Douglas Caddy

I give Jones 8.5 out of 10. His voice and presentation often rub the viewer's nerves raw but he tackles important subjects and topics that most times are ignored by the mass media. At first I found his idea about the FEMA incarceration camps to be way-too-far-out. But now that Congress, at the request of the President, has given the U.S. military to right to arrest any citizen without cause in the same mode as the Argentina military "disappeared" thousands of people, I am beginning to wonder if there is not something to Jones' contention. It may be that Congress gave this incarceration power to the President/Military because if there is a deep world-wide economic depression, society will break down in the U.S. -- just as it is beginning to do so in Greece. There could be widespread national mayhem and violence beyond imagination that could not be dealt with effectively solely by local police forces. http://www.thedaily.com/page/2012/02/05/020512-news-detroit-vigilantes-1-5/

News Corp executives at risk of US prosecution for 'willful blindness' American anti-corruption law holds company chiefs culpable for consciously avoiding knowledge of corrupt deeds at News Corp By Ed Pilkington in New York guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 February 2012 15.40 EST News Corporation executives could be vulnerable to individual prosecution by US anti-bribery authorities under the so-called "willful blindness" clause that holds company chiefs culpable if they chose to be unaware of any specific wrongdoing by their employees. The FBI and other law-enforcers are probing Rupert Murdoch's media empire under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act that seeks to punish US-based companies engaging in bribery abroad. News Corp is headquartered in New York. Under the act, the company and its executives are liable to potentially severe penalties, including up to five years in prison, if it can be shown that they consciously avoided knowing about the corrupt deeds of their employees. "It's a well established prosecutorial principle that it is no defence to close your ears and shut your eyes," said Brad Simon, a former US federal prosecutor who now defends in cases of white-collar crime. News Corporation's FCPA woes intensified sharply over the weekend after five senior journalists at the Sun newspaper and two military officials, as well as a police officer in the UK, were arrested. The eight were brought in for questioning by detectives involved in Operation Elveden investigating improper payments to police and other public officials from within News Corp's UK branch, News International. The perils to News Corp of an FCPA prosecution in the US against the company and its executives was underlined by the revelation that a grand jury has been convened in the case of Avon Products. The Wall Street Journal reported that US authorities are probing an internal audit report compiled in 2005 that found that Avon employees had bribed officials in China, yet the company only launched an official inquiry into possible violations three years later. In the Avon case, the grand jury is likely to be asked to consider whether executives were culpable under the "willful blindness" provision of the FCPA. Professor John Coffee, a specialist in white-collar crime at Columbia law school in New York, said that executives were at risk of prosecution in cases where they failed to ask relevant questions about a suspicious persistent pattern of payments. He gave the metaphorical example of a driver used by a Mexican drugs cartel to transport cocaine across the border who was aware that the vehicle contained a secret storage panel but made no attempt to find out what packages had been placed inside. As part of its response to the billowing phone hacking scandal, News Corp has amassed the most formidable team of FCPA lawyers ever assembled. "They have appointed not just one of the best lawyers in this field, they have appointed most of the best lawyers," Coffee said. "That's not normal defensive strategy," he added. The team is headed by Mark Mendelsohn, who as the former head of the US department of justice's FCPA section was responsible for developing much of the case law in this area. Rupert Murdoch's younger son, James, is in a particularly sensitive position. He is a naturalised US citizen, and chairman of News Corporation in Europe. He has come under repeated questioning by the UK parliament over precisely how much he knew about the News of the World phone hacking scandal, from which the bribery allegations have flowed. There has been no suggestion however that he had suspicions of any irregular payments to police or other public officials. A focal point of the US investigations is likely to be whether false financial information relating to alleged improper payments was given in News International and News Corporation accounts. That could expose the company and its executives to prosecution by the US Securities and Exchange Commission. The department of justice, working through the FBI on both sides of the Atlantic, is also likely to be exploring how much News Corporation executives in the UK were aware of a pattern of improper behaviour and if so what, if anything, they did to stop it.

The Sun's Trevor Kavanagh: News Corp team 'boasting' over help to police War of words at publisher intensifies as paper's associate editor tells of 'unease' at role of internal inquiry By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 February 2012 10.30 EST Parts of Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation have been boasting about handing information to police that has led to the arrests of 10 journalists at the Sun, one of the tabloid's most senior staff said on Monday. Trevor Kavanagh, the paper's associate editor, told BBC Radio 5 Live that the mood on the paper was "despondent" and there was "a feeling of being under siege". Appearing on the Richard Bacon show, he added: "There has never been a bigger crisis than this." In a clear swipe against News Corp's powerful Management and Standards Committee, Kavanagh said "there is certainly a mood of unhappiness that the company proudly, certain parts of the company – not News International I hasten to add, not the newspaper side of the operation – actually boasting that they are sending information to police that has put these people I have just described into police cells." News Corp's MSC was set up last year in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal to co-operate with police investigations into hacking and allegations of corrupt payments to public officials. The arrests of Sun journalists comes after the MSC reconstructed an email archive of 300m messages and turned over parts of that archive to the police, providing the information that led to five arrests of Sun journalists last weekend as well as four last month and one last year. In a tour of broadcast studios at lunchtime, Kavanagh launched a staunch defence of journalists on the tabloid, claiming that they were treated worse than terrorists and that the police now had more officers — 171 in total — investigating News International than they did on the Milly Dowler case or the Lockerbie terrorist attack. He told Radio 4's World at One there was concern about the way in which the MSC is handing over information to the police. "I think it's fair to say that there is unease about the way that some of the best journalists in Fleet Street have ended up being arrested on evidence that the MSC has handed to the police" he told Radio 4's World at One. His remarks are being seen as a sign that Murdoch's British publishing operation is sliding into civil war, with journalists on the Sun and the Times furious with they way they believe their bosses are "throwing journalists to the lion's den". This morning Kavanagh – who had been considered close to Rupert Murdoch – penned an opinion piece for the Sun titled "Witch-hunt has put us behind ex-Soviet states on free press". Kavanagh said the police operation was "completely out of proportion", with as many as 20 officers turning up at one journalist's home on Saturday. He said he suspected police were trying to recover their own reputation after failing to investigate the original allegations of phone hacking. "They lost a police commissioner, they've lost a deputy police commissioner and they now want to make it abundantly clear that they aren't going to leave a single stone, floorboard, drawer, cupboard, Kellogg's packet or any other part of the household untouched," he said. Kavanagh said that no one is opposed to co-operation with the police and that the company should hand over information when appropriate, but it was up to the police to sift through the 300m emails and hordes of other documents, not the MSC. He said 30 current and former News International journalists have now been suspended with no evidence of wrongdoing and no arrests, yet their careers could now be destroyed. Kavanagh's column in the Sun on Monday protested that police were treating staff on the paper like "members of an organised crime gang". On Radio 4 he denounced declarations two weeks ago that the MSC was charged with "draining the swamp". He added: "I think that's an appalling suggestion and it's resented bitterly and deeply by those many excellent journalists who have worked loyally for the company for most of their working lives. "The point is you have people being raided by up to 20 police officers at a time when they are still in bed at home and they are having their children's underwear drawers searched by policemen who in fact are being seconded from sensitive terrorist units at a time when we are trying to prepare for the Olympic games and the potential of a mass suicide attack," he said. He told Adam Boulton of Sky News that the News of the World staff had already paid a high price for alleged wrongdoing at News International and that the police were now going to the other extreme after failing to investigate original allegations over phone hacking. Kavanagh said closing the Sun would be "surely the ultimate disproportionate act". He added: "I think there's no justification on the basis of what you and I know so far for any such precipitate and disastrous decision. I think it would be a catastrophe for British media and newspapers worldwide and even possibly for the BBC if action which at this stage suggests no actual guilt should be regarded as grounds for closing newspapers." In the Sun newsroom there is a sense of anger and despair. "Any of us could be arrested, we just don't know," said one insider who asked not to be named. Another said: "The company has a legal duty of care to its staff. These people work anti-social hours, work overtime without question, miss family occasions for this paper. It's all very well to have the sympathy of your direct boss but when the overall company doesn't give a toss, that counts for nothing. There is going to be a backlash when Murdoch arrives here later this week

Don Fulsom, author of the new book, "Nixon's Darkest Secrets", was interviewed on Coasttocoastam on Sunday night, February 12, 2012. Below is a summary from the show's website of the interview and also a link to Amazon of his book that has favorable reviews by some prominent individuals. My own view of the interview was that it was terribly unbalanced and almost an overkill with hardly a single word of anything good that Nixon accomplished while president being uttered by either the author or the interviewer. ------------------------------------- [summary from Website]------------- In the second half, former White House correspondent, Don Fulsom, discussed Richard Nixon's connections to organized crime as well as the former president's demons, deceptions, paranoia, prejudices, and hatreds. He traced Nixon's mob connections all the way back to his first Congressional bid in 1946 which Fulsom claimed was backed by "the top hoodlum in Los Angeles, Mickey Cohen." This underworld relationship culminated, Fulsom said, when Nixon accepted $300,000 from the Teamster's Union and, subsequently, granted clemency to Jimmy Hoffa, which released the union leader from prison five years early. "He certainly did a lot of favors for the mob all the way through his political career," Fulsom contended. Fulsom also detailed how Nixon had a number of personality quirks which ranged from sinister to bizarre. Some of the traits ascribed that Fulsom ascribed to the former president included a cold distance from his family, fits of rage where ashtrays would be throw at walls, and a lifelong penchant for breaking and entering that preceded the infamous Watergate incident. On Nixon's apparent inability to make small talk or connect with average people, Fulsom shared the story of how a member of the president's motorcade was in an accident and was lying on the ground in pain. Encouraged by his staff to talk to the injured officer, Nixon walked over to the man and simply asked "how do you like the work?" http://www.coasttocoastam.com/show/2012/02/12 http://www.amazon.com/Nixons-Darkest-Secrets-Americas-President/dp/0312662963/ctoc

