Re. the News Corp scandal(s): The thing about corruption is that it's so, um, corruptational

by Ken

If there was any thought that the decision of News International -- the tentacle of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp that controls the British holdings that have become the subject of such mountingly embarrassing (not to mention quite likely prosecutable) disclosures -- to shut down the once-massive-circulation News of the World, which has been at the center of the scandals, would lessen the heat on the company, so far it isn't working out.

Their best hope at this point is that so many people in authority are being incriminated -- not just News Corp execs who've been promoted to lofty positions, including in the U.S., but the Metropolitan Police (i.e., Scotland Yard), British pols like now-PM David Cameron, parliamentary "overseers" -- that there may be enough nabobs with enough power to keep some of the mess safely swept under the rug. Is it any wonder that one of the free "newspapers" circulated to weary New York commuters, Metro New York, had as its front-page head this morning: "Is Murdoch's empire crumbling?"

It's important to remember that the "signature" booboo of the case, that enterprising News of the World reporter's clever stung in hacking into the cell phone of a kidnapped teenage girl and deleting phone messages during the investigation, is not only the proverbial tip of the iceberg but, more importantly old news; there are already NOTW creeps in prison for it.

ASST. COMMISSIONER YATES: IT'S NOT MY FAULT
NEWS INT'L DIDN'T, YOU KNOW, TELL US STUFF

In one form or another the scandal goes back to 2005. In fact, John Yates, the Met's assistant commissioner for terrorism, who in 2009, as assistant commissioner in charge of specialist operations had the mess dumped in his lap, and totally bungled it, reminded us of the timeline in his testimony today before a Home Affairs select committee of the House of Commons:

Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner John Yates: "Please do not take that admission as in any way accepted, I accept responsibility for what News International have not done with regard to this case from 2005 to 2006 to 2009 to 2010 and even up until yesterday." (You can watch Commissioner Yates try to maintain a shred of dignity on the Guardian website.)

Yates, according to the Guardian team's account, "acknowledged in an interview with the Sunday Telegraph that his decision not to reopen an investigation in 2009 was 'pretty crap.'" However, in his opening statement to the select committee today, he set the tone for his testimony, "Had I know then what I know now, I would have made different decisions."

Yates's people are currently poring over "11,000 pages of material containing nearly 4,000 names of possible hacking victims," which "he conceded" he hasn't seen, and whose contents . . . well, apparently our guess is as good as his. Also in the course of his testimony, according to the Guardian account, "Yates said he had 'never, ever, ever' received payment from journalists for information but admitted it was 'highly probable' that some of his officers did."

Well, that's OK then.

In case you hadn't heard, one of the directions well beyond phone hacking into which the case has slithered is police, er, "cooperation" with "inquiring" reporters. And it's not just News of the World that's involved. Suspicious glances are being cast at the other News International papers in London -- the surviving tabloid, the Sun, and even the Times and Sunday Times. The question rightly raised, it seems to me, concerns an entire culture of corruption.

After all, the editor of NOTW from 2000 to 2003, when the first illegal hackings took place, was Rebekah Brooks, who went on to edit the Sun from 2003 to 2009 and is now chief executive of News International! And the man whom Rupert M installed as CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal after he took control of them in December 2007, Les Hinton, came to these august journalistic positions from 12 years as executive chairman of . . . oh my, News International! (His Dow Jones bio adds that "Mr. Hinton is chairman of the Dow Jones Foundation, which supports the promotion and defense of journalism as well as literacy and education." Roger that.)

Somebody (I wish I remembered who) made the excellent point is that the most frightening thing about this whole still-emerging stinkpot is that the practices being uncovered seem to have become standard practices -- for so-called journalists (in search of money-making headlines) whose bosses hobnob with the coppers' bosses and the political elites. (And are we to believe that it's only News International journos who behave in such dastardly fashion. How about their American counterparts? Fox Noise, anyone? And are News Corp minions the only ones playing these games?)

