Since
a press item reveals that New Zealand's
foreign minister Phil Goff has spoken out
in favor of my entry, I do what Caesar did
to all Gaul. 
|
July
30, 2004 (Friday)
Key
West, Florida ROTTEN night, weirdest dreams
yet, very exhausting. Phone rang at 3:53 a.m. (from
"unknown"). Awake from 2 then 3 a.m., wandered into
the Mosquito Room at 5:30 and slept two hours more
there. More from young author Oliver D., writing about
Geoffrey Dawson and the prewar London Times,
an excellent subject: If I am honest I am finding it very
difficult finding a publisher as they all think
my idea is brilliant but does not fit in with
their publication lists, I am considering going
self-publishing. More donations for the battle come in via the
website; several from newcomers over the last few
days, too. Muddled news reports come in from New Zealand --
that the Immigration Service says they "can" ban my
entry if they choose. Looks like another legal
battle is shaping up. The New Zealand Herald sends two emails, the
first reporting that a "decision" has been made,
according to a radio report, the second reading:
"Cancel that, it appears the situation stays the
same, the radio report I was referring did not
really update the situation at all." The situation is thus obscure. I suspect that
was the cause of the 4 a.m. phone call too. I reply
with a lengthy message beginning: If NZ Immigration purport to exclude me
solely on the grounds of the Canadian
deportation (twelve years ago!) please take an
hour of your life to study the
entire dossier on that sordid episode: I summarise it for her: (a) Canadian Jewish bodies planted fake
items about me earlier in 1992 on the Canadian
Immigration computer, after I visited Canada
safely fifty times without any problem since
1965. This was discovered by my Canadian
solicitors who obtained the files under the
Access to Information Act.(b) I was arrested on Vancouver Island by the
Mounties on October 28, 1992 after making a
speech
(on Freedom of Speech) and being given the
George Orwell Award for Freedom of Speech.
Deportation proceedings started. Since my
following lecture tour was accordingly in ruins,
I reached a deal the next day with the Canadian
Immigration adjudicator in Vancouver BC for a
"voluntary departure" notice, expiring 3000
miles away in Ontario at midnight, November 1,
1992. Such a notice was not a deportation, but
would allow me to return at any time thereafter
to Canada. Hence the benefit of the deal. (c) An hour before the deadline, I drove
across the Niagara Falls bridge into the USA. A
certain Canada Immigration official (Harold
Musetescu, who has since been sacked) had
however phoned ahead asking US Immigration to
return me to Canada on a pretext, for minor
paperwork. (d) I was sent back across the bridge to
Canada. I was deemed not to have left Canada by
the appointed hour, and -- after a three week
trial -- deported. I.e. it was an ambush, a
set-up. It shows the lengths people go to. (e) Oddly, I had in fact, by chance, left
Canada later on October 29 for a few hours, to
visit Washington State, just over the US border.
Thus I had complied with the order, as it turned
out (phone Brian Fisher, whom I visited
on the USA side -- he even drove me --, now
living at Las Vegas [...] if you want to
test my veracity; we even produced
in court his phone billing to prove I was
with him). But the Ontario immigration "judge"
refused
to accept that as true, as the timings we
stated were three hours different than those
shown by US border computers (and he even called
me a liar!) - he evidently did not realise that
US INS computer records are standardised on US
East Coast time, three hours' different from
Pacific Coast time. Confused? So am I. The deportation shocked
the Canadian press, who knew the facts, and
there were angry editorials in their newspapers
as it was quite clear what was going on. We
appealed the decision, at vast expense to
myself. After nearly a year the appeal was
rejected without explanation by a Judge
Rothstein. See the dossier. Comment is
superfluous. I conclude: "Please do not ask me for comment on
any Immigration decision. Comment must come from
New Zealanders, in this case." 
NEXT week is going to be a thin week.
