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Jul 12, 2011 2:51 PM EDT / http://www.thedailybeast.com.
The revelations about phone hacking and police payoffs might require Rupert Murdoch himself to appear before a judicial committee, says Geoffrey Robertson. And this would be a good thing, not only for the law, but also for News Corp.’s reputation.
“Be ye ever so high, the law is above you” is the great principle that embodies the rule of law. Should it now require Rupert Murdoch’s detention in custody for long enough to assist police with their inquiries? Anyone whose employees engage in bribery, corruption, or other crimes for his benefit should always be called upon to explain whether he knew or approved of their actions, if only to exculpate himself from secondary liability—e.g., for conspiracy or incitement or aiding and abetting a criminal offense. Murdoch has flown to London to help News Corp. and is therefore available to help “Operation Weeting”—the somewhat puerile name given by Scotland Yard to its inquiry into the hacking scandal. Will his attendance at Wapping police station be required?
This question is of some importance given the prime minister’s refusal to allow a judicial investigation to begin until police inquiries are finished and any trials have run their course. This process will take at least three years and presupposes that police officers have the intellectual ability to get at the truth, through any miasma set up by their corrupt colleagues and by journalists and newspaper executives who are under suspicion. But police inquiries in Britain rarely get to the truth: suspects and potential witnesses have a right not to answer police questions, and no duty to tell the truth if they do.
The incompetence of Scotland Yard in political cases was on display to all yesterday, when its senior officers attended a parliamentary committee and apologized for their behavior back in 2006, when they failed to look at 11,000 pages of evidence because News Corp. told them they would find nothing. What they would have found were the names of 4,000 victims of the ruthless News of the World hacker, Glenn Mulcaire.
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