and articulate, Labour’s longest-serving prime minister put in a silken performance at Court 73 of the Royal Courts of Justice. Even when a protester stormed into the courtroom and shouted “war criminal” within feet of his perma-tanned face, Mr Blair the world statesman, maintained his composure, airily dismissing the intrusion with a flick of his left hand. In coming to the Leveson Inquiry, Mr Blair appeared to have two missions: a) to agree that he felt the press barons had become too powerful and required reform and to demonstrate that he himself had never behaved improperly in wooing them. The chief topic was his relationship with Rupert Murdoch. Had Mr Blair done a deal with News Corp’s chief executive in 1995 two years before his general election landslide? Had he granted Mr Murdoch’s News International favours in return for the wholehearted support of its papers at three general elections? Was he a close friend of the octogenarian proprietor? On everything, Mr Blair, his hands constantly moving and emphatic, delivered what appeared to be off-the-cuff answers which were, on closer inspection, both carefully-worded and often diversionary. The deal? "There was no deal on issues to do with the media... and to be fair he never sought such a thing,” he replied, carefully limiting any accusation to “media issues” rather than the general understanding they are said to have reached, that New Labour would be good for Mr Murdoch’s business in return for his papers giving Labour a “fair wind”. No, Mr Blair had not changed to policy for Mr Murdoch; he did what he thought was right, though he may have carefully presented his messages to The Sun on issues such as Europe (He had entered government a “pro-European” and he left office still a “pro-European”, he stressed) Asked whether he was a close friend of the tycoon, he was presented with a rather fact which limited his wriggle-room: Mr Murdoch’s wife Wendi Deng had last year embarrassingly disclosed that the former Labour leader was godfather to their daughter. Evasively, Mr Blair replied that the relationship with Mr Murdoch had changed since he had left office; in office the relationship had been a “working relationship” but afterwards it had changed. (He couldn’t bring himself to confirm that he was a close friend of Mr Murdoch – but nor, given the evidence, could he deny it.) He seemed to be keen to attack the Daily Mail, and to limit criticism of Mr Murdoch. The “appalling” things which had happened in Mr Murdoch’s business – which Mr Blair did not name, but which commentators might assume were widespread criminality including phone hacking, computer hacking, corruption of police, and allegedly conspiring to pervert the course of justice – were just “one aspect” of his otherwise laudable work in the UK. By lunchtime, Mr Blair had achieved everything he had set out to do – not incriminate himself. Unusually, Robert Jay, QC, did not save his best for last and the session ended with a cosy chat between Lord Leveson and Mr Blair about press reform. Once again, the master escapologist had slipped out of trouble. Martin Hickman is a reporter for The Independent and co-author of 'Dial M for Murdoch: News Corporation and the Corruption of Britain'

Blair protester vows to target former PM again Exclusive: David Lawley-Wakelin talks to the Guardian about bursting into the Leveson inquiry and calling Tony Blair a 'war criminal' By Peter Walker guardian.co.uk, Monday 28 May 2012 12.52 EDT The activist who burst into the Leveson inquiry to shout at Tony Blair as the former prime minister gave evidence had barely planned the protest and made his way into the courtroom unchallenged via a back staircase, he has told the Guardian. David Lawley-Wakelin, a film-maker and teacher of film, who has , said he had now been released by police without charge or even a caution.He disrupted proceedings on Monday when he emerged through a rear door to shout: "Excuse me. This man should be arrested for war crimes." The 49-year-old then made allegations about Blair being "paid off" by JP Morgan for his role in the conflict, yelling: "The man is a war criminal," before he was dragged away. Blair immediately denied the allegations. Lord Justice Leveson apologised to Blair and ordered an investigation into how the intruder gained access to court 73 at the Royal Courts of Justice. Lawley-Wakelin said he had read about Blair's appearance before Leveson only on Sunday and set off for the courts from his west London home on Monday morning with no idea at all how he might