3:53 Radio New Zealand phones (I am sitting
outside the Croissants de France café,
drinking tea) for a recorded interview. They say
that NZ Immigration "can ban" me. I say, "I am not
going to comment on that." "But," I remark, "one
thing appears to unify those who condemn me and
those who support me -- none of them has read any
of my books." She asks about the Holocaust denier
label. I say, "I have never written a book or
article, or made a film about the Holocaust; it is
a mystery why the smear is attached to me." "So you
deny you are a Holocaust denier?" -- Yes. I say that I have been invited by the National
Press Club to speak, and I shall "honour that
invitation." I shall arrive at the appointed time.
She presses: "So, the Jews have nothing to fear
from you coming?" I reply with a snort. "On the
contrary, the question is what I have to fear from
them: everywhere that I have been, they have been
the ones to use violence to stop me speaking." Since a press item reveals that NZ's foreign
minister Phil Goff has spoken out in favor
of my entry, I do what Caesar did to all Gaul. This
letter will go to him by Priority Mail with a copy
of a collector's edition of my "Churchill's War",
vol. ii: "Triumph in Adversity": Churchill's War is a 35-year
project: volume 1, which I had the privilege of
promoting in six NZ cities in 1986; volume 2 in
2002; and volume 3 in 2005, for which purpose I
have already arranged in writing to work in the
NZ National Archives in Wellington on my
forthcoming visit, to study the rather meagre
papers of Peter Fraser.Perhaps you would be good enough, having
glanced at the enclosure, to lean on your feeble
Cabinet colleagues in the Immigration Service,
who seem to overlook that any "any British
Passport holder with the right of abode in the
UK is entitled to travel into New Zealand visa
free for a stay of 6 months", and further remind
them of the terms of your country's fine Bill of
Rights, which defines: Section
13: Everyone has the right to freedom of
thought, conscience, religion, and belief,
including the right to adopt and hold
opinions without interference.Section
14: Everyone has the right to freedom of
expression, including the freedom to seek,
receive, and impart information and opinions
of any kind in any form. You were good enough to be quoted in the
media today (tomorrow actually, NZ time!) as
saying that you did not believe I should be
excluded from your country unless I had serious
criminal convictions. In fact, I don't have any
(unless you intend to allow Germany to decide
which Britons can visit NZ or not -- a privilege
most of us would consider she forfeited
consequent on the events of 1939-1945).
SOMEBODY has sent me a copy of The 9/11
Commission Report, a few days ago. I take it
down the street to "Michael's," the up-market
"Chicago-style" restaurant which is always
advertising on TV and Radio here, and order their
$19.95 early bird special, which seems good value.
By the time the little meal (of minuscule
proportions) is consumed, I have devoured the first
fifty pages of the Report. It is brilliantly written, most unlike a
Government report; the blunders of NORAD and the
Federal Aviation Authority are laid grimly bare.
NORAD's failings were compounded by their
deliberate lies to the Commission recently, about
how good they were that morning; and if NORAD can
lie about that, I wonder what else they have told
untruths over? I cannot help sensing an aftertaste about this
book. The taste of an Establishment whitewash. I
have distorted and manipulated history
myself, so I am told, so I know how these things
are done: a little over-emphasis here, a little
omission there. . . First, I myself have been wrong on a number of
points, it seems: the Commission is sure that none
of the teams had a gun. My understanding is that
there was a telephone call from the air to the
ground reporting the shooting of the Israeli
agent Daniel Lewin aboard United Airlines
93; the report finds he was stabbed. But that is
just one of the phone calls that is not mentioned
in this report, though it was widely reported in
the next day's press. Another phone call which maks no appearance in
this report is the one made by a passenger in UA.93
in the skies over Pennsylvania to a dispatcher on
the ground, from the rear of the plane: he
describes that this is a hijacking, a hijacking, he
is not joking; now there is an explosion and the
cabin is filled with white smoke, and the call is
cut off. This call too was widely reported in the
press at the time; as later was the fact that the
FBI had confiscated the tape. It is not mentioned
in the Report. Nor is the Cleveland
Air Traffic Control Recording of a conversation
with an American Airlines pilot to which I
link
on my website: the tape ends with the words of the
American pilot, witnessing the demise of UA.93 from
about ten miles away: "There appears to be a puff
of black smoke." Not a column, or pillar, of smoke,
but a puff. Was that pilot interviewed about what
he had seen? If he was, the Commission is not
telling us. They tell us instead about another
plane, a National Guard C130-H cargo plane, which
has seen "black smoke" -- and that conversation too
confirms, "from the plane."
