Douglas Caddy

C.I.A. Examining Legality of Work With Police Dept. The New York Times By MARK MAZZETTI September 13, 2011 WASHINGTON — The Central Intelligence Agency has opened an internal inquiry into whether its close cooperation with the New York Police Department in the decade since the Sept. 11 attacks has broken any laws prohibiting the agency from collecting intelligence in the United States. During his first Congressional testimony as the C.I.A. director, David H. Petraeus said Tuesday that the agency’s inspector general had begun to investigate its work with the Police Department “to make sure we are doing the right thing.” Mr. Petraeus said the inquiry began last month, but gave few details about its scope. The C.I.A. is prohibited from gathering intelligence on American soil, but some have criticized its counterterrorism cooperation with law enforcement services as a de facto domestic spying campaign. The head of the Police Department’s intelligence unit, David Cohen, is a former C.I.A. official, and the agency has a senior clandestine officer embedded in the New York police force. James R. Clapper, the director of national intelligence, said during the same Congressional hearing on Tuesday that while there were no C.I.A. officers out on the streets of New York collecting intelligence, he thought it was “not a good optic to have C.I.A. involved in any city-level police department.” Under Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly, Mr. Cohen has been involved with expanding the Police Department’s global reach and trying to penetrate overseas terror networks that might be planning attacks in the city. But he has also overseen a number of controversial department efforts to infiltrate New York’s Muslim community and monitor city mosques to gather information about possible terror plots. Last month, The Associated Press reported that department intelligence officers had infiltrated dozens of mosques and had established a so-called Demographics Unit using plainclothes police officers to monitor ethnic groups in the metropolitan region. The department’s chief spokesman, Paul J. Browne, said he and his colleagues welcomed the agency’s inquiry. Muslim advocacy groups have called the department’s operations illegal, and have asked for a Justice Department investigation into the C.I.A.’s cooperation with local police forces. On Tuesday, Cyrus McGoldrick of the Council on American-Islamic Relations said that his group “cautiously” welcomed the agency’s decision to examine its relationship with the Police Department, although he said he would have preferred an independent investigation into the matter. He said he hoped “the agency’s investigation will be undertaken honestly and transparently.” Marie E. Harf, a spokeswoman for the agency, said that its cooperation with American police forces in the past decade “should not be a surprise to anyone,” and that its work with the department in New York “is exactly what the American people deserve and have come to expect following 9/11.” “The agency’s operational focus, however, is overseas and none of the support we have provided to N.Y.P.D. can be rightly characterized as ‘domestic spying’ by the C.I.A.,” Ms. Harf said. Inquiries by the agency’s inspector general have sometime taken years to complete, and the results of such investigations are rarely made public. Generally, if the inspector general’s office finds evidence that agency operatives broke the law, he will refer the matter to the Justice Department for prosecution. The current inspector general, David B. Buckley, is a former Air Force officer and staff member on the House Intelligence Committee. William K. Rashbaum contributed reporting from New York.

September 14, 2011 Man on Fire Remembering Carl Oglesby by MIKE DAVIS www.counterpunch.org In my lifetime I’ve heard two speakers whose unadorned eloquence and moral clarity pulled my heart right out of my chest. One was Bernadette Devlin (nee McAlliskey), speaking from the roof of the Busy Bee Market in Andersonstown in Belfast the apocalyptic day that Bobby Sands died. The other was Carl Oglesby, president of SDS in 1965. He was ten years older than most of us, had just resigned from Bendix corporation where he had worked as a technical writer, and wore a beard because his face was cratered from a poor-white childhood. His father was a rubber worker in Akron and his people came from the mountains. I’m not capable of accurately describing the kindness, intensity and melancholy that were alloyed in Carl’s character, or the profound role he played in deepening our commitment to the anti-war movement. He literally moved the hearts of thousands of people. He was also for many young SDSers – like myself and the wonderful Ross Altman (original UCLA SDSer and Carl’s close friend, whom I salute) – both a beloved mentor but also leader of the wild bunch. At a crucial moment in the tragic history of this desert country, he precisely and unwaveringly defined our duty. He was a man on fire. To those who knew him, I send my deepest love and solidarity – as I do to those yet to discover this great, tormented and most-old-fashionedly American radical. Mike Davis is currently a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Creative Writing at the University of California, Riverside.

Lawsuit: News Corp. directors knew about U.S. hacking a decade ago www.rawstory.com By Stephen C. Webster Wednesday, September 14th, 2011 -- 11:47 am The board of directors for News Corporation knew that two of its U.S. subsidiaries were involved in illegal hacking efforts against competitors but did nothing to stop it, according to a lawsuit filed this week by shareholders. The allegations point to News America Marketing and NDS Group, two News Corp. companies, as carrying out hacking operations against competitors. News Corp. attorneys admitted in court documents from 2009 that computers at News America Marketing were used to hack into the secure website of U.S.-based Floorgraphics, Inc. some 11 times. Floorgraphics claimed in a lawsuit that News America Marketing stole business from the company by hacking into their website from October 2003 to January 2004. The company agreed to dismiss the case after receiving a $29.5 million payment from News America Marketing. A lawyer for News America Marketing admitted during the trial that someone hacked into Floorgraphics website “through a firewall at News America Marketing headquarters,” but that the company did not know who did it. "For more than a decade, News Corp subsidiaries have engaged in highly improper practices that have subjected News Corp to great financial and reputational damage," the shareholder complaint alleges, adding that the board of directors had "not lifted a finger" to conduct oversight of these activities. They further suggested that the board's inaction on these matters permitted "a historic pattern of corruption" within the company, calling the behavior "pervasive." The suit also points to hacking during 2001 by NDS Group, News Corp.'s digital television smart card subsidiary, which was accused by French media giant Vivendi of hacking into subsidiary EchoStar's smart cards and extracting their proprietary software. That software later wound up on the Internet, then on bootlegged smart cards being sold on the streets, giving media pirates free access to pay television channels. Vivendi claimed NDS's actions had cost them up to $1 billion in damages. Shareholders said the allegation was settled in 2002, after News Corp. purchased Vivendi's Italian television platform Telepiu for €920 million -- but only after a jury described NDS's actions as "illegal." The U.S. Department of Justice said it was investigating whether News Corp. employees targeted the families of 9/11 victims in its phone hacking schemes, which have embroiled the company in scandal since July. So far, 16 employees of News International, the company's British media arm, have been arrested in relation to an investigation by U.K. authorities. The shareholder lawsuit, filed in a Delaware court, is a revision of a similar suit (PDF) shareholders filed in June. News Corp. officials have not commented on the pending litigation

Ian Burrell: Everyone used him. Even me – but I can justify it The subject of the work by Whittamore has more than 60 convictions andwas later prosecuted for defrauding a charity The Independent Wednesday, 14 September 2011 Steve Whittamore was known all over Fleet Street. I once used him myself, although I had no recollection of this until I saw the entry, tucked away among the 17,000 other transactions with journalists. It was from January 1999, a search to confirm the identity and address of a veteran conman and serial fraudster who had taken control of a charity that was being trusted by the Home Office to run entire wings of British prisons. The occupancy search was not illegal, but a phone conversion – without a public interest justification – would have been a breach of the Data Protection Act, although the Act was not in force at that time. The subject of the inquiry, one Kenner Jones, has more than 60 convictions and was later prosecuted for defrauding the charity. More recently, he moved to Kenya, where he was accused by the BBC of posing as a priest and working as a doctor without medical qualifications. This was Whittamore's only business with The Independent but he was kept busy by most of the rest of the national press. There are about 400 journalists named in the Operation Motorman files, including some of the most experienced reporters in Fleet Street and others working in magazines and television. They range from investigations specialists and newsdesk executives to showbiz hacks and diary writers. His colour-coded books – in red, blue, green and yellow – carefully recorded the subject of his inquiry, the name of the journalist requesting the information, the nature of the work and the subsequent result. In order to make the records more searchable, the original Motorman team had the information from the books transferred to computer dics at a cost of several thousand pounds. Further colour-coding was used to distinguish between the type of job – a criminal records check would appear in bright green, vehicle checks in grey, a Friends and Family telephone search in pink and a blag in white. Some searches were in the public interest but a large proportion of Whittamore's inquiries concerned the personal lives of celebrities. Some inquiries were ordered so that the journalist could simply speak to people who were the subject of an article. Others were apparently searches for salacious gossip. At the end of the 1990s, when Whittamore was building his network of investigators and newspaper clients, the evolution of computer technology was at a stage that now seems positively prehistoric. This was the world before Google, the search tool that has made it possible to contact almost anyone with a minimum of time and effort. It was an era when mobile telephones were less ubiquitous and when numbers were guarded much more fiercely than they are now. It was a time before the Data Protection Act, which came into force in March 2000. In that environment, a service that offered to locate individuals at short notice was invaluable to journalists, and Whittamore's business boomed.

Leveson phone-hacking inquiry: JK Rowling among 'core participants' Judge names figures who will be able to give evidence to investigation into phone hacking and media ethics and practices By Lisa O'Carroll guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 September 2011 13.13 BST Harry Potter author JK Rowling, who famously guards her privacy, is one of a number of prominent public figures expected to give evidence to Lord Justice Leveson's judicial inquiry into phone hacking and media ethics and practices. Rowling is one of 46 celebrities, politicians, sportsmen, other public figures, and members of the public who believe they have been the victims of media intrusion granted "core participant" status in the inquiry by Leveson on Wednesday. This will mean Rowling and other core participants can give evidence personally, or via a lawyer, on her experience of alleged media intrusion to the inquiry, which begins in October at London's Royal Courts of Justice. The Harry Potter author has previously expressed her displeasure with the press. In May 2008, she won a legal battle to secure the privacy of her children after photographs were published in the Sunday Express of her young son as he was wheeled down an Edinburgh street in a push-chair. Others on the list including Anne Diamond's former husband, Mike Hollingsworth; former nurse turned model and TV presenter Abi Titmus; Sheryl Gascoigne; and Mark Oaten, the former MP who had to pull out of the Liberal Democrat leadership race after tabloid revelations about his sex life. The parents of murder victim Diane Watson also in Leveson's initial core participants list, along with the parents and sister of teenage murder victim Milly Dowler, and the parents of Madeleine McCann. The son of mass murderer Harold Shipman is also on the list. Christopher Jefferies, arrested on suspicion of murdering Joanna Yeates in December but released without charge, has also been granted core participant status. He subsequently sued several newspapers successfully for libel. Several celebrities who have allegedly had their phones hacked, including Hugh Grant, Sienna Miller and Calum Best, are among the 46 named on Leveson's list of core participants. MPs Chris Bryant, Tessa Jowell, Denis MacShane, Simon Hughes, and former Labour deputy leader Lord Prescott also feature, along with a smattering of sports stars including jockey Kieron Fallon and former Premiership footballer Gary Flitcroft. Rebekah Brooks, former News International chief executive and editor of the News of the World and the Sun, has been denied her application to become a core participant as she no longer works for the Murdoch company, but she will be able to give evidence as a witness. She has appointed a lawyer to act on her behalf who will under the rules of the inquiry will be allowed to apply to ask questions. Jonathan Rees, a private investigator who was at one stage employed by the News of the World, also applied to be a core participant, arguing that there "might be significant criticism of him". However, Rees was also denied the status of core participant on the grounds that he was not of significant enough interest to the first module of the inquiry. This will focus on the relationship between the press and the public and extends not merely to the allegations of phone hacking but also to other potentially illegal or unethical behaviour. News International, owner of the paper at the centre of the phone-hacking scandal, the now defunct News of the World, the Sunday Times, the Times and the Sun, has been given core participant status as expected, as has Guardian News & Media, the owner of the Guardian, which has published a series of revelations on phone hacking over the past two years. Daily Mail publisher Associated Newspapers and Richard Desmond's Northern & Shell, owner of the Daily Express, the Sunday Express and the Daily Star, will also be core participants. English PEN, a writers' freedom association, and Index on Censorship were also denied core participant status. Barrister David Sherborne, who is representing a group of victims suing the News of the World alleged phone hacking, including Hugh Grant and Jemima Khan, had applied to represent 14 people who either believe their voicemail was intercepted or claimed to have their privacy invaded by the press. However, Leveson said he was not prepared to give core participant status to those who could not be named. Leveson has also decided the Metropolitan police can be a core participant

Leveson inquiry: the full list of core participants Inquiry chair Lord Leveson has published list of individuals and organisations who will have core participant status guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 14 September 2011 13.20 BST Inquiry chair Lord Leveson on Wednesday published a list of individuals and organisations who will have core participant status. More can be added during the course of the inquiry. Core participants are decided on the basis of whether they: 1. Played, or may have played, a direct and significant role in relation to the matters to which the inquiry relates. 2. Have a significant interest in an important aspect of the matters to which the inquiry relates. 3. May be subject to explicit or significant criticism during the inquiry proceedings or in the report, or in any interim report. Individuals who believe they may have been victims of media intrusion Chris Bryant MP Tessa Jowell MP Denis MacShane MP The Rt Hon Lord Prescott of Kingston upon Hull Joan Smith Christopher Shipman Tom Rowland Mark Lewis Mark Thomson Gerry McCann Kate McCann Christopher Jefferies Max Moseley Brian Paddick Paul Gascoigne David Mills Sienna Miller Hugh Grant Ben Jackson Ciara Parkes Simon Hughes MP Max Clifford Sky Andrew Ulrika Jonsson Mark Oaten Michele Milburn Abi Titmuss Calum Best Claire Ward Mary-Ellen Field Garry Flitcroft Ian Hurst Shobna Gulati Mike Hollingsworth Kieron Fallon Ashvini Sharma Tim Blackstone Valentina Semenenko Sally Dowler Bob Dowler Gemma Dowler Sheryl Gascoigne Graham Shear JK Rowling James Watson Margaret Watson Organisations Metropolitan police News International Northern & Shell Guardian News & Media Associated Newspapers

