ZGram - 9/8/2003 - "ZGram - 9/8/2003 - "Ingrid's Refusenik Ad, American Version"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny:  Now more than ever!

September 9, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Once more the Zundel Saga has made history!  Important history!

Let me briefly explain:

As you know, some weeks ago I placed a full page ad in the Washington 
Times, calling attention to Ernst Zundel as America's best-known 
Refusenik and asking President Putin to grant him asylum and a 
passport.  Many people were elated about this ad, thinking it a 
clever and inventive idea, but a few grumblers thought that I was 
wasting supporter money that could have been better used in other 
ways.

I'd like to ask:  How?  I am already employing a legal time of five 
attorneys, soon to be seven, not even counting several lawyers on 
volunteer standby in countries other than Canada and the the US.  I 
have spent more than $60,000 on attorneys' fees alone, all of it 
financed by volunteer donations in exchange for simple "Refusenik 
Sketches" Ernst draws with primitive children's crayons to help me 
from his cell.  Fence-sitters dispensing good advice but little else 
are not helpful to us!  We HAVE  to be inventive and novel in our 
approaches - and we are!  And there's more in the hopper, believe me!

This first ad of mine produced only silence out of the Putin 
Quarters, but let's just assume that little birds whisper in our ears 
that it produced lots and lots of diplomatic attention in Washington 
Embassy Quarters we could never have otherwise penetrated with a 
mundane public relations outreach.  Also, it brought us new 
supporters and lots and lots of write-ups, translations and 
commentaries on websites and in print media all over the world.  This 
first ad more than paid for itself!

I thought I should try it again - this time not only in the 
Washington Times but also in several important foreign publications.

To make a long story short, through anonymous leads I connected with 
Zavtra, a Russian paper I have been told is being read by every 
politician in the former Soviet Union, now a democracy.  To my 
amazement, not only was my ad immediately accepted and even 
translated without charge to me, it ran UNEDITED, full page, replete 
with my favorite Zundel cartoon, www.zundelsite.org, a few days ago!

Not so in the Washington Times, an important mainstream publication 
in America.  After much back-and-forth, a HEAVILY CENSORED, much 
truncated version ran on September 7, two days ago!

Is this not a story that speaks volumes?!  Where's freedom now in our 
world?  In the former Soviet Union, you can call a spade a spade and 
name your tormentors.  In Washington, DC., the media lets itself be 
gagged, even if you pay for what you need to say!

For the record and our website archives, I am running both versions, 
the American edited version today, and the Russian unedited version 
in tomorrow's ZGram.  As before, I urge all of you who have either 
access to popular websites or access to print paper, to spread the 
text of one or both ads as far and wide as you can!

Here comes the American media version:

START:

Open Letter to the Senate and Congress of the United States of America

This is an intensely personal story.

When I was very young, I knew life at the mercy of four dictators - 
Stalin, Hitler, Peron and Stroessner.  When I came to America in 
1967, I thought that I had entered paradise  where there was justice, 
law and order.  I willingly and proudly became a US citizen in 1973.

Fast forward to 2003.  Now of retirement age, I was happily married 
for more than three years to a kind, gentle man with politically 
incorrect views - until, in broad daylight on American soil, my 
husband was brutally kidnapped by agents of my government!

Ernst Zündel, a German national, was not arrested and deported 
because he "overstayed his visa", as the arresting officials falsely 
claimed.  A compelling paper trail  proves that my husband was 
deported and imprisoned because he is a high-profile activist best 
known for holding politically incorrect views on the Holocaust.

Because of his dogged insistence on questioning unverified Holocaust 
claims, Ernst Zündel has made powerful political enemies in several 
Western countries.  Repeatedly, he has been targeted for 
assassination -- twice by parcel bomb, once by arson, and once by a 
young woman posing as a foreign journalist who was stealthily 
deported.

Follow what happened recently:

ERNST ZUNDEL - PRISON MEMOIRS, FEBRUARY 5 - FEBRUARY 19, 2003

I lived for more than 40 years in Canada.  After my marriage to 
Ingrid, I had applied for Adjustment of Status so I could live with 
her in Tennessee.  My application had been accepted.  I had been 
fingerprinted, given a work permit, a social security number, a
medical.  I was waiting for an interview with Immigration officials 
which I understood to be the last step before being granted permanent 
resident status.  Since our first interview had to be canceled due to 
a time schedule conflict, our attorney had requested a new date.  We 
have in our possession the original return receipt that our request 
to be re-scheduled had been received by INS.

We waited for that interview in the belief that we had done 
everything we knew how to do, by the book.  We had purchased an art 
gallery and planned to open it in weeks.  One of my handymen was 
helping me frame some of my water colors, oils and line drawings
which I intended to hang that very afternoon.  All this came to an 
abrupt end when a virtual posse of police cruisers and paddy wagons 
materialized in my driveway in Tennessee at about 11:00 a.m., 
February 5, 2003.

