A federal court ordered former Morgan Crucible chief executive Ian Norris to serve 18 months in prison yesterday, the result of an elaborate Department of Justice scheme to subvert the US Constitution and international law. As previously reported, Norris was convicted in July by a Philadelphia jury of “conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice,” a nonsensical charge that made little sense as the same jury acquitted Norris of the underlying “obstruction of justice” charge.
The obstruction case itself was an unconstitutional ruse designed to punish Norris after he successfully resisted the DOJ’s first attempt to kidnap him from his native United Kingdom under the false pretense of a “price fixing” charge. Norris’s former company, Morgan Crucible, had yielded years earlier to US and European Union demands for a ransom in exchange for dropping “price fixing” charges against the company. The DOJ decided to separately persecute Norris, primarily because his age, foreign citizenship, poor health, and the poor health of his wife made him an easy target for vengeful US prosecutors.
The DOJ exploited a not-legally ratified post-9/11 extradition treaty — and the UK’s willingness to put its relationship with the US ahead of the rights of its own citizens — to demand Norris’s kidnapping even though prosecutors possessed no credible evidence of criminal activity that was subject to extradition. “Price fixing” was not a criminal offense in the UK at the time, and despite such knowledge, DOJ attorneys falsely argued — in contravention of centuries of English common law — that “price fixing” was akin to fraud. The British courts ultimately rejected this argument.
In retaliation, prosecutors concocted false “obstruction” charges related to the original “price fixing” investigation, and this time the British courts acquiesced in the illegal kidnapping of Norris. He will now spend the next year-and-a-half in prison for “conspiring” to “obstruct” an investigation of a crime for which he was never legally tried (and for which he was acquitted of the actual obstruction of).
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Conspiring to conspire…
Put chills down my spine. It reminds me a bit of the problem of intent in libertarian legal analysis.
There are few things so emblematic of an out-of-control state as the US legal system’s interpretation and use of “obstruction of justice”.
And yet the politicians and their media cheerleaders have the brass to talk about the “rule of law” in this country.
About that “special relationship”…
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/dec/03/wikileaks-cables-us-special-relationship
Conservative party politicians lined up before the general election to promise that they would run a “pro-American regime” and buy more arms from the US if they came to power this year, the leaked American embassy cables show.
Despite British leaders’ supportive stance, the dispatches also reveal – in what some will see as humiliating detail – how US diplomats in London are amused by what they call Britain’s “paranoid” fears about the so-called special relationship.
One said the anxious British attitude “would often be humorous if it were not so corrosive” and that it was tempting to take advantage of this neurosis to “make London more willing to respond favourably when pressed for assistance”. The UK was said to offer “unparalleled” help in promoting America’s aims.
We can always count on S.M. Oliva to help bring these injustices to light and expose them to publicity. Writers like Oliva are few and far between.
Sounds like Martha Stewart all over again.
I was thinking the same thing.
Conrad Black, also.
When you have a nation that manipulates the Rule of Law into a Rule of men. When you have a nation of “fluid Law.” When you have so many laws,rules and regulations that a person can not go about their innocent daily business without braking a law, and therefor become a criminal. When you have a nation that has a “justice”system made up of government employees that not only break the law but flaunt that law breaking. When you have a situation in a nation similar to Levitri Beria’s NKVD when he said at the height of Stalin’s Terror in the old USSR, “you find me the man and I will find you the law.” Then you have a nation that has become a nation of tyranny and a nation that is doomed for the scrap heap of history.
“conspiracy to commit obstruction of justice”
Telling your employees not to speak to DOJ investigators without an attorney present!
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