The Zundelsite - Zundel Bail Hearing: Delay is the name of the government game!


Zundel Bail Hearing: Delay is the name of the government game!

Sept 23, 2003

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

We are living in Stalinist times. I had managed to persuade Dr. Lorraine Day, a world-renown surgeon who has trained thousands of doctors, to fly to Toronto to examine Ernst and find out what the story is about his health and to give testimony at the hearing if at all possible, and I did not know if she had been admitted to the stand. I was on pins and needles all day long.

I reached her in late afternoon; she told me of an incredible struggle to even be admitted to testify, since even the judge had put roadblocks in her way, but she had managed with the help of defense attorney, Doug Christie - and later Barbara Kulaszka, another attorney on the Zundel Team, told me that Dr. Day "...was a great witness - knowledgeable, fearless! Just great!"

Only very late that night did I get to talk to Ernst who is always at the mercy of the goodwill of the guards on whether or not he will even get the telephone.

He agreed that Dr. Day had been a powerful, impressive witness, but the rest of the hearing was creeping - and creepy! - delay. Delay, delay, and more delay! If bail isn't decided this round, Ernst told me, the next bail hearing will be in December. The tactic, he explained to me, is clearly to keep him in jail - evidently with the aiding and abetting of the judge, to use a vernacular phrase.

"Understand the political constellation," he told me. "Two ministers have declared me a security risk. Is the judge going to let a security risk walk the streets? He is there to do the government's job. Be realistic."

At that point I said: "Then why even continue with the charade?"

Ernst told me: "You have to understand that they want to keep me here until after the election. The politicians can tell their constituents, "We said we would get him, and we have! He is now in our power!" And Ernst added quietly: "Millions are being raised on my back."

Where do we go from here? We have added two young attorneys to our team who have a practice in Toronto, which will help. They will take over the case in the Provincial Court of Ontario. Ernst is very pleased with them, as are his regular attorneys. However, Ernst believes that the only way to dislodge him from the clutches of his enemies is public awareness - in other words, media. He says that with politically beholden courts, an unpopular dissident has next to no chance. Only public outrage at the injustice of it all will make a difference.

That's where we are going to focus our energies now. I ask for your help - each and every one of you on my list. You can help, and you must help if you care about what is happening to all of our freedom. You can help with donations to pay for the costs on the legal front, and you can help by creating awareness in the weeks and months to come. I will tell you how, and together we will mount not only a defense but a media offense that is going to leave our enemies' heads spinning! I am already working on a dramatic plan!

Here is Ernst's Zundel on-location representative, Paul Fromm, reporting about yesterday from the Absurdistan Front:

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Toronto. September 23, 2003

ANOTHER SECRET HEARING & DOCTOR WARNS ZUNDEL'S LIFE'S IN DANGER

When the detention hearing (bail review) for German-born publisher Ernst Zundel re-opened today in Toronto, Federal Judge Pierre Blais refused to recuse himself for bias. He also announced at the beginning of the hearing that he had agreed with the request of the Justice Department to conduct another secret hearing in Ottawa in early September. No report of the evidence or witnesses at this hearing was disclosed to the defence. U.S. doctor Lorraine Day, a surprise defence witness, testified that prison conditions posed a serious threat to Mr. Zundel who suffers from high blood pressure and a growth on his chest, which she fears may be a recurrence of cancer.

When the hearing opened, Mr. Justice Blais said: "On July 30, Mr. Christie put a motion for recusal. After telephone conversations, the parties agreed to written submissions." Originally, Mr. Justice Blais had said he'd render a decision by the end of August, after reading the transcripts which were to be available in mid-August. Apparently, the Crown sought the delay to submit further arguments in writing. This allowed Mr. Justice Blais to set a September 9 deadline for sumbissions and, thus, to delay announcing his decision until Monday, September 22.

Soon after Court resumed, Mr. Justice Blais said he'd agreed with a Department of Justice request for an ex parte hearing in early September "to hear evidence in camera that would not be disclosed to Mr. Zundel."