During his testimony today, Commissioner Yates was asked by select committee chair Keith Vaz whether he has given any consideration to resigning. The commissioner seemed quite adamant that there was no reason for him to consider such a step. After all, how could it be his fault that News International didn't turn over all that information that if only he'd known he wouldn't have made the same "crap" decision he made in 2009?

Apparently police work in the U.K. goes something like this:

SCOTLAND YARD [shaking fist]: We demand that you turn over any information you have that would tell us how naughty you've been.
NEWS INTERNATIONAL: Information? Information? We have no information.
SCOTLAND YARD: Well, that's all right then, because otherwise we might have to, like, do something. Cheerio!

[CURTAIN]

Select committee chairman Vaz, by the way, pronounced himself dissatisfied with Yates's testimony, giving rise to the Guardian head: "Met officer John Yates's evidence on phone-hacking inquiry 'unconvincing.'"

WHAT DOESN'T GET LOST EN ROUTE TO MUMBAI?

Meanwhile, I have to say my favorite episode in all of this mess goes way back to when those Met bulldogs were still trying to shake information loose from NOTW, in particular several zillion e-mails that were mysteriously unaccounted for. We Yanks recall when we had our own missing e-mail scandal, back when the thugs of the Bush crime regime were wiping out everything they could get their zappers on. Our brave American thugs know how to tough it out. "E-mails?" they said. "Nah, they're all gone. Close the door on your way out." And that was pretty much the last we heard of it.

British investigators, however, are more tenacious, and insisted on an answer. Not necessarily a good answer, but an answer nevertheless. Here's the Friday Guardian account:

NI originally claimed the archive of emails did not exist. Last December, its Scottish editor, Bob Bird, told the trial of Tommy Sheridan in Glasgow that the emails had been lost en route to Mumbai. Also in December, the company's solicitor, Julian Pike from Farrer and Co, gave a statement to the high court saying it was unable to retrieve emails more than six months old.

The first hint that this was not true came in late January when NI handed Scotland Yard evidence that led to the immediate sacking of its news editor, Ian Edmondson, and to the launch of Operation Weeting. It was reported that this evidence consisted of three old emails.

Three months later, on 23 March, Pike formally apologised to the high court and acknowledged News International could locate emails as far back as 2005 and that no emails had been lost en route to Mumbai or anywhere else in India. In a signed statement seen by the Guardian, Pike said he had been misinformed by the NoW's in-house lawyer, Tom Crone, who had told him that he, too, had been misled. He offered no explanation for the misleading evidence given by Bird.

What can I say except that I am in awe? Lost en route to Mumbai! But of course! That happens all the time! Why, just last week my watch went missing, and as soon as I read about Bob Bird and his breakthrough in uninvestigation, I knew immediately that the darned thing must have been lost en route to Mumbai.


Now editor Bird could just have said that his dog ate those millions of e-mails. But apparently with that image of e-mails wafting off course en route to Mumbai, his interrogators were charmed into complaisance. Nobody in Scotland seemed to wonder how the e-mails came to be en route to Mumbai. Or for that matter just what was en route to Mumbai. Was the idea that those millions of e-mails had been dumped into a really, really big old steamer trunk and dragged to the post office? Really now, even in my state of technical innocence I know that you can't crate a batch of e-mails up for shipping to India or anywhere else. Maybe the e-mails were on a server that somehow got crated up and somebody slapped a label with a Mumbai address on it?

I like to think that editor Bird didn't even crack a smile when he broke the news about the grief to which the Mumbai-bound e-mails had come. When you come up with a story like that, you really have to sell it.

Hey, I'm sold. I don't even have a dog to accuse of eating my homework. In any case, the "lost en route to Mumbai" story is so much classier, more elegant. As it happens, I found the missing watch this morning, so apparently it wasn't lost en route to Mumbai after all. However, if my DWT post tomorrow should happen not to appear on schedule . . . well, you know where it is.

#

How Involved Was Pakistan In The Mumbai Assault For Real?

