Douglas Caddy

At the time practically everyone smoked. People who knew her were surprised to find that Jackie smoked so much she actually had yellow fingers on the one hand. She loved to smoke but tried not to be in camera view when she did so. Yes, I think this shortened her own life expectancy. Kathy C I remember reading a gossip column in the New York Post published shortly after Jackie's death that quoted her as saying sadly to a friend, in essence, "I don't know why I am dying at such an early age. I have consistently eaten the right foods and done push-ups every day."

Phone hacking: police have more than 100 recordings Lawyers for celebrities suing News of the World claim tapes could contain voicemails recorded by investigator Glenn Mulcaire By James Robinson guardian.co.uk Monday 20 June 2011 15.28 BST The Metropolitan police have more than 100 recordings that were made by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who worked for the News of the World, it emerged in the high court today. Lawyers acting for several of the public figures who are suing the paper's owner, News Group Newspapers, claim a substantial number of the tapes and MiniDiscs seized by Scotland Yard five years ago are likely to contain voicemail messages the private investigator intercepted illegally. They were in court this morning to seek an order which would force the Met to hand over all the material it seized in a 2006 raid on Mulcaire's home as part of an investigation which lead to his arrest and imprisonment. That material also includes 11,000 pages of detailed notes which are likely to list the people Mulcaire targeted. Hugh Tomlinson QC, one of the barristers representing the phone-hacking victims, said the claimants needed to see that information to establish when Mulcaire started to intercept their messages and the "modus operandi" he used to do so. Tomlinson said the News of the World had not disclosed documents which cast light on the paper's use of Mulcaire. "The people we say are the wrongdoers have little or no documents of a contemporaneous or relevant nature for whatever reason," he added. The Met is resisting that request because Mulcaire's records contain personal information belonging to scores of well-known people who have no connection with the current cases. Redacting their names could take many months, according to the police. The claimants want to see the information unredacted, although it would only be seen by the parties in the case and would not be made publicly available. Football agent Sky Andrew, Labour MP Chris Bryant and former Sky Sports commentator Andy Gray are amongst those suing Mulcaire and the News of the World for breach of privacy. The court heard the Met has divided the material seized from Mulcaire into 148 categories. Tomlinson said it was necessary to see it in order to see "when [Mulcaire's activity] began, how it operated and when it ended". He said the content of the messages was not important but the dates on which they were made could help claimants demonstrate how widespread the investigator's activities were. That could effect the amount of damages given. The court also heard that News Group had conceded an attempt to access Andrew's voicemail had been made 33 times between February 2005 and August 2006 but that 19 of those attempts were unsuccessful and a further four were likely to have been failed attempts. No stories were published as a result. Mr Justice Vos said the court was not conducting a public inquiry and pointed out claimants already had the pages from Mulcaire's notebooks which related directly to them. He is likely to decide whether to grant the order late this on Monday or Tuesday.

June 16, 2011 Truth Behind Watergate Uncertain, Even With Technology The New York Times By SAM ROBERTS A high-tech attempt to plug the mysterious 18 ½-minute gap in the Watergate tapes turned up a tantalizing clue, the National Archives and Records Administration said Thursday, but ultimately proved inconclusive in solving the scandal’s most intriguing questions: What did President Richard M. Nixon know, and when did he know it? In 2009, archives officials convened a team of forensic document experts to examine two pages of handwritten notes by H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, during a meeting on June 20, 1972 — three days after Nixon campaign operatives were arrested for breaking into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex. With 18 minutes of that conversation erased before the tapes were surrendered by Nixon to a special prosecutor, Haldeman’s notes — preserved by the National Archives — were the only existing record of the meeting. The investigation was to determine whether the two pages had been doctored to remove or add notes afterward, presumably to protect the president. The examination was prompted by an independent investigator, Philip Mellinger. “It has been suggested,” the archives investigators found, “that the two pages contain insufficient content to represent the entirety of the meeting; that the first page describes the initial few minutes of the meeting and the second page describes a discussion consistent with the end of the meeting; and that one or more intervening pages of original notes corresponding to the content of the audio tape erasures may have been removed prior to submission of the materials on subpoena.” Hyperspectral imaging, which compiles images to determine layers in a document, video spectral comparison, electrostatic detection analysis and handwriting comparison, by teams from the archives, the Library of Congress and the archivist for the United States, David S. Ferriero, found no evidence of additional notes by Haldeman. However, their analysis revealed differences in the black ballpoint inks used to write the notes, and the date on the top of the first page and the page number on the top of a second page. The differences in ink was “an anomaly,” said David G. Paynter, one of the investigating archivists. Asked whether that suggested the page number was written later, to conceal removal of other notes, he replied: “Since the two participants, Mr. Haldeman and Mr. Nixon, are dead and nothing was brought up with any witnesses questioned in the only legal forum on the 18 ½-minute gap, we will probably never know.” In 2003, the National Archives said it had given up trying to retrieve the missing conversation from the tape itself. Experts appointed in 1973 by a federal judge, John J. Sirica, concluded that the conversation had been deliberately erased. On the audible portion, Nixon says of the Democratic headquarters, “My God, the committee isn’t worth bugging, in my opinion. That’s my public line.”

The 18½-minute gap in Watergate tape remains lost to history after high-tech detective work By Associated Press, Updated: Thursday, June 16, 11:04 AM WASHINGTON — High-tech detective work has failed to solve a puzzle from the Watergate scandal that destroyed Richard Nixon’s presidency. Forensic scientists assembled by the National Archives have been examining two pages of notes from a June 1972 White House meeting, looking for clues about what was said during an 18 1/2-minute gap in a recording of the session. They explored impressions in the paper, analyzed ink and hoped to find evidence of missing notes on the conversation between Nixon and aide H.R. Haldeman. But the archives said Thursday the effort didn’t unravel the mystery. The meeting came after burglars tied to Nixon broke into Democratic headquarters. The question of what Nixon knew and when was key, and it caused a sensation when investigators learned the 18 1/2 minutes had been erased.