get in. He got into the courts complex through the public entrance, a process which involves a bag x-ray and passing through a metal detector, before heading towards court 73. He said: "I tried to go by the front stairs first and was asked to leave, and then I figured that there must be a back way in – how does Leveson himself get in? So I went down two floors, round the back, and then up the back stairs, and there was no one there. So I walked straight in." He was as surprised as anyone, Lawley-Wakelin admitted, when he first appeared just behind Leveson's desk: "I thought, I'm not going to be able to do this. I nearly gave up, in fact. But when I figured out a way through it was fairly straightforward." None of his statements were directed at Blair himself. Lawley-Wakelin said: "I could see Blair out of the corner of my eye. I looked at him a couple of times. I was extremely nervous, and I didn't know which way to look. I saw a mass of people straight ahead and I looked at them. I was trying to find the cameras but I couldn't see them." He said he had decided in advance to not approach or remonstrate directly with the former PM: "No, because then you can get done for assault or something like that. Better to just say your piece." The security personnel who removed him were not too rough, he said: "I just said to them: 'Look, I'm not going to do any more harm,' because I didn't want to get myself hurt. After that they listened to me and they treated me very gently indeed." After he was taken to a police station, that was the end of the matter, he said. "They just said, give us your word that you won't be trying to get back into the court again. I said no, and they said it's pretty obvious you won't be able to anyway, because obviously the security will be tightened. So they let me go." While Blair took a directorship with JP Morgan after leaving office, among a number of commercial ventures, once Lawley-Wakelin was removed the former prime minister told Leveson that claims that his relationship with the bank was improper were "completely and totally untrue". Lawley-Wakelin described his impromptu plan as "a great bit of demonstrating", saying that while he would not return to Leveson he would target Blair again: "Whenever Blair is in public he'd better look over his shoulder, as I'll come back and do it again."

Leveson Inquiry: Jeremy Hunt 'briefed David Cameron on BSkyB takeover bid in private memo’ David Cameron was privately briefed by Jeremy Hunt on the News Corporation takeover bid for BSkyB despite publicly insisting that he absented himself from the deal, documents have disclosed. By Robert Winnett, and Gordon Rayner at the Leveson Inquiry The Telegraph 10:00PM BST 25 May 2012 The Culture Secretary sent a private memo to the Prime Minister on March 17 2011 advising him to talk to Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, about the £8billion deal. The memorandum, disclosed as part of evidence released by the Leveson Inquiry, showed the Tories were trying to avoid a row over Mr Hunt’s decision not to refer the deal to the Competition Commission. The document may undermine the Prime Minister’s assurances to Parliament that he had “specifically asked to be taken out of any of the information” about the takeover. Mr Hunt is to appear at the inquiry next Thursday and is expected to be cross-examined over Mr Cameron’s knowledge of the bid. He will also be questioned about 67 text messages he exchanged with Frederic Michel, the News Corp chief lobbyist. Adam Smith, Mr Hunt’s former special adviser, gave evidence showing the Culture Secretary emailed “fortnightly updates” to Mr Cameron. On Thursday, it emerged that he sent the Prime Minister a memo supporting the BSkyB bid in November 2010, before he had control of deciding if the takeover should go ahead. It emerged that Mr Hunt sent another note on March 17 2011 saying: “The News Corp/Sky issue seems to have died completely. “Certainly none of the newspaper groups are talking about it now. I did hear that Chris Huhne was apoplectic and advocated going to the media to criticise it – partly because Don Foster [the Lib Dem media spokesman] was onside Nick [Clegg] reined him in. The point to make to Nick (which I have also made to Chris) is that if I had referred it to the Competition Commission it would almost certainly have been judicially reviewed by News Corp as being unreasonable, given that Ofcom and OFT had given it the all clear.” Downing Street sources said the note provided “background to a decision already taken”.