Exposed after eight years: a private eye's dirty work for Fleet Street Files seen by The Independent detail 17,000 requests to investigator Steve Whittamore The Independent By Ian Burrell and Mark Olden Wednesday, 14 September 2011 http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/exposed-after-eight-years-a-private-eyes-dirty-work-for-fleet-street-2354360.html Former police officer has revealed how the authorities have known for more than eight years the vast scale on which media organisations employed private detectives to obtain the personal information of thousands of individuals, including the families and friends of murder victims. The Independent has conducted a detailed examination of the files seized as part of Operation Motorman in 2003, and has been told by the lead investigator on that inquiry that his team was forbidden from interviewing journalists who were paying for criminal records checks, vehicle registration searches, and other illegal practices. Among the targets of these searches were the victims of some of the most notorious crimes and tragedies of the past 15 years. Many of the investigations were perfectly legal, but many others, it is clear, were well outside the law. The Motorman files reveal that the Sunday Express used private investigators to obtain the private telephone number of the parents of Holly Wells, shortly after she was murdered in Soham by Ian Huntley. In a statement last night, Express Newspapers said it "has never instructed private investigators to obtain information illegally. We have always and will continue to uphold the highest level of journalistic standards". The parents of the murdered schoolgirl Sarah Payne were targeted by the same investigator, who was hired by two national newspaper groups News International and Trinity Mirror and separately by a celebrity magazine, Best, which is owned by the National Magazine Company. The same agency was also used by the News of the World to target the parents of Milly Dowler, and by The People and NOTW to obtain private numbers for the family of Stuart Lubbock, whose body was found in Michael Barrymore's swimming pool. The People used similar tactics to target the families of children who were victims of the Dunblane massacre. Operation Motorman was set up by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) to look into widespread breaches of data protection laws by the media. In a signed witness statement given to The Independent, Motorman's original lead investigator, a retired police inspector with 30 years' experience, accuses the authorities of serious failings, and of being too "frightened" to question journalists. "I feel the investigation should have been conducted a lot more vigorously, a lot more thoroughly and it may have revealed a lot more information," he said. "I was disappointed and somewhat disillusioned with the senior management because I felt as though they were burying their heads in the sand. It was like being on an ostrich farm." He claimed that had investigators been allowed to interview journalists at the time, the phone-hacking scandal and other serious breaches of privacy by the media may have been uncovered years earlier. "The biggest question that needed answering was, why did the reporters want all these numbers and what were they doing with them?" His comments reflect badly on the ICO, and the Press Complaints Commission, which was given early notification of the evidence in the Motorman files. "We weren't allowed to talk to journalists," he said. "It was fear they were frightened." The PCC said last night that it had never been given sight of the Motorman evidence but had strengthened its code and issued industry guidelines which had led to an improvement in standards. All the information has been in the hands of the authorities since 2003, when a team from the ICO seized the material from the home of private detective Stephen Whittamore. Whittamore and three other members of his private investigation network were given conditional discharges when Motorman came to court in 2005. No journalists were charged, although the files contain prima facie evidence of thousands of criminal offences. Thousands of victims disclosed in the paperwork have never even been told they were targeted. News International spent £193 and then a further £105, hiring Whittamore's company JJ Services to carry out investigations into "Sarah Payne", a few months after her murder in 2000. The People also paid for the ex-directory number of Sarah's family home in Surrey. Whittamore was engaged by Best magazine to obtain the same number. At the same time Best, which is now owned by Hearst Magazines UK, asked for three more ex-directory searches relating to Pam Warren, a survivor of the Paddington rail crash of 1999, who was so disfigured she had to wear a face mask. Hearst declined to comment. The families of Dunblane massacre victims Aimie Adam and Matthew Birnie also appear as subjects in the Motorman files, following requests for ex-directory numbers by The People. When a major tragedy occurred, Whittamore was often the first person that tabloid newsrooms would call. NOTW spent more than £200 using him to locate the parents and other relatives of the murdered schoolgirl Milly Dowler, whose mobile phone was later hacked by Glenn Mulcaire. John Whittingdale, chairman of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, said: "There was an absolute lack of any wish on the part of the police or the ICO or those looking into it to start delving into the prosecution of newspapers and journalists. [The ICO] took a list of hundreds and hundreds of journalists' names. Yes, there's a public interest defence but they didn't even bother to go and ask whether that was what they employed Whittamore for." The Operation Motorman investigator, who has requested anonymity, has written to Lord Leveson asking to give evidence to his inquiry into media standards. The inquiry has expressed interest in him giving oral evidence or submitting a witness statement. He has also been interviewed by Strathclyde Police, which is investigating criminal activity by journalists in Scotland. The Whittamore files have also recently been requested by the Metropolitan Police's Operation Tuleta team, which is investigating the use of computer hacking by journalists. Many searches will have been carried out legitimately, but the files show the grand scale on which newspapers were using private detectives to gain access to the police national computer and the records of the DVLA in order to obtain details of criminal records and vehicle registrations. Such offences could carry a jail sentence for encouraging a police officer or DVLA employee to commit misconduct in public office. JJ Services was hired to "blag" personal information (by impersonating individuals or officials) from organisations ranging from hospitals to hotels, gyms and banks. Blags are not always illegal for instance, when information is freely volunteered by an individual without reference to a database. Newspapers and magazines also used the agency to illicitly obtain thousands of private telephone numbers, often including the details held by telephone companies under the category "Friends and Family". In total, the Whittamore files reference 17,489 orders from media organisations. Some 1,028 are in the so-called "blue book", which was essentially dedicated to News International. The "red book" contained 6,774 jobs, most on behalf of Trinity Mirror titles. The "green book", which includes work from Associated Newspapers titles, Express Newspapers and some celebrity magazines, has 2,227 references. And the "yellow book", which is miscellaneous, has 7,460 orders. In 2006, the Information Commissioner's Office published a report What Price Privacy?, giving some details of what it had discovered. The ICO did not identify victims and, in a follow-up report, printed a league table of titles that had used Whittamore's service, showing a total of 3,757 transactions. The senior investigator described the report as "very inaccurate", citing the apparent under-reporting. Christopher Graham, the Information Commissioner, said the ICO stood by its reports and that the placing of these documents before Parliament "was a far more effective method of raising awareness of the illegal trade in personal information" than attempting to prosecute journalists. "The ICO has always been clear that our decision not to pursue legal action against any of the journalists linked to the Operation Motorman investigation was based on a lack of evidence that the journalists who had received information from Mr Whittamore had directly asked him to obtain the information illegally. Without this evidence the ICO could not justify chasing every possible prosecution as this would have taken a disproportionate amount of time and resource and was unlikely to lead to any meaningful results." The ICO said the lower figure in its report was a result of grouping multiple requests by a journalist as a single transaction. The most alarming inquiries in the Motorman files and those which would appear to be among the least justifiable in the public interest are those which involve intrusions into the privacy of victims of serious crime. In 2003, following a drive-by murder in Birmingham, a reporter on The People employed Whittamore to carry out a series of ex-directory checks and other searches on the relatives and associates of the victims, Charlene Ellis and Letisha Shakespeare. He obtained an ex-directory number for the parents of Charlene and sent a total bill to the paper for £355.50. Other tragedies were subjects of searches. When Stuart Lubbock was found drowned in the swimming pool of Michael Barrymore, NOTW paid Whittamore for the ex-directory number of Claire Wicks, his girlfriend and mother of their daughters. The People made similar inquiries for the private number of the dead man's father, Terry. Blags were Whittamore's speciality. Charging £100 a time, he repeatedly posed as someone else to obtain information from organisations. Among the targets were the Guide Association, the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital, the Bel Air Beverly Hills hotel and the investment bank Goldman Sachs. Some of the tasks performed by Whittamore for newspapers are entirely legal and a number of others have been carried out to obtain information in the public interest, such as in exposing corruption and other criminal activity. In some cases, editors may not have been aware their reporters were engaging private detectives. Some subjects were political figures. Anji Hunter, former adviser to Tony Blair, came under close scrutiny following her break-up with the landscape gardener Nick Cornwall. The Daily Mail asked Whittamore to obtain the address of Hunter and Cornwall. It then asked for the "Family and Friends" numbers listed by the couple, through which Whittamore discovered the address of Cornwall's parents. The reporter then requested the "Family and Friends" numbers of the parents 15 numbers, many of them in Liverpool and did a similar exercise on one of those to produce a further 10 numbers. Whittamore and his network of associates typically obtained such numbers by blagging them from staff at BT. There is no evidence that the Daily Mail engaged in phone hacking, and no article actually appeared. Associated Newspapers, which owns the Daily Mail, said last night that it had banned the use of private investigators in 2006. Much of the work in the files targets celebrities or appears to be salacious gossip that has no clear public interest justification. The files contain scores of invoices paid to JJ Services, and among those paid by News International are jobs which he records in his files under such descriptions as "Love Rat Mum", "Sex in Unusual Places", "Emma's Sexy Secrets" and "Bonking Tory". News International declined to comment. A spokesman for Trinity Mirror said: "Since the publication of the Information Commissioner's What Price Privacy Now? report it has been widely known that a number of media organisations, including some of our titles, used the services of Steve Whittamore. We have not used Steve Whittamore since that report. We are engaging fully with the Leveson Inquiry as we will with any other inquiries from appropriate regulatory or legal authorities." Only a tiny proportion of victims have been told they were targeted. The ICO investigator and his senior colleague interviewed a small sample, including Ian Hislop, Lenny Henry, Hugh Grant, Chris Tarrant and Charlotte Church. There are around 400 named journalists in the files, from investigative reporters and newsdesk executives to showbiz hacks and diary writers. For some, Whittamore's services were not just a useful tool but almost an addiction. One reporter used him 422 times. Another carried out 191 transactions, requesting dozens of vehicle searches, more than a dozen criminal records checks, several blags and numerous Friends and Family inquiries. Yet the Motorman team were told not to speak to any journalist. The whistleblower's story: They were too afraid of the press to let us interview journalists It was incredible. Even as we were doing the search I could see how big it was and that night when we retired to the hotel I spent about four hours browsing through it and the more I browsed the more apparent it became how big it was going to be. We were down there for two or three days. We came back and the first thing I did was arrange an informal meeting. When we enlightened them with what we'd found I was subsequently told, within a few days, that we [the investigations unit] weren't allowed to talk to journalists and that he [the Information Commissioner] would deal with the press. It was fear, they were frightened. We told them what our plan of action was. We intended to put together 30 or 40 prosecution packages and then go for conspiracy, which would involve the blaggers, the private detectives, the corrupt sellers of the information, right up to the journalists. When I mentioned the press, I still remember the words which one of them said: "We can't take them on, they're too big for us." I remember thinking, "It's our job to take them on and if we can't take them on, who does take them on?" As an ex-police officer for 30 years and a detective, there's nothing worse than having a damned good case and somebody tells you, "You can't go and interview the suspect". If you don't ask questions you don't get answers. I feel that had we been given the opportunity to interview some of the reporters we might have got a hint about this hacking because it was totally unknown at that time. The biggest question that needed answering was why did the reporters want all these numbers and what were they doing with them? I knew about phone-tapping but I knew there were complicated issues involved in phone tapping so we dismissed that. Had we been given the opportunity to investigate more thoroughly and interview journalists it may well have identified that phone-hacking existed instead of waiting for the Mulcaire case to break. If we had identified this in 2003 then perhaps a lot of this would never have happened. I was not present at the Whittamore court case but I was told that the first thing the judge said was a comment about not seeing any journalists in the dock. If newspapers and reporters had seen the ICO going into their premises or arranging to interview journalists I think it would have sent a lot stronger message out than publishing a report 13 months later. I feel the investigation should have been conducted a lot more vigorously, a lot more thoroughly, and it may have revealed a lot more information. I know it's difficult to tell all the victims but isn't that the Information Commissioner's job? There are thousands of people out there who still don't know they've been victims. When I was in the police I was always taught that your victim is your most important person. I was disappointed and somewhat disillusioned with the senior management because I felt as though they were burying their heads in the sand. It was like being on an ostrich farm. The impression being given is that they never prosecuted the press because they were so disappointed with the [Whittamore] result of a conditional discharge. But by then it was too late and, in any case, we knew virtually from the start of that inquiry that no journalist was ever going to get prosecuted. To be honest it made a bit of a farce of the investigation. Were these methods illegal? The transactions which are contained in Stephen Whittamore's files range from area and occupancy searches to criminal records checks and inquiries into vehicle registrations. Area and occupancy searches Area and address occupancy searches may have been procured illicitly but would provide no prospect of a prosecution, even when there was no public interest defence in requesting the information. This is because the requester of the information could claim an expectation that the investigator would acquire the details through legitimate means, such as by consulting an electoral roll in a public library, for instance. Ex-directory checks, phone 'conversions' and friends and family searches This would be information obtained from a phone company and might be in breach of Section 55 of the Data Protection Act (which came into effect in March 2000 and carries a maximum fine of £500,000) unless Whittamore had obtained them from a friend or relative. These searches could be legally defended if the inquiry was in the public interest. Searches of the police national computer or the DVLA database Serious. Not only would they be a breach of the Data Protection Act but in serious cases, where there was no public interest in the inquiry, the requester of the information might be charged with aiding and abetting misconduct in public office by the person supplying the information, which could carry a jail sentence.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/video/2011/sep/13/phone-hacking-james-murdoch-video

Australia to investigate media after UK phone-hacking scandal Inquiry could cover protections for privacy and the role of the print media's self-regulatory watchdog Associated Press guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011 09.28 BST The Australian government has promised an inquiry into the country's media as politicians complain that Rupert Murdoch's News Corp owns too many newspapers. Calls have been growing for an Australian inquiry into News Corp since the New York-based company closed the News of the World in July over phone-hacking allegations. News Corp owns 70% of Australia's newspapers. The communications minister, Stephen Conroy, told colleagues in his ruling centre-left Labor party on Tuesday that there would be an inquiry into the Australian media. He said the terms of reference were under discussion with the Greens party that supports Labor's minority government. But Conroy said the inquiry would not be "an attack on News Ltd", the Australian subsidiary of News Corp. He said the inquiry could cover areas including protections for privacy and the role of the print media's self-regulatory watchdog, Australian Press Council. Conroy said the government disagreed with a motion to be proposed by the Greens leader, Bob Brown, in the Senate on Thursday. That motion would call on Conroy to "investigate the direct or indirect ramifications for Australia of the criminal matters affecting" News Corp's British subsidiary, News International. There have been no allegations made in Australia of the type of phone hacking that has led to at least 16 arrests in Britain. Labor politicians have long complained that News Ltd publications are biased towards Liberal party conservatives and that the company has too much control over Australian newspapers. They blame the media for their party plumbing record lows in opinion polls four years after Labor first came to government. The Liberal leader, Tony Abbott, dismissed the need for a media inquiry, saying there was no evidence of any new problems in the industry. "This looks like a naked attempt to intimidate the media," Abbott said. The prime minister, Julia Gillard, has had an increasingly testy relationship with News Ltd publications and its executives. The Australian newspaper withdrew an opinion piece from its website and published an apology last month after Gillard threatened to sue over an incorrect claim that she had once shared a house with a corrupt union official that had been paid for with embezzled union money. Gillard attacked the News Ltd broadsheet, saying no one had contacted her for comment before publishing "a false report in breach of all known standards of journalism". "This is a question of ethics and standards for the Australian," she said. John Hartigan, chairman and chief executive of News Ltd, described Gillard's comments as "pedantic" and "disappointing", and said it was accepted practice not to seek comment for opinion pieces.