Daniel Ellsberg: All the crimes Richard Nixon committed against me are now legal Posted by: Jay Kernis - Senior Producer CNN June 7, 2011 http://inthearena.blogs.cnn.com/2011/06/07/daniel-ellsberg-all-the-crimes-richard-nixon-committed-against-me-are-now-legal/ ONLY ON THE BLOG: Answering today's OFF-SET questions is Daniel Ellsberg, author, defense analyst and prominent whistleblower. He is the subject of a documentary about his life, "The Most Dangerous Man in America," nominated for a 2010 Academy Award, which took its title from the words former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger used to describe Ellsberg in 1971. In the 1960s, Ellsberg was a high-level Pentagon official, a former Marine commander who believed the American government was always on the right side. But while working for the administration of Lyndon Johnson, Ellsberg had access to a top-secret document that revealed senior American leaders, including several presidents, knew that the Vietnam War was an unwinnable, tragic quagmire. Officially titled "United States-Viet Nam Relations, 1945-1967: A Study Prepared by the Department of Defense,"–the Pentagon Papers, as they became known–also showed that the government had lied to Congress and the public about the progress of the war. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000-page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In, 1971, Ellsberg leaked all 7,000 pages to The Washington Post, and 18 other newspapers, including The New York Times, which published them. Not long after, he surrendered to authorities and confessed to being the leaker. Ellsberg was charged as a spy. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed on grounds of governmental misconduct against him. In April 1973, the court learned that Nixon had ordered his so-called "Plumbers Unit" to break into the office of Ellsberg's psychiatrist to steal documents they hoped might make the whistle-blower appear crazy. In May, more evidence of government illegal wiretapping was revealed. The charges against Ellsberg were dropped. This led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. (*More bio below) The federal government has now declassified the Pentagon Papers. The Nixon Presidential Library & Museum will release the documents on June 13, forty years to the day that leaked portions of the report were published on the front page of The New York Times. Also, the PBS series POV is streaming “The Most Dangerous Man inAmerica: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers,” on June 13 and 14. In this interview, Ellsberg says, "Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, would feel vindicated that all the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal. " (Thanks to the Patriot Act and other laws passed in recent years.) And he says all presidents since Nixon have violated the constitution, most recently President Obama, with the bombing of Libya. Until now, the public has been able to read only the small portions of the report that you leaked. What do you think the impact of releasing all 7,000 pages might be? The "declassification" of the Pentagon Papers–exactly forty years late–is basically a non-event. The notion that "only small portions" of the report were released forty years ago is pure hype by the Nixon Library. Nearly all of the study–except for the negotiations volumes, which were mostly declassified over twenty years ago– became available in 1971, between the redacted (censored) Government Printing Office edition and the Senator Gravel edition put out by Beacon Press. (I've heard that most if not all of this has long been online. Here's a link I just looked up; there probably are others: CLICK HERE.) It would be helpful if the publishers indicated, by brackets or different type, what was withheld earlier. But that would be very embarrassing to the Library and the government; I'll be surprised if they do it. Most of the omissions in the GPO edition "for security"–a ridiculous claim, since their substance was nearly all available to the world in the simultaneous Gravel/Beacon Press edition–will appear arbitrary and unjustified. I'd really like to see someone–a journalist or an anti-secrecy NGO– compare this version in detail with the redacted white space in the 1971 GPO edition, for a measure of what the government has regarded as necessarily classified for the last forty years. And then ask: just why was most of what was released by the GPO, covering 1945 to1968, kept secret as late as 1971? Hint: it wasn't for "national security." What that comparison would newly reveal is the blatant violation of the spirit and letter of the FOIA declassification process by successive administrations (including the present one), in rejecting frequent requests by historians and journalists for complete declassification of the Papers over the years. But if the hype around this belated release got a new generation to read the Pentagon Papers or at least the summaries to the various volumes (my highest hope, pretty unlikely), they'd get from them as good an understanding as they could find anywhere today of our war in Afghanistan. The Pentagon Papers didn't explicitly present that last alternative, but their release contributed to that result, eventually. Is it too much to hope that their re-release could do the same? Yes, it is. But fortunately there are a few Congresspersons, like Dennis Kucinich and Barbara Lee, Walter Jones and Ron Paul who got that message the first time, even if the Republican and Democratic leadership hasn't, yet. (CLICK HERE to see a salon.com essay pointing to the only way out of Afghanistan, as it was the only way out of Vietnam). On June 23, 1971, in an interview with CBS News anchor Walter Cronkite, you said, "I think the lesson is that the people of this country can’t afford to let the President run the country by himself, even foreign affairs, without the help of Congress, without the help of the public. I think we cannot let the officials of the Executive Branch determine for us what it is that the public needs to know about how well and how they are discharging their functions." How concerned are you that elected officials haven't learned those lessons? I still stand by my cited conclusions, both for 1971 and for every single year since, including this one. But I never expected elected officials in the Executive branch (of which there are exactly two in each administration) or their myriad subordinates to "learn those lessons" or to accept them as warnings. Leaders in the Executive branch–in every country– know what they're doing, and why they're doing it, and they always want to stay in office and keep on running things with as little interference from Congress, the public and the courts as possible: which means, with as much secrecy as they can manage. So I'm not exactly concerned that they're still at it (which is why I'm still at what I do), since that is so predictable, in every government, tyrannical or "democratic." Our Founders sought to prevent this. Article I, section 8 of the Constitution, for the first time in constitutional history, put the decision to go to war (beyond repelling sudden attacks) exclusively in the hands of Congress, not the president. But every president since Harry Truman in Korea–as the Pentagon Papers demonstrated up through LBJ, but beyond them to George W. Bush and Barack Obama–has violated the spirit and even the letter of that section of the Constitution (along with some others) they each swore to preserve, protect and defend. However, as has been pointed out repeatedly by Glenn Greenwald, ( CLICK HERE) and Bruce Ackerman , David Swanson and others, no president has so blatantly violated the constitutional division of war powers as President Obama in his ongoing attack on Libya, without a nod even to the statutory War Powers Act, that post-Pentagon Papers effort by Congress to recapture something of the role assigned exclusively to it by the Constitution. This open disregard of a ruling statute (regardless of his supposed feelings about its constitutionality, which Obama has not even bothered to express) is clearly an impeachable offense, though it will certainly not lead to impeachment–given the current complicity of the leaders of both parties–any more than President George W. Bush's misleading Congress into his crime against the peace, aggression, in Iraq, or President Johnson's lies to obtain the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Yet the most important point, as I see it, is not the secrecy and the lying, or even the blatant disregard of the Constitution, the Presidential oath and the rule of law. As the Pentagon Papers documented for the much of the Vietnam era (we still lack, and we still need, the corresponding Papers for the Nixon policy-making, that added over twenty thousand names unnecessarily to the Vietnam Memorial and over a million deaths in Vietnam) and the last decade confirms: the point is that the Founders had it right the first time. As Abraham Lincoln explained their intention (in defending to his former law partner William Herndon his opposition to President Polk's deliberately provoked Mexican War): "The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us." ( CLICK HERE to read the whole letter, which I keep pinned to the wall of my office). As Lincoln put it, the alternative approach (which we have actually followed in the last sixty years) "places our President where kings have always stood." And the upshot of that undue, unquestioning trust in the president and his Executive branch is: smart people get us into stupid (and wrongful) wars, and their equally smart successors won't get us out of them. Either we the people will press elected officials in Congress–on pain of losing their jobs–to take up their Constitutional responsibilities once again and to end by defunding our illegal, unjustifiable (and now, financially insupportable) military occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq and air attacks on Pakistan, Libya and Yemen: or those bloody stalemates will continue indefinitely. In March–at the age of 79–you were arrested in front of the White House–and then again outside of Quantico military prison–while protesting in support of Army private Bradley Manning, accused of being the Wikileaks leaker. Manning, charged with 34 counts including "aiding the enemy," faces life in prison and possibly, execution. Have you been able to communicate with Bradley? It was then almost impossible to communicate with Bradley Manning, and I have so far done so only through his few visitors. In front of the White House and at Quantico, I was attempting to communicate with those holding him prisoner, to protest the abusive and illegal conditions of his detention, amounting not only to punishment of someone not tried, convicted or sentenced but to torture forbidden by domestic and international law and the Constitution even as punishment. Do you believe what Bradley did was necessary and heroic? Yes. Do you still have all 7000 pages of the Pentagon Papers? I don't really know. Hundreds of boxes of files have gone from storage into my basement, and my old copies of the Papers may or may not be somewhere in there. I'm not going to go searching among them for the still-classified eleven words. These days, when you find yourself thinking about Richard Nixon, what comes to mind? Richard Nixon, if he were alive today, might take bittersweet satisfaction to know that he was not the last smart president to prolong unjustifiably a senseless, unwinnable war, at great cost in human life. (And his aide Henry Kissinger was not the last American official to win an undeserved Nobel Peace Prize.) He would probably also feel vindicated (and envious) that ALL the crimes he committed against me–which forced his resignation facing impeachment–are now legal. That includes burglarizing my former psychoanalyst's office (for material to blackmail me into silence), warrantless wiretapping, using the CIA against an American citizen in the US, and authorizing a White House hit squad to "incapacitate me totally" (on the steps of the Capitol on May 3, 1971). All the above were to prevent me from exposing guilty secrets of his own administration that went beyond the Pentagon Papers. But under George W. Bush and Barack Obama,with the PATRIOT Act, the FISA Amendment Act, and (for the hit squad) President Obama's executive orders. they have all become legal. There is no further need for present or future presidents to commit obstructions of justice (like Nixon's bribes to potential witnesses) to conceal such acts. Under the new laws, Nixon would have stayed in office, and the Vietnam War would have continued at least several more years. Likewise, where Nixon was the first president in history to use the 54-year-old Espionage Act to indict an American (me) for unauthorized disclosures to the American people (it had previously been used, as intended, exclusively against spies), he would be impressed to see that President Obama has now brought five such indictments against leaks, almost twice as many as all previous presidents put together (three). He could only admire Obama's boldness in using the same Espionage Act provisions used against me–almost surely unconstitutional used against disclosures to the American press and public in my day, less surely under the current Supreme Court–to indict Thomas Drake, a classic whistleblower who exposed illegality and waste in the NSA. Drake's trial begins on June 13, the 40th anniversary of the publication of the Pentagon Papers. If Nixon were alive, he might well choose to attend. * * * *MORE BIO: After graduating from Harvard in 1952 with a B.A. summa cum laude in Economics, he studied for a year at King’s College, Cambridge University, on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Between 1954 and 1957, Ellsberg spent three years in the U.S. Marine Corps, serving as rifle platoon leader, operations officer, and rifle company commander. From 1957-59 he was a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows, Harvard University. He earned his Ph.D. in Economics at Harvard in 1962 with his thesis, Risk, Ambiguity and Decision. His research leading up to this dissertation—in particular his work on what has become known as the “Ellsberg Paradox,” first published in an article entitled "Risk, Ambiguity and the Savage Axioms"—is widely considered a landmark in decision theory and behavioral economics. In 1959, Ellsberg became a strategic analyst at the RAND Corporation, and consultant to the Defense Department and the White House, specializing in problems of the command and control of nuclear weapons, nuclear war plans, and crisis decision-making. In 1961 he drafted the guidance from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the operational plans for general nuclear war. He was a member of two of the three working groups reporting to the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (EXCOM) during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. Ellsberg joined the Defense Department in 1964 as Special Assistant to Assistant Secretary of Defense (International Security Affairs) John McNaughton, working on the escalation of the war in Vietnam. He transferred to the State Department in 1965 to serve two years at the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, evaluating pacification in the field. On his return to the RAND Corporation in 1967, Ellsberg worked on the top secret McNamara study of U.S. Decision-making in Vietnam, 1945-68, which later came to be known as the Pentagon Papers. In 1969, he photocopied the 7,000 page study and gave it to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; in 1971 he gave it to the New York Times, the Washington Post and 17 other newspapers. His trial, on twelve felony counts posing a possible sentence of 115 years, was dismissed in 1973 on grounds of governmental misconduct against him, which led to the convictions of several White House aides and figured in the impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. Ellsberg is the author of three books: Papers on the War (1971), Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers (2002), and Risk, Ambiguity and Decision (2001). In December 2006 he was awarded the 2006 Right Livelihood Award, known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize,” in Stockholm, Sweden, “. . for putting peace and truth first, at considerable personal risk, and dedicating his life to inspiring others to follow his example.” Since the end of the Vietnam War, Ellsberg has been a lecturer, writer and activist on the dangers of the nuclear era, wrongful U.S. interventions and the urgent need for patriotic whistleblowing. He is a Senior Fellow of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation.