News Corp may face US inquiry after Sun arrests at News International Alleged bribery in Britain could fall foul of US law as editor Dominic Mohan tries to rally staff at embattled tabloid By Ed Pilkington in New York, Dan Sabbagh and Andrew Sparrow The Guardian, Sunday 12 February 2012 Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation faces the increased prospect of a full-blown inquiry by US authorities as part of the continuing investigation into alleged bribery of public officials under America's foreign corrupt practices act, after the latest round of arrests of senior journalists at the Sun this weekend. Murdoch flies into London later this week on a scheduled visit at a time of turmoil for Britain's best-selling newspaper, with journalists on the title angry at News Corp's powerful management and standards committee (MSC), whose reconstruction and trawl of the company's email archive produced the evidence that led to the arrests. It was reported on Sunday night that the solicitor representing the family of Milly Dowler and other alleged victims of phone hacking is to take his battle against Murdoch to America. Mark Lewis, one of several lawyers representing clients pursuing claims against the News of the World for phone hacking, is expected to travel to the US within the next few weeks to meet American lawyers to discuss legal action there. Lewis was reported to be in the "advanced stages" of bringing at least one case against Murdoch's company in the US. He said he was "not prepared to deny" the reports. The threat of prosecution under the US foreign corrupt practices act, which criminalises the payment of bribes to public officials by American companies overseas, exposes the company to tens of millions of dollars in fines and the risk of imprisonment of its executive officers – and brings the fallout from the phone-hacking scandal to the US. Mike Koehler, an expert in FCPA law at Butler University, said the arrests on Saturday marked an escalation in the risk of an FCPA prosecution for the New York-based News Corp. "This spreads the alleged bribery to a completely different newspaper, to a different segment of the company and to other public officials," he said. Eric Holder, the US attorney general, launched a preliminary investigation into News Corp's activities last July. The FBI is known to be involved in the investigation, but its activities have so far remained at an early stage, and News Corp sources in London say the investigators have not yet been in direct contact with the MSC. Meanwhile, over at a battered Sun the editor, Dominic Mohan, addressed staff on Sunday in an effort to rally journalists. Those not on duty came into work to show solidarity with a title whose future is uncertain after the arrest of the 10 journalists on suspicion of making corrupt payments to public officials. Those arrested on Saturday include Geoff Webster, the deputy editor; John Kay, chief reporter; Nick Parker, chief foreign correspondent; Mike Sturgis, reporter; and John Edwards, picture editor. It is understood that the evidence giving rise to their arrests by police from Operation Elveden dates back a number of years; it also prompted the arrest the same day of a Surrey police officer, a Ministry of Defence official, and a member of the armed forces. Anger and frustration in the Sun's newsroom is in part directed at the MSC – with one Sun reporter, Jen Blackburn, the girlfriend of Chris Pharo, the news editor arrested as part of the same inquiry last month, tweeting quotes from media lawyer Mark Stephens. The lawyer had said, according to Blackburn, that "the police are effectively working towards criminalising the relationship between … the media and their sources, and that is a bad thing for democracy". However, those close to the MSC, which ultimately reports to Rupert Murdoch, believe the body had acted in the only way it could if there was evidence of possible crime. "What are we supposed to do? Payments to public officials are illegal," said one person close to the body, noting that after allegations that News Corp had participated in a cover-up of phone hacking, now the company was being accused of being too helpful to the police. It is also understood that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting its own inquiries. The SEC takes an interest in cases where false financial information has been provided – in the case of News International, the use of false names in company records and accounts to disguise the recipients of bribes from journalists could fall into that category. Koehler said the FCPA inquiry was likely to consider whether any News Corp executives were culpable. "The Department of Justice and SEC wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't ask what the executive officers of the company knew about corruption and whether they authorised it, or did anything to stop it." The scale of any penalties that flow from the FCPA investigation would be based on a calculation of how much benefit the company derived from any corruption. Against that, mitigating factors would be taken into account such as the extent of co-operation given to the investigating authorities by the company. That helps explain why News Corp has bent over backwards in recent months to assist the police by handing over evidence of possible wrongdoing, to the dismay of some of its own journalists. British law also states that the police cannot serve warrants on News Corp for evidence if the company is co-operating with inquiries. The costs of an FCPA prosecution can be severe. The largest fine in FCPA history was imposed in 2008 against Siemens for $800m (£508m), while the heaviest prison term was handed out last October to Joel Esquenazi, who is now serving 15 years in jail for bribery of telecoms officials in Haiti. Meanwhile, interviewed on BBC1's Andrew Marr Show and Radio 4's The World This Weekend, culture secretary Jeremy Hunt said that since the Leveson inquiry started he had been "shocked" to learn that misconduct in the newspaper industry was "a lot more widespread than I initially thought". Commenting on the role played by News International, he said: "I think it's greatly to their credit that News Corporation are co-operating fully [with the police investigation]. I wish they had done so a bit earlier." He added that there was more agreement than he expected on the "tougher" form of newspaper regulation that will emerge in the light of the phone-hacking scandal, a system that the minister said he wanted in place before 2015. "We've come much closer to a consensus on the way forward than I would perhaps have predicted," he added. While stressing that he wanted to put off any decisions until Leveson has published his recommendations, Hunt indicated that he agreed with the broad thrust of the consensus that was emerging. "I think everyone recognises that we don't want politicians telling people what to write, so no statutory regulation of press content," Hunt said. "But we do need a much tougher system to deal with newspapers who step out of line. Basically, the body that decides on whatever the punishments are for newspapers who step out of line needs to be fully independent from newspaper proprietors and current newspaper editors."

I'm glad you articulated what I, with some discomfort, felt. It was a different time back then, with a different moral compass. I suspect that his friends and family probably felt somewhat proud and even envious of his ability to seduce women, and to get away with it. It would be later, toward the end of the 60s, that American men first started to catch on to the concept that promiscuity and cheating were immoral and demeaning. One could argue that his marriage may not have been mutually satisfactory, that it was maintained only for "show," but it appears that he was still having some marital relations and children even while cheating. It almost seems to have been something of a game. As I admire President Kennedy, I was willing to overlook an incident or two of infidelity, but the the slow trickle of names and stories, some of which are probably true, makes it a lot harder to excuse or ignore. What was he thinking? http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=9704&st=0

Rupert Murdoch faces revolt from angry Sun staff Daily Telegraph 9:55PM GMT 12 Feb 2012 Rupert Murdoch faced revolt from his own staff last night after journalists angry at the arrest of five senior colleagues accused the company of throwing them to the wolves The 80-year-old media mogul is due to fly into Britain this week to address workers at his Wapping plant and reassure them of his commitment to his remaining UK newspaper titles. But he is likely to receive an angry reception after five more journalists on The Sun were arrested as part of Operation Elveden – the police investigation into allegations of bribery. The arrests early on Saturday morning were the second batch in a fortnight and sources close to the investigation have indicated that they are unlikely to be the last. Journalists at The Sun yesterday accused the company’s Management Standards Committee (MSC), which handed a huge amount of information to detectives, of allowing a “witch-hunt” to take place. One angry journalist said the MSC were behaving like “reptiles” in order to protect the reputation of Mr Murdoch’s parent company in the United States. Ten senior journalists on the paper have now been arrested and bailed as detectives probe allegations that they illegally paid police officers and other public officials for information. But staff at the paper said many of the allegations were “pathetic” and related to matters many years ago where reporters had bought drinks for contacts in the pursuit of legitimate stories. Writing in today’s Sun, the newspaper’s influential former political editor, Trevor Kavanagh, questioned the proportion of police resources being used in the inquiry and warned that the heavy handed police tactics left it looking like a “witch hunt”. Staff also described a highly charged atmosphere when the paper’s current editor Dominic Mohan spoke to his newsroom yesterday afternoon. One source at Wapping said: “There is a real feeling of anger, deepening anger but also defiance about what is going on. But there is not the mood for a strike, as people are loyal to the paper but perhaps not the people who run it." “It is looking like a witch hunt now. Some of the allegations being made against people are pathetic – reporters taking contacts out for drinks, meals and the like. The police don't really seem to understand how journalism works. "Huge teams of counter-terrorism detectives are turning up at people's homes, going through their children's underwear drawers about things which happened seven or eight years ago. This is behaviour reminiscent of Mugabe.” While Mr Murdoch’s attention will this week be focused on The Sun, pressure over the scandal continues to mount in the United States, where shareholders are angry at the damage the scandal is doing to the wider brand. It has also now emerged that the Sun’s parent company News Corp could face an investigation by officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The law allows American companies to be fined hundreds of millions of dollars for illegal activities overseas. The phone hacking scandal at the News of the World has already cost the company more than £125 million and many investors want to see News Corp extricate itself from such a damaging association. Mr Murdoch is now likely to face renewed pressure to overhaul how the company is run with experts suggesting he may now be forced to split his roles of chairman and chief executive. “From a (News Corp) shareholders point of view, you want this to end and for people to move on," said Charles Elson, director of the Weinberg Centre for Corporate Governance at Delaware University. "The key is to make sure it doesn't happen again," he added. A memo to News International staff from the company’s chief executive Tom Mockridge assured staff of Mr Murdoch’s continuing determination to own and publish The Sun, which is said to be the newspaper closest to his heart. But Tom Watson, the Labour MP and a member of the Culture and Media Select Committee, said the latest development would prove extremely difficult for News Corp to deflect. He said: “This moves things on considerably because this is no longer just about hacking phones and it is no longer just about one newspaper. “This goes to the very heart of corporate governance. This is now about three newspapers; the News of the World, the Times and the Sun and it involves allegations of phone hacking, email hacking and illegal payments for information. “Inevitably it takes it to the top of the company because that is where the culture is set. That is why New York is worried because they know you cannot just blame it on individual rogue reporters. “If what we are told is true, if illegal payments have been made to police and other public officials this is hugely damaging. I am certain there will be more arrests at The Sun.” He added: “I think he has lost a lot of the trust of the front line staff because what you have got is a lot of very experienced and senior news reporters who now feel that they are being used as pawns in a political game to save the business.” Mr Watson added that it had to be Mr Murdoch who bore the ultimate responsibility for what happened in his newsrooms. Speaking on The Sunday Politics on BBC ONE he said: “It’s Rupert Murdoch who appoints bullies like Kelvin MacKenzie or small children like Dominic Mohan to run these very big institutions of national newspapers of repute. He’s responsible for the personnel that allow these things to happen and he must take responsibility for it.”

