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Je lis PCR depuis un petit bout de temps. Je lui avais meme ecrit il y a un peu pres un an de cela, suite a un article ou il parlait de 911 en le decrivant suivant la ligne officielle. La realite de 911 ne l’avait pas encore rejoint. Sa psychologie resistait et je lui avait envoye quelques liens sur des ressources bien connues relative a 911 (Webster Tarpley, In Plane Sight, Loose Change, etc..). Un peu comme DeDefensa aujourd’hui qui rechigne. Mais ne sourions pas du derisoire. Il est symptome du vivant. Or, depuis, PCR a bien change. Je ne pretend pas en etre la raison. Mais cela fait plaisir de voir que sa comprehension de 911 a maintenant rejoint celle de Webster Tarpley. Au souvenir de l’email que j’avais recu de lui, PCR est un homme qui a du avoir du mal a ouvrir les yeux sur 911. Mais il les a ouvert. Je suis donc revenu vers ses articles.

Vous devriez regarder un film qui s’appelle The Moneymasters.

http://www.themoneymasters.com/synopsis.htm

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-515319560256183936

Vous apprendriez bien des choses, notemment ce que pensent Ron Paul et Paul Craig Roberts.

Il ne tient qu’a vous.

J’avais rencontre chez lui, le dernier des economistes de l’ecole autrichienne, a Cannes, un venerable monsieur, tres aimable, qui nous avait recu chez lui. On avait discute pendant 2 heures, mon pere etait venu aussi, curieux de qui j’allais voir. Vous connaissez peut etre, le docteur Richebächer

http://www.dailyreckoning.com/LP/Richebacher.html

J’etais alle le voir, car il tenait le meme discours qu’un ami a moi, passione de finance, qui me parlait il y a 3 ans deja de Fanny May et Fredie Mac…

Le Dr Kurt Richebächer est le seul economiste a ne pas s’etre voile la face…

FT.com
Saturday Dec 1 2007Saturday Dec 1 2007

Judicial torture and the NatWest 3

By Martin Wolf

Published: November 29 2007 19:38 | Last updated: November 30 2007 06:30

The case of the “NatWest three” has stirred up huge concern among business people in the UK. This week, however, we learn that the three former NatWest bankers have pleaded guilty to wire fraud. So was this just much British ado about nothing? My answer is: “no”. The fact that these three men pleaded guilty does not prove they were. It demonstrates that the offers made by US prosecutors are of a kind sensible people cannot refuse. The pressures the former can exert make it rational, even for the innocent, to plead guilty. I do not know whether that happened here. But it would not be very surprising.

This case had yet another disturbing feature: the fact that the three men were extradited under a treaty agreed with the US in 2003 that allows US courts to extradite people without establishing a prima facie (preliminary) case in a British one. Many believe the good reason for this change was the need to co-operate over terrorism. Yet it has, in practice, been used extensively against British business people by US prosecutors who are targeting white-collar crime.

Because so many British businesses have some US involvement, their vulnerability to this judicial activism is self-evident. What made the case of the NatWest three more remarkable is that the bank, alleged victim of the fraud, never pressed for a British investigation of the events.

Yet why should anybody object to the extradition of suspects to face US justice? Is America not, after all, a bastion of the rule of law? The answer, I fear, is: “alas, no”. The urge to find guilt has overwhelmed the presumption of innocence on which Anglo-Saxon justice is based. It is easy to understand the frustration that ambitious prosecutors and populist politicians feel over the difficulty in sending criminals to prison. But hard cases make bad law. This is a good example of that axiom.

Plea-bargaining is effective because of four salient features of American justice: the exceptional severity of punishment; the justified terror of what might happen in prison; the uncertain outcome of fighting cases before juries; and the possibility of obtaining a far lighter sentence by agreeing to pleas of guilty.

In the case of the NatWest three, the accused faced the possibility of up to 35 years in prison for their alleged offences. It is a reflection of the gulf in culture that has grown up between the US and the UK that what are in effect life sentences might be imposed for their alleged involvement in helping Andrew Fastow, then Enron’s chief financial officer, defraud Enron.

Such a sentence would be far longer than all but the tiniest proportion of murderers could expect to serve in the UK. Yet, apparently, it is regarded as perfectly reasonable in the US. Nor is this all. A sentence in a US prison, particularly for middle-class men, is likely to be entry into a lifetime of torment. Indeed, a few cynical Americans responded to complaints about what happened to Iraqi inmates in Abu Ghraib by arguing that it could not truly be torture since it was no worse than what might happen to inmates of a US prison.

Now imagine that you might face such a sentence if found guilty. Imagine, too, that you believed yourself innocent of all charges, but recognised the great complexity of the case and the ease with which a prosecutor might twist evidence against you before an uninformed (perhaps prejudiced) jury. You might suppose you had a one-in-five chance of being found guilty. That would be particularly plausible if you had run out of financial resources and so were unable to retain a first-rate legal team. What would you do if the prosecutors offered a plea bargain, under which you would serve just 37 months in prison in your home country (and pay $7.3m in restitution to the Royal Bank of Scotland, now the owner of NatWest)?

The answer is that most people would plead guilty, not because it was true but because it is what any risk-averse human being would do.

To my mind, this system is tantamount to extracting confessions of guilt under a form of psychological torture. That torture consists of the reasonable fear of being found guilty and fear of the length of time one might then serve in prison and of what might happen while one was there. All but exceptionally brave people will confess to almost anything to escape even the possibility of torture. In the same way, the majority of people would surely confess to almost anything to avoid the possibility of spending the rest of their lives in prison. Recognition of the meaninglessness of confessions extracted under threat of torture was the main reason civilised jurisdictions abandoned its use. The same objection applies to pleas of guilty made under the kind of plea bargaining employed in the case of the NatWest three.

Let me be clear: I am not asserting that the men are innocent. But the fact that they have made a plea of guilty does not prove their guilt. It could just as well show that the US judicial system has a potent machine for extracting pleas of guilty to lesser charges. In this way, it has also effectively eliminated a presumption of innocence. It is, for this reason, not a system with which the UK should retain its current extradition arrangements. At the least, the US must be asked to make a prima facie case. The conclusion is that simple.