ZGram - 7/17/2003 - "A shocking document!"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

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

July 17, 2003

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

I just received this write-up from Paul Fromm, a personal friend and 
on-location advisor of my husbands.  Paul titled it "THE JUDICIAL 
KIDNAPPING OF ERNST ZUNDEL IN TENNESSEE".  Some of the information is 
new even to me.  It is a shocking document!

I will correct some misspellings but otherwise leave the write-up 
intact.  I urge all of you who have websites or access to 
publications to spread it as far as you can!

[START]

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

Dear Paul,

You asked me to write something about what happened to me. I find it 
difficult because I am in a state of denial about it all. 

It simply has been one grotesquely unfair and very emotionally 
disturbing,  highly unpleasant experience from the word "go", 
especially since we were living  in the belief that we had done 
everything by the book, everything we could have  possibly been doing 
and, and in our lawyer's opinion, the overwhelmed  immigration 
service checking into thousands, tens of thousands in fact, of 
terrorists in the United States simply had not come around to look at 
the file of two pension-aged Whites setting up residence. 

All this came to an abrupt end when a virtual posse of police 
cruisers, paddy  wagons, etc., materialized in my driveway in 
Tennessee at about 11:00 a.m.,  February 5, 2003. 

One of my handymen was helping me frame some of my water colors, oils 
and  line drawings which I intended to hang on the walls of our 
soon-to-be opened Art Gallery that very afternoon. We were to open in 
two weeks. 

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

They had no arrest warrant. I asked to call my attorney. The request 
was  denied. Ingrid joined us. She, too, was told no calls to the 
attorney were  allowed. I asked Ingrid to go into the house for my 
passport and jacket. I took  no papers or identification like 
driver's license, social security number, etc.  and absolutely no 
addresses with me, not to compromise my friends, because by  then I 
knew I was being deported - I thought to Germany. 

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 we did our shopping, onto 
highway I-40 to Knoxville, where I was  processed, finger printed, 
photographed and where 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 wondered to myself if 
they had Nazi swastika flags on the walls of the INS in the 1930s or 
1940s. 

I was given some documents to sign which were lying on the table 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".

A Polaroid photo was taken of me against the wall of some garage, 
part of a  hollow block-type building with a very noisy, 
malfunctioning air conditioner  being checked by a technician. This 
photo was then trimmed and later on stapled  onto a document of which 
I was given, I believe, a copy. The photo clearly shows  the outfit I 
wore the moment I was arrested. 

I was then put again into a prison van in handcuffs and leg irons and 
driven  for approximately 1 1/4 to 1 ½ hours through heavy traffic 
from Knoxville via  Maryville past the airport to the Blount County 
Jail, a building I had pointed out to Ingrid several times in the 
previous two years saying, "This is where  they will take me when 
they come to arrest me", prophetic words! How did I know?  I don't 
know. 

I was unloaded at the Blount County Jail, a cold unfriendly place 
whose staff  had a nasty attitude, the likes of which I had never 
encountered in any other  prison facility in Canada or in Europe 
before. 

The processing took over four hours. Then I finally was allowed a 
brief call  to Ingrid which did not go through right away as it was 
9:45 p.m. I was kept in  an ice-cold, all concrete holding cell - 
even the seats and floors were concrete  - until well after midnight. 
I had had nothing to eat or drink since about 12:30  at the INS 
office in Knoxville. The medication I was on which I brought with me 
to jail was denied to me. The doctor, I was told, was to decide if I 
was allowed  it or not. Since [the pills] were all non-chemical 
based, they were denied me. As a  result, my blood pressure began to 
act up. I was told by the nurses to whom I was taken in handcuffs and 
ankle irons, that it was dangerously high. 

I was housed in a two-man cell, 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 a chemical engineer, 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 to persons unseen, 
thinking he was in charge of the CIA  and talking loudly to "the 
president" on his make-believe telephone. He annoyed  the guards 
repeatedly in the middle of the night by frequently using the in-cell 
intercom. He smelled something awful, obviously not having showered 
in weeks. 

Finally, the guards came en force, 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,  motioning me out into the hallway. The next thing I heard 
was hollering,  screaming and kicking and punching and blood 
squirting against the wall as my  crazy cell mate was dragged on one 
leg across the floor into a different area of  the prison. I saw him 
a few days later on my way to sick bay with bruises, all  black and 
blue over his eyes and head as they led him past me from the doctor's 
office. 

Later on, I was told by my U.S. attorney that he had engaged a 
well-known  Knoxville attorney (Public Defender) who had filed a $6 
million lawsuit against the Blount County Jail and the sheriffs and 
guards. 

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 and taught me  the ropes of U.S. prison life. I was now briefly 
with the general population,  half Black, Mexican and Indian, the 
rest being Whites mainly from the Smoky  Mountain area. There was 
hardly a blond person amongst them, all were  dark-haired to jet 
black. Most were hardened criminals, murderers, bank robbers,  car 
thieves. Most were repeat offenders. Many had 25- to 30-year 
sentences.  There was anger, rage and frustration in that place that 
was palpable. Guards  were cold, abrupt and unfriendly. 

Contact with Ingrid [my wife] was very unpredictable because one of 
the  phones was broken and the young Black inmates were hogging the 
phones for calls  of 45 minutes to an hour. 

One Sunday, I heard dogs barking.  The next thing I saw, we were all 
ordered  into our cells while black-uniformed SWAT teams went 
systematically from cell to  cell, threw us on the floor face down, 
hand cuffed, arms twisted behind our  back. They searched our 
pockets, beds and plastic bins. They dragged us outside the cells 
like sacks of potatoes while helmeted, visored, New World Order-type 
cops hollered commands at us. 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, crying, tears streaming down some of 
their faces, frightened out  of their wits. The women filmed these 
hapless prisoners with mini camcorders  close up, laughing and 
joking, having themselves a ball. For whom were these  videos taken? 

During this amazing performance, the water in the toilets was turned 
off and  after we were ordered back into our cells, many felt the 
urge to poop and soon,  and the place stank to high Heaven! After 
about two hours, the water was turned  on and everything returned to 
normal. 

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 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,  even though 
we had a habeas corpus motion filed with the court and it was 
already before the Cincinnati Sixth Circuit Court at that time. 

A few nights 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 national 
holiday, "President's Day" [Monday, February  17]. They could not let 
me have the U.S. $400 I had brought with me to prison  because of the 
holiday. Thus, 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 
they were  deporting me to but saw the airline counter we went to, 
and it said,  "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. two times ten 
years, which meant Ingrid would  be 87, and I would be 84 years-old 
before I might have my first chance to 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. The end result was 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. It was 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 like in 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. Especially the Immigration 
Detention area I was kept in was state of  the art, efficient and 
clean. The guards were friendly. There were a dozen  phones on the 
wall, a pencil sharpener which worked and paper and envelopes 
cheerfully handed to me by a big, blond guard who could have stepped 
out of an SS  recruiting poster a few moments before. 

Unfortunately, I was only there for not quite two days before I was 
taken  back to Canada, this time for good. Again, 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, friends, and within two hours, 
some Scottish friends [from Hamilton, Ontario] had come to see me, 
and brought me some much-needed money.  They left. I was arrested and 
taken to Thorold, the Niagara Region Detention  Center. It was an old 
facility and primitive in comparison to Batavia. 

This was to be my home away from home for the next three months, 
interrupted  by numerous detention hearings...

[END]