Rodney King dead at 47
Jun 21st 2012, 6:28 am
#46
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Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Jun 21st 2012, 7:30 am
#47
Lost in BE Cyberspace
Thread Starter
Joined: Jul 2007
Posts: 13,553
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Ah yes........... American justice. Conrad Black's review (in The Spectator) of David Bermingham's book:
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
Jun 21st 2012, 12:58 pm
#48
MODERATOR
Joined: Dec 2004
Location: Dubai
Posts: 6,370
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Scenario: Financial scam on the scale of that committed by Bernie Madoff and the Enron group is being carried out throughout the Gulf. The suspects, like those of the aforementioned criminals are of Western origin. Arab response: profile all Western expats. Check their personal belongings at and outside of work. Monitor and harass them all until such crimes come to a halt. They are known for perpetrating such acts after all!
Expat's response: Hmmm, not sure if I want to stay in the gulf anymore.
Alternatively: Big deal, I don't care if they search my entire house or if my coworkers give me dirty looks. I'm innocent, have nothing to hide, and consent to this type of search and profiling for the sake of justice.
Expat's response: Hmmm, not sure if I want to stay in the gulf anymore.
Alternatively: Big deal, I don't care if they search my entire house or if my coworkers give me dirty looks. I'm innocent, have nothing to hide, and consent to this type of search and profiling for the sake of justice.
Profiling is not the same as monitoring and harassing. We're talking about police work not concentration camps and asking people to wear yellow stars. Why do people take a concept (profiling) and expand it to something it is not (harassment, monitoring) as a basis for opposing the original concept? Lazy thinking...most sane people are against harassment and unjustified monitoring...we're talking about people just having to show their ID when asked for the most part - something Americans are already used to doing.
N.
Jun 21st 2012, 1:05 pm
#49
MODERATOR
Joined: Dec 2004
Location: Dubai
Posts: 6,370
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Ah yes........... American justice. Conrad Black's review (in The Spectator) of David Bermingham's book:
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
N.
Jun 21st 2012, 4:00 pm
#50
Banned
Joined: May 2012
Posts: 47
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Why would you need to check personal belongings of random people to detect financial crimes? That sort of thing requires different policing and they tend to know who the suspects are by name and description once the scams are exposed...and usually they end up catching them at home or at the airport trying to run.
Profiling is not the same as monitoring and harassing. We're talking about police work not concentration camps and asking people to wear yellow stars. Why do people take a concept (profiling) and expand it to something it is not (harassment, monitoring) as a basis for opposing the original concept? Lazy thinking...most sane people are against harassment and unjustified monitoring...we're talking about people just having to show their ID when asked for the most part - something Americans are already used to doing.
N.
Profiling is not the same as monitoring and harassing. We're talking about police work not concentration camps and asking people to wear yellow stars. Why do people take a concept (profiling) and expand it to something it is not (harassment, monitoring) as a basis for opposing the original concept? Lazy thinking...most sane people are against harassment and unjustified monitoring...we're talking about people just having to show their ID when asked for the most part - something Americans are already used to doing.
N.
Should all priests be profiled as sexual predators because of the actions of a few? Are all Jews Zionists and racists because of how some treat the non-Jews? Is the same true for Muslims? Or how about the Germans? Surely Hitler did a terrible thing, and certainly all Germans are the same, right? I mean, why should only law enforcement agents get to profile and generalise? Why can't I have the same suspicions and teach that to my children?
After my post I saw this article. It sorts of proves my point about the unwanted consequences of profiling and generalising:
http://rt.com/usa/news/apple-racism-iranians-us-334/
Last edited by Jamworld; Jun 21st 2012 at 4:32 pm. Reason: Added news link
Jun 21st 2012, 4:10 pm
#51
Banned
Joined: May 2012
Posts: 47
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Ah yes........... American justice. Conrad Black's review (in The Spectator) of David Bermingham's book:
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
21 April 2012
Conrad Black
http://www.spectator.co.uk/books/779...-justice.thtml
A Price to Pay: The Inside Story of the NatWest Three
by David Bermingham
Gibson Square, 384pp,
It was the misfortune of David Bermingham and his co-defendants to be very peripherally connected to the Enron debacle. Enron was the ultimate hot financial client for a merchant banker and designer of sophisticated financial vehicles, the author’s occupation at Greenwich National Westminster.