The extent of Jims ignorance about Watergate is breathtaking. Based upon his comments about me and my role in Watergate, I now must begin to wonder if he is equally as loose with the facts about JFKs assassination. David Lifton may well be correct in his assessment of Jims credibility on this. Why did Hunt call me after the arrests at Watergate? The answer is because I was his attorney and the law firm that employed me had done legal work for him as a client once I left General Foods Corporation. One of the law firms partners, Robert Scott (who later was appointed a District of Columbia judge) and I worked together on Hunts various personal legal matters for two years. When Hunt visited me in my residence in Washington after calling me from his office in the Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House soon after the arrests at Watergate, I telephoned Scott with Hunts permission and told him what had occurred. At that point Scott informed me and Hunt how to proceed with the arraignment of the five arrested burglars scheduled to occur later that same day. This and all other relevant issues involving me were examined in great detail by the original three Watergate prosecutors (with whom I had half a dozen meetings), the federal grand jury (before which I testified on six separate occasions) and the Special Prosecutor (with whom I met three times). My deposition was taken by Edward Bennett Williams who represented the Democratic National Committee in its civil suit that was filed in the wake of the Watergate break-in; I was never named a defendant in that civil suit. I was also never questioned or called to testify by the Senate Watergate Committee or the House Judiciary Committee in their investigations? Why? Because my role had already thoroughly examined with a fine tooth comb by the prior investigative bodies and authorities enumerated above. In addition, I had testified under oath as a witness for both the prosecution (involuntarily) and the defense (voluntarily) at the first Watergate trial at which Liddy and McCord were found guilty after Hunt and the four Cuban-Americans had pleaded guilty at the start of the trial. However, Jim now has assumed his usual role in the forum as the frustrated Grand Inquisitor and is using false and misleading information to dredge up issues answered 40 years ago in the Watergate historical record. Who has the time for such nonsense?

OMG. so the Secret Service, according to Lifton, helped off the President cuz he was screwing around? So then why didn't they do Bill too? I agree that this IS "salacious gossip" and I am very glad to see those refuting it. Loved how Jim D was able to show how Alford lifted parts of her story from Exner. Expect more of this as the 50th anniversary draws near. We'll hear from the left, that he was no different than Nixon or LBJ, and we will hear the rehashed sex trash from the tabloids ...all to try to disprove Douglass on "why it matters". It is sad to see the critical community even having this debate. Predictable of some, however. Dawn How Bill Clinton betrayed us: allies speak out on Lewinsky affair TV documentary reveals how Clinton's closest aides felt about affair that ended in scandal By Vanessa Thorpe, arts and media correspondent guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 12.18 EST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/12/clinton-allies-monica-lewinsky-affair Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton photographed together in November 1995. Photograph: Rex Features A close-knit band of friends and colleagues around Bill Clinton at the time of the Monica Lewinsky affair will speak publicly for the first time of their disbelief and sense of betrayal this month in a much-anticipated four-hour documentary about the former US president. The two-part biography, which premieres in Britain and America on 20 February , chronicles Clinton's struggle with his unruly libido from the beginning of a political career he was determined would take him to the White House. His loyal adviser, the pollster Dick Morris, will tell of the moment Clinton rang him just before evidence of his affair with Lewinsky was about to be made public. "Bill said to me: 'Ever since I got to the White House I have had to shut down my body'," says Morris, adding that Clinton told him he had been weak in the case of the 23-year-old intern and had done enough with her to be in serious trouble. He then asked Morris to conduct polls on how he should handle the crisis. Ken Gormley, a legal expert working in the White House, also recalls the sexual tension between the president and Lewinsky. "There were almost these sparks flying between them from the first moment when they saw each other," he says. Those who worked with Clinton on his initial bid for governorship in his home state of Arkansas, campaigning alongside his wife Hillary, refer to his involvement with a long queue of women. One campaign chief remembers dealing with "25 women a day" who came into the office looking for Clinton, while Betsey Wright, the politician's trusted political aide, recounts how she eventually presented him with a list of girlfriends he had to deal with before he could stand as governor. "It became clear it was not the time to do it," she says. As a result, Clinton pulled out of the race at the last minute. Marla Crider, who worked with Clinton in Arkansas and had an affair with him, describes women as being "literally mesmerised". "It was like flies to honey. I don't think there is any question Hillary was hurt," she says. The decision to abort that early gubernatorial campaign was the first in a series of reversals and recoveries that have marked Clinton's career. David Maraniss, a Pulitzer prizewinning journalist and contributor to the documentary, believes it succeeds in revealing how Clinton's flawed nature both helped and hindered him. "People always try to separate the good from the bad in Clinton and say that, if he had not done certain things, he would have been a great president. But you can't do that. Those were his major characteristics," Maraniss told the Observer. Clinton apparently deployed charisma of rock-star proportions, but with this came a sexual appetite that finally threatened his presidency when he faced impeachment for perjury over the Lewinsky affair in 1998. Wright tells the programme-makers she felt betrayed because the president had lied to her and "to a lot of people" about the affair. Barak Goodman, the award-winning producer who made the Clinton film for America's Public Broadcasting Service, points out that until now Wright has been extremely loth to speak about the incident. "She has been underground for many years because she was so close and so important to Clinton and felt very bad," he said. Robert Reich, Clinton's labour secretary, also expresses his sense of shock about the Lewinsky affair. "He would not be so stupid as to jeopardise his whole presidency, I felt. That was not the man I knew." Reich also reveals the rocky start to Clinton's presidency in 1993. "The atmosphere in the White House in that first year was chaos," he says. "Clinton wanted to be a part of everything." The documentary, which was partly funded by US government grant and partly by donation, details early difficulties such as the scandal surrounding Clinton's affair with Gennifer Flowers, the sexual harassment suit brought by Arkansas state employee Paula Jones, and the devastating suicide of the Clintons' close friend, Vince Foster, at the time that the suspected Whitewater land fraud first case came to light. During the period that the Republicans under Newt Gingrich blocked the national budget, Lewinsky began her internship at the White House. "Monica Lewinsky gave him something that he needed at that time: to be adored," says Crider. When the affair became public, however, it fuelled the inquiry into Clinton's presidency being run by Kenneth Starr and led to the impeachment of a president for only the second time in US history. According to the leading American journalist Jeff Toobin, who contributes to the documentary, the Lewinsky affair did not ultimately harm Clinton's image as much as predicted. "The legacy of this scandal favours Clinton more than his adversaries," he told the Observer. "More Americans think that it was a trivial waste of time than think that he got away with something unforgivable." Toobin puts this down in part to "a long-established pattern that the longer a president is out of office the more kindly the public starts to feel about them", but also to Clinton's resilience and to his "extraordinary political electricity". "In comparison, too, both with [George] Bush, with his foreign misadventures, and with [barack] Obama's economic problems, the boom years of Clinton's presidency start to look a lot better," added Toobin