Phone-hacking scandal widens to include Kate Middleton and Tony Blair MP calls for expanded investigation as list grows of those allegedly hacked by Jonathan Rees for News International By Nick Davies guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 8 June 2011 18.36 BST Pressure is building on the Metropolitan police to expand their phone-hacking inquiry to include a notorious private investigator who was accused in the House of Commons on Wednesday of targeting politicians, members of the royal family and high-level terrorist informers on behalf of Rupert Murdoch's News International. Guardian inquiries reveal that the former prime minister Tony Blair is among the suspected victims of Jonathan Rees, who was involved in the theft of confidential data, the hacking of computers and, it is alleged, burglary. According to close associates of Rees, he also targeted: • Jack Straw when he was home secretary, Peter Mandelson when he was trade secretary and Blair's media adviser Alastair Campbell; • Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex, and the Duke and Duchess of Kent, all of whom are said to have had their bank accounts penetrated, and Kate Middleton when she was Prince William's girlfriend; • The former commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir John Stevens, and the current assistant commissioner, John Yates, who later supervised the failed phone-hacking inquiry for 19 months; • The governor and deputy governor of the Bank of England, whose mortgage account details were obtained and sold. Rees, who worked for the Mirror Group as well as the New of the World, is also accused of using a specialist computer hacker in July 2006 to steal information about MI6 agents who had infiltrated the Provisional IRA. According to a BBC Panorama programme in March, Rees was commissioned by Alex Marunchak, then the News of the World's executive editor, to hack the information from the computer of Ian Hurst, a former British intelligence officer in Northern Ireland who had stayed in contact with several highly vulnerable agents. Marunchak has denied the allegations. The Guardian has previously identified other suspected targets of Rees, including Eric Clapton, Mick Jagger, George Michael, Linford Christie, Gary Lineker, Richard Madeley and Judy Finnigan, and the family of the Yorkshire Ripper, Peter Sutcliffe. None of these cases has been officially confirmed or even investigated. With many of them, it is not yet clear precisely what form of surveillance Rees and his agency, Southern Investigations, were using. Answers may lie in the "boxloads" of paperwork the Metropolitan police are believed to have seized from Rees. But the Labour MP Tom Watson told the prime minister on Wednesday the head of the Operation Weeting inquiry into the News of the World's investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, had told him that it may be beyond its terms of reference to investigate this evidence. "Prime minister, powerful forces are attempting a cover-up," Watson said. "Please tell me what you intend to do, to make sure this doesn't happen." While Glenn Mulcaire worked for the News of the World as a full-time employee from 2001, Rees worked freelance for the Mirror Group and the News of the World from the mid 1990s. His agency was earning up to £150,000 a year from the News of the World alone. In 1999, he was arrested and sentenced to seven years for conspiring to plant cocaine on a woman so that her husband would get custody of their children. After his release in May 2004, the News of the World continued to hire him under the editorship of Andy Coulson, who went on to become David Cameron's media adviser. Rees's targets during this period included Prince William's then girlfriend, Kate Middleton. On Wednesday, a News International spokesperson said: "It is well documented that Jonathan Rees and Southern Investigations worked for a whole variety of newspaper groups. With regards to Tom Watson's specific allegations, we believe these are wholly inaccurate. The Met police, with whom we are co-operating fully in Operation Weeting, have not asked us for any information regarding Jonathan Rees. We note again that Tom Watson MP made these allegations under parliamentary privilege." Scotland Yard is believed to have collected hundreds of thousands of documents during a series of investigations into Rees over his links with corrupt officers, and over the 1987 murder of his former business partner, Daniel Morgan. Charges of murder against Rees were dismissed earlier this year. Daniel Morgan's brother, Alastair, who has been gathering information for a book, told the Guardian he was aware from his own investigations and from material revealed in court hearings that the Metropolitan police was holding "boxloads" of evidence on Rees's activities. Guardian inquiries suggest that this paperwork could include explosive new evidence of illegal news-gathering by the News of the World and other papers. According to journalists and investigators who worked with him, Rees exploited his position as a freemason to make links with masonic police officers who illegally sold him information on targets chosen by the News of the World, the Sunday Mirror and the Daily Mirror. One close contact, Det Sgt Sid Fillery, left the Metropolitan police to become Rees's business partner and added more officers to their network. Fillery was subsequently convicted of possession of indecent images of children. Some police contacts are said to have been blackmailed into providing confidential information. One of Rees's former associates claims that Rees had compromising photographs of serving officers, including one who was caught in a drunken coma with a couple of prostitutes and with a toilet seat around his neck. Rees claimed to be in touch with corrupt Customs officers, a corrupt VAT inspector and two corrupt bank employees. An investigator who worked for Rees claims he was commissioning burglaries of public figures to steal material for newspapers. Southern Investigations has previously been implicated in handling paperwork which was stolen by a professional burglar from the safe of Paddy Ashdown's lawyer, when Ashdown was leader of the Liberal Democrats. The paperwork, which was eventually obtained by the News of the World, recorded Ashdown discussing his fears that newspapers might expose an affair with his secretary. The Guardian has confirmed that Rees also used two specialist "blaggers" who would telephone the Inland Revenue, the DVLA, banks and phone companies and trick them into handing over private data to be sold to Fleet Street. One of the blaggers who regularly worked for him, John Gunning, was responsible for obtaining details of bank accounts belonging to Prince Edward and the Countess of Wessex, which were then sold to the Sunday Mirror. Gunning was later convicted of illegally obtaining confidential data from British Telecom. Rees also obtained details of accounts at Coutts bank belonging to the Duke and Duchess of Kent. The bank accounts of Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, are also thought to have been compromised. The Guardian has been told that Rees spoke openly about obtaining confidential data belonging to senior politicians and recorded their names in his paperwork. One source close to Rees claims that apart from Tony Blair, Straw, Mandelson and Campbell, he also targeted Gaynor Regan, who became the second wife of the foreign secretary, Robin Cook, the former shadow home secretary, Gerald Kaufman; and the former Tory minister David Mellor. It is not yet known precisley what Rees was doing with these political targets, although in the case of Peter Mandelson, it appears that Rees obtained confidential details of two bank accounts which he held at Coutts, and his building society account at Britannia. Rees is also said to have targeted his brother, Miles Mandelson. Separately, for the News of the World, Glenn Mulcaire was hacking the voicemail of the deputy prime minister, John Prescott, Straw's successor as home secretary, David Blunkett, the media secretary, Tessa Jowell, and the Europe minister, Chris Bryant. Scotland Yard has repeatedly refused to reveal how many politicians were victims of phone hacking, although Simon Hughes, Boris Johnson and George Galloway have all been named. The succesful hacking of a computer belonging to the former British intelligence officer Ian Hurst was achieved in July 2006 by sending Hurst an email containing a Trojan program which copied Hurst's emails and relayed them to the hacker. This included messages he had exchanged with at least two agents who informed on the Provisional IRA – Freddie Scappaticci, codenamed Stakeknife; and a second informant known as Kevin Fulton. Both men were regarded as high-risk targets for assassination. Hurst was one of the very few people who knew their whereabouts. The hacker cannot be named for legal reasons. There would be further security concern if Rees's paperwork confirmed strong claims by those close to him that he claimed to have targeted the then Metropolitan police commissioner, Sir John Stevens, who would have had regular access to highly sensitive intelligence. Sir John's successor, Sir Ian Blair, is believed to have been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, although it has not been confirmed that Mulcaire succeeded in listening to his voicemail. Assistant commissioner John Yates was targeted by Rees when Yates was running inquiries into police corruption in the late 1990s. It appears that Yates did not realise that he himself had been a target when he was responsible for the policing of the phone-hacking affair between July 2009 and January 2011. Targeting the Bank of England, Rees is believed to have earned thousands of pounds by penetrating the past or present mortgage accounts of the then governor, Eddie George, his deputy, Mervyn King, who is now governor, and half-a-dozen other members of the monetary policy committee. According to police information provided to the Guardian in September 2002, an internal Scotland Yard report recorded that Rees and his network were engaged in long-term penetration of police intelligence and that "their thirst for knowledge is driven by profit to be accrued from the media". Operation Weeting has been investigating phone hacking by the News of the World since January. The paper's assistant editor, Ian Edmondson, chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck, and former news editor James Weatherup have been arrested and released on police bail. On Wednesday, A police spokesman said: "[We] can confirm that since January 2011 the MPS [Metropolitan police service] has received a number of allegations regarding breach of privacy which fall outside the remit of Operation Weeting. These allegations are currently being considered."