Bermingham’s offence was to produce a spectacularly imaginative new structure for an existing financial company, which impressed the Enron financial officers, at a time when Greenwich National Westminster was being offered for sale and NatWest itself was a takeover candidate. His plan was so original that, as he wrote, quoting Blackadder, ‘If you could put a tail on it, you could call it a weasel.’ Emails at the time that referred to the delicate position they were in as their employer was being shopped to possible buyers and everything was frozen — though they tried to conduct business as usual as best they could — were later misrepresented by American prosecutors as evidence of fraudulent intent, in collusion with Enron and against the buyer of NatWest, the Royal Bank of Scotland, which made no such contention.
In the unique manner of US prosecutors, there was not only a scramble to avenge the wronged and financially wounded city of Houston, but also to put as large as possible a notch in their belts.There is fierce competition between US and district attorneys for headlines, and thus acceleration up the political ladder or into the highest echelons of the private sector bar. The United States has five per cent of the world’s population, 25 per cent of its incarcerated people and 50 per cent of the world’s lawyers. The legal profession takes about 10 per cent of the country’s GDP, approximately $1.5 trillion, a sum close to the entire GDP, depending on exchange rates, of Russia, India or Canada.
US criminal justice is based on the almost completely corrupt manipulation of the plea bargain, in which suspects, or alleged suspects, are interviewed and advised that they can have immunity in exchange for miraculous revenances of memory that incriminate the prime targets — failing which, however flimsy or nonexistent the evidence, they too will be charged.
In Britain, and most other serious jurisdictions, this routine form of extorted or suborned pseudo-evidence would be inadmissible and would cause the prosecutors to be disbarred. Only about 10 per cent of US criminal cases are tried, so proficient is the prosecution at intimidating its targets, and running all but the wealthiest of them out of resources. They frequently make a case, however spurious, that the assets with which a target would contest a case were ill-gotten gains, connected to a crime of which he is about to be accused, causing the assets to be frozen, and then bring down the criminal charges, denying the defendant access to the funds he had been relying on to pay the retainer of American counsel, leaving him without means for defence.
The procedural rules and trials themselves are a stacked deck; the government lines up (i.e. intimidates) as many co-operating witnesses as it feels it needs to make its case. The pre-trial procedure is the ludicrous charade of the grand jury, promised in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution as an assurance against capricious prosecution, that is a notorious rubber stamp for the prosecutors. The prosecution throws all the spaghetti at the wall, tens or scores of charges, including catchments such as Honest Services, Obstruction of Justice, Criminal and Civil Racketeering (the latter a unique American concept), Civil Assets Forfeiture and all manner of conspiracies, whether any offence was actually committed or not, and which can be defined to the taste of the prosecutor and are very difficult to rebut. The prosecution speaks last to the jury, who have to rely on their memories without access to transcripts.
By their asset-freezing wheeze of alleging ill-gotten gains, and by the prosecutors’ custom of media indictments and lynchings, in which the US media are generally only too happy to co-operate, and by dragging everything on endlessly, the Fifth and Sixth Amendment rights of avoidance of seizure of property without just compensation, access to counsel, an impartial jury, and prompt justice are all routinely subverted.
It is little wonder that American prosecutors win over 90 per cent of their cases (compared with about 65 per cent in Canada). And sentencing, in response to the mindless reactionary law and order agitation that is uniform in America from right to left, is so severe that the United States has six to 12 times as many people in prison per capita as Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, the most closely comparable jurisdictions.
