Stupid is as stupid does

The New York Times has an indignant editorial about some stupid Brits:

Outrage is a word badly weakened by overuse. This is unfortunate because it would be good to have now, at full strength, for the despicable things the British tabloid News of the World is accused of doing to a murdered thirteen-year-old girl, Milly Dowler, and to her family and friends.
Milly’s disappearance in 2002 was a sensation in Britain. News of the World, a sex-and-celebrity pillar of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, dove in, though it shoved its snout far deeper into the muck than anyone knew.
A lawyer for Milly’s family, Mark Lewis, said that, after she vanished, but before her body was found, News of the World hacked into her cellphone, recording anguished voice messages from relatives and friends desperate to hear from her. When the phone’s memory was full, the paper’s operatives deleted some messages to make room for new ones. This baffled the police and made Milly’s family think she was alive, deleting the messages herself.
News of the World faced prosecutions and lawsuits for hacking phones of movie stars and British royals. That was slimy. The news that it violated the privacy of a family during a criminal inquiry sends it off a moral precipice. Rebekah Brooks, News of the World’s editor then and now a top executive in the News Corporation, its owner, played dumb. “I hope that you all realize it is inconceivable that I knew,” she said. Glenn Mulcaire, the investigator accused of the hacking, apologized vaguely: “A lot of information I obtained was simply tittle-tattle, of no great importance to anyone, but sometimes what I did was for what I thought was the greater good, to carry out investigative journalism.” He asked the news media “to leave my family and my children, who are all blameless, alone.” Blameless children. The greater good. Mr. Mulcaire found the right words, almost a decade late.

Rico says she didn't play dumb, she is dumb, and Mulcaire is no better... This cries out for some good, old-fashioned British justice, but probably won't get it. (Actually, it cries out for some good, old-fashioned American ass-whupping, but they probably won't get that either.)