Hacking Cases Focus on Memo to a Murdoch By SARAH LYALL and RAVI SOMAIYA The New York Times February 11, 2012 LONDON — As dozens of investigators and high-powered lawyers converge on Rupert Murdoch’s News International in the phone hacking scandal, attention has focused on the printout of an e-mail excavated three months ago from a sealed carton left behind in an empty company office. Addressed to Mr. Murdoch’s son James, it contained explosive information about the scale of phone hacking at The News of the World tabloid — information James Murdoch says he failed to take in because he did not read the whole e-mail chain. The e-mail returned to cause trouble for News International, the British newspaper subsidiary of News Corporation, several weeks ago when the company said that it had been deleted from Mr. Murdoch’s computer. Even as people familiar with the investigations said the e-mail and its convoluted history will form a crucial part of the inquiry into allegations of a cover-up, the scandal appeared to be widening on Saturday, as senior journalists at News Corporation’s Sun tabloid were arrested. Tracing the story of the e-mail, which was found in November and first became publicly known in December, also sheds light on the intrigue surrounding Mr. Murdoch, the company’s heir apparent, and on efforts to protect him from the scandal. Embroiled in three separate police operations, a parliamentary investigation, a judicial inquiry and a flurry of civil suits with potentially hundreds more waiting in the wings, News Corporation has begun to provide information that suggests a broader sweep of hacking activity at News International than was suspected even recently and more widespread knowledge within the company of past efforts to cover it up. This new level of cooperation includes the release of damaging material from an internal investigation that is being overseen by executives who, observers say, are using it to consolidate their power within the company, a move that could come at James Murdoch’s expense. “There’s no good way out of it,” a former News International executive said, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of the continuing investigations. “If you put up your hand and say, ‘I’m going to investigate myself and here’s what I found’ and you’re not very open and full about it, then it looks like just another cover-up.” A Stunning Find When The News of the World was closed in disgrace last summer, its newsroom was locked down by security guards. In mid-November, News International says, investigators searching the seized materials found a storage crate that, judging from a sticker on top, had come from the office of Colin Myler, the paper’s last editor. It contained a hard copy of an e-mail sent from Mr. Myler to James Murdoch on June 7, 2008 — in reality a chain of e-mails that included correspondence with Tom Crone, then an in-house lawyer. “Unfortunately, it is as bad as we feared,” Mr. Myler wrote, speaking of an impending lawsuit that threatened to reveal that voice-mail hacking at the paper was endemic. Last summer, senior News International officials said that in that crucial period in 2008, Mr. Murdoch had neither been told about nor shown documentation of the extent of the illegality at The News of the World. The discovery of the e-mail, said one former official with knowledge of the situation, was completely unexpected. Why did it take so long to come to light? Linklaters, a law firm working for News International, said that a junior employee found it in November, but that senior officials at the firm did not know about it until December. In addition, Linklaters told the Commons Committee on Culture, Media and Sport, Mr. Myler’s electronic copy had been lost “in a hardware failure” on March 18, 2010,” while Mr. Murdoch’s electronic copy had been deleted on Jan. 15, 2011 during an “e-mail stabilization and modernization program.” Big corporations routinely delete old e-mails. Between April 2010 and July 2011, News International discussed e-mail deletion with HCL Technologies, which manages its e-mail system, on nine occasions, according to a letter HCL wrote to Parliament last summer. Most of the reasons were mundane. But in January 2011, HCL said, News International asked whether HCL was capable of helping “truncate” — meaning delete — “a particular database” in the e-mail system. The question came shortly after disclosures in a civil suit brought by the actress Sienna Miller raised fears that material about widespread phone hacking at The News of the World might become public. News International did not explain why it wanted the deletion. HCL said it could not help and told the company to look elsewhere. It is not clear whether the “stabilization and modernization program” that deleted the Murdoch e-mail was linked to News International’s request to “truncate” data. But it is clear that on Jan. 15, when the deletion took place, the company knew it was facing civil and potentially criminal inquiries. A month earlier, reacting to new information from the Miller and other cases, it had suspended the News of the World’s news editor, Ian Edmondson, on suspicion of phone hacking, and handed some material to the police. Questions of Timing “They were aware that it was highly likely the police were going to reopen the investigation,” said a person with knowledge of the police operation. Indeed, the police formally began Operation Weeting, their new phone hacking investigation, 11 days later. At every step of the inquiry, the company has said it is cooperating fully and producing relevant documents. A News International spokeswoman declined to comment for this article. A lawmaker involved in the investigations of News International said the company’s primary objective from the beginning was to protect James Murdoch, and everything else was secondary to that. News International has given a variety of explanations for where its e-mails are and whether the ones it says it cannot find were deleted, lost in computer malfunctions or simply mislaid. In December 2010, a News of the World editor told a court in Scotland that “many e-mails had been lost when they were being moved to an archive in India.” That same month, a company lawyer said that News International could not retrieve e-mails written more than six months earlier. Neither of those statements was true, the company admitted later. Last month, the High Court judge presiding over the civil lawsuits brought by hacking victims castigated News International for what he called its “startling approach” to e-mail. Even after the company received a formal request for documents, said the judge, Geoffrey Vos, “a previously conceived plan to delete e-mails was put in place by senior management.” Speaking of News Group Newspapers, a division of News International, Justice Vos said that “they are to be treated as deliberate destroyers of evidence.” At every step of the way, News International has declared that it is doing its utmost to investigate wrongdoing. In 2007, for example, the company told Parliament that it had conducted an investigation by asking an outside law firm, Harbottle & Lewis, to examine 2,500 e-mails, and that the investigation had cleared senior editors of wrongdoing. Many of those supposedly cleared were later arrested on suspicion of phone hacking and other charges. And Harbottle & Lewis said later that the investigation had, in fact, been requested by News International to answer allegations in an unfair dismissal claim brought by a former employee involved in phone hacking — not to look for more phone hacking at the paper. News International has pledged to police itself better. Under the aegis of its four-person Management and Standards Committee, it says it will comb through and make available every piece of potentially pertinent material. Dozens of people — lawyers, forensic accountants, forensic computer technicians and, sometimes, police officers — gather daily at a site in Thomas More Square here, where News International is based, searching through 300 million e-mails and other documents stretching back a decade. “Pooling data together is a complex matter,” said a person with knowledge of the standards committee. “What is recoverable is a very technical operation.” Mr. Murdoch, who is News Corporation’s deputy chief operating officer and chairman and chief executive of its international division, relocated to New York recently as part of a long-planned move meant to help ease him into place to eventually take over News Corporation from his father. But the younger Mr. Murdoch’s position seems much more precarious than it did a year ago. Last month, he resigned from the board of GlaxoSmithKline, Britain’s biggest drug company, and last summer his dream of helping News Corporation take over all of British Sky Broadcasting shattered to pieces in the wake of the hacking scandal. People in New York say that Mr. Murdoch is confident he will survive the storm back in London. But questions still abound about what he knew, and when. When he got the 2008 e-mail, News International was facing a major potential disaster: a lawsuit brought by Gordon Taylor, chief executive of the Professional Footballers’ Association, who said that his phone had been hacked and that he had proof. That is what the e-mail told Mr. Murdoch. Farther down in a short message chain, there was mention of a “nightmare scenario” of legal repercussions, and an acknowledgment that The News of the World “knew of and made use of the voice mail information” it illegally acquired from Mr. Taylor’s cellphone. Mr. Myler’s e-mail was sent on a Saturday afternoon. Mr. Murdoch replied minutes later, agreeing to a meeting that Tuesday and telling Mr. Myler he would be home “if you want to talk before.” Soon afterward, Mr. Murdoch approved a settlement of more than $1.4 million to Mr. Taylor, an unprecedented amount for such a case. In December, he said he had not read the whole e-mail. “I am confident that I did not review the full e-mail chain at this time or afterwards,” he said in a letter to the Commons culture committee. “I would also like to take this opportunity to reaffirm my past testimony that I was not aware of evidence that either pointed to widespread wrongdoing or indicated that further investigation was necessary.” Contradicting Mr. Murdoch’s testimony, Mr. Myler and Mr. Crone told Parliament they had informed him about the damaging aspects of the Taylor lawsuit. Mr. Murdoch has consistently denied this, declaring that he approved the settlement because of his lawyers’ advice, not because he knew the underlying details. Jo Becker contributed reporting from New York.

Ian Burrell: How far will Rupert Murdoch go to save the Currant Bun? The Independent By Ian Burrell Sunday, 12 February 2012 Is this the end of The Sun? Rupert Murdoch is reportedly flying to the UK, ostensibly to save a newspaper he has loved since he bought it in 1969 from being engulfed by an unprecedented police bribery scandal. But as Tom Mockridge, the loyal Antipodean lieutenant he has placed in charge of his wobbling British newspaper empire, issued an assurance to The Sun's staff that the media mogul had a "total commitment" to continue publishing the paper, journalists on the tabloid were beginning to doubt it had a future. The News of the World was shut down last July apparently to create a firewall that would protect the more lucrative brand of the daily sister paper from being burned by the phone-hacking scandal. Many News of the World evacuees were given refuge at The Sun. But in recent months staff on the daily have felt anything but protected by News International (NI) and certainly not by the News Corp Management and Standards Committee (MSC), which is operating from separate offices within NI and has a remit to clean up the company's reputation. The MSC has made available to the Metropolitan Police a vast cache of internal emails which are being sifted carefully for words that might relate to criminal activity. The Sun's journalists are scared. The shockwaves began in November with the arrest of the popular district reporter Jamie Pyatt, who was based in Windsor and known for his royal scoops. Then police arrested Cheryl Carter, The Sun's beauty editor and, more importantly, former executive personal assistant to ex-Sun editor and NI chief executive Rebekah Brooks. By the end of January, raids had been carried out on the homes of four current and former members of The Sun staff: Mike Sullivan, the veteran crime reporter; head of news Chris Pharo; former deputy editor Fergus Shanahan; and former managing editor Graham Dudman. These were people at the very heart of The Sun's news operation. The Sun has always been published with a swagger of self-confidence, from the days when Mr Murdoch put editor Larry Lamb in charge and changed it from a left-leaning publication to the home of Page Three girls. But there's not much confidence on the Currant Bun at the moment. Word quickly leaked back that the January raids had been no gentle knock on the door. Some of the searches took 13 hours and were carried out by teams of up to six officers, some of them highly experienced detectives seconded from elite squads. Those arrested yesterday included a serving Surrey Police officer, a member of the armed forces and a Ministry of Defence employee. There were five Sun journalists among those held, all of them senior, including associate editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis. Most significantly from the point of view of The Sun newsroom, police arrested John Kay, the paper's multi-award winning chief reporter and a man revered by his colleagues. Kay, who is known for having excellent contacts in high places, is regarded as a model Sun reporter. Dominic Mohan, The Sun's editor, appealed for calm and claimed, on the paper's day off, that his staff were focused on producing Monday's edition. Hardly. Mohan appeared before the Leveson inquiry and emerged fairly unscathed. Dummy editions were also recently produced of a Sun on Sunday newspaper which NI had hoped to launch as a replacement for the News of the World. The arrests surely mean there is no prospect of that happening now. Even if Mr Murdoch flies in, it is not clear just what he could do to help his stricken paper. But with News Corp releasing financial figures last week showing that the phone-hacking scandal has cost the business £126m already, he will come under great pressure to withdraw from a sector that contributes very little to his global media empire and has become a severe embarrassment. The Sun, then, could go the way of the News of the World. Except that there are options. Waiting in the wings, should Mr Murdoch decide to sell, are other magnates – most notably Richard Desmond, who has previously expressed interest in getting his hands on The Sun.

Opinion J.F.K.’s Intern By LIESL SCHILLINGER The New York Times Published: February 11, 2012 FRESH out of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Conn., a well-brought-up young woman named Mimi Beardsley (now Alford) went to work, in 1962, as an intern in President Kennedy’s press office. Thanks to Ms. Alford’s memoir — which was released last week and well publicized — everyone now knows that, on the fourth day of her internship, after a trusted aide and go-between, David Powers, plied the 19-year-old intern with daiquiris, the president gave her a private tour of the White House residence and then took her virginity on the first lady’s bed. (Mrs. Kennedy, conveniently, was away.) They embarked on an affair that lasted 18 months, until Nov. 15, 1963, when she met the president at the Carlyle in Manhattan, two months before her marriage. He gave her a gift she used to buy a tasteful gray suit from Bloomingdale’s as a wedding present. The following Friday, he was assassinated in Dallas. Ms. Alford never made her full story public until last week, when her book came out. I could not rest until I met this woman. My motives were twofold. The first was that I suspected that, in a parallel universe, my mother, who is Ms. Alford’s age and, like her, was the editor of her high school paper, could have been the star-struck young girl in the Pappagallo flats and madras dress who succumbed to the wiles of the handsome commander in chief. In 1960, when he came to Springfield, Ill., on his election tour, my mother sneaked into his hotel. He shook her hand and said, “Young lady, I believe I’ve seen you here in Springfield last year.” She was mesmerized. (My mother, who looked like Jackie Kennedy and who has been married to my father for 46 years, said of Ms. Alford, “I’m just mad it wasn’t me!”) The second reason: I was curious about the self-effacing woman who describes herself, as she did in her book, as a “footnote to a footnote in the story of America’s 35th president.” Would she turn out to be enigmatic, standoffish or inscrutable, or an Audrey Hepburn who’d found her way to Breakfast at Camelot? Not at all. Ms. Alford was friendly and poised and told me she associated the White House not with Camelot but with the sexy, deceptive dystopia of television’s “Mad Men,” in which comely young women service their married bosses, as glasses clink, ashtrays fill and everyone keeps mum about the misbehavior. “God, I love ‘Mad Men,’ ” Ms. Alford told me. “All of it is exactly what was going on.” When she arrived at the White House as a teenager, she said, she “wanted to be Peggy” — an ambitious “Mad Men” character. But the part she ended up playing was closer the frustrated wife of the lead character, Don Draper. “I think I probably relate most to Betty Draper,” she admits. Ms. Alford’s second husband, Dick Alford, whom she married in 2005 — two years after her identity was leaked in a biography by Robert Dallek called “An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963” — sat beside her when we spoke. Mr. Alford said he was there “for moral support” and he gazed proudly and tenderly at Ms. Alford as we discussed the exhilaration involved in being the teenage lover of the most powerful man in the world; the sadness of her first marriage, which was haunted by her secret; and the relief she found in confronting and finally exposing her past. I felt, as I looked at this warm, earnest woman, that I had never encountered a more guileless person. And I marveled at the generational distance between the 1960s, when she came of age, and the ’90s, when her daughters (and I) did. How had she managed to be so discreet for so long, I asked, especially when she was a young intern? “I think it was the era, the times,” she said. She said, however, that she now wishes that she had not been so closemouthed. Keeping a secret like that, she explained, “silences a piece of you inside.” For decades, she said, she felt disconnected not only from other people, but from herself. Leaning forward in her tailored dark dress and ladylike pearl earrings, Ms. Alford told me she applauded the societal changes that have given young women more sexual freedom. In November 1963, during the weekend of Kennedy’s death, Ms. Alford was with her fiancé planning their January wedding. Overcome with grief, she confessed to him the affair she had hidden throughout their courtship. He ordered her never to speak of Kennedy again. To keep the peace, she pawned the diamond pins the dead president had given her; gave away her gray suit and ripped up the photo he had signed for her into hundreds of tiny pieces, depositing handfuls of the shreds in different corner trash cans, to disperse the evidence. And yet, she says she does not regret the affair. What would have happened, I asked, if Kennedy had not died on that November day? Would she have continued seeing him after her marriage? His parting words before he left for Texas were that he’d call her when he got back. “Remember, Mr. President, I’m getting married,” she chided him. “I know that,” he said. “But I’ll call you anyway.” “What if he’d rung again, and he was living in New York? I might have stayed connected. But I don’t think I would have taken up with him.” “What I really want is the gray suit I bought with his wedding present,” she said. “I think I could have worn it today.” Then she and her husband stood to leave. They’d been up since 4:45 that morning and were exhausted by their lengthening 15 minutes of fame. All the same, Ms. Alford said, “In these last two days, I feel incredibly liberated.” Liesl Schillinger is a journalist, literary critic and translator