Sienna Miller settles hacking case The Independent Tuesday, 7 June 2011 Sienna Miller was granted an injunction preventing any further unlawful accessing of her voicemail and publication of her private information Sienna Miller's privacy and harassment claim in the News of the World phone-hacking action settled for £100,000 damages today. The 29-year-old actress, who is appearing in Terence Rattigan's Flare Path at the Theatre Royal Haymarket, was not at London's High Court for the brief hearing. Her counsel, David Sherborne, told Mr Justice Vos that, in 2005 and 2006, she was the subject of numerous articles which contained "intrusive and private information". As well as the damages and her legal costs, Ms Miller was granted an injunction preventing any further unlawful accessing of her voicemail and publication of her private information. The order also provided for disclosure of information about the extent of the activities and expressly allows her to come back to court in the light of any new material. Mr Sherborne said that Ms Miller did not know the source of the information and could not understand how it was possible for the News of the World to obtain it. She had considerable concerns about the security of her mobile phone, having experienced periods of hang up calls and missing voicemail messages, and changed her number three times in a bid to protect herself. "The information which was being published was only known to trusted friends and family. "The claimant did not know whether someone close to her was leaking information or whether her mobile telephone was somehow being hacked into. "Both possibilities were extremely distressing for the claimant," said counsel. Mr Sherborne said that in October 2010, after disclosure of documents by the Metropolitan Police Service, Ms Miller issued proceedings for misuse of private information, breach of confidence and harassment. In April this year, News Group Newspapers made an unconditional admission of liability. He added: "This meant that News Group accepted that confidential and private information had been obtained by the unlawful access of the claimant's voicemail messages, that confidential and private information had been published as a result, and that there had been an invasion of her privacy, breaches of confidence and a campaign of harassment for over 12 months." News Group's counsel, Michael Silverleaf QC, offered its "sincere apologies" to Ms Miller for the damage and distress caused. It acknowledged that the information should never have been obtained in the manner it was, the private information should never have been published and it had accepted liability.

Excerpts of two key paragraphs from the above article: After Watergate, ethics rules slowly toughened from state to state, based on model rules developed by the American Bar Association and further toughened after the financial scandal at Enron, the Texas energy and trading company, through such legislation as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed new standards for corporate oversight. Under todays rules, Mr. Dean would have an obligation to report wrongdoing up the ladder to the top of his organization, and could take evidence of crimes to law enforcement if the highest authority refused to act. History could easily have been changed, even if Mr. Dean only threatened to go public, Mr. Robenalt said. The leverage alone could have changed the dynamic within the White House when it could still have been changed. ----------------------------------- Now members of the Forum can readily understand why I was ethically and legally obligated to write my letter of March 31, 2011 to FBI Director Mueller, a copy of which I posted on this forum topic on April 13, 2011. http://educationforum.ipbhost.com/index.php?showtopic=17579

Using Legacy of Watergate, John Dean to Teach Ethics By JOHN SCHWARTZ The New York Times June 4, 2011 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/04/us/04dean.html?_r=1&ref=us It was a telling list. When John W. Dean III testified before the Senate Watergate Committee in June 1973, he handed over a list of names of those in the Nixon administration he believed had broken the law. His own name was on the list, along with 15 others. Senator Herman Talmadge asked about an odd feature of the list: asterisks. Why, the Georgia senator asked, had the former White House counsel placed an asterisk by more than two-thirds of the names? Because, Mr. Dean replied, each was a lawyer. Mr. Dean told the senators that he thought, “How in God’s name could so many lawyers get involved in something like this?” Mr. Dean was not the only one asking that question. In the years after the Watergate scandal, the American Bar Association demanded that law schools teach their students ethics. A portion of the bar exam was adopted in each state to test would-be lawyers on the issues. Over time, continuing legal education courses — required programs for members of the profession to retain active status — also came to include ethics offerings. These courses rarely stir the soul, and the businesses that present them may dress them up as weekend getaways with plenty of opportunities for golf, or offer them online for those seeking a quicker and more convenient path. But this month, an ethics course given in Chicago promises to offer something a little different: the lessons of Watergate, taught by Mr. Dean himself. Learning ethics by studying Watergate might sound like learning about fiduciary duties by studying Bernard L. Madoff . That, Mr. Dean, 72, said in an interview, is the point. “I helped write the book of what not to do, so I’m hopeful that people can learn from that — and not make the mistakes I did.” Those mistakes, which earned Mr. Dean four months in prison, are an integral part of the greatest American political scandal of the 20th century: the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex on June 17, 1972, that was ultimately revealed to be part of a broad conspiracy of spying, payoffs and cover-up reaching to the top of the administration, and which led to Richard M. Nixon’s resignation on Aug. 8, 1974. The half-day program focuses on the events of the week after the arrests of the burglars, when G. Gordon Liddy explained the extent of the White House “plumbers” operation to Mr. Dean, the White House counsel, and Mr. Dean’s involvement in obstruction of justice began. “That first week foreshadows everything, raises everything a lawyer can be confronted with, and it’s where the problems started,” Mr. Dean said. The issues are complex, but come down to this: What are a lawyer’s obligations when his bosses are engaged in criminal acts? James D. Robenalt, a lawyer in Cleveland who developed the course with Mr. Dean after they got to know each other over a shared interest in Warren G. Harding, said the course would contrast Mr. Dean’s very limited options at the time with those available to today’s lawyers, armed with reforms inspired by Watergate. Mr. Robenalt said the course paraphrases the famous Watergate hearings question from Senator Howard H. Baker, Jr.: “What did the president know, and when did he know it?” The course asks, “What could John Dean have done, and when could he have done it?” In 1972, Mr. Dean had few obvious options other than to serve his bosses, Mr. Robenalt said. Ethical standards were vague, and the requirement to zealously defend one’s client paramount. Under the circumstances of the rules in force in the District of Columbia at the time, the best a lawyer could have done might have been to resign rather than report the wrongdoing. “The code prior to that time was homilies,” Mr. Robenalt said. After Watergate, ethics rules slowly toughened from state to state, based on model rules developed by the American Bar Association and further toughened after the financial scandal at Enron, the Texas energy and trading company, through such legislation as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which imposed new standards for corporate oversight. Under today’s rules, Mr. Dean would have an obligation to report wrongdoing up the ladder to the top of his organization, and could take evidence of crimes to law enforcement if the highest authority refused to act. “History could easily have been changed,” even if Mr. Dean only threatened to go public, Mr. Robenalt said. “The leverage alone could have changed the dynamic within the White House when it could still have been changed.” After the debut course for the law firm of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, Mr. Robenalt and Mr. Dean will take their show on the road, with $300-a-head classes already planned for Ohio, New York, Washington and California. Brian W. Duwe, managing partner of Skadden’s Chicago offices, said that the firm was looking for something that went beyond the usual ethics class, which often involves “people walking you through the canons, step by step by painful step,” he said. Expectations are so high for the Dean class that the firm is actually inviting nonlawyer clients to attend. Society does not necessarily have a high opinion of lawyers, and “legal ethics” is the kind of phrase that elicits gibes about oxymorons. But Ronald D. Rotunda, a professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange, Calif., and a Senate aide during the Watergate hearings, said that the overall effect of the ethics rules had been to sensitize lawyers to where the lines were drawn, and that has had an effect on their behavior. “We’re not quite in heaven yet,” he said. “We can’t make a bad person good.” But, he insisted, “Most people aren’t born bad — they’ll follow the rules as the rules get clearer.” Legal ethics requirements are not the only reforms inspired by Watergate. Congress toughened federal election finance laws, authorized the creation of independent prosecutors, loosened the bonds of government secrecy and tightened the president’s powers to go to war without Congressional approval. “All those things have largely gone away,” Mr. Dean said, undercut over time by actions of the executive, legislative and judicial branches. Even the surge in investigative journalism in the wake of Watergate has ebbed, Mr. Dean noted, as newsroom budgets shrink. The upgraded legal ethics rules, he said, are “the only lasting legacy of Watergate.”