It seems to me that you pretty much get as close as can be to the root of all evil anywhere between Herat and Dacca when you zero in on Pakistan's very own CIA-- which has been very much in cahoots with the CIA much of the time-- the ISI. They have nurtured virtually all of the worst players in the subcontinent from their clients and Frankenstein monster the Taliban to al-Qaeda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammed, Hizbul Mujahideen, Harkat-ul-Mujahideen and al-Badr. This morning's NY Times asserts what all Indians suspected, that Pakistan's venal Inter-Services Intelligence was indeed involved with the savage assault on Mumbai. ISI is a rogue terrorist organization that isn't under the control of the Pakistani government anymore than nuclear black marketeer A.Q. Khan was. And you can take that as you'd like.

Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group suspected of conducting the Mumbai attacks, has quietly gained strength in recent years with the help of Pakistan’s main spy service, assistance that has allowed the group to train and raise money while other militants have been under siege, American intelligence and counterterrorism officials say.

American officials say there is no hard evidence to link the spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI, to the Mumbai attacks. But the ISI has shared intelligence with Lashkar and provided protection for it, the officials said, and investigators are focusing on one Lashkar leader they believe is a main liaison with the spy service and a mastermind of the attacks.

...“People are having to go back and relook at all the connections,” said one American counterterrorism official, who was among several officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still progressing.

Meanwhile Britain's Guardian has tracked down the home and family of the lobe surviving gunman, Ajmal Amir Kasab... in Pakistan. The villagers in the town tried misleading outsiders, claiming to have never heard of the terrorist. But they were all lying.

Finally one villager confirmed what was going on: "You're being given misinformation. We've all known from the first day [of the news of the terrorist attack] that it was him, Ajmal Amir Kasab. His mother started crying when she saw his picture on the television."

Attempts to meet Amir, the father, however, were not to be successful. Villagers eventually told us that he and his wife, Noor, had been mysteriously spirited away earlier in the week.
"Ajmal used to go to Lahore for work, as a labourer," continued the villager who feared being named. "He's been away for maybe four years. When he came back once a year, he would say things like, 'We are going to free Kashmir.'"

Wresting the whole of Kashmir from Indian rule is Lashkar-e-Taiba's aim. Ajmal had little education, according to locals. But it is still unclear whether he was radicalised in the village or once he had left to work elsewhere.

...But the villager who turned whistleblower said that local religious clerics were brainwashing youths in the area and that Lashkar-e-Taiba's founder, Hafiz Sayeed, had visited nearby Depalpur, where there were "hundreds" of supporters. There was a Lashkar-e-Taiba office in Depalpur, but that had been hurriedly closed in the past few days. The Lashkar-e-Taiba newspaper is distributed in Depalpur and Faridkot. Depalpur lies in the south of Punjab province, an economically backward area long known for producing jihadists.

Shown a picture of Ajmal, the villager confirmed that he was the former Faridkot resident, who had last visited the village a couple of months ago at the last festival of Eid.

Some locals have claimed that this Faridkot, and another poor village nearby called Tara Singh, are a recruitment hotbed for Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group accused of carrying out the Mumbai attack. On the side of a building, just outside Faridkot, is graffiti that says: "Go for jihad. Go for jihad. Markaz Dawat ul-Irshad." MDI is the parent organisation of Lashkar-e-Taiba. In Depalpur, a banner on the side of the main street asks people to devote goatskins to Jamaat ud Dawa, another MDI offshoot.

Caught red-handed, Pakistan is making a big show of cracking down. It's just a show. It always is. They're virtually a CIA client state but until the ISI is disbanded and it's leaders turned over to face justice, it's all meaningless. A friend of mine pointed out today that if the Indians and Pakistanis really go at it big time, they can knock the earth off its axis. And that, my friends, really is evil.


UPDATE: TRAINING CAMP RAIDED

The Pakistani military raided a Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp in Kashmir and arrested a dozen activists, including Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, the operations chief who India claims was the mastermind behind the Mumbai attack. It's unlikely that they'll certain they won't allow Indian officials to question him-- and it remains to be seen what they actually do with him themselves.

"We've seen before how Pakistan will arrest some militants, keep them for a couple of months and then release them when the world's not paying attention," said B. Raman, a former head of the Pakistan desk at the Research and Analysis Wing (India's MI6).