Phone hacking: News International finds 'large caches' of documents' Many tens of thousands' of items discovered by News of the World publisher could contain evidence of phone hacking By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011 14.55 BST The publisher of the News of the World has found "many tens of thousands" of new documents and emails that could contain evidence about the scale of phone hacking at the paper, it has emerged. Michael Silverleaf QC, the barrister for the News International subsidiary News Group Newspapers (NGN), told the high court at a pre-trial hearing on Tuesday: "Two very large new caches of documents have been [discovered] which the current management were unaware of." NGN was ordered in the summer to search its internal email system for any evidence that mobile phones belonging to a list of public figures were targeted by the paper. That search has not been completed, but some documents have already been retrieved, the high court heard. Referring to the emails that NGN has been searching through, Mr Justice Vos told the high court that "there is some important material in what has already been disclosed". It also emerged on Tuesday that lawyers acting for phone-hacking claimants have received a 68-page document from police that lists the names of those who asked Glenn Mulcaire – the private investigator who worked for the paper – to engage in hacking, based on notes seized from his home during a raid in 2006. Mulcaire had a habit of noting the names of people who asked him to target mobile phones in the left-hand corner of his notebooks, often using their initials or first name to denote their identity. The document cannot be made public because Vos had previously ordered that they remain confidential so the police inquiry would not be compromised. The fact that the document compiled by Scotland Yard runs to 68 pages suggests it contains many names. The high court judge also gave NGN more time to comply with the earlier order requiring the company to hand over potential evidence to phone-hacking litigants – now extended to 30 September. NGN said last year that it had lost some emails from the period when Mulcaire was most active, but subsequently said they had been found. However, the Commons home affairs select committee was told last week by HCL, which managed the IT systems of NGN's ultimate parent company, News Corp, that its client had asked HCL to delete hundreds of thousands of emails – on 13 occasions between April 2010 and July this year. News also emerged on Tuesday that Mulcaire told one alleged phone-hacking victim, the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes, that he cannot remember who at the paper ordered him to target the politician's phone. Hughes launched legal action against the paper's publisher in August and won a high court order forcing Mulcaire to answer questions about who asked him to target his phone. Although Mulcaire has now complied with that order, Hugh Tomlinson QC, one of the barristers acting for the phone-hacking victims, told the court today: "Mr Mulcaire has indicated in respect of every question raised that he has no recollection."

News Corp shareholders lodge complaint against Rupert Murdoch Major US banks accuse Murdoch and News Corporation of corporate misconduct extending far beyond UK Full text of shareholders' complaint http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/sep/13/news-corporation-shareholders-complaint By Ed Pilkington in New York guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 13 September 2011 16.37 BST A prominent group of US banks and investment funds with substantial investments in News Corporation has issued a fresh legal complaint accusing the company of widespread corporate misconduct extending far beyond the phone-hacking excesses of News of the World. The legal action, lodged in the Delaware courts, is led by Amalgamated Bank, a New York-based chartered bank that manages some $12bn on behalf of institutional investors and holds about 1 million shares of News Corporation common stock. Its lawsuit is aimed against the members of News Corp's board, including Rupert Murdoch himself, his sons James and Lachlan, and the media empire's chief operating officer, Chase Carey. In the complaint, the shareholders accuse the board of allowing Murdoch to use News Corp as his "own personal fiefdom". In addition to the phone-hacking scandal at the News of the World, the complaint focuses on the controversial business tactics of two News Corp subsidiaries in America, its advertising arm News America Marketing and a manufacturer of satellite TV smart cards called NDS Group Plc. In legal documents, the shareholders allege that the two companies were accused by multiple parties of "stealing computer technology, hacking into business plans and computers and violating the law through a wide range of anti-competitive behaviour". The complaint draws on several lawsuits and trial transcripts in which the News Corp subsidiaries were prosecuted by rival businesses for alleged misconduct. In the case of News America, the company reached settlements with three separate competitors amounting to $650m. In one trial, involving an advertising company called Floorgraphics, evidence was presented to the jury that News America had broken into its rival's secure computer systems at least 11 times. The chief executive of News America, Paul Carlucci, was also quoted as having told Floorgraphics: "If you ever get into any of our businesses, I will destroy you. I work for a man who wants it all, and doesn't understand anybody telling him he can't have it all." The complaint says that as Carlucci and Murdoch talk regularly, "it is inconceivable that Murdoch would not have been aware about the illegal tactics being employed by NAM to thwart comptetition". In the case of NDS, the shareholder complaint refers to lawsuits launched by rivals Vivendi and EchoStar, who accused the company, which News Corp acquired in 1992, of illegally extracting the code of its smart cards used to unscramble satellite TV signals and charge subscribers. In court documents, Amalgamated Bank says NDS posted the Vivendi code on the internet, allowing hackers to break into broadcasts for free and inflicting more than $1bn in damages on its competitor. In a separate case, EchoStar accused NDS of illegally intercepting one of its satellite television broadcasts, and a court injunction was obtained preventing the News Corp subsidiary from "intercepting or receiving, anywhere in the US, EchoStar's satellite television signal without authorisation". Jay Eisenhofer, a lawyer representing Amalgamated Bank and its other leading complainants, the New Orleans Employees' Retirement System and Central Laborers Pension Fund, said the details of the alleged misconduct at News America and NDS were significant as they suggested a wider culture of improper behaviour that went beyond the illegality at the now-defunct News of the World. "These cases establish a pattern of misconduct that extends far beyond the UK subsidiary. It demonstrates a corporate culture that allows this sort of misconduct to take place over a very long period of time." Eisenhofer pointed out that several members of the News America and NDS boards were also directors of News Corp. The latest complaint from Amalgamated and its co-plaintiffs provides the most detailed and serious allegations yet against News Corp for alleged business improprieties carried out within the US. The company is already under investigation by the FBI, which is looking into suggestions that News of the World reporters tried to gain access to the phone records of 9/11 victims. The justice department is also carrying out a wide-ranging inquiry in the wake of the phone-hacking scandal into News Corp's corporate behaviour to see whether any US laws were broken. There was no immediate response from News Corp to the allegations

I had a conversation a year ago in Dallas with two women who approached me and who told me they knew and had with visited Billie Sol only a few days before. They described a legal dispute regarding guardianship between Billie Sol and his daughter, Pam, that was in the process of being resolved. Since I live in Texas and Billie Sol is a legendary character in the Lone Star State, if he were to pass away it would be front page news. I have seen no news about him in the Texas media for the past year.

Phone hacking: 7/7 victim's mother to sue News of the World The mother of a 7/7 bomb victim has become the latest person to take legal action against the News of the World in the phone hacking scandal, the High Court has heard. Daily Telegraph 1:37PM BST 13 Sep 2011 By Mark Hughes, Crime Correspondent 1:37PM BST 13 Sep 2011 Sheila Henry, the mother of 26-year-old Christian Small who died in the blast at King’ Cross, has been put forward as a lead case in the civil litigation cases against the News of the World. She joins Jude Law, the football agent Sky Andrew, interior designer Kelly Hoppen and MP Chris Bryant as the key cases against News International. High Court judge, Mr Justice Vos, has previously asked for a cross section of alleged victims to be heard as lead cases so he can set damages and make it possible for other hacking cases to be settled without further court hearings. Mr Small died in the Piccadilly line blast which killed 26 people. On the day of his death his family, worried by the fact they could not contact him, pinned up posters around London urging people to contact them with any sightings. It is feared that Miss Henry then had her phone hacked by the now defunct Sunday newspaper. She also fears that her son’s phone was hacked.

Murdoch empire will still pay disgraced detective's damages The Independent By James Cusick and Cahal Milmo Tuesday, 13 September 2011 News International has not cut its financial ties with Glenn Mulcaire despite the insistence by Rupert Murdoch's media empire that it would do so by no longer paying the legal fees of the disgraced private detective. According to a previously protected High Court document obtained by The Independent, the company is still on course to pay any damages awarded against Mr Mulcaire in dozens of civil phone hacking claims. Mr Murdoch's son James told Parliament in July that he was "surprised" to learn his company was still paying Mulcaire's legal bill and that the arrangement would be terminated with "immediate effect". News International had previously refused to answer questions about who was paying Mr Mulcaire's lawyers bill. The private investigator lodged a lawsuit last month against the company, claiming that its decision to stop paying his legal fees, which had reached nearly £250,000, breached a long-standing contract. The claim document, lodged in the Chancery Division of the High Court, details the close-knit legal relationship that existed between Mr Mulcaire's legal team and the Murdoch UK media company. Until Mr Murdoch ended the legal fees deal, Mr Mulcaire was still co-operating with the News of the World's controlling company, News Group Newspapers (NGN), and had been giving them "access to confidential and privileged information to which it would not otherwise have had access", according to the claim. He was also allowing NGN to prescribe the ways in which he "conducted the telephone interception litigation", and to choose the barrister to represent him. News International's agreement with Mr Mulcaire includes his appeal against a High Court ruling that directed him to answer a list of questions drawn up by hacking victims who are suing NOTW. The court document lodged on 17 August by Mr Mulcaire's lawyer, Sarah Webb, states that NGN had no right to end the legal fees arrangement with her client because he had performed everything NGN had asked him to do. The document describes letters from NGN's solicitors to Mr Mulcaire denying that it had agreed to pay his legal costs. The claim alleges that in a letter dated 11 August NGN said it would pay Mr Mulcaire's costs "up to the date that our client made its position clear". This refers to James Murdoch's promise to MPs on 20 July that NI would terminate the deal. But it goes on to state that the letter "did not to purport to withdraw the indemnity in respect of damages" – meaning that a previously unacknowledged undertaking by News International to pay any cash settlements against Mr Mulcaire remains in place. Dozens of civil damages claims have now been filed against the owners of the defunct Sunday tabloid, naming both NGN and Mr Mulcaire as co-defendants. New International has signalled its intention to settle claims wherever it feels they are justified and has already paid £100,000 to the actress Sienna Miller. Settlements have also been reached with the football pundit Andy Gray and the television actress Leslie Ash and her family. News International has set aside a fund of at least £20m to settle the damages claims against it. Mr Mulcaire was jailed for six months in 2007 after he admitted hacking into the voicemails of royal aides and celebrities including the supermodel Elle Macpherson and the Liberal Democrat MP Simon Hughes. But he continues to be at the centre of the scandal as Scotland Yard detectives go through records seized from his home detailing further alleged voicemail interception. He recently issued a public apology for the "hurt and upset" caused by his activities but said NOTW had placed him under "relentless pressure". News International last night said it did not accept it had any indemnity to pay legal fees or damages for Mr Mulcaire. A spokeswoman said: “We have no agreement whatsoever with Glenn Mulcaire.” A done deal? * On 28 July, just after James Murdoch expressed surprise that News International was still paying Glenn Muclaire's legal bills, NI's solicitors wrote to the former News of the World private investigator ending the deal. Another letter dated 11 August denied that NI had agreed to pay Mr Mulcaire's legal costs and stated it was no longer picking up the bill. However, in the same 11 August letter the company said it would meet the costs of any legal bill incurred prior to Mr Murdoch's public termination. This could have been the point at which NI severed legal links with Mr Mulcaire. But it did not. Instead, there was no mention it would not pick up the potentially substantial bill for the damages Mr Mulcaire could face in phone-hacking civil actions as a co-defendant with News Group Newspapers.

James Murdoch recalled by phone hack MPs The Independent By Gavin Cordon Tuesday, 13 September 2011 James Murdoch is to face a fresh grilling by MPs investigating the News of the World phone hacking scandal, it was announced today. Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee chairman John Whittingdale said Mr Murdoch, who gave evidence to the committee last July, was being recalled. However, he said that the committee wanted to take evidence first from other witnesses, including former senior News Corp executive Les Hinton and Mark Lewis, the lawyer representing victims. Mr Whittingdale told Sky News that his committee was "beginning to reach the end of its deliberations" but wanted to tie up "one or two loose ends" by recalling witnesses. He said Mr Hinton would be asked about the period in which payments were made to News of the World royal correspondent Clive Goodman and private investigator Glenn Mulcaire, who were jailed in 2007 for eavesdropping on private voicemail messages. And he said that the committee wanted to hear from Farrer's, the solicitors who advised News International on the six-figure payment made to settle the case of Professional Footballers Association chief executive Gordon Taylor, who took legal action over alleged phone-hacking. Mr Whittingdale said: "As a final session, we will have some more questions based on what we have heard which we will want to put to James Murdoch." The questions will focus on discrepancies between Mr Murdoch's evidence in July and the evidence given to the committee last week by former News of the World editor Colin Myler and ex-News International lawyer Tom Crone. Mr Myler and Mr Crone insisted that they told Mr Murdoch in a 2008 meeting about the notorious "For Neville" email, which showed that phone-hacking was not confined to a single rogue reporter on the News of the World - something he has always denied. "Clearly, there are different accounts which we have heard," said Mr Whittingdale. "We have spent some time questioning Tom Crone and Colin Myler last week about their version of what happened. "We would want to put that to James Murdoch and hear more about how he recalls the meeting." Asked whether the committee had any powers to force Mr Murdoch to appear if he refuses to do so voluntarily, Mr Whittingdale said: "I honestly don't think that will be necessary. "My understanding has always been that he wants to co-operate with all the inquiries and he has said that on the record." A News Corp spokesperson said: "James Murdoch is happy to appear in front of the committee again to answer any further questions members might have."