For David Bermingham, once the dominoes started falling in Houston, in the ashes of Enron, the great prosecution turkey-shoot began in earnest, and it was open season on anyone with any connection to the giant failed company. Defendants get reduced sentences if they are helpful in roping in other convictions. Those who plead guilty receive a fraction of the sentence of those who go to trial and are convicted. The constitutionally hallowed right to trial is in fact often worthless, as exercise of it is severely penalised, as the prosecutors almost always win, regardless of the facts, unless the defendant is innocent, wealthy, and can evoke the issue to a very high court.
In these circumstances, Giles Darby, Gary Mulgrew and David Bermingham, when they were inevitably dragged into the Enron cauldron, really only had one chance: avoiding extradition. Except for the ineffable Boris Johnson, Bermingham’s MP, almost everyone in British officialdom favoured giving the Americans what they wanted, no matter how shabbily British citizens were treated as a result, and regardless of any reciprocity. (The Americans had not even ratified the extradition treaty.)
The NatWest Three put up a terrific fight, which is engagingly described in this book, and had a good deal of British media support. But they were victims of the cowardice of their government and the slavish will to compliance of the British courts. Once transported to Texas, the defendants made a go of it for a while, and then made the best deal they could.
This is a lively book by an innocent and persecuted man. And it is a grim and truthful account of the moral bankruptcy of the American legal system. Bermingham is at pains to criticise himself for not notifying his employer of the investment opportunity as he created it, and makes no excuses based on the impending sale of his company. He pleaded guilty to precisely what he had volunteered to the regulator six years before, without attracting any sanction or allegation of wrongdoing at all. He manfully reproaches himself, but chiefly denounces the servility of the British to the US.
(Disclosure: I was charged under 17 counts of corporate misconduct in Chicago in 2005; all counts were abandoned, rejected by jurors, or unanimously vacated by the US Supreme Court, but two counts were spuriously revived by a lower court judge, whom the high court excoriated for his mistaken opinion, but to whom it perversely referred the vacated counts for assessment of the gravity of his own errors.)
Didn't read the whole thing mate, but from skimming through I saw that some good points were made. One reason for the high incarceration in the US is because some prisons are private and are for profit! Not many are aware of this however.
Jun 22nd 2012, 4:39 am
#52
BE Forum Addict
Joined: Jan 2009
Location: Up on the Ranches not down on the Springs
Posts: 2,109
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Should all priests be profiled as sexual predators because of the actions of a few? YEs Are all Jews Zionists and racists because of how some treat the non-Jews?YES Is the same true for Muslims? NO.
Or how about the Germans? Good guys
Or how about the Germans? Good guys
Jun 23rd 2012, 2:09 pm
#53
MODERATOR
Joined: Dec 2004
Location: Dubai
Posts: 6,370
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Norm, the purpose of the hypothetical, though not perfect, was to illustrate how profiling can lead to unwanted consequences. Though it makes sense to search for a perpetrator of a crime based on a description given in a certain vicinity, it would make life difficult for all that fit that description if the search takes on a larger scale. Just like the example given before, what if all white males were profiled and were continued to be profiled to this day because of the actions of Timothy Mcveigh, or what if the actions by James Vonn Brunn, a white supremacists, were to lead to all white males being subjected to suspicion and warrantless searches. Imagine the scorn and dirty looks that would ensue. You can take these two examples and expand them to multiple scenarios, and multiple groups.
What you teach your children is your business. Given the number of brainwashed children all over the world you wouldn't be doing anything unique and probably still harm them less than the children raised to hate and kill Jews or to only have honest dealings with people of the same religion as their parents.
After my post I saw this article. It sorts of proves my point about the unwanted consequences of profiling and generalising:
http://rt.com/usa/news/apple-racism-iranians-us-334/
http://rt.com/usa/news/apple-racism-iranians-us-334/
N.
Jun 25th 2012, 7:00 pm
#54
Banned
Joined: May 2012
Posts: 47
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
You're taking a completely different sort of crime which profiling probably doesn't work with and applying it to situations where profiling will work (asking people who look Mexican for ID just to make sure they're not illegal immigrants from Mexico). If we are talking about hunting for specific individuals profiling might not work, that doesn't mean it should be banned completely as it is just another tool police have to use when appropriate. It seems you feel police will be raiding homes at random and tailing only people of certain ethnicities for days on end without good reason - which is clearly harassment, not profiling.