I was dressed in my work outfit, blue jeans, mountain hiking boots, 
colorful carpenter's suspenders and casual flannel shirt. I inquired 
what brought them there as they surrounded me menacingly. They told 
me to put my hands on the hood of a truck in the driveway and said 
that they were Immigration Service Enforcement Officers who had come 
to take me into custody because I had failed to keep a hearing date.

There was no "hearing" date.  We were waiting for an interview we 
thought was going to be rescheduled.  I was stunned - as was Ingrid. 
The five officers had no arrest warrant. I asked to call my attorney. 
The request was denied.   Ingrid, too, was told no calls to our 
attorney were allowed.  I asked Ingrid to get my jacket, passport and 
medication, since I was not allowed to go back into the house. 
Ingrid was later told that this was deemed to have been a "civil" 
arrest.  There was nothing "civil" about this arrest!

Within minutes, I was in handcuffs and leg irons in a prison van, 
escorted in a police convoy down our mountain road, past our art 
gallery, into our little town where Ingrid and I did our shopping, 
and onto highway I-40 to the Knoxville Immigration Office, where I 
was processed, finger printed, and photographed.  A Polaroid photo 
was taken of me against the wall of some garage. This photo was then 
trimmed and later on stapled onto a document. The photo clearly shows 
the outfit I wore the moment I was arrested.

I was given some documents to sign, which were lying on the desk of 
one of the bureaucrats when I came in. They had yellow post-it notes, 
and one clearly said in someone's handwriting, "Add today's date 
here".    One Immigration officer, not directly involved in my case, 
had his wall decorated with a 2 x 4-foot large Israeli flag. Needless 
to say, I found this somewhat of an odd wall decoration in a U.S. 
Immigration Office!

I was then put again into a prison van in handcuffs and leg irons and 
driven for approximately 1 1/4 to 1 1/2 hours through heavy traffic 
from Knoxville via Maryville past the airport to a nearby jail, a 
cold, unfriendly place.  The processing there took over four hours. I 
was kept in an ice-cold, all-concrete holding cell - even the seats 
and floors were concrete  - until well after midnight. The medication 
I had brought with me to jail was disallowed.  As a result, my blood 
pressure began to act up. I was told by the nurses, to whom I was 
taken - still in handcuffs and ankle irons -- that it was dangerously 
high.

I was housed in a two-man cell, in 24-hour lockup, only allowed a 
brief shower after two to three days and a short call to Ingrid -- I 
don't remember when.  My cell-mate was an engineer in chemistry, a 
manic-depressive who hallucinated, talked to unseen people all day 
and jumped up and down and out of bed all night long, hollering 
orders, thinking he was in charge of the CIA and talking loudly to 
"the President" on his make-believe telephone. He smelled awful, 
obviously not having showered in weeks.  He annoyed the guards 
repeatedly in the middle of the night by using the in-cell intercom. 
Finally, the guards came, six or seven of them, and told me to get 
off my top bunk, grab my mattress and sheets and get out of the cell. 
I stood in the hallway where I heard hollering, screaming, and 
punching.  I saw blood squirting against the wall as my crazy 
cellmate was dragged on one leg across the floor into a different 
area of the prison. I saw him a few days later.  He was bruised, all 
black and blue over his eyes and head as guards led him past me from 
the doctor's office.

I was put into a two-man cell with a gentle, soft-spoken 65-year-old 
barber who had tried to shoot his mother. He was kind and helpful to 
me. I was now briefly with the general population, half Black, 
Mexican and Indian, the rest being Whites, mainly from the Smoky 
Mountain area.  Most were hardened criminals, murderers, bank 
robbers, car thieves. Almost all were repeat offenders. Many had 25 
to 30-year sentences.  There was anger, frustration and rage in that 
place that was palpable.

Guards were unfriendly, cold, abrupt.  One guard woke me up in the 
middle of the night by poking me into the ribs with a flashlight 
because I had left a book on the windowsill.

Come Sunday, I heard dogs barking.  We were all ordered into our 
cells while black-uniformed SWAT teams with dogs went systematically 
from cell to cell, threw us on the floor face down, hand-cuffed, arms 
twisted behind our backs. They dragged us outside the cells like 
sacks of potatoes while helmeted, visored, New World Order-type cops 
hollered commands at us.  They searched our pockets, beds and plastic 
bins. The dogs dripping saliva from their snapping jaws were mainly 
Dobermans and German Shepherds and were kept on chain leashes two 
feet away from our bodies and faces.  Young, pretty women in 
skin-tight uniforms and tightly-fitting flak jackets, all black in 
color, kept climbing over the men who were curled up, face down, 
shaking, frightened out of their wits. Some had tears streaming down 
their faces.  The women filmed these hapless prisoners with 
mini-camcorders close up, laughing and joking, having themselves a 
ball.  Why were those videos taken?