Murdoch media empire engulfed in scandal as Scotland Yard's net spreads Increasing arrests and suspicions of bribery puts News Corporations' global interests under greater scrutiny By Jamie Doward guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 16.07 EST Dark rumours were swirling as long ago as last spring, when Rupert and James Murdoch paid three unprecedented visits to Wapping in the space of a month. Not only were father and son considering closing the scandal-racked News of the World, went the chatter on the Wapping grapevine, but its sister paper, the Sun, was also in the line of fire. Back then the fears seemed outlandish, born of the febrile atmosphere around the Sunday title that was to bring about its demise last July. There was little evidence the toxic allegations of malpractice would spread to the daily tabloid. But what seemed incredible last year is now being discussed openly in Fleet Street following the arrests of five Sun employees on suspicion of bribing public officials. They follow the arrest of four other current and former Sun executives and journalists in January – and the separate arrest of a reporter on the paper the previous November – on similar suspicions. The drip, drip nature of the arrests is in danger of becoming a flood. What started as a separate, but minor, line of investigation for the Metropolitan police team predominantly charged with examining allegations of phone hacking now threatens to become an epic bribery scandal of equal gravity. A total of 21 people have now been arrested in the bribery probe, Operation Elveden, including three police officers, though no one has yet been charged. Those arrested include Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of Murdoch's News International, the company that owns the Sun, and ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson, who went on to become prime minister David Cameron's communications chief. That the arrests are linked to alleged bribes paid not just to police officers but prison staff and Ministry of Defence officials, confirms Scotland Yard is throwing its net wider as it seeks to root out corruption. The arrest of an MoD official may invite speculation that the Official Secrets Act could have been breached. The investigation is expected to examine allegations of payments from other non-Murdoch titles to officials soon. But it is the Sun that is currently feeling the heat. Yesterday the paper attempted to put a brave face on things. "I'm as shocked as anyone by today's arrests but am determined to lead the Sun through these difficult times," said the paper's editor, Dominic Mohan. "I have a brilliant staff and we have a duty to serve our readers and will continue to do that. Our focus is on putting out Monday's newspaper." The allegations will revive concerns that News International is too close to the police, including officers at the most senior levels. Andy Hayman, the Met's counter-terrorism expert who led the original phone-hacking investigation, was criticised after he was made a columnist for the Times. Toxic allegations that the Yard failed to take allegations of endemic phone hacking on the News of the World seriously did for the careers of both the Met's commissioner, Paul Stephenson, and his deputy, John Yates. Now it is the mirror image of this relationship that is damaging the Sun. The paper's journalists are said to be furious that the arrests have been triggered by information supplied to the Yard by the Management and Standards Committee (MSC), an independent committee set up by the New York-based News Corporation, the parent company of News International. Following the first set of arrests, a News International source suggested it was intent on "draining the swamp", a comment that provoked fury among the company's journalists. In a statement, the MSC said it was ploughing through a mass of information as it seeks to ensure "that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated". The committee has given a team of advisers, lawyers and forensic IT staff a broad remit to search for any evidence of wrongdoing. Significantly, the investigation is not confined to the now defunct News of the World. Overseen by Will Lewis, the former Telegraph executive, the committee is working closely with the law firm Linklaters, which is conducting a review of all three remaining News International titles – the Sun, the Times and the Sunday Times. "The MSC is authorised to conduct internal investigations to fulfil its responsibilities in relation to News International's papers," the committee said in a statement. "It has powers to direct News International staff to co-operate fully with all external and internal investigations, and to preserve, obtain and disclose appropriate documents." Chaired by Lord Grabiner QC and reporting directly to Joel Klein, executive vice-president and board director of News Corp, the committee's team is examining some 300m emails and what one insider described as "masses of hard copy". "They are looking at more information than one person could read in an entire lifetime," the insider said. What the committee finds has potentially huge implications, not just for Murdoch's UK newspapers, but the mogul's empire, which stretches across Europe to the US, Latin America and Australia. Legal experts speculate that the bribery allegations could lead to the broadcasting watchdog, Ofcom, reviewing Murdoch's stake in Sky television. Under UK law, owners must prove they are "fit and proper" to own media interests. Any evidence suggesting News International titles were engaged in the corruption of officials could also trigger an investigation by the US authorities into breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) which prohibits corrupt payments to foreign government officials. It is this – the threat of the cancer spreading outside the UK and eating away at an empire that includes Fox News and 20th Century Fox film studios, and last year had revenues of $34bn (£21.5bn) – that really worries Murdoch's lieutenants. "We're more frightened by the [uS justice department] than we are of Scotland Yard," a source close to News Corp told Reuters last year. "All Scotland Yard can go after is News International, but the justice department can go after all of News Corporation." One person close to News Corp suggested fears about an investigation being launched under the FCPA were overblown. But News Corp is clearly concerned about the possibility. Last year it hired Mark Mendelsohn, the deputy chief of the fraud section in the criminal division of the US department of justice, and an expert on the act. Combing through the potential evidence being presented to the MSC is proving painstaking work. Some of it is in the form of emails that had sat for years in the archives of Harbottle & Lewis, the law firm commissioned by News International following the original phone-hacking allegations that saw the News of the World's royal editor, Clive Goodman, jailed in 2007. A one-paragraph letter supplied by Harbottle & Lewis to News International, and presented to the parliamentary inquiry into phone hacking, stated that senior editors on the paper were unaware of Goodman's "illegal actions". The letter appeared to corroborate claims made by News International executives that there was no evidence criminal activity on the paper went beyond one rogue reporter. In response to a question by the Tory MP Philip Davies about whether Goodman was working alone, Colin Myler, the News of the World's then editor, said: "I conducted this inquiry with Daniel Cloke, our director of human resources. Over 2,500 emails were accessed because we were exploring whether or not there was any other evidence to suggest, essentially, what you are hinting at. No evidence was found; that is up to 2,500 emails." But when the former director of public prosecutions, Lord Macdonald, was hired by a law firm acting on behalf of News Corp to review some of the emails a vastly different picture emerged. Macdonald told parliament that it had taken him "about three minutes, maybe five minutes" to determine that the emails contained evidence of possible criminality. "I can't imagine anyone looking at that file and not seeing crime," said Macdonald, who recommended the file should be handed over to the Yard. In one email contained in the file it is alleged a senior News International journalist agreed a police contact should receive a "four-figure sum" for leaking a confidential document containing the movements, locations and phone numbers of members of the royal family. Brooks, Coulson's predecessor on the News of the World, told parliament last year she had no knowledge of payments the Sun might have made to police officers in exchange for information. Yesterday's arrests will place this denial once again under scrutiny. It will also add piquancy to the second stage of Lord Justice Leveson's inquiry that reconvenes at the end of this month and will examine "the relationships between the press and police and the extent to which that has operated in the public interest". Leveson's inquiries are going to be made considerably more difficult by the fact that a significant cast of characters will be reluctant to give evidence for fear of prejudicing any future corruption trials. Coincidentally, Rupert Murdoch is rumoured to be flying in to London this week. Insiders at News Corp, which last week disclosed the phone-hacking scandal had so far cost it almost $200m, maintain it is a prearranged visit that has nothing to do with the latest allegations dogging Murdoch's newspaper interests. They insist Murdoch has no control over the release of evidence to the Met or how it conducts its investigations. Some News Corp employees have claimed Murdoch will use the trip to reassure Sun staff their title is safe. Anxious journalists on the bestselling paper will look back to last May when Murdoch flew in to tackle the furore engulfing the News of the World, a cash cow that produced annual profits of more than £10m. The paper was closed within two months. The Sun may have its enemies, but many on Fleet Street will be hoping that history is not about to repeat itself.