No, only Catholic Priests if any at all. Any honest priest wouldn't mind having a background check to prove they are suitable to be around minors. I believe they are quite strict about this now after all the scandals and coverups.
Zionist and racist are two completely different things (or is nationalism only racist when Jews do it but ok for the rest of us?)...and given the incessant demonisation of them in Muslim press, religious scripture and history (including clear links between the Third Reich and Amin Al Hussaini and Arab nationalism in general) I'd say a lot of people believe they are one and the same anyway. I can't speak for all Muslims as I don't know them all, most criticism against them is actually directed at their beliefs and ideology but to them it's the same thing and worthy of lethal response apparently.
A lot of Germans spent the war in camps for not siding with Hitler...only Germans who agree with what Hitler did and said can be considered Nazis. Anyway, why the Hitler referrence...Stalin and Mao killed at least ten times as many as the Nazis.
Because unless you're a law enforcement officer you have no business enforcing the law. If you think someone is criminal it's your job to report it to the police and leave it at that.
What you teach your children is your business. Given the number of brainwashed children all over the world you wouldn't be doing anything unique and probably still harm them less than the children raised to hate and kill Jews or to only have honest dealings with people of the same religion as their parents.
Your example proves some idiots working for one outlet of a company misunderstanding what the boycott of another country actually entails. This has nothing to do with allowing police to stop and ID people they suspect of being illegal immigrants in US border states. Allowing police to profile suspects within sensible guidelines will not usher in a new era of the KGB.
N.
No, only Catholic Priests if any at all. Any honest priest wouldn't mind having a background check to prove they are suitable to be around minors. I believe they are quite strict about this now after all the scandals and coverups.
Zionist and racist are two completely different things (or is nationalism only racist when Jews do it but ok for the rest of us?)...and given the incessant demonisation of them in Muslim press, religious scripture and history (including clear links between the Third Reich and Amin Al Hussaini and Arab nationalism in general) I'd say a lot of people believe they are one and the same anyway. I can't speak for all Muslims as I don't know them all, most criticism against them is actually directed at their beliefs and ideology but to them it's the same thing and worthy of lethal response apparently.
A lot of Germans spent the war in camps for not siding with Hitler...only Germans who agree with what Hitler did and said can be considered Nazis. Anyway, why the Hitler referrence...Stalin and Mao killed at least ten times as many as the Nazis.
Because unless you're a law enforcement officer you have no business enforcing the law. If you think someone is criminal it's your job to report it to the police and leave it at that.
What you teach your children is your business. Given the number of brainwashed children all over the world you wouldn't be doing anything unique and probably still harm them less than the children raised to hate and kill Jews or to only have honest dealings with people of the same religion as their parents.
Your example proves some idiots working for one outlet of a company misunderstanding what the boycott of another country actually entails. This has nothing to do with allowing police to stop and ID people they suspect of being illegal immigrants in US border states. Allowing police to profile suspects within sensible guidelines will not usher in a new era of the KGB.
N.
Jun 26th 2012, 3:11 pm
#55
MODERATOR
Joined: Dec 2004
Location: Dubai
Posts: 6,370
Re: Rodney King dead at 47
Norm, I considered you an intelligent and objective poster. Now, after looking at your responses, I've seen that you are one to sidestep the issues and go off onto tangents. Why the Hitler reference? Is it okay for us to declare nationalism but not Jews?--You inquire.Really, I thought you were capable of discerning why those examples were used, instead it seems you think I have ulterior motives for using these examples. Pity really, never thought a poster of your caliber would be incapable to stay on subject and objectively address the points raised. Let's just say we differ on profiling, and that personally, I am thankful for legislature such as the constitution that protects people from that which you proffer.
If you're not able or willing to reply point by point don't do so. I'll respect you more than if you go down the ad hominem path...ulterior motives? Yes I really use this forum as a platform of world domination of my views, and you've been here for ages so are an accurate judge of my views and motivations no doubt
N.