Jackie: In her own words Jacqueline Kennedy was the consummate presidential consort – clever, stylish, loyal. But tapes of her candid thoughts about political figures, about to be heard for the first time, make for illuminating, unsettling listening, says David Usborne The Independent Tuesday, 13 September 2011 It is a country worn down by present dangers (the economy) and exhausted by commemorations of grief (9/11). Around the corner is an election where retrenchment and lost ambition will trump hope. Oh, for the days of... what or who? Oh, for the bright beacon days – of course – of Camelot. Tonight a wish will be granted by the fairy godmother of the nation. Imagine she has dropped in and asked: "Which figure in your recent history, taken too young, should I restore to you, at least in voice, to give you distraction?" So some might answer Elvis or Tupac Shakur, but it's a decent bet that many will have looked up and said Jackie. Give us Jackie again. And presto! With gratitude in truth to Caroline Kennedy, Americans will stay in tonight to watch as ABC News pushes the play button on tapes of a seven-part conversation the former First Lady had with the historian and former aide to her husband, Arthur Schlesinger, in 1964. It will be a Disney ride aboard a spinning teacup – gilt-edged like the dinner service she introduced to the White House – to a heroic past of glamour, to when the Kennedys were America's royalty. There is a health warning posted before we board. Passengers may experience brief periods of vertigo. The tapes, made four months after JFK's assassination in Dallas, do offer confirmation of a wife unstintingly loyal to the husband she has lost and the father of her children. But they swerve alarmingly – or deliciously – when Mrs Kennedy turns to describing characters she didn't quite approve of. The trailers for the tapes – The New York Times boasted its own synopsis yesterday, and ABC primed its ratings numbers with a few juicy audio excerpts on its news bulletins – read like those saucy teasers in the tacky tabloids. Which women's rights pioneer did Mrs Kennedy dismiss as a "lesbian"? Which American civil rights movement icon did she consider a womanising "phoney", and which leader of a European nation an "egomaniac"? And what scared her husband most about Lyndon Johnson? Maybe it was the skill of Mr Schlesinger, a Pulitzer Prize-winning chronicler of American public affairs who died in 2007, that drew Ms Kennedy into becoming, well, a bit bitchy. Just about everyone she dishes dirt on has a legacy, by the way, rather more substantial than hers. Did she really say that about Indira Gandhi? Theoretically, we should be hearing none of this quite yet. When Jacqueline Kennedy agreed to give what is, all the juicy bits aside, a unique oral history, she demanded that they be kept under lock and key until 50 years after her death. The guardian of the tapes was Caroline. And she, it seems, is the one who concluded that they deserved unveiling before then. The deal that was struck was simple: a book and accompanying audio discs would be released on 14 September 2011, which is tomorrow. And ABC would be tied in to give it maximum exposure. That this was coming has been known for some time. Different news organisations in recent months have unleashed nuggets of speculation of the "explosive" revelations. We would hear, they said, of how she struck back at her husband for his serial infidelities by revealing details of her own love affairs. That does not seem to be the case. Nor do we hear much of what some expected from Mrs Kennedy on her alleged distrust of the conclusions of the investigation into her husband's assassination. Indeed, it appears that JFK's death is not discussed at all. History, meanwhile, is not likely to undergo much rewriting because of what she is heard saying, although scholars will linger over her description of Johnson and the concerns JFK and his brother, Bobby, had about him possibly becoming President, which of course he did through circumstances neither could have predicted. They were thinking of 1968, when JFK would have finished his second term. "Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?" she quotes her husband saying of his then Vice-President. "He didn't like that idea that Lyndon would go on and be President because he was worried for the country. Bobby told me he'd had some discussions with him. I forget exactly how they were planning or who they had in mind. It wasn't Bobby, but somebody. Do something to name someone else in '68." Perhaps not surprisingly, the most difficult moments of her husband's truncated presidency – the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba and then the Cuban missile crisis – elicited some of the most touching passages. The former prompted Kennedy to cry in the private quarters of the White House. The long missiles drama was the time when the wife knew that her place was nowhere but beside her husband. "That's the time I have been closest to him," she is heard saying, in her breathy tones. "And I never left the house or saw the children, and when he came home, if it was a sleep or a nap I would sleep with him. I said: 'Please don't send me to Camp David, me and the children, please don't send me anywhere. If anything happens we are all going to stay right here with you.' You know I said even if there is no room in the bomb shelter in the White House, which I saw, I said, 'Please... I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too – than live without you'." The context is important, of course. Though in later years she was to marry her shipping tycoon and would eventually live a private life in Manhattan as a publisher and champion of charitable causes before dying of lymphoma in 1994, Mrs Kennedy appears content to be a woman and a wife more from the Mad Men era. At one point she describes her marriage as "rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic", dedicated to preserving "a climate of affection and comfort and détente" in the White House. At the time of the making of the tapes she was still in "the extreme stages of grief," as Caroline points out in an introduction to the book. Moreover, she knew she was making an oral history and saying ill of her husband would never have done. Of others, she was entirely less circumspect to a degree that she must have looked back at with a certain flushing of cheeks. Thus Mrs Gandhi was in her books "a real prune – bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman". It was the French President Charles De Gaulle whom she considered an "egomaniac". She is heard attributing to her husband doubts about the sincerity at times of Franklin D Roosevelt: "Charlatan is an unfair word," he allegedly said of the former wartime President, but "he did an awful lot for effect". Better perhaps she had kept her opinion of Martin Luther King Jr to herself. He is the "phoney" whom, she suggested, had been caught while under electronic surveillance – he was not an FBI favourite either – arranging romantic liaisons. Those women she dismissed almost childishly as sexually suspect were Madame Nhu, sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress. "I wouldn't be surprised if they were lesbians," she is heard whispering in conspiratorial manner. But there is mirth in the tapes too. She is heard recalling trying to impress President Sukarno of Indonesia by having a copy of a new book about his personal art collection open on a table in the White House so he would notice during a meeting with her and her husband. Only too late did she see that his taste ran mostly to a kind of portrait of a woman "naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair". She added: "I caught Jack's eye, and we were trying not to laugh at each other." Of Sukarno, she concluded, "he had a sort of lecherous look" and "left a bad taste in your mouth". And if Ms Kennedy steers clear of her husband's own weaknesses toward the fairer sex, she does offer other insights, like the fact that generally he rose at 7.45am to be read his daily briefs, put on pyjamas for his afternoon naps, went through the most perfunctory rituals of prayer at night, kneeling on the mattress of their bed, and never grew out of having toys in the bath, something that greatly amused officials visiting the private quarters. "All along his tub were floating animals, dogs and pink pigs and things. And you'd hear this roar," of laughter from behind the locked door, she says. Every First Lady evokes curiosity in most Americans. What influences did they have? How did they tolerate the pomp, even the boredom? Nancy was a possibly dark force behind Ronny's Oval Office desk, even offering him guidance from readers of the stars. That she was unutterably devoted to her husband has never been in doubt. One modern First Lady had troubles with drink, another with an intern who got altogether too close to her husband. Anyone watching Michelle Obama in the gallery of Congress last Tuesday as her husband unveiled his American Jobs Act to a joint session of Congress may have been struck by how stern she appeared. Is someone making tapes of her true feelings? In talking to her historian friend, Mrs Kennedy pauses to note that when her husband was seeking election, some in the electorate had particular doubts about her, but that much of the popular scepticism had evaporated when she found her feet and most notably after she had taken television viewers into the White House to see the style she had introduced to it. "Suddenly, everything that had been a liability before – your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn't just adore to campaign, and you didn't bake bread with flour up to your arms – you know, everybody thought I was a snob and hated politics," had just gone away, she said. "I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together, that he could be proud of me then. Because it made him so happy – it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years." The television audience for her White House tour was 56 million, by the way. She may not do quite so well today, so many generations later. But the number will be high for the ABC channel in a nation tired of bad news and ready from some Camelot relief.

Gold Coins: The Mystery of the Double Eagle How did a Philadelphia family get hold of $40 million in gold coins, and why has the Secret Service been chasing them for 70 years? Business Week Magazine August 25, 2011 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/gold-coins-the-mystery-of-the-double-eagle-08252011.html The article states that Stephen Fenton, Chairman of the British Numismatic Trade Assn., in 1996 bought what he thought was the only existing Double Eagle held in private hands. A few days later the U.S. Secret Service seized the coin from him. The article further states, “After five years of legal wrangling and just four days before the [civil case concerning the seizure] was scheduled to go to trial in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan, Fenton and the Justice Dept. came to an unusual agreement. The coin would be auctioned off and the proceeds split between them. The coin was taken from the Treasury vault at 7 World Trade Center and put in Fort Knox. Then came the terrorist attacks of September 11 [2001]. ‘If the coin had been left where it was, it would have been destroyed,’ says Fenton. “ Question: How much gold was being held in the U.S. Treasury vault at 7 World Trade Center on 9/11 and what happened to it just before and in the wake of the attack?

Matthew Freud Will See You Now If the PR whiz can steer himself and his wife, Elisabeth Murdoch, through the News Corp. scandal, he could emerge as a central force in the empire Business Week Magazine September 1, 2011 http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/matthew-freud-will-see-you-now-09012011.html