"It must not be allowed to do that this time. They have to prosecute these people and dismantle the whole terrorist infrastructure," he told the Times.

Yes, good luck with that. Coddled Pakistani terrorist groups, who have a great deal of sympathy among a population which has been brainwashed to revere and idolize them, are already denouncing the arrests. One prominent Pakistani terrorist leader, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, brazenly condemned the raid, knowing full well that there is no will in his country to really put a stop to the activities if these psychotic religious extremists.

"The operation against jihadi organisations in Pakistani Kashmir is unwarranted and we strongly condemn it," he said. "The Government has shown signs of weakness by targeting Kashmiri organisations... India wants to crush the independence movement of Kashmir using the Mumbai attacks as a pretext."

Arrests and the appearance of a crackdown have continued.

Will Marilyn Musgrave Take A Job Counseling Lashkar-e-Taiba Next?

Extremists and fanatics = terrorists

According to a London tabloid "the Mumbai terrorists may have pumped themselves full of drugs to keep going during their murderous three-day rampage." The headline screams that they "took cocaine and LSD before carrying out attacks." And steroids. The last time I took acid was on New Years Eve 1968 and, maybe it was a different kind of LSD, but it barely bet me walk down the street, let alone go on a murder rampage for 50 hours.

An Indian TV station has released footage showing Kasav [the captured terrorist] being lynched by a mob on Wednesday after his getaway vehicle was stopped at a roadblock.

It shows police firing at the white Skoda, unleashing a volley of bullets that kill Ismail. Kasav then stumbles from the car and appears to play dead as the police beat him repeatedly with riot batons.

A mob then joins in the attack on Kasav, who has curled into a ball.

Finally a senior police officer steps in to stop the attack. Some reports say Kasav pleaded with medical staff to save him, saying: “I don’t want to die.”

Wow! If that doesn't stop him from ever using drugs again...

I guess they couldn't use the Twinkie defense if it could be shown that pumping themselves up with LSD was done with the intent of murdering 180 or so people. I'm sure some sharp lawyer will come up with something to blame other than themselves. Or perhaps they can hire like-minded religious fanatic and all around angry person, Marilyn Musgrave. She's an expert in not taking responsibility and blaming everyone and everything else.

Musgrave has been in hiding ever since Betsey Markey thoroughly thrashed her in last month's election. She has refused to concede, let along congratulate Congresswoman-elect Markey, who beat her by a whopping 12 points, one of the worst drubbings any incumbent from either party took anywhere in America. It's what you would call a thorough and complete repudiation by the voters of Colorado's 4th CD. But the unhinged Musgrave doesn't see it as a repudiation at all. Congress' most fanatic hate-monger, Musgrave has built a kind of political career on one issue: hysterical and irrational homophobia. She recorded a robo-call for her soul brother, Saxby Chambliss, which was targeted at mentally ill women in Georgia. In it she blames her lost re-election bid on "Pro-abortion radicals and liberal activists" and "leftist special interests" that "overwhelmed us with money and ... smothered the truth with vicious attacks and lies."

A staffer for one of the longest-serving Republican members of Congress told us he had never quite seen anything like it before. "She's some piece of work. No one could stand her and there's probably not a member of Congress who will miss her. I've worked here for almost two decades and I can't remember a losing member of Congress, from either party, not congratulating the winner."

One has to wonder if Mike Huckabee didn't have Musgrave-- as well as higher profile GOP whiners like John Boehner, James DeMint and Mark Sanford-- in mind when he told Republicans to quit blaming others for their shortcomings and start looking at themselves. “You hear these Republicans bragging about not raising taxes, when they’ve been spending out of control, racking up huge deficits and then kicking the can down the road," he told reporters. “Republicans didn’t lose because they were social conservatives. They lost because they have been irresponsible with the taxpayers’ money... If you advertise one thing and you deliver another, people are going to start reaching for another product off the shelf." Yes indeed, and Marilyn Musgrave's "good until" label was long out of date.