Murdoch Private Eye Targeted US Hedge Fund Boss Reuters | Posted: 05/25/2012 1:30 pm Updated: 05/25/2012 2:09 pm * Database shows NY financier Robert Agostinelli targeted * Evidence suggests "blagging" by Murdoch private detective * One of few U.S. connections to News Corp hacking scandal By Mark Hosenball May 25 (Reuters) - A private detective working for Rupert Murdoch's British newspapers used a legally questionable tactic to obtain a hotel bill that a New York financier ran up at one of London's swankest hotels, records reviewed by Reuters show. A database of business records compiled by British government investigators shows that some time before his arrest in March 2003, private investigator Steve Whittamore, or someone working for him, misrepresented themselves to obtain from Claridge's Hotel a copy of a bill belonging to Robert Agostinelli, an American who runs the Rhone Group private equity firm. Whittamore was convicted of trading in illegally obtained information but did not serve jail time. He could not be reached for comment. Agostinelli did not respond to messages left for him at Rhone Group offices in New York and London. He is a former senior partner at Goldman Sachs and Lazard and ranks among the richest financiers in the world. The Whittamore database entry on Agostinelli is one of the few pieces of evidence to surface from extensive U.K. investigations that Americans were targeted by operatives working for Murdoch's British newspapers, who used questionable investigative techniques. Murdoch's News Corp newspapers in Britain are among the principal targets of a judicial inquiry, created by British Prime Minister David Cameron and chaired by Sir Brian Leveson, a senior English judge, into the practices and ethics of the British press. A spokesperson for News International, Murdoch's London-based newspaper publishing arm, said: "The information you refer to was the subject of a report by the Information Commissioner's Office in 2006 and has been examined extensively by the Leveson Inquiry in recent months. News International has given detailed evidence on these matters." Allegations have surfaced that Murdoch journalists or investigators may have used similar tactics on celebrities visiting the United States, but so far those allegations relate to journalists and targets based in Britain. An FBI investigation so far has turned up no evidence to substantiate allegations, originally made by a British newspaper which competes with Murdoch properties, that victims of the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. may have been targeted for intrusion by Murdoch journalists or investigators. The Whittamore database was put together by the office of Britain's Information Commissioner, a government privacy watchdog, from records seized in a police raid on the private detective's office. The database indicates that Whittamore's inquiry regarding Agostinelli was commissioned by Murdoch's now-defunct Sunday tabloid, the News of the World. The database shows an address for Agostinelli on Fifth Avenue, New York City. It describes Whittamore's assignment as a "Claridges blag". "Blag" is a British slang word meaning that a private detective adopts a false identity in order to con information out of a targeted organization or individual. In the United States, blagging is known as "pretexting". According to the website of the Federal Trade Commission, pretexting is illegal under federal law if the purpose is to obtain "customer" or financial information. In Britain, media industry sources said, blagging is usually illegal. But newspapers can defend themselves against legal complaints by asserting that the use of the practice in a specific case was in the "public interest." The Whittamore database records show that as a result of the "Claridges blag", information was obtained about a four-day Agostinelli hotel stay, in a room which cost 411.25 British pounds per night. The total bill was 3,433.98 British pounds. The records show that the hotel stay in question was in the month of July, but do not specify a year. Searches through media databases do not indicate that stories about Agostinelli appeared in the News of the World in the period before or soon after the police raid during which Whittamore's records were seized. Some years later, British press articles did mention Agostinelli as a member of a group which was interested in buying the Liverpool soccer team, but ultimately lost out to another American bidder. Agostinelli appeared as No. 19 in the 2011 edition of an annual "rich list" published by Murdoch's Sunday Times of London. The paper said Agostinelli was now "London-based", with estimated wealth of 625 million British pounds, and counted former French President Nicholas Sarkozy as a friend. The journalist named in the Whittamore database as having commissioned the private detective to investigate Agostinelli, who now works for a different newspaper, said he had never heard of Agostinelli and maintained that the database entry referring to him was inaccurate. A spokesman said Claridges had no comment. The News International spokesperson added: "There is a public interest defence available for any potential breach of the Data Protection Act and you do not have the information necessary to make any judgement on specific cases. We are not in a position to comment on a specific case."