Poster's note: It increasingly appears that Murdoch, his son and other cohorts may face criminal prosecution in both the U.K. and the U.S. in the coming months. -------------------------------------- News Corp faces renewed threat of prosecution in US following Sun arrests Investigation of alleged bribery under Foreign Corrupt Practices Act is greatest danger to Rupert Murdoch's media empire By Ed Pilkington in New York guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 17.32 EST The latest Operation Elveden arrests sharply increase the danger to News Corporation of potential multimillion dollar fines by US authorities as part of the continuing investigation into alleged bribery of public officials under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA). The eight arrests escalate the FCPA crisis for the company by extending the allegations of bribery from the News of the World to the Sun newspaper, and by broadening its scope from police officers to other public officials. An official from the Ministry of Defence and a member of the armed forces were also arrested for alleged corruption and "misconduct in a public office". The threat of prosecution under the FCPA constitutes the greatest danger of the phone-hacking scandal for Rupert Murdoch's media empire. It could expose the company to tens of millions of dollars in fines and the risk of imprisonment of its executive officers. It would also bring the scandal to America, which is the financial heart of the global company. News Corporation's headquarters are on Manhattan's Sixth Avenue, which is why the company is susceptible to the FCPA, a law introduced in the 1970s to hold US-based companies accountable for acts of bribery and corruption abroad. Mike Koehler, an expert in FCPA law at Butler university, said Saturday's arrests marked an escalation in the risk of an FCPA prosecution. "This spreads the alleged bribery to a completely different newspaper, to a different segment of the company and to other public officials," he said. Eric Holder, the US attorney general, launched a preliminary investigation into News Corporation's activities last July. The FBI is known to be involved in the investigation on both sides of the Atlantic. It is also understood that the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is conducting its own inquiries. The SEC takes an interest in cases where false financial information has been provided – in the case of News International, the use of false names in company records and accounts to disguise the recipients of bribes from journalists could fall into that category. In September, the US justice department reportedly approached News Corporation directly and asked for information on alleged bribes of police officers. Koehler said that the FCPA inquiry is likely to consider whether any News Corp executives were culpable. "The DoJ and SEC wouldn't be doing their job if they didn't ask what the executive officers of the company knew about the corruption and whether they authorized it, or did anything to stop it." James Murdoch, Rupert's younger son who serves as chairman of News Corp's European arm, has faced questioning in the British parliament over how much he knew about phone hacking at the News of the World. The scale of any penalties that flow from the FCPA investigation would be based on a calculation of how much benefit the company derived from any corruption. Against that, mitigating factors would be taken into account such as the extent of co-operation given to the investigating authorities by the company. That helps explain why News Corp has bent over backwards in recent months to assist the police by handing over evidence of possible wrongdoing, to the dismay of some of its own journalists. The costs of an FCPA prosecution can be severe. The largest fine in FCPA history was imposed in 2008 against Siemens for $800m (£507.8m), while the heaviest prison term was handed out last October to Joel Esquenazi, who is now serving 15 years in jail for bribery of telecoms officials in Haiti. To protect itself, News Corp has hired a battery of world-class FCPA lawyers led by Mark Mendelsohn, former chief of the DoJ's FCPA section. The team also includes Brendan Sullivan, a famously tough trial lawyer who represented Oliver North during the Iran-Contra hearings

Key paragraph at end of article published by Murdoch owned paper: "In a statement, legislator Tom Watson, a vocal critic of News Corp. who sits on a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking, said the arrests 'show this is no longer only about phone-hacking. It goes to the very heart of corporate governance of the company led by Rupert Murdoch.'" ------------------------------------ Sun Journalists Arrested as Bribe Probe Widens The Wall Street Journal By JEANNE WHALEN February 11, 2012 LONDONBritish authorities investigating potential cases of journalists paying bribes for information arrested another round of high-ranking employees of News Corp.'s tabloid The Sun, and said they are now probing suspected payments not just to police but to other public officials. The arrests deepen News Corp.'s problems in a high-profile scandal involving illicit reporting tactics. While the scandal began at the company's now-closed News of the World tabloid, its spread to the Sun threatens to tarnish the biggest-selling newspaper in News Corp.'s stable. With a daily circulation of about 2.7 million, the Sun is the most widely read newspaper in Britain and among the biggest globally. London's Metropolitan Police said officers arrested eight people early Saturday morning on suspicion of corruption, including a serving police officer, an employee of the Ministry of Defence and a serving member of the armed forces. Late Saturday, police said the eight arrested individuals had been released without charge on bail, pending further inquiries. The other five arrested are Sun employees. They include deputy editor Geoff Webster, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker, picture editor John Edwards and John Sturgis, a member of the news desk. The men couldn't immediately be reached for comment. "I'm as shocked as anyone by today's arrests but am determined to lead the Sun through these difficult times'" said Dominic Mohan, editor of the Sun, in a statement. "I have a brilliant staff and we have a duty to serve our readers and will continue to do that. Our focus is on putting out Monday's newspaper." The arrests follow an earlier round two weeks ago, when police arrested four current and former Sun employees and a police officer. The men were later released on bail without charge. News Corp. owns The Wall Street Journal. News Corp. Chairman Rupert Murdoch, meanwhile, is set to arrive in London later this week. According to a person familiar with the matter, Mr. Murdoch plans to assure the Sun's staff that he neither plans to close nor sell the paper. This person said plans to launch a Sunday version of the title continue. In an email Saturday to his staff, Tom Mockridge, chief executive of News International, News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit, said: "You should know that I have had a personal assurance today from Rupert Murdoch about his total commitment to continue to own and publish The Sun newspaper." He said Mr. Monhan "is committed to leading the paper through this difficult period and, while today's arrests are shocking, we need to support him and his team to serve the loyal readers of The Sun and produce a great paper for Monday." In a sign that News Corp. may view the arrests as excessive, Mr. Mockridge added that he had "today written to the Independent Police Complaints Commission to seek clarification from them about the process of independent oversight of the police investigation." The bribery investigation is one of three under way into alleged illegal reporting tactics. The others are focusing on interception of voice-mail messages and emails, also known as phone hacking and computer hacking. In their statement Saturday, police said the remit of their bribery investigation has widened to include suspected corruption by both police officers and other public officials. Arrested Saturday were a 39-year-old male police officer for the suburban county of Surrey; a 39-year-old woman working for the Ministry of Defence; and a 36-year-old man in the armed forces, police said. A spokeswoman for the Ministry of Defence declined to comment on the arrests. Surrey Police couldn't immediately be reached to comment. All of the eight arrested are being questioned at police stations in and around London, and their home addresses are being searched. Police said they are also searching the offices of News International, News Corp.'s U.K. newspaper unit. Revelations of widespread phone hacking at the News of the World last summer forced News Corp. to close the tabloid and to pay millions of pounds to settle civil lawsuits filed by phone hacking victims. Even as civil suits are resolved, however, possible criminal cases still loom. U.K. authorities have arrested about 30 people in connection with the probes, including former Sun and News of the World editors and reporters. No one has been charged. Last summer, News Corp. established what it calls an autonomous committee to liaise with police and provide any documents requested by investigators. The Management and Standards Committee is also conducting its own investigation into News International's three remaining newspapersthe Sun, the Times of London, and the Sunday Times. In its statement, News Corp. said the Management and Standards Committee provided police with the information that lead to Saturday's arrests. "News Corporation remains committed to ensuring that unacceptable news gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated," the statement said. The bribery investigation began last year, after a lawyer hired by News Corp. to assist with an internal investigation reviewed emails sent by News of the World employees and said he found "blindingly obvious" evidence of "corrupt payments" to police. The company then passed these emails to police. In 2003, Rebekah Brooks, a former editor of the News of the World and the Sun, told a parliamentary committee: "We have paid the police for information in the past." She later backtracked from the assertion, and, asked about it last summer at another parliamentary hearing, said: "I can say that I have never paid a policeman myself; I have never knowingly sanctioned a payment to a police officer." Speaking before a parliamentary committee last summer, Mr. Murdoch said: "Let me be clear in saying: Invading people's privacy by listening to their voice mail is wrong; paying police officers for information is wrong. They are inconsistent with our codes of conduct and neither has any place in any part of the company that I run." The new focus on The Sun, however, is likely to intensify criticism, of News Corp. In a statement, legislator Tom Watson, a vocal critic of News Corp. who sits on a parliamentary committee investigating phone hacking, said the arrests "show this is no longer only about phone-hacking. It goes to the very heart of corporate governance of the company led by Rupert Murdoch."

I am pleased to see Jim quoting from Jim Hougan’s book, “Secret Agenda: Watergate, Deep Throat and the CIA”, published in 1984. Secret Agenda and James Rosen’s book, “The Strong Man: John Mitchell and the Secrets of Watergate”, published in 2008, are at the top of my list for recommended reading about that scandal. Jim is factually incorrect in stating above that “by the time Hunt got there, the [Mullen] firm was essentially being run by Robert Bennett, who was a CIA agent.” General Foods Corp. sent me from its White Plains, N.Y. headquarters in 1969 to work for about a year out of its Washington public relations firm, the Mullen Company, until I was to open its own office for the corporation in the nation’s capital. Hunt came to work for the Mullen Company about six months after I arrived. In late 1970, Robert Mullen, who owned the firm, asked Hunt and me if we wanted to buy the firm. While we were considering the proposal, Mullen suddenly announced he was selling it to Robert Bennett. At that point in time I left General Foods and went to work as an attorney for the law firm of Gall, Lane, Powell and Kilcullen. I did not learn definitively that the Mullen Company had been incorporated by the CIA in 1959 and was a CIA front until Senator Howard Baker released this information in his separate report as part of the final report of the Senate Watergate Committee in 1975. Up until then I had only inklings or “intimations” as I testified in July 1972 to the federal grand jury investigating Watergate. I have since concluded that General Foods not only knew of the Mullen Company’s CIA background but that this was part of that corporation’s own relationship with the CIA, all of which information was not disclosed to me when I was sent to work out of the Mullen Company in 1969. This and more will be covered in my autobiography that I am writing at the present time under contract with TrineDay Publishers.