Mr. Christie reminded the judge of his promise in the July hearings to see whether some of the material from the numerous secret hearings thus far might be added to the government disclosure summary. "So far, there is no evidence that can be added to the summary and made public." However, he added, "the hearing is not yet over and I'll keep it in mind, but there are different reasons why the [secret] information cannot be made public."

A fierce argument ensued when defence lawyer Douglas H. Christie sought to interrupt Crown Attorney Donald MacIntosh's cross-examination of Ernst Zundel, now in its fifth day, to introduce a surprise witness, Dr. Lorraine Day, a California orthopaedic surgeon. Dr. Day, 67, was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in 1993. She had a lump the size of a grapefruit on her chest. Formerly a practitioner of orthodox medicine, Dr. Day searched, experimented and cured herself through natural techniques which include extensive consumption of water, proper nutrition and reduction of stress. Since then, she's been an outspoken advocate of natural healing and has produced numerous books and videos. Day created a furor when she went public with charges that the AIDS virus can be transmitted in aerosol form. She ceased doing surgeries, as she said she was putting herself at unacceptable risk.

Crown Attorney Donald MacIntosh strongly objected to the surprise witness. Initially, the judge was reluctant to hear Dr. Day. "You know something. There are people who are in jail for 25 years and are sick and they don't let them out."

"Mr. Zundel isn't even charged with a crime," Mr. Christie responded.

"He's detained because he's considered a threat to national security," the judge shot back.

Several of the 25 Zundel supporters hissed at this comment.

An angry Mr. Justice Blais threatened the spectators. "You won't interrupt my court. Get out, if you won't be silent!"

Mr. Justice Blais accepted Dr. Day as a witness, but not as an "expert" witness, because she had not filed a report on her visit Monday to Ernst Zundel. Douglas Christie pointed out that permission had not been granted by provincial authorities for Dr. Day to visit and examine Mr. Zundel until last Friday. She flew in from California on Sunday and examined him Monday morning.

"The rules allow you to accept anything you want. Section 78.j. of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act says that the judge may accept anything into evidence, even if it is not admissible otherwise."

Dr. Day, a slim blonde dressed in a light blue suit, took the stand. "There is a cartilagenous mass, a tumor, measuring an inch by and inch by an inch, at the inferior portion of the sternum," she told the Court. While in prison, "Mr. Zundel's blood pressure has been as high as 235/135, and that's in the area of stroke. In the past several years, he's had a blood pressure problem which he's handled by natural therapy."

Dr. Day testified that the prison has been giving Mr. Zundel a beta blocker to control the high blood pressure. "Beta blockers have enormous side-effects," she warned. These side-effects can include cardiac arrest, arterial thrombosis, colitis, mental depression, memory loss , catatonia and even death. "He has some side effects," she observed, "including cold extremities, difficulty in urinating, memory loss, unsteadiness in his gait, and low heart rate.'

"He has a low resting heart rate of 56, a false rate due to the medication," she testified.

"He needs sunlight, fresh air. The stress of incarceration is immense and is raising his blood pressure."

Asked by Mr. Christie for her conclusion after her examination of dissident publisher Ernst Zundel, Dr. Day said his continued incarceration "is life threatening, especially with his blood pressure and the tumor increasing in size."

Under cross examination, Dr. Day elaborated: "Every beta blocker has side effects. Sometimes the patient usn't aware of them. The side effects get much more serous the older one gets." The prison had ordered an x-ray of Mr. Zundel's chest in July, after he complained of the growth. "The radiologist didn't even look for the tumor," Dr. Day charged. "A p.s. on his report says that he was only told after the x-ray was taken that the patient had a mass."

In her exchange with the Crown, Dr. Day noted acidly about holocaust skeptic Ernst Zundel's present incarceration: "It's not a criminal activity in my country to question anything."

When Ernst Zundel, dressed in an olive coloured windbreaker, took the stand and sat down, he joked pointedly, "Yes, I got a good chair this time," referring to the fact that prison authorities continue to deny him a chair in his solitary confinement cell.

The rest of the day consisted of an interminable cross-examination of Ernst Zundel by Crown Attorney Donald MacIntosh, seeking to connect Mr. Zundel to various nationalist leaders or revisionists in a process Mr. Zundel denounced as guilt-by-association. Mr. MacIntosh frequently sounded as if he were testifying in his questioning.