September 12, 2011 Big Brothers Buy in at Big Media The Koch Whisperers by PAM MARTENS A CounterPunch Special Report http://www.counterpunch.org/2011/09/12/the-koch-whisperers/ When Larry Kudlow of CNBC, WABC Radio and National Review speaks, whos really talking? Is it Kudlow or is it the $332,500 he has pocketed from the Koch-funded Mercatus Center. While Kudlow did previously acknowledge accepting $50,000 from Enron after he wrote an article about the company and failed to disclose it, he has not disclosed the Mercatus money to readers of his columns, blog or to viewers of his programs as he openly pitches the Mercatus/Koch agenda. When John Stossel gives us his free market shtick on his weekly program on the Fox Business Network, whos putting the words in his mouth? Is Stossel a muckracker or a buckracker in the debt of a web of shadowy right wing nonprofits that manage his name and message? How about Stephen Moore, member of the Wall Street Journals editorial board and a frequent opinion writer on its pages; does his attendance at the super secretive Koch brothers junket in Aspen last year and his service to fellow Kochtopi as a Board Member of the ultra secretive Donors Capital Fund, Inc. cloud his views? As we reported here on October 26 of last year, Donors Capital Fund, Inc. is a conduit that guarantees its donors complete anonymity. It takes money from the elite folks and plows it into shady operations. Secretly, in 2008, it handed the Clarion Fund $17,778,600 to release 28 million DVDs of the race-baiting documentary, Obsession: Radical Islams War Against the West. Seven weeks before the Presidential election, against the background whispers that Obama was a Muslim, the DVDs flooded households in the swing voter states. The Board composition and funding patterns of this group have Koch brothers written all over them. (See The Far Rights Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive at related articles below.) Now, according to tax records obtained through the assistance of www.GuideStar.org, Donors Capital sluiced over $130 million into the Kochtopi in 2008 and 2009, with massive sums going to fund news bureaus in dozens of states. (Apparently, as Brad Friedman exposed at Mother Jones recently, when Charles Koch stated at his secret Colorado bash in June of this year that the upcoming presidential campaign would be the mother of all wars over the next 16 months, he already had his boots on the ground in Donors Capital-funded newsrooms around the country.) Next to each notation of funding for a news bureau there frequently appears another line item that reads for transparency project. It takes an Orwellian brand of tartuffery to be running an ultra secretive slush fund and telling the IRS its for transparency projects. Charles and David Koch, the anointed chiefs of the Kochtopi (way too sprawling to be called a Kochtopus) tied for 5th place, with $21.5 billion each, in the 2010 Forbes list of the richest Americans. They are the controlling shareholders of Koch Industries Inc., a private global conglomerate with a presence in over 60 countries, including interests in oil, refining, pipelines, paper products, chemicals, fertilizer and commodities trading. The firms annual revenues are estimated to be in the range of $100 billion. A review of documents and tax records for the dizzying, interconnected web of corporate front groups, frequently created, supported and influenced by Charles or David Koch, shows just how dangerous these groups espousing free markets and liberty have become to a free society. The game plan is to devalue the rights of actual citizens by seeking human voices dangling from a corporate marionette string, that might be willing for the right amount of cash incentive to broadcast the Orwellian reverse-speak: liberty means more liberty for corporations (corporate serfdom for real citizens); freedom means corporate freedom to privatize national resources, pollute the environment and fleece the consumer with impunity; free market means the freedom to draw a dark curtain around how the corporations are actually screwing us and stealing our liberty. The reverse speak of the Koch brand of academic freedom became crystal clear this year with the leak of a contract the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation had previously signed with Florida State University to provide a grant of $1.5 million in exchange for the right to vet and veto faculty hires for an economics program based on political economy and free enterprise. According to the St. Petersburg Times, Jennifer Washburn has reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and donors and found the Koch agreement with FSU truly shocking. Washburn went on to say: This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing. If Washburn thinks the FSU deal is shocking, she should take a look at the arrangement Koch has carved out for itself over the past twenty years with another publicly funded institution: George Mason University in Virginia. The goal is to financially allure university professors to Kochs distorted vision of market based management, free markets, and transparency. All the while, Koch Industries is a private, dark curtain corporation. Its own stock has never been subjected to price discovery in a free market; the public cant get a peek at the financials of this firm; there is no means of determining how much debt is on the corporate balance sheet or if, as with AIG and Citigroup, we, the sheared sheep, might have to bail the corporation out some day to save some too-big-to-fail bank that holds its debt. When the firm purchased Georgia-Pacific, that company was immediately delisted from public, transparent trading on the New York Stock Exchange. Maybe it takes a juggernaut of think tanks, lobby groups and corporate tyrants in drag as citizen movements to disorient inquisitive media minds. The little we do know about Koch Industries came from 60 Minutes and that wasnt at all pretty. As we reported back on October 19 of last year here at CounterPunch, 60 Minutes did a story in 2000 on Koch Industries, disclosing jaw-dropping charges made by a brother, Bill Koch, in court documents. According to a transcript of the show: Bill Koch filed a lawsuit in federal court claiming that much of the oil collected by Koch Industries was stolen from federal lands. At the trial, 50 former Koch gaugers testified against the company, some in video depositions. They said Koch employees had a name for cheating on the measurements. It was called the Koch Method. The company used the Koch method with virtually all its customers. In the 1980′s alone, Koch records show those so-called adjustments brought the company 300 million gallons of oil it never paid for. And it was pure profit. Bill Koch says that profits from that oil were a minimum of $230 million…In December 1999, the jury found that Koch Industries did steal oil from the public and lied about its purchases 24 thousand times. So is the Koch Method the mumbo-jumbo market based management that theyre incentivizing economics departments at our institutions of higher education all around the country to indoctrinate in the minds of our young people? Or is it something more basic; say, for example, plain ole cheating and regulatory capture. The Koch brothers decision to create a nonprofit network dates back to 1977 when Charles Koch founded the Cato Institute, an organization the Koch foundations continue to fund. According to Catos web site, David Koch continues to sit on its board along with Kevin Gentry, Vice President for Strategic Development at the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and chief honcho of the secret, annual strategy meetings of the Kochtopi. The next phase of a pseudo citizens group began in 1984 when Charles Koch, David Koch, and Richard Fink (Executive Vice President at Koch Industries and a board member at numerous Koch funded nonprofits) co-founded Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation. According to Right Wing Watch, Citizens for a Sound Economy (CSE), a sister organization, spent $5 million against Clintons health care proposal, dogging the White Houses nationwide bus tour with its own bus and rallies. For a 1997 campaign, CSE spent hundreds of thousands of dollars per week running radio ads in 20 markets against proposed new EPA air standards. According to Source Watch, CSE was a member of Project Relief, an alliance of corporations, trade associations, think tanks and law firms formed in December 1994 to promote the regulatory reform components of the House Republican Contract with America. It was a member of the Cooler Heads Coalition, an industry-funded campaign sponsored by the National Consumer Coalition (an industry-funded front group) to spread skepticism about the science of global warming. It also belonged to the Health Benefits Coalition, which lobbies on behalf of the healthcare industry… CSE functioned very much as Donors Capital Fund is functioning today: in the dark. In 2000, Public Citizen issued a report titled CSE: Corporate Shill Enterprise, calling it a corporate lobbying front group. Budget documents for 1998 had been leaked to Public Citizen, showing that for just that one year, the oil and gas industry contributed nearly $2.3 million, big phone companies gave nearly $1.5 million and the tobacco industry contributed more than $1.1 million…. Back then, the Koch funding mechanisms were not that well known. Today, looking at the names and amounts on the documents for just that one year of 1998, there is the Koch controlled Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation for $665,000; Koch Industries Inc., $626,500; David H. Koch, $750,000 for a total of $2,041,500 almost twice that of any other single contributor. (Lawrence Kudlow served as economic advisor to the organization, according to Source Watch.) In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy merged with Empower America (where Kudlow had served on the Board) to became FreedomWorks and the Citizens for a Sound Economy Foundation was renamed Americans for Prosperity Foundation. According to the organizations 2009 tax return, David Koch is chairman of the board and Koch Industries Executive V.P. Richard Fink is a board member. Charles Koch, on the Koch Industries web site, admits to helping found or build the following organizations: the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University, the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, the Bill of Rights Institute and the Market-Based Management Institute. In reality, there are many more organizations where Koch money forms the core of the operations. Tax records obtained by Greenpeace show that Koch Foundations have given over $12 million to the Mercatus Center and its precursor organization, the Center for the Study of Market Processes, since 1986; over $13 million to Cato, since 1986; over $10 million to the Institute for Humane Studies. Citizens for a Sound Economy received at least $11 million from 1986 through 2002. Since 2005, Americans for Prosperity Foundation has received over $5 million from the Koch Foundations. Since its founding in 1999, the Bill of Rights Institute has received $2.6 million from the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and $100,000 from the David H. Koch Charitable Foundation. From 2007 through 2009, the foundation for the deceased parents of the brothers, the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, which typically restricts its giving to Kansas, sent off $650,000 to the Bill of Rights Institute in Virginia. A documentary available on the internet, [Astro]Turf Wars, exposed dissembling on the part of the Kochs over funding the Tea Party through Americans for Prosperity. The video shows David Koch at an Americans for Prosperity confab, acknowledging his founding of the group and applauding each Tea Party speaker as they relay their work for the cause. David Koch can be distinctly heard to say: Five years ago my brother Charles and I provided the funds to start the Americans for Prosperity and its beyond my wildest dreams how AFP has grown into this enormous organization of hundreds of thousands of Americans from all walks of life standing up and fighting for the economic freedoms that have made our nation the most prosperous society in history. Prosperous? A man worth $21.5 billion can hardly be expected to take note of the news that 43 million Americans now live below the poverty level; or that 50 percent of the population would not be able to come up with $2,000 within 30 days for an unexpected expense, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research. One of those freedoms most treasured by the Koch brothers is their ability to see a research study done by one of their funded economics departments, then have its dubious data quoted from the mouth of a funded news celebrity. From 2002 through 2006, the Koch funded Mercatus Center paid Lawrence Kudlow, a CNBC co-host and later host of his own show, The Kudlow Report, a total of $332,500 through his consulting arm, Kudlow & Co. LLC. I obtained the information from public filings Mercatus made with the IRS. It is not known if the Mercatus Center continued to pay Kudlow after 2006. The Mercatus tax filings show $3.1 million paid in a line item called honoraria from 2001 through 2007. Emails and phone calls to Kudlow, the CNBC legal department, and three communications executives of both CNBC and NBC/Universal were met with silence, despite a weeks lead time to respond. The Center for Public Integrity had this to say about the Mercatus Center in 2006: In 2005, Rep. Bob Ney, R-Ohio, whose office has accepted 19 trips from Mercatus more than any other introduced a bill to amend the Clean Air Act and require the secretary of energy to construct 15 new gasoline refineries and sell them to private businesses. Mercatus has sought to weaken the act and spoken of the need for more refineries both scenarios that could benefit Koch Industries. Neither the congressman nor his staff has ever had a single conversation with anyone from Mercatus about that bill, said Brian Walsh, communications director for Ney. He introduced that bill to reduce Americas dependence on foreign countries for oil. We have not had a new refinery built in this country in over 20 years. Mercatus spent at least $227,000 on more than 400 trips for lawmakers and their aides from 2000 through mid-2005. Most of this money appears to have been spent on the groups annual retreat for congressional chiefs of staff, who are often put up in posh hotels near Washington and attend seminars on public policy. While Congress is in session Mercatus also conducts regular seminars in congressional office buildings, where staffers are offered free meals and given lectures on issues such as health care, telecommunications regulation and tort reform. There is no conceivable argument of why this group has not registered to lobby. They have met the threshold that makes them a lobbying group, said [Craig] Holman of Public Citizen… The Mercatus Center does not engage in lobbying, Carrie Conko, the organizations communications director, said in a written statement for this story. Kudlow has a creed that he states regularly on air: We believe that free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity. Rather than an editorial we, a strong argument could be made that Kudlow is speaking on behalf of the Kochtopi. Consider this entry on June 29, 2006 at Kudlows ironically named blog, Kudlows Money Politic$. (The dollar sign is not a mistake; nor could it be more appropriate. Kudlow received $70,000 from the Mercatus Center in 2006.) At the request of my friends at the Mercatus Center, here is (sic) some policy issues that need the most attention during the remainder of 2006. Kudlow goes on to detail the fondest dreams of the Mercatus Center. Heres a nice partisan snippet: The Republican Congress should be curtailing budget earmarks and tight spending policies in order to get re-elected. Kudlow has also highlighted, at CNBC or National Review, the work of Veronique de Rugy, a senior research fellow at Mercatus, along with multiple scholars paid by Mercatus or its sister organization, the Institute for Humane Studies. The Institute for Humane Studies (HIS), funded by the Koch Foundations, describes its mandate as follows in its Spring 2010 Newsletter: Reversing decades of big government will require a critical mass of talent in every channel of opinion influence. The Institute for Humane Studies is on it. Targeting college students with a unique set of education and career-development programs, IHS is developing a growing supply of opinion leaders who champion the principles of individual liberty and free enterprise. The number of IHS alumni in opinion-leading careers has quadrupled in just 10 years, to 1,156 college professors, 587 in public policy and the freedom movement, and 385 in journalism and the venues of popular culture. And many more are in the pipeline. IHS alumni will influence many multiples of their own numbers, over many decades. This is the leverage of the IHS strategy, as alumni educate tomorrows leaders in university classrooms all around the country, inform millions of consumers of news and opinion, critique government interventions, and advance solutions that respect the ideals of Americas Founders. Veterans of IHS programs include professors such as John Tomasi at Brown University, where he founded a center that is bringing the ideas of liberty into the classroom. Steve Moore is a member of the Wall Street Journals editorial board. Scott Bullock is a star litigator at the Institute for Justice, fighting for property rights and school choice all the way to the Supreme Court. And Kristi Kendall is John Stossels top producer, first at ABC 20/20 and now at Fox Business Network. A repeat guest on Kudlows CNBC show is Stephen Moore. Moore joined the Wall Street Journal as a member of the editorial board and senior economics writer on May 31, 2005. Moore is the former president of the Club for Growth and the Free Enterprise Fund. He has served as a federal budget expert for the Heritage Foundation and was a senior economics fellow at the Koch-founded Cato Institute, where he published dozens of tax and economic studies that then made their way into the echo chamber of right-wing columnists. Moore also served as research director for President Reagans Commission on Privatization. Moores name appears on the guest list for the secret Koch bash in Aspen last June. Moore is on the Board of the super secretive Donors Capital Fund and held that position in 2008 when the Fund made the outsized gift of $17 million to the Clarion Fund for the DVD production and distribution of the Islamophobic documentary, Obsession, seven weeks before the Presidential election. Surely, as a board member of Donors Capital and an editorial board member of the Wall Street Journal, one of the papers that distributed the race-baiting film, Moore was in a pivotal position to debate the ethics of this deal. Kudlow and Moore have co-authored articles such as: Its the Reagan Economy, Stupid Washington Times, February 1, 2000 trumpeting the mantra that the nations prosperity had been built on tax cuts and deregulation of key industries like energy, financial services and transportation; and The Time To Cut Taxes Is Now, But Bush Plan Should be Bigger Investors Business Daily, February 8, 2001. Both Kudlow and Moore collect substantial additional income each year as keynote speakers for a broad assortment of conservative groups, Kochtopi, and industry groups. One of Kudlows speakers bureaus puts his fee for a talk at between $25,000 and $40,000; Kudlow has previously said $15,000 is more typical. Moore is listed at All-American Speakers Bureaus web site with a fee of $5,001 to $10,000. John Stossel, former co-anchor of ABCs 20/20 and now host of Fox Business News weekly Stossel show, is a case study in opaque money webs. While Stossel was at ABC, a nonprofit operation sprang up to market DVDs of Stossels shows along with teaching guides to teachers of middle and high school students. A stated goal was to help the students learn to engage in independent thought. Indeed, one of the nonprofits involved is called the Center for Independent Thought, run by Andrea and Howard Rich. (Howard Rich is on the Board of Cato and his involvement with Charles Koch dates back to the early 1980s and the Libertarian Party. ) The earlier teacher guides for this operation, called Stossel in the Classroom, boldly shows ABC News on the cover together with a photo of Stossel. But the guides were originally written by economic professors at George Mason University where Charles Koch holds heavy influence. (According to Kris Hundley of the St. Petersburg Times, Koch has donated $30 million to the university over the past 20 years.) On his page at George Mason University, one of the professors, Thomas Rustici, admits to preparing the materials. In 1999, I wrote the student guide that accompanies ABC News reporter John Stossels Greed, Freeloaders and Are We Scaring Ourselves to Death videos. These Stossel in the Classroom guides are in almost 600 classrooms and have been read by more than 175,000 students. A producer for Stossel at both ABC and Fox, Kristina (Kristi) Kendall, was involved in the Koch funded Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason University. According to the Institutes web site, Stossel asked it to recommend someone to work with him at 20/20. (Why an ABC producer would turn to a Koch funded institute was not explained.) Kendall received the Charles G. Koch Outstanding Alumnus award of $5,000 and in 2009 was elected to the Institutes Board of Directors. According to the Institutes web site, Stossel has had other interns from the Institute working for him and had this to say: I dont know what Id do without them. Their enthusiasm, and their knowledge of free markets and limited government is a tremendous help in conveying the ideas of liberty in our special television reports. The 2011 Stossel in the Classroom teachers guide was written by Robert Schimenz, a teacher at the Queens Vocational and Technical School in New York. Schimenz is also the varsity baseball coach there. One fascinating lesson plan focuses on Needy Seniors or Greedy Seniors? It asks: Are our senior citizens living at the expense of our youth? Shouldnt senior citizens pay for their own health care? What was the purpose of Medicare? Then it turns to a programmed learning approach to launch class warfare between junior and grammy: Directions: as you watch the video, fill in the blanks with the correct words. 1. Its an issue that dwarfs everything else. Isnt it time America did less for the ___________? 2. And even though these folks are doing quite well, they get a bonus. Thanks to __________, you pay for most of their health care. 3. ______________ likes getting free stuff. 4. Harvard Business School Professor Regina Herzlinger says Medicare cheats the __________. 5. How do they feel ___________ that theyre living in these $300,000, $500,000 homes and theyre still, you know, not paying for their own health care. My answer to question 1 is: billionaires. 2. Rigged question. 3. Everyone. 4. Grim reaper. 5. Teacher needs to hire an editor. In 2007, Teacher Education Quarterly took a hard look at Stossels ties to right wing front groups. In an exhaustive piece written by David Gabbard and Terry Atkinson, the authors concluded: Everyone who cares about the future of our schools needs to be aware of the heavy influence of neoliberal think tanks on Stossels reporting and the sorts of reforms promoted through programs such as Stupid In America. In all likelihood, he will continue his attacks on public schools as part of the previously-mentioned neoliberal strategy of pressuring schools to teach to high-stakes tests or risk having their schools placed under the management of a private corporation. For neoliberals, this presents a win-win situation. So long as teachers succeed in maintaining satisfactory test scores by teaching only to the testsand even sometimes from scripted lesson plans aligned with the teststhey will have little opportunity to engage students in activities that might be destructive of their allegiance to the corporate order. If they fail to maintain satisfactory test scores, this failure serves to rationalize handing over the management of schools directly to private corporations. Between 2007 and 2008, Donors Capital paid the following sums to groups associated with Stossel in the Classroom: $300,000 to Center for Independent Thought; $393,607 to Free to Choose Network, Inc.; $1.8 million to the Palmer R. Chitester Fund. (The Free to Choose Network, Inc. and Palmer R. Chitester Fund have the same IRS tax identification number.) In the past, Stossel has said he turned over his enormous speaking fees to the Chitester Fund, which, at one time, owned the trademark to Stossel in the Classroom. The Center for Independent Thought currently owns the domain name for Stossel in the Classroom. Big name personalities like Kudlow, Moore and Stossel are to be aided in the mother of all wars for the winning slate in the 2012 elections by an interconnected network of news bureaus being funded by Donors Capital. In 2009, the most recent year for which tax documents are available at GuideStar.org, Donors Capital earmarked millions specifically for news bureaus and journalism projects. The money flowed into right wing nonprofits and came out as independent news coverage of individual state issues. Specific reporting work was also earmarked. Heres one example: The Heartland Institute received $150,000 for GW reporting for one year. Im going to muster a wild guess that GW stands for Global Warming. The Heartland Institute holds annual climate change conferences where it brings AGW sceptics. It got another $520,940 for a GW-end. Im guessing thats Global Warming Weekend. All told, Heartland received $2,171,530, just in the one year of 2009. Big Brothers or Big Brother? You decide whos scarier. Pam Martens worked on Wall Street for 21 years, retiring in 2006. She has been writing on public interest issues for CounterPunch since that time. She has no security position, long or short, in any company mentioned in this article. She can be reached at pamk741@aol.com Related articles by Pam Martens: The Far Rights Secret Slush Fund to Keep Fear Alive The Koch Empire and Americans for Prosperity The Far Rights Plot to Capture New Hampshire