The Sun shocker at the heart of its newsroom The tabloid faces its most serious crisis since Murdoch's takeover, with journalists reportedly stunned at arrests and angry at management By Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 09.27 EST Some time this morning, Dominic Mohan, the editor of the Sun, would have received an uncomfortable phone call. Five more of his reporters and executives had been arrested on suspicion of making corrupt payments to public officials – taking the total to 10. One of those held on Saturday is his deputy, Geoff Webster. But he is not the only senior executive who has been held this year: another was former deputy editor Fergus Shanahan. It is not an exaggeration to say that the sheer number of arrests, and their seniority, means that the paper has been plunged into its most serious crisis since Rupert Murdoch relaunched the title in 1969. Details as to why the journalists have been arrested remain sketchy for the moment but what is clear is that the Operation Elveden investigation into allegations of corrupt payments made by journalists to police officers has been widened to encompass other public officials at the armed forces and presumably elsewhere. The mood amongst reporters is, in the words of one, "stunned" – which is probably an understatement – coupled with a worry as to where this will end. Could a tip-fee paid five years ago now be considered a bribe? There is no shortage of anger, too. Some of it is directed at the Guardian, stemming from the newspaper's earlier exposé of the News of the World phone-hacking scandal, although much is aimed at the company's Management and Standards Committee that has been providing information to the police which led the Elveden squad to make all its arrests. It did not take long, either, for speculation to surface from outside Wapping that the Sun could close. At lunchtime, the beleaguered Dominic Mohan issued a rare public statement to shore up the situation, making it clear that he would stay on, "determined to lead the Sun through these difficult times" and that "our focus is on putting out Monday's newspaper". The message was clear: there would be no resignations, and above all, no immediate closure of the newspaper that is dear to Rupert Murdoch's heart. However, the police enquiry is far from complete and it is unclear what evidence has prompted the police arrests or even when the alleged offences occurred. Until there is a better picture as to what went on at the Sun it is impossible to form a view as to whether there was a systemic problem to match the industrialised nature of phone hacking as practiced at the News of the World. For now, the absence of detail also means that the wider public has not formed a view about what has happened at the Sun. Remember, it was a wave of public revulsion that brought the News of the World to the brink last summer. The scale of uncertainty is such that it is impossible to predict with confidence what will happen next. But if the Elveden investigation is not yet over: one thing is clear – a punch-drunk Sun is owned by an organisation that is at war with itself

Eight held in corruption probe The Independent By Laura Harding Saturday, 11 February 2012 Five employees of The Sun, a serving Surrey Police officer, a serving member of the armed forces and a Ministry of Defence employee were arrested today over allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials. Five men aged between 45 and 68 were arrested at addresses in London, Kent and Essex on suspicion of corruption, aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office, and conspiracy in relation to both these offences. They are being questioned at police stations in London and Kent. The men were named by Sky News as deputy editor Geoff Webster, chief reporter John Kay, picture editor John Edwards, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker, and John Sturgis, who is a news editor. A 39-year-old serving Surrey Police officer, a 39-year-old Ministry of Defence employee and a 36-year-old member of the armed forces were also arrested at their homes on suspicion of corruption, misconduct in a public office and conspiracy in relation to both. They are being questioned, at police stations in London and Wiltshire. A statement from News Corporation, parent company of News International which owns The Sun and The Times, confirmed that five employees of The Sun were among those arrested today. It said its Management and Standards Committee (MSC) had provided information to the Elveden investigation which led to the arrests and had also provided the option of "immediate legal representation" to those arrested. "News Corporation remains committed to ensuring that unacceptable news-gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated and last summer authorised the MSC to co-operate with the relevant authorities," it said. "The MSC will continue to ensure that all appropriate steps are taken to protect legitimate journalistic privilege and sources, private or personal information and legal privilege. "News Corporation maintains its total support to the ongoing work of the MSC and is committed to making certain that legitimate journalism is vigorously pursued in both the public interest and in full compliance with the law." Officers from Operation Elveden made the arrests between 6am and 8am as part of the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials. Operation Elveden - which runs alongside the Met's Operation Weeting team - was launched as the phone-hacking scandal erupted last July with allegations about the now-defunct News of the World targeting Milly Dowler's mobile phone. The home addresses of all eight suspects are being searched and officers are also carrying out searches at the offices of News International in Wapping, east London, the Metropolitan Police said. Surrey Police confirmed a serving officer was arrested at the officer's home address today as part of Operation Elveden. A spokesman said: "Surrey Police has been working closely with Operation Elveden since it was established in 2011, with a number of its officers seconded to the MPS to assist with the investigations. "On learning about the involvement of one of its officers, the force immediately referred the matter to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)." Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Kirkby said: "The Force takes matters of this nature extremely seriously and we will not hesitate to respond robustly to allegations where there is evidence to support them." A Ministry of Defence spokeswoman today said: "We do not comment on ongoing investigations." PA

Senior Sun journalists arrested in police payments probe Rupert Murdoch is flying to London after five of tabloid's most senior staff are arrested inongoing inquiry into alleged bribery By David Batty, Damien Pearse and agencies guardian.co.uk, Saturday 11 February 2012 06.15 EST The Sun has been plunged into crisis following the arrest of five of its most senior journalists, including the deputy editor, over allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials. The five Sun journalists are understood to be: deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards, chief reporter John Kay, chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis. The Sun's editor, Dominic Mohan, said: "I'm as shocked as anyone by today's arrests but am determined to lead the Sun through these difficult times. I have a brilliant staff and we have a duty to serve our readers and will continue to do that. Our focus is on putting out Monday's newspaper." A News International source said Mohan was "not resigning" but added that it was "obviously a dramatic day for him". Sky News reported that Rupert Murdoch is flying into the UK to reassure Sun staff that he will not close the paper in the wake of the latest arrests. The worsening crisis at the tabloid could have wider ramifications for the Murdoch media empire, according to some media experts. Clive Hollick, former chief executive of United Business Media, said the latest arrests could intensify the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act investigation into News Corp in the US. In a post on his Twitter account he added that the arrests "may lead to fines, director oustings and asset sales". He also suggested that the developments could lead to the broadcasting watchdog Ofcom review Murdoch's control of Sky television in the UK. Hollick tweeted: "Will Ofcom conclude that Sun arrests on top of hacking render NI not fit and proper to hold #Sky license and make them sell shareholding?" A Surrey police officer, 39, a Ministry of Defence employee, 39, and a member of the armed forces, 36, were also arrested at their homes on Saturday on suspicion of corruption, misconduct in a public office and conspiracy in relation to both. The new arrests at Britain's bestselling newspaper will further rock News International, which is still reeling from the closure of the Sun's sister title, the News of the World last year, after it emerged that journalists had hacked the phone of murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler. The journalists, aged between 45 and 68, were arrested at addresses in London, Kent and Essex on suspicion of corruption, aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office, and conspiracy in relation to both these offences. They are being questioned at police stations in London and Kent. News Corporation, the parent company of News International which owns the Sun and the Times, confirmed that five Sun staff were among those arrested today. It said its Management and Standards Committee (MSC) had provided information to the Elveden investigation which led to the arrests and had also provided the option of "immediate legal representation" to those arrested. "News Corporation remains committed to ensuring that unacceptable news-gathering practices by individuals in the past will not be repeated and last summer authorised the MSC to co-operate with the relevant authorities," it said. "The MSC will continue to ensure that all appropriate steps are taken to protect legitimate journalistic privilege and sources, private or personal information and legal privilege. "News Corporation maintains its total support to the ongoing work of the MSC and is committed to making certain that legitimate journalism is vigorously pursued in both the public interest and in full compliance with the law." The arrests come two weeks after four former and current Sun journalists and a serving Metropolitan police officer were arrested over alleged illegal police payments. Senior Sun employees Chris Pharo, 42, and Mike Sullivan, along with former executives Fergus Shanahan, 57, and Graham Dudman, were named by sources as suspects facing corruption allegations. All five were released on bail. Surrey police confirmed a serving officer was arrested at the officer's home address on Saturday as part of Operation Elveden. A spokesman said: "Surrey police has been working closely with Operation Elveden since it was established in 2011, with a number of its officers seconded to the [Metropolitan Police Service] to assist with the investigations. "On learning about the involvement of one of its officers, the force immediately referred the matter to the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC)." Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Kirkby said: "The force takes matters of this nature extremely seriously and we will not hesitate to respond robustly to allegations where there is evidence to support them." Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the IPCC, said: "Today's arrests are further evidence of the strenuous efforts being undertaken to identify police officers who may have taken corrupt payments." The MoD refused to comment. Officers from Operation Elveden made the arrests between 6am and 8am as part of the investigation into allegations of inappropriate payments to police and public officials. Operation Elveden, which runs alongside the Met's Operation Weeting team, was launched as the phone-hacking scandal erupted last July with allegations about the now-defunct News of the World targeting Milly Dowler's mobile phone. Its remit has widened to include the investigation of evidence uncovered in relation to suspected corruption involving public officials who are not police officers. All home addresses of all eight detained men are being searched and officers are also carrying out searches at the offices of News International in Wapping, east London, the Metropolitan police said. "