Hi Douglas, good to talk to you again. I am entertained by this thread, but do not take it seriously. Joseph P. Kennedy was a financier/businessman who made a boatload of money but never sought elective office. So it is a bit ridiculous to suggest he made enemies in his POLITICAL career, since -- apart from government assignments --he never had one. The first few paragraphs in the link below clearly illustrate Joseph Kennedy's political career, being born to a political family and becoming a leading member of the Democratic Party -- and eventually being SEC Chairman and Ambassador to Great Britain. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr. Your definition of a "political career" is too restrictive. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Joseph Kennedy, Sr. died knowing that something he had purposely done in the past that caused great loss or harm to the group that has exercised world power for centuries had put his family at risk. This knowledge may have even caused him to suffer his stroke in 1961.

My guess, and it is only a guess, is that Joseph Kennedy, Sr. did something purposely in his business and/or political career(s) that resulted in tremendous harm or loss to those whose roots in power go back for centuries and as a result a plan for calculated revenge was placed into motion (which still may not be finished.) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_P._Kennedy,_Sr.

PULL the other leg, Doug! It's got BELLS ON! You need to take your beef about this up with Jim Marrs who talked about it on Dreamland and with Robert Fischer who presented a peer reviewed paper about it at the 2009 annual meeting of the American Society of Criminology.

http://johndenugent.com/images/2-Kennedy-Sidereal-Times.jpg

Kennedy Family Deaths linked to Sidereal Time On the current May 21, 2011, Dreamland program, Jim Marrs interviews Whitley Strieber about material manuscript changes made in the first edition of Strieber’s 2001 book, The Key, which took place without his being aware of them until recently. In the course of the interview Jim Marrs makes the unrelated observation that the deaths in the Kennedy family all took place in the same hour in sidereal time. Sidereal time is calculated on the movement of the stars and is used by the astronauts, astrologers, and astrophysicists. We, of course, use Greenwich Mean Time based on the movement of the Earth around the Sun, which, like Sidereal Time, is broken into 24 hours. For a description of Sidereal time, click on the link below: http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro2201/sidereal.htm Jim Marrs discloses in the interview that all the Kennedy deaths took place in the 16th hour of Sidereal Time: Joe Kennedy, Jr. in 1944, JFK in 1963, Bobby in 1968, John Jr. in 1999 – and Ted Kennedy in a near fatal plane crash in 1964. He says it is like saying the deaths all took place between Noon and 1 P.M. He further discloses that his study of Masonic lore reveals that the 16th Hour is the Hour of Revenge. To hear Jim Marrs talk about this intriguing aspect, go the link below and listen to the free program of Dreamland. His verbal observations begin almost immediately subsequent to the 25th minute of the 54 minute program. http://www.unknowncountry.com/dreamland/latest

Phone-hacking investigation uncovers hundreds more examples of practice True extent of investigator Glenn Mulcaire's activities only now becoming apparent as Operation Wheeting continues By James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Friday 20 May 2011 21.00 BST The Metropolitan police holds evidence that could prove hundreds of people had their phones hacked by the News of the World, Scotland Yard told the high court, a far greater number than had previously been believed. Barristers for the Metropolitan police said notes seized from Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator on the paper's books, showed he made a note of 149 mobile phone pin numbers and around 400 unique voicemail numbers. Both are used to access messages left on mobile phones. Jason Beer QC, for the Metropolitan police, told a high court hearing the figures were: "a snap shot in time as of last week". Until Friday, the police had maintained Mulcaire kept a record of just 91 pin numbers. The true extent of the investigator's activities is only now becoming apparent as Operation Wheeting, the new police investigation into phone-hacking at the News of the World which began in January, continues. Mulcaire's targets included the actor Jude Law, who is suing the paper for breach of privacy. Law's case was joined the list of test cases that will be tried next year, along with that of Labour MP Chris Bryant, a former Europe minister. Justice Vos, the judge assigned to take charge of all the hacking claims, said they would be added to three other test cases which were chosen last month – those of the agent Sky Andrew, interior designer Kelly Hoppen and football pundit Andy Gray. Law's former girlfriend Sienna Miller was also scheduled to have her case against the News of the World heard next year but she indicated last week she would accept damages of £100,000 from the paper's publisher, News Group Newspapers. The damages that will be awarded in each of the fives test cases, should they be successful, are likely to vary because each of them alleges a different level of criminal wrongdoing by Mulcaire and the News of the World. Vos raised the prospect of imposing exemplary damages on parent company News International. They are set at a level high enough to punish the company for its behaviour and deter others from committing the same crime, and are often a percentage of a company's profits. "It's one thing for a journalist to say 'I'm desperate to get a story'," Vos said. "It's another thing for the chief executive of a company to say 'I'm desperate to make more money by getting stories in this evil way'." Vos added: "Was there a conspiracy between Mulcaire and News Group Newspapers to intercept voicemail messages? The answer is yes there was. Was it an agreement between the board of directors of NGN? ... I will have to determine the answer."

Al Gore hits out at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp Former US vice-president says media giant is forcing his liberal Current TV service off air in Italy for hiring Keith Olbermann By Dan Sabbagh guardian.co.uk, Thursday 19 May 2011 15.04 BST Former US vice-president Al Gore has hit out at Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation, accusing it of "an abuse of power" by forcing his liberal TV station off air in Italy because it did not fit in with the media giant's "ideological agenda". In an interview with the Guardian, Gore said the Current TV news and documentary channel was told unexpectedly three weeks ago that it could no longer be carried by Sky Italia because of its decision to hire a US left-leaning commentator often critical of Murdoch's company. He added that the decision reflected how News Corporation operated worldwide. "News Corporation is an international conglomerate with an ideological agenda. It seeks political power in every nation they operate. They wield that power to shut down voices that disagree with the agenda of Rupert Murdoch," Gore said. The decision, he added, was "a complete shock" but Current TV executives were told "off the record that the decision was taken on News Corp instructions from New York". The primary reason, he said, was "because Current is launching Keith Olbermann next month". Olbermann – who styles himself as a leftwing alternative to the rightwing shock jock journalism of Fox News – worked at rival cable news network MSNBC until he left abruptly in January. This came after he was briefly suspended by MSNBC in November for making donations to three Democratic candidates in the midterm elections without seeking prior approval, in breach of company rules. "Olbermann has often been critical of News Corporation," Gore added. Current TV broadcasts around the world, including the UK, but the channel has been more successful in Italy, where it claims that "one in three" Sky Italia viewers watch at some point during the week. However, Gore said that decision to not renew the channel's existing distribution deal also had implications in the UK – where News Corp's takeover of BSkyB is under review on the grounds of "media plurality". "I know that News Corp is close to reaching an agreement to buy BSkyB. Now I may not be a party to that debate, but if anybody believes that [News Corp] will remain hands off if there are diverse opinions that do not agree with its ideological agenda then they are fools. This is proof positive of their abuse of power," Gore said. However, Current TV's existing agreement with BSkyB does not expire until next year, so there is no immediate threat to its UK position on the satellite service in this country. Gore also said he understood there has been "a rapprochement" in the struggle between News Corp and Silvio Berlusconi's media empire in Italy. Current TV has run several documentaries critical of the Italian premier and his government. "Sky Italia is in the midst of negotiations to enter the digital terrestrial television market and the need Berlusconi's support," he said. Gore added that he had a "pleasant personal relationship" with Murdoch dating back to the former vice-president's time in the White House, and said that he wasn't sure exactly on whose authority the decision was made to order Current TV off the air in Italy. He said that he didn't want "to make this ad hominem" but added it was clear that Murdoch and News Corp had too much power. Programming aired by Current TV in Italy has included Citizen Berlusconi, a documentary first produced by the US PBS network, and about the consequences of handing a media mogul formal political power. "Anglo-American political theory highlights the problem. Too much power in the hands of one person is dangerous, no matter the ideology," Gore said. "The conversation of democracy, which used to happen in newspapers or in other public places now happens on the television screen. But this is a public space in which gatekeepers charge rents." He cited the example of the 2003 Iraq war, in which News Corp had acted as "an aggressive cheerleader" for the US-led invasion, to the point where "three quarters of the American public got the impression that Saddam Hussein was responsible for the attacks of 2001". This journalism, Gore said, "has consequences" and he argued that "our democracy is much better when there are diverse viewpoints" to inform decision-making. News Corp had not returned a request for comment at time of publication