In Tapes, Candid Talk by Young Kennedy Widow The New York Times By JANNY SCOTT September 12, 2011 In the early days of the Cuban missile crisis, before the world knew that the cold war seemed to be sliding toward nuclear conflict, President John F. Kennedy telephoned his wife, Jacqueline, at their weekend house in Virginia. From his voice, she would say later, she could tell that something was wrong. Why don’t you come back to Washington? he asked, without explanation. “From then on, it seemed there was no waking or sleeping,” Mrs. Kennedy recalls in an oral history scheduled to be released Wednesday, 47 years after the interviews were conducted. When she learned that the Soviets were installing missiles in Cuba aimed at American cities, she begged her husband not to send her away. “If anything happens, we’re all going to stay right here with you,” she says she told him in October 1962. “I just want to be with you, and I want to die with you, and the children do, too — than live without you.” The seven-part interview conducted in early 1964 — one of only three that Mrs. Kennedy gave after Mr. Kennedy’s assassination — is being published as a book and an audio recording. In it, the young widow speaks with Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., the historian and Kennedy aide, about her husband’s presidency, their marriage and her role in his political life. They do not discuss his death. The eight and a half hours of interviews had been kept private at the request of Mrs. Kennedy, who never spoke publicly about those years again before she died in 1994.The transcript and recording, obtained by The New York Times, offer an extraordinary immersion in the thoughts and feelings of one of the most enigmatic figures of the second half of the 20th century — the woman who, as much as anyone, helped shape a heroic narrative of the Kennedy years. Though the interviews seem unlikely to redraw the contours of Mr. Kennedy or his presidency, they are packed with intimate observations and insights of the sort that historians treasure. At just 34, and in what her daughter, Caroline Kennedy, describes in a foreword to the book as “the extreme stages of grief,” Mrs. Kennedy displays a cool self-possession and a sharp, somewhat unforgiving eye. In her distinctive breathy cadences, an intimate tone and the impeccable diction of women of her era and class, she delivers tart commentary on former presidents, heads of state, her husband’s aides, powerful women, women reporters, even her mother-in-law. Charles DeGaulle, the French president, is “that egomaniac.” The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is “a phony” whom electronic eavesdropping has found arranging encounters with women. Indira Gandhi, the future prime minister of India, is “a real prune — bitter, kind of pushy, horrible woman.” The White House social secretary, Letitia Baldrige, Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, loved to pick up the phone and say things like “Send all the White House china on the plane to Costa Rica” or tell them they had to fly string beans in to a state dinner. She quotes Mr. Kennedy saying of Lyndon B. Johnson, his vice president, “Oh, God, can you ever imagine what would happen to the country if Lyndon was president?” And Mr. Kennedy on Franklin D. Roosevelt: “Charlatan is an unfair word,” but “he did an awful lot for effect.” She suggests that “violently liberal women in politics” preferred Adlai Stevenson, the former Democratic presidential nominee, to Mr. Kennedy because they “were scared of sex.” Of Madame Nhu, the sister-in-law of the president of South Vietnam, and Clare Boothe Luce, a former member of Congress, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, in a stage whisper, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they were lesbians.” Any shortcomings on the part of her husband are not mentioned. She speaks of his loyalty, sensitivity, courage — traits consistent with the Camelot template she had been the first to invoke. She presents herself as adoring, eager for his approval and deeply moved by the man. There is no talk of his extramarital affairs or secret struggle with Addison’s disease, though she does speak in detail about his back pain and the 1954 back surgery that almost killed him. He was, she says, kind, conciliatory, forgiving, a gentleman, a man of taste in people, furniture, books. Fondly, she recalls him ever reading — while walking, dining, bathing, doing his tie. She remembers with amusement how he would change into pajamas for his 45-minute afternoon nap in the White House. She lets slip a reference to a “civilized side of Jack” and “sort of a crude side,” but she clarifies: “Not that Jack had the crude side.” He wept in her presence a handful of times. Mrs. Kennedy describes how he cried in his bedroom, head in hands, over the debacle of the attempted invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 by Cuban exiles opposed to Fidel Castro and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency. On the subject of her marriage, she presents herself in many ways as a traditional wife — one year after the publication of “The Feminine Mystique” by Betty Friedan had helped inspire a wave of rethinking of that role. Her marriage, she remarks, was “rather terribly Victorian or Asiatic.” Her aim was to provide “a climate of affection and comfort and détente” — and the children in good moods. She suggests the couple never really had a fight. She insists she got her opinions from her husband. On that last point, at least, Michael Beschloss, the historian, who was enlisted to write an introduction and annotations to the book, said in an interview, “I would take that with a warehouse of salt.” In fact, he said, he found “a very high correlation” between the people Mrs. Kennedy runs down in the interviews and those known to have had difficulty in the Kennedy administration. In some cases, they were in danger of being fired. Those she praises, Mr. Beschloss said, tend to have flourished. To what extent that correlation reflects Mrs. Kennedy’s influence on her husband, or vice versa, is open to interpretation and is likely to vary from case to case. Recalling a trip to India and Pakistan with her sister, Lee Radziwill, in 1962, Mrs. Kennedy says she was so appalled by what she considered to be the gaucherie of the newly appointed United States ambassador to Pakistan, Walter McConaughy, that before even completing her descent from the Khyber Pass, she wrote a letter to her husband alerting him to “what a hopeless ambassador McConaughy was for Pakistan, and all the reasons and all the things I thought the ambassador should be.” She even named possible replacements. “And Jack was so impressed by that letter,” she tells Mr. Schlesinger, that he showed it to Dean Rusk, the secretary of state (whom Mrs. Kennedy disparages as apathetic and indecisive). According to her account, Mr. Kennedy said to Mr. Rusk, “This is the kind of letter I should be getting from the inspectors of embassies.” Even so, Mr. McConaughy, a career diplomat, remained ambassador to Pakistan until 1966. There are men she praises, too, in the book, which is titled “Jacqueline Kennedy: Historic Conversations on Life With John F. Kennedy” and published by Hyperion. She credits Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., the president’s father, as the dominant influence in inculcating a sense of discipline in his children. Among the administration figures she admires are Robert F. Kennedy, the president’s brother; Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary; and McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser. She calls André Malraux, the French novelist, “the most fascinating man I’ve ever talked to.” She says she was impressed above all by the Colombian president, Alberto Lleras Camargo, whom she finds “Nordic in his sadness.” In many of her accounts of her marriage, the grieving widow in her early 30s appears to bear little resemblance to the woman who married Aristotle Onassis, the Greek shipping magnate, four years later, or who, after his death, embarked upon a career as a book editor in New York and later told a friend she had come to realize she could not expect to live primarily through a husband. Doris Kearns Goodwin, the historian and wife of Richard Goodwin, a Kennedy aide, said in an interview on Friday, “It’s certainly not the Jackie that we knew later on.” But, she added, “By then, she’s a different woman.” Mrs. Kennedy might have been intentionally projecting the image expected of women at the time. She also knew that she was speaking for the historical record, since the conversations were part of a larger oral history of the Kennedy presidency. But her self-confidence seems to have grown in the White House. For the first time, she became one of her husband’s most visible assets. Her televised tour of the White House restoration that she had initiated was watched by 56 million viewers. “Suddenly, everything that’d been a liability before — your hair, that you spoke French, that you didn’t just adore to campaign, and you didn’t bake bread with flour up to your arms — you know, everybody thought I was a snob and hated politics,” she tells Mr. Schlesinger. All of that changed. “I was so happy for Jack, especially now that it was only three years together that he could be proud of me then,” she says. “Because it made him so happy — it made me so happy. So those were our happiest years.” She humorously recounts a visit from Sukarno, the president of Indonesia, to the Kennedys’ private sitting room. The briefing papers she had read in preparation had mentioned that Sukarno had been flattered by Mao’s decision to publish his art collection. To impress Sukarno, Mrs. Kennedy asked the State Department for the volume, positioned it prominently on the table and invited him to sit on the sofa between her and Mr. Kennedy and admire the paintings. Every single one turned out to be of a woman — “naked to the waist with a hibiscus in her hair,” Mrs. Kennedy tells Mr. Schlesinger, who bursts out laughing. She says she could not believe what she was seeing. “I caught Jack’s eye, and we were trying not to laugh at each other.” Sukarno was “so terribly happy, and he’d say, ‘This is my second wife, and this was.’...” Mrs. Kennedy says. “He had a sort of lecherous look” and “left a bad taste in your mouth.” Describing the night of the inauguration, she recalls that she was both recovering from a Caesarean section and exhausted. She skips dinner and takes a nap. But she finds herself unable to get out of bed to attend the inaugural balls until Dr. Janet Travell, who would become the White House physician, materializes and hands her an orange pill. “And then she told me it was Dexadrine,” Mrs. Kennedy says Asked if Mr. Kennedy was religious, she tells Mr. Schlesinger, “Oh, yes,” then appends a revealing qualification: “Well, I mean, he never missed church one Sunday that we were married or all that, but you could see partly — I often used to think whether it was superstition or not — I mean, he wasn’t quite sure, but if it was that way, he wanted to have that on his side.” He would say his prayers kneeling on the edge of the bed, taking about three seconds and crossing himself. “It was just like a little childish mannerism, I suppose like brushing your teeth or something,” she says. Then she adds: “But I thought that was so sweet. It used to amuse me so, standing there.” In her foreword to the book, Caroline Kennedy says her decision to publish was prompted by the 50th anniversary of her father’s presidency. It would be a disservice, she said, to allow her mother’s perspective to be absent from the public and scholarly debate. People have certain impressions of her mother, Ms. Kennedy suggests in a video accompanying the electronic version of the book, but "they really don’t know her at all." In her printed foreword, she says, “they don’t always appreciate her intellectual curiosity, her sense of the ridiculous, her sense of adventure, or her unerring sense of what was right.”