Feb 11, 11:16 AM EST Staff at The Sun tabloid arrested in bribe inquiry By DAVID STRINGER Associated Press LONDON (AP) -- Britain's biggest-selling tabloid newspaper was fighting to contain the damage after five of its employees were arrested Saturday in an inquiry into the alleged payment of bribes to police and other officials, detectives and the newspaper's parent company said. Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. said the five employees from The Sun tabloid had been detained and that police had searched their homes and the group's London offices, potentially deepening the scandal over British tabloid wrongdoing. A 39-year-old female employee at Britain's defense ministry, a 36-year-old male member of the armed forces and a 39-year-old serving police officer with Surrey Police, were also arrested, police said. The development follows the arrest of four current and former journalists at the newspaper last month in connection with the same bribery inquiry. Sun editor Dominic Mohan expressed his alarm at Saturday's arrests, but insisted the six-day-a-week newspaper would continue its work. "I'm as shocked as anyone by today's arrests, but am determined to lead The Sun through these difficult times," Mohan said in a statement. "I have a brilliant staff and we have a duty to serve our readers and will continue to do that. Our focus is on putting out Monday's newspaper." Two people familiar with the matter, both of whom requested anonymity because they were not authorized to publicly discuss the issue, said Murdoch was scheduled to head to London in the near future to spend time with the company's journalists. One person explained that the trip had been planned for some time and wasn't in reaction to the latest arrests. News Corp. declined to comment on Murdoch's travel plans, or on whether he planned to address staff at The Sun. Murdoch closed down the 168-year-old News of The World tabloid in July amid public anger when the extent of its phone hacking of celebrities, public figures and crime victims was exposed. A former News of the World executive, who also requested anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigations, said The Sun's current deputy editor Geoff Webster, picture editor John Edwards and chief reporter John Kay were among those arrested Saturday. Sky News and other British media reported that chief foreign correspondent Nick Parker and reporter John Sturgis were also being questioned. News Corp. would not publicly confirm the identities of those detained. The executive - who said he was in touch with the Sun's senior staff - claimed that management there were "fighting to halt morale collapse" at the tabloid, describing Mohan as "somewhat shellshocked" by the arrests. A total of 21 people have now been arrested in the bribery probe - including three police officers - though none has yet been charged. They include Rebekah Brooks, former chief executive of Murdoch's News International; ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson - who is also Prime Minister David Cameron's former communications chief; and journalists from both the News of the World and The Sun. Police said the inquiry - which is running in parallel to investigations into phone hacking and alleged email hacking - had also now widened its remit. It was initially focused on whether reporters had illegally paid police officers for information, but will now examine whether other public officials were also targeted. In a statement, police confirmed the latest arrests came after information was provided to detectives by the management standards committee of Murdoch's News Corp., set up to investigate alleged malpractice. News Corp. also confirmed that it had supplied the police with information, but insisted it would "continue to ensure that all appropriate steps are taken to protect legitimate journalistic privilege and sources, private or personal information and legal privilege." "News Corporation maintains its total support to the ongoing work of the management standards committee and is committed to making certain that legitimate journalism is vigorously pursued in both the public interest and in full compliance with the law," it said. All eight people arrested Saturday are being questioned by police in London and at stations in the southern England counties of Kent, Essex, Surrey and Wiltshire. Police said later Saturday that they had completed searches at the offices of News International, a division of News Corp., in east London. The five journalists from The Sun - aged between 45 and 68 - are being quizzed on suspicion of offenses of corruption and aiding and abetting misconduct in a public office. Police said the three public servants were being questioned on suspicion of misconduct in a public office and corruption offenses. Deborah Glass, deputy chair of the Independent Police Complaints Commission, said Britain's policing watchdog was cooperating over the inquiry. "Today's arrests are further evidence of the strenuous efforts being undertaken to identify police officers who may have taken corrupt payments," she said. Assistant Chief Constable Jerry Kirkby, of Surrey Police, confirmed that one of his force's officers was being questioned. "The force takes matters of this nature extremely seriously and we will not hesitate to respond robustly to allegations where there is evidence to support them," he said. Surrey Police was responsible for the investigation into missing 13-year-old girl Milly Dowler, who was later found murdered. A wave of public revulsion over the disclosure that reporters had intercepted her voicemails in 2002 led Murdoch to close down the News of The World. Britain's ministry of defense declined to comment on the arrest of the defense official. --- Raphael Satter and Paisley Dodds in London and Ryan Nakashima in Los Angeles contributed to this report

Included among the letters to the editor about the above article is this one: February 10, 2012 | 12:03 PM Speaking as a Marine Corps veteran who himself did sensitive classified work during the 1980s, I will echo the sentiment of the previous comment. There is much about the history of the Cold War that has yet to be told. Indeed,, there are still vast quantities of documentation over a half century old thats still being kept from public view. The reason given of course, is for "National Security". The real reason for this action is probably a lot more chlling. The powers that be most likely feel that should certain awful truths ever be told, than popular support of this nation's political and economic institutions would vaporize like a nuclear fireball. Regarding Francis Gary Powers and Lee Harvey Oswald, there is one other suspicious event to note here. In 1977, Gary Powers was earning his living as an aerial traffic reporter for KNBC TV in Los Angeles, under the moniker- "The Spy in the Sky". It is well known that Gary Powers was killed that year when his Hughes 500 helicopter allegedly ran out of fuel. What is not well known was that the following week Powers was scheduled to testify before the House Select Committee on Assasinations concerning Oswald and the U2. Coincidence? John F. Davies Berkeley , CA

I have been told about his efforts, which should be praised, but I do not know him.

http://www.rd.com/family/marilyn-monroe/5/

I got a different impression of Ann Curry's interview on the Today Show. One occasion Ms. Curry says, "If your story is true..." and on another occasion says, "If what you are saying is true...." This line of questioning is not zero skepticism or fawning. Here is a link to the interview: http://video.today.msnbc.msn.com/today/46325017#46325017 David Lifton in a prior comment raised the question of how the Secret Service agents must have viewed the comings and goings of JFK's sexual conquests. In the Today Show interview Ms. Curry mentions that Ms. Alford must have walked by the Secret Service agents upon leaving JFK after having sex and Alford acknowledges that the agents stationed on the second floor by the elevators in the family area of the White House saw her leave. She also says that she does not know how many other persons in the White House knew about the sexual affair. A close friend of mine residing in France wrote me years ago about how JFK when President would have French prostitutes flown over. One wonders if they, too, were invited by him to the family quarters on the second floor of the White House and what the reaction of the Secret Service agents might have been to the sight of this.

Once Upon a Secret: My Hidden Affair with JFK by Mimi Alford – review The confessions of a teenage intern in JFK's White House are less kiss'n'tell than three-act tragedy By Robert McCrum Guardian.co.uk Friday 10 February 2012 06.00 EST http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/feb/10/affair-jfk-kennedy-alford-review John F Kennedy, always a US icon, has over the years acquired a life story that's almost all sex and violence. Assassinated on 22 November 1963 in an atrocious public death, JFK and his record have become progressively tarnished by the sexual secrets of Camelot. The names of Judith Campbell Exner, Mary Pinchot Meyer, Gunilla von Post, Marlene Dietrich and two secretaries dubbed "Fiddle" and "Faddle" are now associated with the 35th president's private life as much as Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby are with his violent death. Marion ("Mimi") Beardsley Fahnestock Alford is the latest notch to be carved into the presidential bedpost. She was first outed by Robert Dallek in his 2003 JFK muckraker, An Unfinished Life, as a "tall, slender, beautiful" 19-year-old college sophomore with the pet-name "Monkey", and endured a firestorm of post-Lewinsky media intrusion. Now, as Mrs Alford, a sixtysomething divorcee, she has decided to take control of "my story". Actually, Once Upon a Secret is less an act of independent self-possession, more the helpless revelation of a woman as a victim. Her carefully constructed memoir, despite its marketing, is not so much a saucy kiss'n'tell of hanky panky in the White House, rather a tragic three-act case study of a young woman who flew too close to the sun. In American class terms, Mimi is medium posh. She describes a childhood of "preppie privilege", growing up "in a rambling colonial farmhouse" in New Jersey. Her parents were classic east coast Wasps, but no picnic: her father a manic depressive; her mother a domestic diva. Reading between the lines of her tight-lipped family history, it's clear that, as a young girl, Mimi was stifled, obedient, anxious – and low on self-esteem. "Everyone we knew was a Republican," she writes, "and shared the same Protestant faith." In high school, Mimi says she had "a run of bad luck" with boys. When her luck changed and she landed a suitor in eighth grade, she let him kiss her, once. Even in the late 1950s, this was not exactly the primrose path of dalliance. "That was the last kiss anyone bestowed on me through high school," she writes. "Monkey" Beardsley was a psychosexual accident waiting to happen. The first sign of trouble, aged 17 and feeling "like I didn't belong", was anorexia, though no one was using the word then. By 1962, barely 19, Miss "Changed Most Since Sophomore Year" was a young woman who, in her own words, "could talk and flirt and parry [with boys] easily. I just needed to find someone who understood me." It was at the climax of this first act in her life that, exploiting a school connection, young Marion Beardsley wrote to the first lady, Jackie Kennedy, and landed a job as a White House intern. Rarely has a naive virgin stepped into a more perilous scenario. Alford says that "the word feminism had not yet entered my vocabulary". It's a moot point whether women's lib could have inoculated this vulnerable 19-year-old against the aphrodisiac of supreme power. It was as if, she writes, on the brink of her fall, "I had been awarded membership in an elite club without having to go through the initiation process". Almost, but not quite. She was already in too deep. On only her fourth day at 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, Alford found herself in the White House swimming pool with "Fiddle" , "Faddle", JFK and his procuring "first friend", Dave Powers. Cocktails in the president's suite followed. According to Alford, the president "couldn't resist a girl with a little bit of social register in her". Late in June 1962 Mimi Alford experienced "the thrill of being desired". Cruelly, she "cannot describe what happened that night as making love". But she resists any charge of date rape. "I wouldn't call it non consensual, either." The 18-month affair Alford reveals reduced her 19-year-old self to the status of presidential plaything. She would do her college classwork in the limo on the way to have sex. JFK never kissed her on the mouth. Even in bed, she called him Mr President. Afterwards, she would listen to Little Peggy March or the Shirelles ("Will You Love Me Tomorrow?"). He preferred Tony Bennett or Frank Sinatra. The dark side of the man she calls "the Great Compartmentaliser", and who would identify himself on the telephone as "Michael Carter", was never far away. One day in the swimming pool, he decided that Dave Powers was looking "tense", and coerced Alford into giving the first friend a blow job. "I don't think the president thought I'd do it, but I'm ashamed to say that I did. The president silently watched." With sex, came drugs. Alford claims she was "the guinea pig" for the president's fascination with amyl nitrate – poppers. The exercise of power can be very discreet. The secret service turned a blind eye. Alford kept her shame to herself, and would do so for more than 40 years: "Blinded by the president's power and charisma, I was fully committed to keeping our affair secret." It was a joyless business. "I can't say our relationship was romantic. It was sexual, it was intimate, it was passionate," she writes. "But there was always a layer of reserve." Don't look to Once Upon a Secret for much new insight into JFK's presidency. Alford tells us that during the Cuban missile crisis, her lover confided "I'd rather my children be red than dead", but little else. On the death of his baby son, Patrick, he shared condolence letters with Alford, "tears rolling down his cheeks". That was probably the closest she came to the Great Compartmentaliser's heart. Then she met a boy her own age, Tony Fahnestock, and got engaged. She continued to see the president. In the third act of this romantic tragedy, it's only on JFK's assassination that she confesses all to her future husband. Fahnestock, with terrible cruelty, says he will forgive and marry her, but that she must never tell a soul. The burden of this secret (which she gradually shares with a tiny circle of girlfriends) stifles her emotional life, poisons her marriage, and traps her in what she calls "her emotional shell". Because this is America, where stories must have happy (or at least, feel-good) endings, she has therapy, finally meets Mr Right, and is able to "let go of my secret, and share". Sadly, for her, it may be too late. At the end of Once Upon a Secret she confesses she has perhaps "never been part of the story" and was only "a footnote to a footnote