The Zundelsite - Ingrid's Refusenik Ad, American Version

Sept 8, 2003

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

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 supporters 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.

[END]

Tomorrow: Ingrid's Refusenik Ad, Russian Version.