"In conclusion, we can see that news reports are sometimes not clear and often inconsistent. Many different numbers have been reported for recovered gold. Shouldn’t Loose Change have informed us about this and avoided compounding the problem with giving weight to unfounded rumors? Supporters of this film need to ask themselves this question: Are the filmmakers more interested in getting at the truth, or marketing sensationalism This seems to be one of those events about which the ultimate truth will never be known. I posted the article because it was something that is not being discussed or acknowledged in any fashion in the midst of the current mass publicity about the tenth anniversary of 9/11. Maybe it deserves that fate and maybe it doesn't.

http://web.archive.org/web/20031211032008/http:/911research.wtc7.net/wtc/evidence/gold.html Missing Gold A King's Ransom in Precious Metals Seems to have Disappeared There are rumors that $160 billion in gold bullion was stored under the World Trade Center. Yet the only published articles about recovered gold mention only around $200 million worth of gold. All of the reports of recovered precious metals appear to refer to a removal operation conducted in late October of 2001. On Nov. 1, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani announced that "more than $230 million" worth of gold and silver bars that had been stored in a bomb-proof vault had been recovered. A New York Times article contained: 2 Two Brinks trucks were at ground zero on Wednesday to start hauling away the $200 million in gold and silver that the Bank of Nova Scotia had stored in a vault under the trade center ... A team of 30 firefighters and police officers are helping to move the metals, a task that can be measured practically down to the flake but that has been rounded off at 379,036 ounces of gold and 29,942,619 ounces of silver .. Another article gave a figure of $650 million to the value of gold in the 4 WTC vault. Unknown to most people at the time, $650 million in gold and silver was being kept in a special vault four floors beneath Four World Trade Center. The gold and silver were recently recovered. An article in the TimesOnline gives the following rundown of precious metals that were being stored in WTC vaults belonging to Comex. 4 • Comex metals trading - 3,800 gold bars weighing 12 tonnes and worth more than $100 million • Comex clients - 800,000 ounces of gold with a value of about $220 million • Comex clients - 102 million ounces of silver, worth $430 million • Bank of Nova Scotia - $200 million of gold That totals $950 million. There appear to be no reports of precious metals discovered between November of 2001 and the completion of excavation several months later. It would seem that at least the better part of a billion dollars worth of precious metals went missing. It is not plausible that whatever destroyed the towers vaporized gold and silver, which are heavy malleable metals that are extremely unlikely to participate in chemical reactions with other materials. The circumstances surrounding part of the gold that was recovered offer clues to what may have happened to the unrecovered gold. According to reports, two truckloads of gold were found in a delivery tunnel under 5 World Trade Center in a 10-wheel lorry which had been crushed by falling steel. The vault was under 4 World Trade Center, which was closer to the South Tower, and more heavily damaged. There were no bodies discovered with the lorry, suggesting that whoever was removing the gold was warned of the imminent collapse of the South Tower. 5 ________________________________________ References 1Thanksgiving at Ground Zero,National Real Estate Investor, 2Below Ground Zero, Silver and Gold,New York Times,11/1/2001 3Cache of Gold Found at WTC Two truckloads retrieved through a tunnel in rubble2,, 4Crushed towers give up cache of gold ingots,TimesOnline,11/1/02 5,Reuters and New York Daily News,