THE lesson is that for maximum comfort with this
Report, we must forget all else we may have
read about Sept. 11 and particularly about
UA.93. The omissions are one thing. The over-emphasis
another. It appears to be on the actual time of
impact of UA.93 in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.
It is given to the second, as 10:03:11.
Three minutes past ten, and eleven
seconds. There is none of this precision about the impact
times of the other planes on the North and South
Towers -- largely, perhaps, because of the
thousands of eye-witnesses. But the Pennsylvania
time is given to the second, which worries me: why
was that necessary? In order to establish that it crashed before the
"Military Command Authority" -- i.e. the president
and his staff -- authorized a shootdown of
unresponsive airliners? Over the later time, the
timing of the order, the Report displays a charming
vagueness, although the order was firmed up in
phone calls between Vice President Dick
Cheney (in the White House shelter) and
George Bush (in the air): now, surely such
phone calls are logged, start and finish? Even if
we are to believe (which I don't) that these calls
are not taped, is there not usually an aide at an
earpiece, taking notes? The second thing I find, upon which again the
obedient US press have not remarked, is that in a
section of the Report temptingly called
"United 93 and the Shootdown order," Cheney is
actually recorded on page 43, as saying in a phone
talk with Rumsfeld at 10:39 a.m., "…And it's
my understanding they've already taken a couple of
aircraft out." (Asked about this the next day on
television, as I saw, Cheney said: "I am not aware"
that any planes were shot down -- a curiously
defensive, lawyerly kind of statement: as in, to
the best of my knowledge and
belief. . .) The third piece of hard evidence which the
Report omits concerns the impact time
itself. On August 9, 2002, I posted
an article which contained this passage: "[Seismologists] Won-Young
Kim and Gerald R. Baum were unable to
definitively set the impact time of the Pentagon
crash, but they were able to determine the time
of Flight 93's impact to within 5 seconds
(10:06:05 ±5, EDT)" That is three full minutes later than the
Report claims. The seismologists determined
this using seismic data -- which again is missing
from the Report; which is startling, because the
same seismic data also showed a mystery plane
making a supersonic boom over Pennsylvania at 9:22
a.m. -- a plane which is totally excluded by
the NORAD version of events.  The three-minute discrepancy seems crucial for a
number of reasons: one is that the cockpit tape
recording of those three minutes has not been
released. I am told that there have been reports on the
Web about a fighter pilot in a National Guard unit
based in South Dakota having admitted taking down
UA.93. He is even named. Other rumours, for instance about the "gun", are
squarely addressed by the Report. This one
is not -- just the over-detailed fudging of the
impact time by three minutes; and the Report
makes no mention of one of the airliner's engines
being found two miles from the crash site (and
bodies being found scattered over a relatively wide
area, hanging in trees etc: I have invited the
Somerset County coroner to talk about this at
Cincinnati,
but so far he has not responded).
FOOD for thought indeed. The waitress at
"Michael's" comes with the bill: steeper than
expected, $32 -- but then she has charged $9 for a
small glass of house red. I put my last
fifty-dollar bill on the table. She returns with
eight dollars change. Short-changed by ten dollars.
I leave the cash untouched, and call over the
supervisor to count it. I remark that such errors
are never made in the customer's favour, invariably
the restaurant's, which is statistically
improbable. "I don't usually do that --," sniffs the
waitress, pouting. "-- And I don't usually leave only a quarter as
a tip," I reply, doing so. "I may be English, but I
object to be taken for a sucker." A pity, the food
was excellent -- but the waitress a crook. Or her math is not up to it. She should have
been on the 9/11 Commission, perhaps. -
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David Irving