Phone hacking: Sienna Miller accepts £100,000 from News of the World Actor is first celebrity to settle claim since tabloid admitted hacking several public figures' voicemail messages By Amelia Hill and James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Friday 13 May 2011 14.59 BST Sienna Miller has accepted £100,000 compensation from the News of the World after it accepted unconditional liability for her phone-hacking claims. The unexpected agreement came midway through a high court battle with the paper. The actor is the first celebrity to settle a claim since the tabloid, part of Rupert Murdoch's News Group Newspapers (NGN), last month admitted hacking the phones of several public figures. The settlement is the highest privacy award to date; NGN will also pay Miller's legal costs. Michael Silverleaf QC, NGN's barrister, had previously claimed Miller's case could result in £400,000 in damages. He told the court this would be a "ludicrous" sum. Separately, it emerged that James Hewitt, the man who became famous for his affair with Princess Diana, is poised to sue for invasion of privacy. He will issue proceedings next week after the Metropolitan police showed him evidence that suggested he may have been targeted by Glenn Mulcaire, the private investigator who was jailed for phone hacking in 2007. Hewitt's lawyer, Charlotte Harris of Mishcon de Reya, confirmed that her client is to begin action against the paper: "He's had his meeting with the police, we're satisfied he has a strong case and we will be issuing legal proceedings next week." Max Clifford has claimed Koo Stark, a former girlfriend of Prince Andrew, is also poised to sue a tabloid over phone-hacking, although it is unclear which title he was referring to. Her lawyer, Andrew Veen, said he could not comment at this stage. Clifford said that his understanding was that the title was not part of the News International stable, which includes the Sun, The Times and Sunday Times. "She approached me some time ago saying she is convinved her phone was tapped when she was with Prince Andrew," he said. "She wanted her to put me in touch with lawyers and she has been taking legal advice. I won't say who she thinks it was, but it wasn't News International". Miller's legal team had previously insisted she was not concerned with the financial aspect of the settlement. "The crucial point in our view is to know the extent of the wrongdoing," Hugh Tomlinson QC, Miller's barrister said in court. He added that she had made the last-minute agreement "precisely because all her claims have been admitted [comprising] misuse of private information, breach of confidence, publication of articles derived from voicemail hacking and a course of conduct of harassment over a period of 12 months as resulting from all that. "Her primary concern is not how much money is rewarded by way of compensation but what the extent was of the hacking that took place," he said. "What she wants is to have is disclosure and proper answers from the News of the World as to what took place so she can have effective non-monetary relief and can be properly compensated." Silverleaf told the high court the story about her troubled relationship with actor Jude Law, which was published after her voicemail was hacked, was "hurtful" to the 29-year-old. He said £100,000 was fair because it was more than what she would receive if she had suffered a "life-changing experience" such as the loss of an eye or facial scarring. "What she wants is a public inquiry that goes beyond what the remedy in civil law provides," Silverleaf added. "The complainant's career, reputation or life has not been affected in the long term. She said she was upset at the time. She does not suggest she suffered any long-term harm, there is no suggestion in the pleading." Last night Hugh Grant backed the use of injunctions to protect celebrities' private lives. Speaking on Newsnight, he said the British press had "been completely out of control for the last 20 years". He added: "It's a bit like living under the Stasi. You never know when you haven't got a long lens in the bushes at the end of my road or in a car … I've had my phone hacked, I've had the police come and tell me that now. They're always looking for anyone you may have been in contact with." Grant said that it would be "wonderful" if newspapers closed as a result of injunctions . "It's fabulous that people can go to a judge and stop these things being printed, and it's wonderful that ultimately if it goes on like that the worst of the tabloids will pretty much go out of business, because there's very little real journalism done in those papers now. "It's mainly stealing successful people's privacy and selling it," he said. At least 24 breach of privacy claims have been lodged against the News of the World by celebrities who believe their mobile phone voicemails were eavesdropped on using stolen information, such as pin codes, obtained by Mulcaire. The newspaper has admitted hacking at least eight public figures' voicemails. Rupert Murdoch's News International announced last month it was setting up a £20m compensation fund. A News International spokeswoman said: "We're pleased we have managed to bring this case to a satisfactory conclusion. Several weeks ago we admitted liability in certain cases and offered a genuine and unreserved apology. We hope to resolve other cases swiftly. "For the record, reports that we have been ordered to disclose 8,000 emails to Ms Miller are inaccurate. The error stems from a reference in court to the fact that a total of 8,000 emails were being searched to ascertain whether any Sienna Miller related material was amongst them." A statement from both Miller and NGN will be read to the court at a hearing next Friday

Men who lack conscience will even lie to themselves – Lauryn Hill quoted in the New York Times of April 23, 2011 In response to the allegations made by Robert Merritt, I wish to state that I stand by my letter of March 31, 2011, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, which I reproduced in this Watergate Topic on April 13, 2011. As to Merritt’s allegations that I left out material from Watergate Exposed that he wanted included, it needs to be noted that Merritt in late January 2011 approved the galley of the book sent to him by TrineDay Publisher and at that time expressed no reservation to either the publisher or me about information not being included in the book. No publisher will publish a book until the author has signed off on the galley. This Merritt did at the time and TrineDay sent the book to print within 24 hours of Merritt’s approval of the galley. Shortly thereafter the printed book was distributed to book stores. As noted in my letter to the FBI, it was only after the book was printed that Merritt decided to disclose material he wanted included in the book, some of which is overtly criminal in nature. One only has to listen to his interview on March 17, 2011, on KPFK radio in Los Angeles, whose link in included in my letter to the FBI, wherein Mr. Merritt proudly announces that he is disclosing this new information for the first time. His announcement on the radio show rebuts his assertion that I purposely left material out of the book. I assume that almost everyone reading this response has not read Watergate Exposed. For that reason let me quote from the book so that the reader can get an idea of what type of person Merritt is. These quotes are his own words and were approved by him in the book’s galley: (1) Merritt was born in West Virginia in 1944 and quit attending high school there two months before being graduated in 1962. He moved to Washington, D.C. to start a new life. His first job in Washington was with at the Trailways bus terminal. “Soon I managed to change jobs at the bus terminal from working in the restaurant to a baggage agent. My immediate supervisor was gay and he quickly promoted me to baggage manager. This did not last long as the terminal manager soon fired me: he was homophobic and constantly made anti-gay remarks; this led me to send about 12 bus loads of passengers’ luggage to the wrong destinations around the country as a means of getting even with him for his smart-ass anti-gay remarks.” (pages 21-22). (2) At a new job at a hospital Merritt contracted hepatitis B and ran up a $100,000 bill for medical treatment at another hospital. How did he get out from paying the bill? “I simply changed my name to Robert Antoine Chevalier and got a job at the Washington Medical Center in the billing department as an insurance adjuster. In no time at all I managed to misplace permanently all of the billing records for Robert Merritt, right under the nose of my immediate boss.” (page 24). (3) Later, when he later moved to New York City, Merritt got a job as a property manager. “My job as property manager was to pretend to make repairs on 36 buildings for violations of the housing code. However, my real job was to create more violations of very serious nature, such as opening a gas line in order to cause a serious fire or make the building blow up. Bruce [one of the owners of the investment corporation that owned the buildings] wanted all of his so-called tenants to vacate the building forthwith because they were squatters and it was nearly impossible to evict them because they would bring up publicly the multiple violations of the buildings. On one occasion I did open a main gas line that could have caused the death of many people, but I immediately telephoned the city’s fire department to report gas odors. Firemen arrived within minutes and shut the gas off to the entire building which was precisely what I wanted as this left the tenants with no heat or hot water before Christmas. When they found they had no gas to cook with, many tenants chose to move out but many did not.” (pages 143-144) (4) Later at a job as superintendent for an exclusive building on Park Avenue, after a confrontation with the building’s owner, Merritt “decided to leave in style. I placed an ad in The New York Times to sublease my [superintendent’s] free apartment at 77 South Park Avenue. I managed to rent out my apartment for $3000 per month plus a $3000 security deposit, for a total of $6000. I rented out my apartment to 10 different people and pocketed $60,000, leaving the owner to straighten out the inevitable chaos….[when] six moving vans showed up, each of which had instructions to move their truck’s belongings into my former apartment. Now I had a small war chest on which to survive as a fugitive from justice.” (page 146) (5) Not long thereafter Merritt got a job again as a building superintendent in the Washington Heights section of New York City. “I did not like the area, the building and especially the tenants. I had already decided to rent my apartment out as usual but decided to take my time and collect my thoughts…One day several undercover cops arrested me for making calls for the Muslims using ‘illegal’ phone cards…I made the decision that it was time for me to move on and rent out my free super’s apartment. I did this using my tried and true formula but only made about $18,000.” (page 147) (6) Once again Merritt got a job as a building superintendent, this time for two buildings on 14th Street in Manhattan. “The owner of the buildings, whom I never did believe had converted to Judaism, one day told me when he had three empty apartments that he did not want any ‘niggers or spics, only whites.’ He did not know how much he had offended me. So pursuant to his wishes I rented all three apartments out to upscale whites. As a matter of fact, I rented each apartment at the rate of $1000 per month when he actually wanted $2500 a month. The problem was that I rented each apartment to three different tenants, collecting $9000. I sent the tenants to pick up their apartment keys and their leases from the owner at his Long Island office, all on the same day. The day that I selected was his daughter’s wedding day at his own restaurant.” (pages 156-157). If you are getting the idea from his proudly asserted admissions that Merritt is not a very nice person, and is probably a sociopath who gets his kicks from wrecking and destroying the lives of innocent persons, you may be on the right track. This is why in 1972 and 1973 he chose not to tell publicly what he knew about the true origins of Watergate but instead put his personal interest and ambition ahead of what was best for the country. In my next installment, I shall disclose how he and his gay lover, Washington Police Officer Carl Shoffler, devised a plan to bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon upon their learning two weeks in advance of the Watergate burglars’ plan to break into the Democratic National Committee. Shoffler and Merritt were in effect a latter day Leopold and Loeb. They planned the perfect crime and, as were Leopold and Loeb, “broken machines.”