Fukushima disaster: it's not over yet Six months after the multiple meltdowns at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant, the streets have been cleared but the psychological damage remains By Jonathan Watts guardian.co.uk, Friday 9 September 2011 23.01 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/09/fukushima-japan-nuclear-disaster-aftermath It was an email from an old friend that led me to the irradiated sunflower fields of Fukushima. I had not heard from Reiko-san since 2003, when I left my post as the Guardian's Tokyo correspondent. Before that, the magazine editor had been the source of many astute comments about social trends in Japan. In April, she contacted me out of the blue. I was pleased at first, then worried. Reiko's message began in traditional Japanese style with a reference to the season and her state of mind. The eloquence was typical. The tone unusually disturbing: "It is spring time now in Tokyo and the cherry blossoms are in bloom. In my small terrace garden, the plants tulips, roses and strawberries are telling me that a new season has arrived. But somehow, they make me sad because I know that they are not the same as last year. They are all contaminated." Reiko went on to describe how everything had changed in the wake of the nuclear accident in Fukushima the previous month. Daily life felt like science fiction. She always wore a mask and carried an umbrella to protect against black rain. Every conversation was about the state of the reactors. In the supermarket, where she used to shop for fresh produce, she now looked for cooked food "the older, the safer now". She expressed fears for her son, anger at the government and deep distrust of the reassuring voices she was hearing in the traditional media. "We are misinformed. We are misinformed," she repeated. "Our problem is in society. We have to fight against it. And it seems as hard as the fight against those reactors." She urged me to return and report on the story. Five months on, that is what I have tried to do. Driving around Fukushima's contaminated cities, Iwate's devastated coastlines and talking to evacuees in Tokyo, I've rarely felt such responsibility in writing a story. Reiko and other Japanese friends seemed to be looking not only for coverage, but for an outsider's judgment on the big question weighing on their minds: is Japan still a safe country? The magnitude 9 earthquake that struck Japan on 11 March was one of the five most powerful shocks recorded; so powerful that it lowered the coastline by a metre and nudged Japan two metres closer to the United States. It was followed by a devastating tsunami which rose to a peak of 40m and accounted for most of the destruction. These two natural catastrophes left 20,000 people dead or missing and 125,000 buildings destroyed. They triggered a third disaster the multiple meltdown of three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant that have together released more radiation than any accident since Chernobyl. Such was the magnitude of the catastrophe that Emperor Akihito delivered a televised address to his people. The almost archaically formal speech was so rare that it was compared to the historic radio broadcast by his father, Hirohito, that announced Japan's surrender after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945 and prompted an era of national reform and rebuilding. Six months on, the emergency is over. But another disaster is becoming apparent: a psychological crisis of doubt and depression that could prove more destabilising than anything that came before. The streets are clear of debris, reconstruction is under way and evacuees are moving out of shelters. But millions of people are having to readjust to levels of ionising radiation that were until March considered abnormal. This is not a one-off freak event, it is a shift in day-to-day life that changes the meaning of "ordinary". But quite how is hard to determine. Low-level radiation is an invisible threat that breaks DNA strands with results that do not become apparent for years or decades. Though the vast majority of people remain completely unaffected throughout their lives, others develop cancer. Not knowing who will be affected and when is deeply unsettling. This has happened before, of course. Twenty years after the 1986 reactor explosion in Chernobyl, the World Health Organisation said psychological distress was the largest public health problem unleashed by the accident: "Populations in the affected areas exhibit strongly negative attitudes in self-assessments of health and wellbeing and a strong sense of lack of control over their own lives. Associated with these perceptions is an exaggerated sense of the dangers to health of exposure to radiation." Russian doctors have said survivors were "poisoned by information". But in Japan, it would be more accurate to say that people are contaminated by uncertainty. On my first morning in Fukushima, I was shaken awake by a magnitude 6 earthquake, one of the many hefty aftershocks that have wobbled eastern Japan since March. But that is not what plays most on the mind. Japan's population is accustomed to physical instability. This is, after all, the most seismically active nation on earth. For centuries, the nation's culture has been infused by a spirit of "mujo", or impermanence. It is at the core of the nation's identity and until now its resilience. But this disaster is different. In a country long famous for safety, hygiene and raw food, millions of people are now being asked to accept a small but persistently higher health risk, long-term contamination of their homes, gardens, streets and schools; and food that is now deemed safer if it is prepackaged and from as far away from Fukushima as possible. In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there were clear guidance from scientists and politicians, but here, too, contemporary Japan seems particularly vulnerable. The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to. Sachiko Masuyama, 29, in her new appartment in Tokyo on the 29th floor. She escaped from her house in Minami-Soma (Fukushima prefecture), 25km from the nuclear power plant, in May. She took refuge in a public housing unit in Tokyo with her two children and her husband. She is pregnant and will give birth in November. Photograph: Jeremie Souteyrat "Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them Japanese people are not good at that," says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan's leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact. Unlike an earthquake, he says, the survivors do not suffer post-traumatic stress symptoms of insomnia, shaking and flashbacks. Instead, the radiation "creates a slow, creeping, invisible pressure" that can lead to prolonged depression. "Some people say they want to die. Others become more dependent on alcohol. Many more complain of listlessness." Sachiko Masuyama has suffered many of these symptoms as she has been forced to make life-or-death decisions for herself and her unborn baby. On 9 March, she found out she was expecting her third child. Two days later, the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant only 25km from her home was jolted into meltdown. And since then her life has been turned upside down, first by a desperate escape from the disaster zone, then by a growing worry about the effects of the radiation on the foetus growing inside her. Each time she goes to the hospital for a checkup, she is filled with anxiety that the ultrasound might reveal a deformity, so she counts and recounts the fingers and toes. The doctors have reassured her there is no sign of abnormality, but they won't know for sure until the birth in November and perhaps not for years later. For Masuyama, the worry has become so all-consuming that she has considered abortion and suicide. "For the first two months after the disaster, I was focused only on survival," the 29-year-old tells me in a Tokyo restaurant, "but since then I have had time to think and that has made me very depressed. I have been so worried that I stopped eating. I wanted to die." There is nobody nearby to confide in. Her friends are scattered across refuge centres in Japan. Her husband who chose to remain with his parents in Fukushima wants her to return because the government and the power company say it is safe. But they have withheld so much information since the disaster that she no longer trusts them. "When I watch the documentaries about Chernobyl, it is horrifying, but I have decided to give birth," she tells me. "I have three children: one inside me and two outside. I wouldn't kill my son and daughter because they were exposed, so how could I kill my unborn child?" She'd like to return to her former life, but her home, Minami Soma, is in the midst of a major decontamination operation: the streets are being cleaned, every surface sprayed. Instead, she's chosen to remain in Tokyo, where she feels lonely but safe. The decision has not been easy. "I don't like it, but I have to choose. We Japanese like to follow each other, but this time it doesn't seem right." Did she need to leave? Travel around Fukushima today and there is little evidence of disaster or trauma. In the cities, the streets throng with smart suited salarymen and office ladies. In the countryside, the paddy fields are heavy with rice. Watch the bullet train speed through a frame of distant mountains and sharp blue skies and this seems to be postcard-perfect Japan. But look more closely and you will see that many families now own Geiger counters or dosimeters to check their exposure. DVD chain stores have started to rent them along with the latest Hollywood blockbusters. Inside hundreds of school playgrounds, bulldozers are scraping off the top 50cm of dirt to reduce contamination from the soil. Local newspapers and TV bulletins carry daily radiation updates with a breakdown for every neighbourhood. Zen monk Koyu Abe lets people dump contaminated soil from their gardens on the hillside behind his temple. Photograph: Jeremie Souteyrat Each day for most of the past six months, there has been a steady drip, drip, drip of worrying news: cesium found in the breast milk of seven mothers; strontium discovered inside the city limits; 45% of children in one survey testing positive for thyroid exposure. There are reports of suicides by desperate farmers and lonely evacuees, contaminated beef smuggled on to the market, and warnings that this autumn's rice crop may have to be abandoned. At the Koriyama Big Pallette a conference centre-turned-refugee shelter in southern Fukushima, most people have moved into temporary shelters. The few that remain benefit from ample provisions, friendly volunteers and cardboard-and-curtain partitions designed by the world-famous architect, Shigeru Ban. But an electronic display inside the corridors shows a reading of 0.1 microsieverts equivalent to one chest x-ray per hour (becquerels, the quantitative measure of radiation, are converted to sieverts to offer a qualitative indicator of the impact on the body). The question of whether it will return to normal prompts a sigh from volunteer Michio Terashima. "Normal no longer means what it did. The nuclear disaster didn't turn out to be the cataclysm we feared at first and many things are getting better, but they will never be the same again." But there's also an effort to decontaminate and lift spirits. Fukushima is distributing 20m sunflower seeds to suck up the cesium radionuclides that have permeated the soil. The towering yellow flowers now adorn gardens, farm fields and roadside plots. Although they brighten the landscape, their stalks and petals concentrate the radioactivity and will later have to be burned or left to decompose in a controlled environment. The sunflowers are the brainchild of Kouyuu Abe, a Zen monk who owns a temple just outside Fukushima city and is committed to the "fight against radiation". He allows people to dump the irradiated soil from their gardens on the hillside behind his temple, where it will be buried and covered with zeolite. He is also planning to decontaminate the forests with high pressure sprays so the leaves are less of a hazard when they fall in the autumn. His greatest concern is the mental wellbeing of his followers. "There is a lot of information but huge uncertainty. That makes everyone uneasy. The politicians, bureaucrats and academics cannot agree on anything, so how can people feel reassured? We need positive action, but we don't know what to believe." Many locals are farmers, who are despairing about their contaminated soil. "Young people are leaving. In the past six months, there has been an increase in suicides. There will be more. If you don't give people hope, they lose their reason for living." Adding to the problem is a trust deficit. Ministers have admitted holding back vital information in order to prevent a panic. Government spokesmen initially denied there was a meltdown and said the plant's problems posed "no immediate risk" to human health. Safety authorities ranked the accident as a mere four on the international scale of nuclear accidents. Not until a month later did it upgrade this to a maximum seven like Chernobyl. The full details of what happened to the nuclear reactor are still emerging and far from complete. The day after the earthquake, there was an explosion in the No 1 reactor building. Two days later, the No 3 reactor building blew its top. The following morning there were blasts at reactors two and four. These explosions released a plume of radiation, but the government withheld projections of its size and how it spread up and down the coast and inland to Fukushima city, Koriyama and Tokyo. Nuclear and emergency workers were also in the dark. I drive to Iwaki, a coastal city south of the power plant, to interview one of the men involved in the clear-up operation. T-san was evacuated from Fukushima Daiichi plant after the earthquake struck and returned almost two weeks later to join the containment operation. "They didn't tell us anything," says T-san, who has asked to remain anonymous. "Nobody mentioned a meltdown. We didn't get any critical accident training or instructions. But we all knew the situation was very bad. I thought this might be my final mission. I know it sounds a little silly, but I felt like a kamikaze who was prepared to sacrifice everything for my family and my country." Since March, he estimates he has been exposed to 50 millisieverts of radiation. Under the government's previous guidelines, this was the maximum allowed for an entire year. He is not alone. By Tokyo Electric's own figures, 410 workers have, like T-san, been exposed to more than 50 millisieverts since the disaster. Another six have received a dose above 250. But in an emergency move, that became legal in March, the government has increased the permissible dose for nuclear workers from 100 to 250 millisieverts. "They changed it so suddenly and dramatically that we didn't know what was dangerous, what was safe," T-san says. "We were confused. Had the government been too strict before, or was it suddenly being too lax? We didn't know what to believe." It is a common refrain. Since March, the government has relaxed radiation targets for food, nuclear workers, school playgrounds and discharges into the sea. What was considered dangerous a year ago is now deemed safe and legal. Close to 2 million people in Fukushima are living in areas where the annual radiation dose exceeds the one millisievert per year safety target set by the government for the general population. Even in downtown Tokyo 240km from the reactor levels have risen close to the point where they would have to be marked with a "Radiation Hazard" warning if they were found in a workplace. According to the WHO, the average background radiation people are exposed to worldwide is 2.4 millisieverts per year. A single chest x-ray adds 0.1 microsieverts, a six-hour transatlantic flight 0.5 and a whole-body CT scan 12 microsieverts. However, in these cases, the radiation is predictable, external and relatively easy to deal with. The fallout from Fukushima was far messier and likely to enter human bodies, where radiation does more damage. Supermarket signs declaring radiation safety. Many prefer to place their trust in imported foods. Photograph: Jeremie Souteyrat After the explosions, the radionuclides scattered like the debris from a firework display, according to wind direction and the weight of the particles. Each has a different impact on the body. First and farthest to spread was gas-light iodine 131, which tends to accumulate in the thyroid gland it was quickly detected as far away as Tokyo. Next came particles of cesium 134 and 137, which affects the bladder and liver with a half-life of about 30 years this contaminated the soil, water and trees of most of Fukushima as well as chunks of Miyagi, Chiba and Tokyo and remains the biggest problem. Strontium, which tends to accumulate in the bones and cause leukaemia, is heavier and spread less widely, but it has been found in 64 locations, including Fukushima city. The heaviest radionuclide, plutonium with a half-life of tens of thousands of years has been detected in small quantities inside the plant perimeter and may have been leaked or discharged into the Pacific Ocean along with more than 10,000 tonnes of heavily contaminated water. The overall radiation release from the plant is staggering 770,000 terabecquerels in the wake of the accident and a billion becquerels still being added each day while engineers struggle to seal the broken containment structure. Most of the iodine with its eight-day half-life has since decayed and the cesium and other radionuclides have been diluted and dissipated. But much has seeped into the soil, contaminated the leaves in the forests and is being passed through the food chain to cattle, fish, vegetables and humans. As more details become apparent, people in Fukushima are trying to work out what dose they have received. They look back at where they were on the peak day of 15 March and calculate how long they were outside, whether it was snowing and what they were wearing. Then they consider what they have eaten and drunk since and whether it was from a safe source. There is not much they can do about it. Full-body scans promised by the government will take time. Checking the radiation in every item of food is almost impossible, but one group is trying to help out. The Citizen's Radiation Monitoring Station in Fukushima which has been set up by the journalist Ryuichi Hirokawa offers free grocery checks. It is a slow process. Each item must be peeled, ground or grated, bagged and then placed in an LB 200 Becquerel Monitor for 20 minutes. Akiko Sakuma drove from two hours away to test the potatoes in her allotment. "It's terrifying. I think about the radiation every day," she says and shows me a notebook in which she meticulously records the doses to which she is exposed. When it snowed after the explosion on 15 March, the level was over 100 microsieverts per hour equivalent to 1,000 x-rays. She said she suffered headaches and nosebleeds. "I want to run away to Tokyo, but there is no work. I could never understand why people in Chernobyl didn't flee, but now I'm in the same situation." Yet it is also not hard to find people who are fatalistic. Several tell me there is a greater risk from stress and upheaval than from the radiation. The divergence of opinion has led to divisions among families, generations and communities. "Should I stay or should I go?" is a question that weighs heavy on countless minds. It is why hotels in north-eastern Japan are struggling to attract tourists. It explains the rash of postponed visits by foreign dignitaries to Tokyo. And it is a particular worry for those whose DNA is most vulnerable to change: expectant mothers and young children. Among them is Mari Ishimori, another pregnant evacuee in Tokyo, who is struggling to balance health concerns for her unborn baby and pressure from her in-laws to return to her husband in Fukushima. It is a conservative rural area, but many wives, she said, are now arguing with their husbands. As soon as she heard about the accident at the plant, she fled. "I love my husband, but I will never return to Fukushima," she says over a coffee. "I want my child to have a normal childhood. But if we are in Fukushima, I will have to say, 'You can't touch the ground or touch the leaves or go in the river.' I want my child to grow up without worrying about that, just as I did. That's hard. I'm not sure if my husband and I will live together again." Ishimori has more reason than most to fear radiation. She grew up in Hiroshima, the city that was the target of the world's first atomic bombing. During her childhood, her grandmother and great-grandfather recounted the horrors of the US attack and the fallout that followed. She has seen the prejudice suffered by "hibakusha" nuclear survivors whose children are sometimes treated as though they bear the contamination in their genes. The discrimination is well documented. Some are refused employment. Others are rejected as marriage partners because of medically unproven fears that their offspring may be born with deformities. But the hibakusha are also revered as survivors and repositories of knowledge about the very real risks or radiation. After the disaster, they were among the first to demand a greater sense of crisis even as the government was offering soothingly ambiguous words about there being "no immediate health impact". Due to give birth next month, Ishimori is now alone. She avoids eating fish, meat or eggs, and is deeply sceptical about official safety assurances. "I don't trust anything they say. Tokyo Electric and the government have told us so many lies." Behind much of the anxiety and suspicion is a lack of clear guidance about the health risks. But the fact is that no one is capable of setting a totally safe level of radiation. Masao Tomonaga, the director of Nagasaki Atomic Bomb Disease Hospital, has been studying the effects of radiation for 40 years. Based on the survivors of the US atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he has proven that for every rise above 100 millisieverts of radiation exposure, there is a corresponding increase in the likelihood of cancer. It is assumed the same linear pattern applies at lower levels, but the change is too small to measure with accuracy. "We cannot give people data to prove that five millisieverts is very safe or 10 is very safe. There is no clear evidence," Tomonaga says. "With the atomic bombs, the survivors received a massive dose of radiation over their entire bodies in a short space of time. In Fukushima, people are getting a very small dose every day. This is an important difference." Chernobyl offers a closer comparison. The accident in the former Soviet Union left 134 cleanup workers with acute radiation sickness. Twenty-eight died within a year. Millions more were exposed to lower doses and a wide area of Belarus and northern Europe was contaminated. In a follow-up study 20 years later, the WHO concluded the accident caused an additional 4,000 cancer deaths about 4% higher than the normal rate among the 626,000 most highly exposed people. For those exposed to lower levels of radiation, it estimated that cancer fatalities would rise by about 0.6%. The organisation also noted Russian studies showing increased risk of heart disease and cataracts, but it found no evidence of an impact on fertility, miscarriages or birth defects. Given that Fukushima has released a tenth of the radiation of Chernobyl and taken greater steps to prevent contamination through milk, this would suggest Japan must brace for hundreds rather than thousands of extra cancer cases and births may not be as much of a problem as many believe. That ought to ease the minds of expectant mothers like Masuyama and Ishimori, but they like many in Japan are sceptical of official reassurances. They are aware of alternative studies of Chernobyl, which suggest the number of extra cancer cases caused could be 30,000 to 900,000. They know, too, that population densities in Japan are 10 times higher than in Belarus. There are suspicions that politicians put economic cost above public health when they withheld projections about the spread of radiation. In Namie the worst-affected area outside the exclusion zone with readings 200 times the permissible level locals have described this as "murder". There is also a growing awareness of the influence of the nuclear industry, particularly Tokyo Electric, which is one of the country's biggest advertisers, campaign donors and science graduate employers. Watching the obfuscation by Tokyo Electric and the slow response of the government, some people have become depressed. Others have been radicalised. Ryuichi Hirokawa, a photojournalist, covered Chernobyl and was one of the first reporters independently to measure radiation near the Fukushima nuclear plant after this year's accident. He believes the industry is once again in the process of a cover-up because the investigation into the health impacts of the disaster is being led by academics who, he says, have long served as cheerleaders for the power companies. "These are the same people who initially said there was no impact from the Chernobyl accident," the veteran reporter tells me in his Tokyo office. "They treat people like guinea pigs. They collect information, but they don't share it with the individuals. There will be no results and no treatment." To counter this threat, he's raised money to buy advanced monitoring devices including ¥3.5m (£28,000) whole-body monitoring devices that are being used for free at the citizen centres. "I am worried about the government's health survey," he says. "That is why I have provided these machines. They want as few people to be recognised as radiation victims as possible. We have to fight that with information. That way we can ensure people are better aware of the risks and they can get the medical treatment they need." Some see this new questioning of authority as a chance to shift industrial and political baselines for the better. Tetsunari Iida is a former nuclear engineer who has been advocating a shift towards solar, wind and geothermal for more than a decade. His Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies was marginalised until 11 March, but after the meltdown, Iida's call for nuclear power to be phased out has gained traction. Opinion polls suggest 70% of the public support the idea. Iida is now working with Masayoshi Sun the founder of SoftBank and one of the country's most respected entrepreneurs to generate more funds for clean energy. This week they will launch the Japan Renewable Energy Foundation in which Sun has promised to invest a billion yen. Businessmen, politicians and celebrities are more critical of the nuclear industry, which would once have been career suicide, and the country's top news programme has stopped taking sponsorship from the power company. The shift has been noted in Nagatacho, Tokyo's political heartland. After Chernobyl, the Soviet edifice collapsed within five years. The main parties are calculating how far they must change to avoid a similar fate. Former prime minister Naoto Kan called for an end to the use of nuclear power in Japan and promptly lost his job. His replacement, Yoshihiko Noda, is far more cautious, suggesting the momentum for change is slowing. Even the Liberal Democratic party which gets much of its funds from the industry is promising to reduce the country's reliance on this energy source. But for anyone to do that, they will first have to regain public confidence. I meet the politician charged with rebuilding the disaster area reconstruction minister Tatsuo Hirano and ask what needs to be done to restore trust. "Until now, we have tried to help people who have been directly impacted by the disaster," he says, "but we must also help those who are having to live for the first time with radiation." The government has earmarked ¥23 trillion (£181bn) for reconstruction over the next 10 years, but it has yet to calculate the cost of the radiation clear-up. That is partly because the full extent remains unknown. To relieve public anxiety, Hirano who is from the disaster area says the government must find out whether it was the earthquake or the tsunami that destroyed the reactor's cooling systems and clear up other remaining mysteries. It has launched a detailed study of the radiation inside the 20km exclusion zone, a long-term programme of health checks for Fukushima residents, and established an expert panel to set definitive radiation standards. A food safety commission recently proposed a new lifetime maximum radiation dose for Japanese citizens of 100 millisieverts, excluding natural background and medical radiation. Masami Takanos mother watches as he leaves for Shiga, 450km away. 'Im running away,' he says. Photograph: Jeremie Souteyrat Ultimately, he would like to see a restructuring of the power industry, including the steady phasing out of Japan's 54 reactors, starting with the oldest first. The nuclear industry is certain to put up a fight, but Hirano predicts voters will insist on change. "In the next election, politicians will not be elected if they support nuclear expansion in exchange for personal benefit." But does Japan have the dynamism to denuclearise, decontaminate and regain confidence? The country has bounced back in the past, but this time it has a shrinking, ageing population, an economy in the doldrums and a putrid political system. A new start will be difficult, but some are already making a move. On my final day in Fukushima, I wake up at 5am on a drizzly morning to see off Masami Takano, who is leaving his home of 30 years and his job as a chef. He wants to leave early as he has a 10-hour drive to Shiga, a mountainous prefecture on the other side of the country, where he plans to make a new life far from the radiation leak. As his mother sobs, he packs his Honda with boxes of clothes, the noodle-making equipment he will use to find a job and a few Lady Gaga CDs for the journey. He has already bid farewell to his friends: "I told them straight: 'I'm worried about radiation so I'm running away.' Some of them disagree. I understand, it's difficult to leave I have been here almost all my life but it's not safe here." The government, meanwhile, is urging evacuees to return. Officials insists the area is safe. Radiation levels have fallen in the past two months from 1.2 to 0.7 microsieverts per hour. But there is still concern about food and Takano is taking no chances. "Moving will be stressful, but at least I won't have to wear a mask or fear that I am being exposed to more radiation every day." Over a final cup of coffee, he watches the morning news. The top story reveals that radiation inside the nuclear plant is still at a lethal level of 10 sieverts per hour. This is followed by an item on a nuclear cover-up by Kyushu Electric. "Nowhere is completely safe," Takano says. "Japan is not a big country, but we have so many reactors. There is a power plant near my new home. I want to tell the local people what a risk they are taking," he says. "My internal organs have been irradiated. That will continue to affect me for many years. So even after I move, the worry won't completely go." It is time to leave. He gets into the car and, as his mother and their elderly neighbour Sato-san look on, he motors down the narrow driveway, past the cracks caused by the earthquake. As the car turns out of view, his mother is red-eyed and speechless. Sato-san seems unsure what to say. "He's gone," she starts, then changes the subject to her garden. "Look at these sunflowers. I planted them to soak up the cesium. I can't believe how big they have grown." Before publication, I sent Reiko a draft of this article. Her reply was polite, but I felt she was disappointed. "Maybe you can find the answer. Maybe it is too much to ask. If so, just forget it. Even though I am much louder than other Japanese, I feel I am lost. My life here requires me to be normalised, to behave like we used to. I have to work, I have to eat. After five months of struggling, I am getting tired of worrying. It is much easier to give up pursuing reality. What bothers me most is being torn in this conflicting situation with no answer, every moment." I sympathise immensely but regret that I cannot offer the comfort of clarity. The nuclear disaster has been terrifying, but not as expected. If someone had told me a year ago that three reactors would melt down simultaneously, I would have assumed an apocalypse. Yet Japan today is not like any doomsday I imagined. Instead, there is a kind of slow decay. After three visits to Fukushima, I am less afraid of radiation than I was a year ago but more worried about Japan.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/sep/09/how-mi6-family-gaddafi-jail

I agree that Hoagland's credibility will permanently be minus zero or zero minus if nothing happens on the dates he has selected for Elenin. He has a lot riding on this issue that he has raised unilaterally. Nonetheless I find his Facebook page quite interesting because of the sundry articles and videos posted there daily by his Facebook Friends, and sometimes by his comments appended to those postings. Of course, in viewing all of these one must separate the wheat from the chaff. Today, Sept. 10, 2011 Hoagland responded to a Facebook Friend's inquiry about Leonid Elenin, the Russian astronomer who discovered Elenin, as follows: As I said in my Red Ice interview of a couple months ago, I think Elenin is REAL ... but (unknowingly) part of a MUCH bigger "plot" around this object ... which goes back to long before he was even BORN-- IF our model -- re a ~13,000-year-old Time Capsule, coming from a SPECIFIC celestial direction -- is correct .... This (as we say over here) is for "ALL the marbles ...." Stay tuned; it is ONLY going to get "stranger" ....