The Unraveling Myth of Watergate by Patrick J. Buchanan www.lewrockwell.com May 25, 2012 It was, they said, the crime of the century. An attempted coup d'etat by Richard Nixon, stopped by two intrepid young reporters from The Washington Post and their dashing and heroic editor. The 1976 movie, All the President's Men, retold the story with Robert Redford as Bob Woodward, Dustin Hoffman as Carl Bernstein and Jason Robards in his Oscar-winning role as Ben Bradlee. What did Bradlee really think of Watergate? In a taped interview in 1990, revealed now in Yours in Truth: A Personal Portrait of Ben Bradlee, Bradlee himself dynamites the myth: "Watergate ... (has) achieved a place in history ... that it really doesn't deserve. ... The crime itself was really not a great deal. Had it not been for the Nixon resignation, it really would have been a blip in history." "The Iran-Contra hearing was a much more significant violation of the democratic ethic than anything in Watergate," said Bradlee. Yet when the Iran-Contra scandal hit the Reagan White House, Bradlee chortled, "We haven't had this much fun since Watergate." All fun and games at the Post. Yet with Nixon's fall came the fall of South Vietnam, thousands executed, hundreds of thousands of boat people struggling in the South China Sea and a holocaust in Cambodia. Still, what is most arresting about Yours in Truth is the panic that gripped Bob Woodward when Jeff Himmelman, the author and a protege of Woodward, revealed to him the contents of the Bradlee tapes. Speaking of All the President's Men, Bradlee had said, "I have a little problem with Deep Throat," Woodward's famous source, played in the movie by Hal Holbrooke, later revealed to be Mark Felt of the FBI. Bradlee was deeply skeptical of the Woodward-Felt signals code and all those secret meetings. He told interviewer Barbara Feinman: "Did that potted palm thing ever happen? ... And meeting in some garage. One meeting in the garage. Fifty meetings in the garage ... there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight." Bradlee spoke about that fear gnawing at him: "I just find the flower in the window difficult to believe and the garage scenes. ... "If they could prove that Deep Throat never existed ... that would be a devastating blow to Woodward and to the Post. ... It would be devastating, devastating." When Himmelman showed him the transcript, Woodward "was visibly shaken" and repeated Bradlee's line – "there's a residual fear in my soul that that isn't quite straight" – 15 times in 20 minutes. Woodward tried to get Bradlee to retract. He told Himmelman not to include the statements in his book. He pleaded. He threatened. He failed. That Woodward became so alarmed and agitated that Bradlee's bullhockey detector had gone off over the dramatized version of All the President's Men suggests a fear in more than just one soul here. A second revelation of Himmelman's is more startling. During Watergate, Woodward and Bernstein sought to breach the secrecy of the grand jury. The Post lawyer, Edward Bennett Williams, had to go to see Judge John Sirica to prevent their being charged with jury tampering. No breach had occurred, we were assured. We were deceived. According to Himmelman, not only did Bernstein try to breach the grand jury, he succeeded. One juror, a woman identified as "Z," had collaborated. Notes of Bernstein's interviews with Z were found in Bradlee's files. Writes Himmelman: "Carl and Bob, with Ben's explicit permission, lured a grand juror over the line of illegality ..." This means that either Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee lied to Williams about breaching the grand jury, or the legendary lawyer lied to Sirica, or Sirica was told the truth but let it go, as all were engaged in the same noble cause – bringing down Nixon. Who was that grand juror? Woodward, Bernstein and Bradlee know, but none is talking and no one is asking. The cover-up continues. Had one of Nixon's men, with his approval, breached the secrecy of the Watergate grand jury, and lied abut it, that aide would have gone to prison and that would have been an article of impeachment. Conduct that sent Nixon men to the penitentiary got the Post's men a stern admonition. Welcome to Washington, circa 1972. With the 40th anniversary of the break-in coming up this June, Himmelman's book, well-written and revelatory of the temper of that time, will receive a wider reading. As will Max Holland's Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat, out this spring and the definitive book on why J. Edgar Hoover's deputy betrayed his bureau and sought to destroy the honorable man who ran it, L. Patrick Gray. With Bernstein's primary source spilling grand jury secrets, and Mark Felt leaking details of the FBI investigation to Woodward, both of the primary sources on which the Washington Post's Pulitzer depended were engaged in criminal misconduct. At Kay Graham's Post, the end justified the means. Redford is now backing a new documentary, All the President's Men Revisited. The Sundance Kid has his work cut out for him. May 25, 2012 Patrick J. Buchanan is co-founder and editor of The American Conservative. He is also the author of seven books, including Where the Right Went Wrong, and Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War. His latest book is Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025? See his website.