I was there on two weekends, and this terrorizing of the prisoners 
happened on both weekends. I was lucky to miss it the last weekend 
because my American  attorney, whom Ingrid had in the meantime 
engaged, had come to see me and I was in the visitor meeting area of 
the prison.  He had found out by the grapevine that I was going to be 
deported from the USA to Germany where I was born, even though I 
lived in Canada since I was 19 years old and don't have a criminal 
record either in Canada or the United States.  He filed a habeas 
corpus motion with the court, which was denied the same day, a 
decision challenged by us the very next day in the Cincinnati Sixth 
Circuit Court.   By law, I should not have been taken out of that 
prison and deported without having seen a judge - yet that is exactly 
what happened a few night later!

I was awakened by pounding on my cell door at 2:30 a.m. and told to 
get ready. By 4:30 a.m., the guards finally came to get me for 
"processing out". I was given a shower, ice cold, and changed back 
into my civilian clothing. It was a February 17, "President's Day". 
Because of the holiday, they could not let me have the U.S. $400 I 
had brought with me to prison.  To this day, that money has not been 
returned, nor was my expensive medication.

I was taken to the Knoxville Airport without a single cent in my 
pocket. We boarded a plane to Atlanta, Georgia shortly after 7:00 
a.m., landing there after 9:00 a.m.  I was not told where we were 
going, but I saw a sign at the airline counter:  "Buffalo, New York". 
Then, I realized they were shipping me to Canada, not to Germany.

I had had no opportunity to let Ingrid know where I was and what was 
happening to me.

We arrived in Buffalo at 11:30 a.m. in a bad snowstorm. There I was 
told I was banned from the U.S. for 20 years, which meant Ingrid 
would be 87, and I would be 84 years old before I might see her again.

I was taken across the Canadian border, kept in a locked room at 
Canadian Immigration offices at the Peace Bridge. There was lots of 
gesticulation and loud talking. For reasons never explained, I was 
taken back across the U.S. border, still in a snowstorm.  We seemed 
to slide and slither for hours until I finally spotted a sign saying 
"Attica, New York, Maximum Security Prison".  Luckily, the van turned 
into Batavia and we finally arrived there at dusk, way out in a 
wind-blown farming area. It was a flat-roofed facility, surrounded by 
high barbed-wire fences and search lights with a small guard hut and
a barrier, reminiscent of the Dr. Zhivago film.  A huge six-foot 
guard, dressed in a Russian-type fur hat and a dark green greatcoat, 
came to check papers and cargo, and soon I was processed into the 
Batavia Detention Center. It was a seemingly new, very clean, 
well-organized facility.  Unfortunately, I was only there for not 
quite two days before I was taken back to Canada, this time for good.

I was deported via the Peace Bridge at Fort Erie on February 19, 
2003.  I was interrogated for about seven or eight hours off and on. 
I was allowed to call Ingrid, my lawyer and, within two hours, some 
Scottish friends from Hamilton, Ontario.  They came to bring me some 
much-needed money.

I was "arrested" again - I thought I had already been arrested! - and 
taken to Thorold, the Niagara Region Detention Center where, a few 
weeks later, I was "arrested" for the third time when I was labeled, 
by ministerial decree, a "security risk" for Canada - NOT for what I 
had done in 42 years of responsibly and productively living in that 
country, but for what someone else in the future "might" do by 
reading what I had discovered about the murky business called the 
"Holocaust".

=====

It has been six months since my husband was taken from me.  Now 
seriously ill, he is still being held in Toronto in 24-hour lock-up. 
He has been viciously demonized by the Canadian media.  He has been 
totally ignored by the US government.  He must defend himself against 
"security risk" charges that could well lead to life-long 
imprisonment, yet is not allowed a ball point pen, a pillow, or a 
chair.  After he was arrested, not a single law enforcement agency 
has contacted me to explain, much less defend, what I can't help but 
call a surreptitious  extradition in the guise of "deportation" to 
punish a principled man for his politically incorrect views.

Am I still living in America?  If somebody smashes my window, I can 
go to the police and complain -- and can expect that someone will 
investigate.  If somebody smashes my life, is there no recourse 
because of the politically incorrect views my husband happens to 
hold?  I'd like to think that this is still America where dissident 
views have a place, as long as they are put forth peacefully - as my 
husband, a lifelong pacifist, has always responsibly done, and as the 
record shows.

With this Open Letter, I am formally petitioning my government for a 
an impartial congressional investigation.  I ask that men of 
principle and courage stand up to right this wrong.  I am putting my 
trust in "We the People" and ask that members of the US Congress and 
Senate, elected to listen to our petitions, take concrete steps to 
have my husband be returned to me - replete with politically 
incorrect views.

Sincerely,

Ingrid Rimland Zündel, Ed.D.

Readers are asked to write for information and help defray 
skyrocketing legal expenses.)

[END]

Tomorrow:  Ingrid's Refusenik Ad, Russian Version.