Men who lack conscience will even lie to themselves – Lauryn Hill quoted in the New York Times of April 23, 2011 In response to the allegations made by Robert Merritt, I wish to state that I stand by my letter of March 31, 2011, to FBI Director Robert Mueller, which I reproduced in this Watergate Topic on April 13, 2011. As to Merritt’s allegations that I left out material from Watergate Exposed that he wanted included, it needs to be noted that Merritt in late January 2011 approved the galley of the book sent to him by TrineDay Publisher and at that time expressed no reservation to either the publisher or me about information not being included in the book. No publisher will publish a book until the author has signed off on the galley. This Merritt did at the time and TrineDay sent the book to print within 24 hours of Merritt’s approval of the galley. Shortly thereafter the printed book was distributed to book stores. As noted in my letter to the FBI, it was only after the book was printed that Merritt decided to disclose material he wanted included in the book, some of which is overtly criminal in nature. One only has to listen to his interview on March 17, 2011, on KPFK radio in Los Angeles, whose link in included in my letter to the FBI, wherein Mr. Merritt proudly announces that he is disclosing this new information for the first time. His announcement on the radio show rebuts his assertion that I purposely left material out of the book. I assume that almost everyone reading this response has not read Watergate Exposed. For that reason let me quote from the book so that the reader can get an idea of what type of person Merritt is. These quotes are his own words and were approved by him in the book’s galley: (1) Merritt was born in West Virginia in 1944 and quit attending high school there two months before being graduated in 1962. He moved to Washington, D.C. to start a new life. His first job in Washington was with at the Trailways bus terminal. “Soon I managed to change jobs at the bus terminal from working in the restaurant to a baggage agent. My immediate supervisor was gay and he quickly promoted me to baggage manager. This did not last long as the terminal manager soon fired me: he was homophobic and constantly made anti-gay remarks; this led me to send about 12 bus loads of passengers’ luggage to the wrong destinations around the country as a means of getting even with him for his smart-ass anti-gay remarks.” (pages 21-22). (2) At a new job at a hospital Merritt contracted hepatitis B and ran up a $100,000 bill for medical treatment at another hospital. How did he get out from paying the bill? “I simply changed my name to Robert Antoine Chevalier and got a job at the Washington Medical Center in the billing department as an insurance adjuster. In no time at all I managed to misplace permanently all of the billing records for Robert Merritt, right under the nose of my immediate boss.” (page 24). (3) Later, when he later moved to New York City, Merritt got a job as a property manager. “My job as property manager was to pretend to make repairs on 36 buildings for violations of the housing code. However, my real job was to create more violations of very serious nature, such as opening a gas line in order to cause a serious fire or make the building blow up. Bruce [one of the owners of the investment corporation that owned the buildings] wanted all of his so-called tenants to vacate the building forthwith because they were squatters and it was nearly impossible to evict them because they would bring up publicly the multiple violations of the buildings. On one occasion I did open a main gas line that could have caused the death of many people, but I immediately telephoned the city’s fire department to report gas odors. Firemen arrived within minutes and shut the gas off to the entire building which was precisely what I wanted as this left the tenants with no heat or hot water before Christmas. When they found they had no gas to cook with, many tenants chose to move out but many did not.” (pages 143-144) (4) Later at a job as superintendent for an exclusive building on Park Avenue, after a confrontation with the building’s owner, Merritt “decided to leave in style. I placed an ad in The New York Times to sublease my [superintendent’s] free apartment at 77 South Park Avenue. I managed to rent out my apartment for $3000 per month plus a $3000 security deposit, for a total of $6000. I rented out my apartment to 10 different people and pocketed $60,000, leaving the owner to straighten out the inevitable chaos….[when] six moving vans showed up, each of which had instructions to move their truck’s belongings into my former apartment. Now I had a small war chest on which to survive as a fugitive from justice.” (page 146) (5) Not long thereafter Merritt got a job again as a building superintendent in the Washington Heights section of New York City. “I did not like the area, the building and especially the tenants. I had already decided to rent my apartment out as usual but decided to take my time and collect my thoughts…One day several undercover cops arrested me for making calls for the Muslims using ‘illegal’ phone cards…I made the decision that it was time for me to move on and rent out my free super’s apartment. I did this using my tried and true formula but only made about $18,000.” (page 147) (6) Once again Merritt got a job as a building superintendent, this time for two buildings on 14th Street in Manhattan. “The owner of the buildings, whom I never did believe had converted to Judaism, one day told me when he had three empty apartments that he did not want any ‘niggers or spics, only whites.’ He did not know how much he had offended me. So pursuant to his wishes I rented all three apartments out to upscale whites. As a matter of fact, I rented each apartment at the rate of $1000 per month when he actually wanted $2500 a month. The problem was that I rented each apartment to three different tenants, collecting $9000. I sent the tenants to pick up their apartment keys and their leases from the owner at his Long Island office, all on the same day. The day that I selected was his daughter’s wedding day at his own restaurant.” (pages 156-157). If you are getting the idea from his proudly asserted admissions that Merritt is not a very nice person, and is probably a sociopath who gets his kicks from wrecking and destroying the lives of innocent persons, you may be on the right track. This is why in 1972 and 1973 he chose not to tell publicly what he knew about the true origins of Watergate but instead put his personal interest and ambition ahead of what was best for the country. In my next installment, I shall disclose how he and his gay lover, Washington Police Officer Carl Shoffler, devised a plan to bring down the presidency of Richard Nixon upon their learning two weeks in advance of the Watergate burglars’ plan to break into the Democratic National Committee. Shoffler and Merritt were in effect a latter day Leopold and Loeb. They planned the perfect crime and, as were Leopold and Loeb, “broken machines.”

News Corp finds Avatar hard act to follow as third quarter profits slump Rupert Murdoch's company reports 24% drop in third quarter profits, though Fox News had highest ever operating profit By Dominic Rushe in New York The Guardian, Thursday 5 May 2011 Rupert Murdoch's News Corp is prepared to walk away from its controversial bid for BSkyB if the price keeps rising, its chief operating officer said. News Corp offered 700p a share for BSkyB but the broadcaster's shares are now 849p. Chase Carey, chief operating officer, told analysts that BSkyB's share price was "clearly troubling" and was "unrealistic" given the challenges he sees ahead for the broadcaster as Murdoch's company posted its quarterly results. Carey's comments came as News Corp, owner of Twentieth Century Fox and the Times newspaper, reported a 24% slump in its third quarter profits as the success of Avatar proved tough to match. News Corp reported a fall in net income to $639m (£387m), or 24 cents a share, from $839m, or 32 cents, a year earlier. Fox News reported its highest ever operating profit, but filmed-entertainment sales slid 36% to $1.55bn as the quarter's movies didn't measure up to Avatar, the biggest box-office movie of all time. Film earnings fell by half to $248m. In a statement, News Corp chairman Rupert Murdoch said the third quarter figures had faced "challenging comparisons" thanks to the enormous success of Avatar a year ago. "Looking beyond our film business, I am delighted with the continued and significant operational momentum of our channels businesses," he said. Murdoch said he was particularly pleased with News Corp's results in television, a segment that "viewed by the market just one year ago as a challenged business, more than quadrupled its earnings contributions over the prior year quarter on the strength of the national advertising market, increased retransmission consent revenues, and the popularity of our programming." Television revenues rose 23% thanks to a strengthening ad market and revenues for Super Bowl XLV and lower costs. Revenue declines for News Corp's UK and Australian newspapers and the costs of launching iPad newspaper The Daily helped drag down publishing returns that reported an operating income of $36m, a $207m decrease compared with the $243m reported a year ago. Most of that decline, $125m, was due to the litigation costs at News' Integrated Marketing Services. The slump in figures comes as News Corp fights off problems in its UK newspaper and satellite TV businesses. The company's attempts to take full control of BSkyB have been hampered by scandal as well as demands for a higher price from shareholders. Last month News Corp issued an "unreserved apology" to eight victims of the phone hacking scandal that has dogged the firm's UK newspaper division. "Past behaviour at the News of the World in relation to voicemail interception is a matter of genuine regret," the company said in a statement. "It is now apparent that our previous inquiries failed to uncover important evidence and we acknowledge our actions then were not sufficiently robust." Before the statement News had maintained the scandal was the work of a rogue reporter. But the position became untenable as Scotland Yard's investigation gathered pace. The News of the World's chief reporter, Neville Thurlbeck and Ian Edmondson, who was sacked as associate editor (news) in January, have both been quizzed by the Yard. Lord Prescott, former deputy prime minister and a hacking victim, is suing the Metropolitan police over their initial handling of the phone tap inquiry. Prescott and Labour MP Tom Watson have used parliamentary privilege to claim the new inquiry has now spread to The Sunday Times and The Sun. Prescott has said Murdoch's takeover of BSkyB should be delayed until the phone-hacking inquiry is over. • This story was amended on 5 May 2011 to correct the price of News Corp's offer for BSkyB, which the article originally gave as770p, and to clarify that this was not a formal bid.

