Attorney General Eric Holder on Wednesday promised 9/11 families a preliminary criminal investigation into a report of possible phone hacking involving the Rupert Murdoch media empire.
Following a meeting at the Justice Department that lasted over an hour, the family members and their lawyer said they were pleased that the attorney general made the commitment for a preliminary probe into whether the Sept. 11 victims or their families were the targets of phone hacking by journalists at Murdoch's now-shuttered News of the World.
The lawyer for the families, Norman Siegel, told reporters that the attorney general had used the words "very disturbing" to describe the possibility that phones of 9/11 victims and their family members might have been hacked. Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler confirmed that account of the meeting.
Siegel said he and the families recommended that the Justice Department get the cell phone numbers of 9/11 victims and family members, then have the phone company search their records to find out whether someone engaged in hacking.
The families also recommended that the scope of the investigation be expanded to computers in addition to cell phones. The families also recommended a review of newspaper, TV and radio stories about 9/11 victims and their families to determine whether personal information in the stories only could have come from someone engaged in hacking.
"From everything we saw today it certainly appears that the government is taking these allegations very seriously," 9/11 family member Peter Gadiel told the news conference. "I find the idea that somebody would have hacked into my son's cell phone reprehensible. I certainly hope that the individuals responsible are found and prosecuted." Gadiel's 23-year-old son James worked on the 103rd floor of the World Trade Center's North Tower and died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
The suggestion that Sept. 11 victim families in the United States might have been subject to phone hacking rests on a single, thinly sourced news story in the Daily Mirror, a London tabloid rival to Murdoch's The Sun.
According to the Daily Mirror's story based on unnamed sources, a former New York police officer who became a private investigator said he rejected requests by journalists from Murdoch's News of the World to retrieve private phone records of Sept. 11 victims. The U.S.-based parent company for Murdoch's News Corp. has called the report "anonymous speculation" with "no substantiation."