A typical exchange had Mr. MacIntosh asking about Ewald Althans, a former advance man for Mr. Zundel in Germany, who, when charged under Germany's anti-free speech laws, made a deal with the Office for the Protection of the Constitution to give the names of 5,000 rightists in exchange for 360,000 Deutsche Marks. He later moved to Holland to live with his homosexual lover, an antique dealer.

MacIntosh; "Althans' office was in Munich?"

Zundel: "Correct."

MacIntosh: "Munich is the birthplace of the Nazi Party."

Zundel: "Correct."

MacIntosh: "Were you aware Althans didn't like Black people?"

Zundel: "No."

MacIntosh: "Were yo aware he didn't like Jewish people?"

Zundel: "Yes. Well, some Jewish people. He has an uncle who is Jewish."

Finally, an exasperated Douglas Christie objected. "This whole process makes me wonder what's going on. Unsubstantiated newspaper clippings are put to the witness to see if he can recognize them. It's a fishing expedition." What does this have to do "with whether he's a threat to national security or a flight risk," the points of contention in the detention hearing, he demanded.

After questioning Mr. Zundel about a series of personalities, Mr. MacIntosh, after each name, would ask, "like you, he was a great admirer of Adolf Hitler?"

Finally, Ernst Zundel shot back: "Mr. MacIntosh, you have Hitler on the brain. I do not."

Much of the afternoon questioning centred on an expose by the U.S. Anti-Defamation League (ADL). Questioned about Pastor Richard Butler of the Aryan Nations, whom he'd met just once, Mr. Zundel retorted: "The ADL is a Jewish hate group. What you're reading from is their take on Butler. This is ADL propaganda, as far as I'm concerned. I feel like a Black man convicted on Ku Klux Klan evidence. The ADL was convicted of burglary and spying and fined $500,000. Don't show me some Jewish propaganda and then ask me to agree with it."

On the stand, Mr. Zundel noted that he'd been examining the 1,806 pages of newspaper clippings, reports, and portions of books that form the Crown's public case against him.

"A net is being woven here of guilt-by-association," Mr. Zundel replied, when questioned about former Canadian Aryan Nations representative Terry Long. "I met Terry Long for 10 minutes after a speech in Calgary 15 years ago. Yet, there are 300 pages of information about Mr. Long" in the Crown's documents.

Mr. MacIntosh, a thin man with a mane of unruly, iron grey hair, hunched over the podium, with his nose, at times, just inches from the document he was reading.

The Court audience grew increasingly agitated by the Crown's badgering of Mr. Zundel. At the end of the day, Mr. Justice Blais asked Mr. MacIntosh about his intentions for the next day. He indicated that he'd continue the cross-examination of Mr. Zundel. When asked how long he thought he would need, he replied, "all day."

Many in the audience groaned. Judge Blais exploded: "I will not tolerate this type of comment here. You do not have to be here. You can just get out," he threatened.

Seemingly taking their cue from the judge's aggressive attitude to Mr. Zundel's supporters in Court, one of the Court security guards, nameless, so I'll call him Stringbean, asked two German men, one a leader of the Danube Swabian community, to be quiet or leave. He claimed he could hear their whispers across the courtroom. They were standing directly behind me and I heard nothing.

As soon as Court was over, Stringbean tried to shoo us all out. When I didn't move fast enough, he demanded: "Do you have a problem with that?"

"Yes," I said, "I have a big problem with a country treating a man the way they're treating Zundel."

Parroting the judge, Stringbean said: "You don't have to be here."

"We pay their salaries," a number of furious spectators said as they gathered outside the courtroom and discussed the Judge's threats. "It's just more German-bashing."

One of the few opponents of Ernst Zundel present was lawyer Anita Bromberg, who sported an ID bade indicating that she was a staff person for the League for Human Rights of B'nai Brith.

After the Judge threatened the audience, one of Mr. Zundel's supporters whispered: "God help this country."

Bomberg leaned over and warned "I could report you to the judge."

The hearing continues tomorrow.

Paul Fromm

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