The title to my posting was the title given to the article by AOLNews.com. Please click on the link in my posting. All I did was post it. How Marilyn Monroe died remains a mystery. I would say, however, that since George Masters was close to Monroe, it is likely that he would have been careful in what he told the authorities at the time of her death for fear that he might be the next victim who had to be shut up because he knew too much. Anything he told the FBI would have been relayed to the White House within hours. Douglas, I know all you did was repost it without your own commentary. That doesn't change the smell of it. What I would like to know is how Masters would know "too much" without either being involved in her death or being a trusted confidante of those who were. And what are you insinuating by saying he'd be too scared to say anything and linking that statement to the FBI passing his statements on to the WH? Campbell??? Why don't you go whole hog and cite Victor Lasky as a Kennedy authority? He "knew" as much as she did about the Kennedys. Where does Platts say he was issued any instructions regarding the release of the tapes? The story states the tapes were made a month before Masters died. It describes his voice as "frail". Presumably he had some idea he didn't have much longer to live. His LA Times obit, btw, says he died of natural causes and that the person who notified of his death was his "friend", Jeff Platts. So which is it, friend or nephew? How do you explain Platt's comment " I haven't listened to the tapes since they were recorded so I don't remember exactly what's on them..." when later in the story we get him giving very specific details of what he "uncle" told him. And finally, why did Platts "reach out" to someone whose forte seems to be infotainment rather than investigative journalism? In the words of the Immortal Barb*, "This is a bunch of hooey, and make no mistake, my young lad!" *My neighbor as a kid, Barb McGurkenfarkle, used to say those words when dismissing claims she was running a house of ill-repute". And I believed her. Not once did I ever see a man leaving there looking ill. In fact, most looked rather pleased they'd paid a visit to this fine lady. Were I George Masters at the time I would have hesitated telling the FBI anything. The FBI is part of the Justice Department. The Attorney General at the time was Bobby Kennedy. So the White House would have known almost immediately what Masters was saying, as would have Giancana somewhat later. Masters was no dummy and took his own precautions. I have re-read the article and find it appears to be a significant contribution to putting the pieces of the puzzle together as to what occurred at the time.

I also found intriguing that the article mentioned Sam Giancana. It has always been assumed that one of the Kennedy brothers played a key role in Monroe's death. But if George Masters' account is accurate, then it is quite possible that Giancana was behind her death. She may have known too much about his relationship with the Kennedys, as did Judith Campbell, who served as the go-between. Giancana was later murdered on the eve of his public testimony. Masters may have made the tapes with the thought in mind that if he suddenly died under mysterious circumstances, the tapes would see the light of day. The tapes may have been his insurance policy, which is why he lived longer. Who knows?

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/26/science/26ausubel.html?_r=1&ref=science Key excerpt from this article: "In 2009, Jesse Ausubel started a fourth environmental project, the Deep Carbon Observatory. Mr. Ausubel had long been interested in an idea developed by Cornell University physicist Thomas Gold, who believed that oil and gas are produced by deep-earth microbes feeding on natural sources of methane. From this it followed, Dr. Gold argued, that oil wells might be naturally replenished from vast sources of carbon deep in the planet."

The title to my posting was the title given to the article by AOLNews.com. Please click on the link in my posting. All I did was post it. How Marilyn Monroe died remains a mystery. I would say, however, that since George Masters was close to Monroe, it is likely that he would have been careful in what he told the authorities at the time of her death for fear that he might be the next victim who had to be shut up because he knew too much. Anything he told the FBI would have been relayed to the White House within hours.

Phone hacking: Met admits to only warning 36 people they may be targeted Disclosure of formerly secret number exposes Met to complaint it breached agreement to warn potential victims By Nick Davies and James Robinson guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 26 April 2011 21.14 BST The Metropolitan police has admitted that during the first four years of the phone-hacking affair it warned only 36 people they may have been targeted by the News of the World's private investigator Glenn Mulcaire. Scotland Yard's latest inquiry, which was launched in January, is believed to be contacting up to 4,000 people whose names and personal details were found in Mulcaire's possession during the original police investigation in 2006. The disclosure of the number – which Scotland Yard had previously insisted on keeping secret – exposes the Met to the complaint that it breached an agreement with the director of public prosecutions that it would warn all "potential victims" in the affair. It will also revive criticism that it has consistently played down the scale of criminal activity commissioned by the News of the World. Scotland Yard has previously repeatedly refused to disclose the number of victims it had warned, rejecting applications under the Freedom of Information Act on the grounds that releasing it would necessarily disclose the identities of those warned, and that this would breach their privacy. However, in a sharp change of policy, the Met's acting deputy commissioner, John Yates, volunteered that during the 2006 inquiry police had warned 28 people they may have been victims; and that after the Guardian revived the affair in July 2009 they warned eight more. In a letter to John Whittingdale, chairman of the culture, media and sport select committee, Yates – who was responsible for dealing with the hacking affair for nearly 20 months – gave no explanation for the failure to inform more than 36 potential victims. He said: "I have accepted that more could and should have been done in relation to those who may have been potential victims." The new inquiry, which is not being overseen by Yates, is known to have approached scores of politicians, police officers, actors, sports personalities and others who had previously been unaware that the Met held evidence to suggest their voicemail messages may have been intercepted by Mulcaire. Many are now suing News International, which owns the News of the World. Some are also seeking a judicial review of the Met's actions. Yates's disclosure appears to contradict evidence he gave to the media select committee in February last year. On that occasion he said that where there was evidence that "interception was or may have been attempted by Mulcaire, the Met police has been diligent and taken all proper steps to ensure those individuals have been informed." In September he told the home affairs select committee that Met policy was "out of a spirit of abundance of caution to make sure that we were ensuring that those who may have been hacked were contacted by us". In his letter to Whittingdale, Yates also confirmed that during a brief investigation last autumn, police interviewed a total of four people under caution. Yates did not name them, but they included Sean Hoare, the former News of the World journalist who told the New York Times that he had been actively encouraged to hack voicemail by his editor, Andy Coulson, who went on to become the prime minister's media adviser and who has always denied all knowledge of illegal activity. When Yates's officers cautioned Hoare that anything he said might be used in evidence against him, he declined to answer questions. The Yates letter also disclosed more details of his social contacts with senior editors from News International. He acknowledges that he had dinner with the News of the World editor Colin Myler at the Ivy, one of London's most exclusive restaurants; that he had two dinners with the editor of the Sunday Times; and a further dinner with the editor and crime editor of the News of the World four months after he had decided in July 2009 that there was no basis to reopen an investigation into the paper. Yates reveals in his letter that he failed to disclose a meeting with Neil Wallis, who was deputy editor at the paper at the time of the original hacking inquiry and left in August 2009 after six years in the job. He described a meeting with Wallis earlier this year as a "private engagement" and said "relevant senior officers" at Scotland Yard "have been made aware that Mr Wallis and I know each other". Whittingdale has now written to Yates again asking him who at the Met was informed about his relationship with Wallis and when. The investigation into phone-hacking, which is being led by the deputy assistant commissioner Sue Akers, has resulted in the arrest of three News of the World executives, including two who are still employed by the paper, this month. All of them were released without charge. Separately, the Information Commissioner Christopher Graham told MPs on the Home Affairs select committee on Tuesday that the law on phone-hacking is confusing and in urgent need of clarification.