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David Irving to solicitor Ed Wall, Perth, West Australia July 28, 1994
Dear Ed This is now my reasoned response to the papers you faxed through. Comments on "Minute to Minister" Page 24, para 8 (A) GERMANY (ii): "In January 1993 Mr Irving was permanently prohibited from any political activity in the State of Bavaria." --I deny that I was engaged in any such activity. Page 23, (B) CANADA (ii): this paragraph is a travesty in its present shortened form. "Mr Irving subsequently entered Canada." True, but only after obtaining legal advice that the grounds being adduced against me to exclude me were not pertinent since (a) I was prima facie unlikely to commit offences, and (b) there was no exact equivalency (as required under Canadian Immigration law) between the alleged "offence" committed in Germany and any such Canadian law. I point out that although the original "arrest" in Victoria, BC, was on three alleged counts (see attached documents), all of these charges were dropped in the subsequent hearing in Niagara Falls on November 2. I.e., the Canadians made no attempt to make these charges stick; they never returned to them. At the end of para.(iii) Thompson's disbelieving words are quoted. Mr Thompson heard evidence from a number of officials as well as Mr Irving. Natural justice would require the Minister to have been informed that Thompson (a) heard sworn evidence on oath from Mr Irving, Mr Douglas Christie, Mr Brian Fisher, Mr Paul Norris, all in person, testifying to his allimportant brief visit to the USA; (b) was given the sworn affidavits of Mr Fisher, Mr Heinz Koppe, and Mr Koppe's daughter, also testifying to this; (c) was given the Pacific Bell telephone billing record which confirmed Mr Irving's sworn testimony that he had made two phone calls to certain numbers from Mr Fisher's phone, which was located on US soil; (d) was given the contents of Mr Irving's typewriter memory confirming the said visit to the USA, which had been extracted from said electronic memory by the governor of the detention center where Mr Irving and the typewriter were held (the typewriter having been removed from him at his arrest), to which was attached a sworn statement of the governor confirming that he had extracted the diary record and that Mr Irving had not touched the typewriter in any way after his arrest. Further, the Minister should have been informed that Mr Irving had referred to his brief visit to the USA in discussion with newspaper and radio journalists on October 31 and November i in Toronto, and that he had no reason to believe that he needed to create an "alibi." Mr Thompson singularly failed to address this argument, about the lack of need to create an alibi until the precise moment when Mr Irving was astonishingly and unexpectedly refused admission to the USA. Mr Thompson inexplicably ignored all this sworn evidence; refused to produce or allow the cross examination of the officials whose written evidence was produced; he was shown, and relied on, a US border-crossing computer record (whose production I had demanded) on which (i) it was found that the border official had entered no record of Mr Fisher's car first crossing (with me aboard) at around 10 p.m., but (ii) it was noticed that Fisher's car was recorded as again crossing back into the USA at 3:30 a.m. Thompson used this as proof that Fisher had perjured himself (having testified that he made that return crossing, having taken me back to Vancouver, at 00:30 a.m. Pacific Time); in fact Thompson through malice or ignorance concealed the fact that the US INS border crossing computer records all data at Eastern Standard Time, three hours later than Pacific Time; the computer record thus confirmed, not contradicted, Fisher's veracity (and therefore indirectly mine). We found this out only after my deportation. Fisher has now submitted further testimony backing his (and my) story, and his fiancee Helga, now his wife, is finally willing to swear an affidavit also. All this goes to my truthfulness, and I am very hurt that it should be challenged by these squalid officials for personal political reasons. Would it be of use if I swore a testimony on my perceptions of the political background of Thompson's decision: (he is not a judge, but a jumped up immigration official; he is a paid employee of the Minister, and in no sense an independent arbitrator). The newspaper hysteria, the media coverage, the TV cameras in the hearing room, the angry, banner waving mobs of hired Serbian and Jewish agitators outside, the ever-ready presence of the head of Canada's Jewish community Bernie Farber in the hearing room, who was constantly badgering the officials, as I protested at one stage in the proceedings (my cross examination of official Musetescu); Thompson's repeated retirement to a rear room, where no doubt he was never far from a phone; the statement to me by Steve McCaffrey, case presenting officer, who became something of a friend, that the case had high political profile and was causing them all big headaches; his statement to me (just before the Adjudication was read out) that if I was released as he now expected on the basis of our evidence, Canada Immigration had instructions to rearrest me immediately (I related this at once to the assembled journalists waiting in the press room); the statement to me by the head of Toronto airport immigration center on November 13 at 6 p.m., as I was held there to be sent back to London, that the minister Bernard Valcourt himself and his office had phoned him repeatedly during the day and wanted to be informed the moment the plane with me aboard left Canadian soil. This might seem necessary to explain why an Adjudicator, a lowly ministry employee, should act so blatantly wrongly. I think such an Affidavit might prove useful to Peter Bates. On the other hand, there may be no way he could introduce it. (B) CANADA (iv) Mr Irving then sought leave to appeal his deportation in the Canadian Federal Court but this was dismissed. This implies that the appeal was heard and dismissed. The correct word should be denied--leave was denied. Denied, moreover, in a one line document, without a shred of explanation by Judge Rothstein. You should however mention that we have now lodged timeously an application for Judicial Review with the District Court in Ontario, grievously delayed by the illegal failure of the Canadian immigration and US immigration departments to release their files to me under the US Freedom of Information and Canadian Access to Information Act respectively; these files are expected to provide proof (a) that I made the brief visit to the USA and (b) that I was set up by Canadian officials who deliberately conspired to prevent me from complying with the voluntary departure notice. (C) AUSTRIA (ii) Mr Irving's account should be accepted. I.e. in the absence of evidence to the contrary Mr Irving is accepted as truthful! (F) BRITAIN (i) On 4 February 1994... In fact 11 February, a week later. The conviction was subsequently purged. It is not a conviction, but a civil penalty. The "conviction" is not purged, but the alleged "contempt" is. Perhaps it needs to be set out in our application that (a) the prosecution of my alleged offence in Germany is now increasingly recognized as politically inspired; (b) there is no such offence anywhere else on Earth as "defaming the memory of the dead", a trumped up charge if ever there was one--particularly when it is recalled that my actual offence was stating that the gas chamber shown to the tourists in Auschwitz is a fake built after the war by the Poles, which is now admitted by the Poles. Having said this, I must frankly add that had I known that it was a criminal offence to make such a statement even as an historian in Germany I would not have done so; but even a raving lunatic would not have guessed that there could be such an "offence" as this one on the statute book of a civilised country in the western world that has moreover signed the Helsinki Accords on freedom of speech! On page 19 are quoted in (iii) Mr Justice Mitchell's comments of 21 Februar 1994. I was in court all day and I not recall the judge making any such remarks in such severity. Since no court reporter was present, and no verbatim transcript was made, I think we must inquire where the passage quoted is from. No such words were quoted in the national press. I have seen such a passage only in the report of the London Jewish Chronicle, which did not have a reporter in court, and whose reporting is not above reproach. What needs to be pointed out is that (a) I submitted an affidavit explaining that none of the legal documents in a civil action had been served on me; thus (b) in my view I was not in contempt--I had not even known of the court hearing of February 11. I am not a complete fool, and if I had been served with a court order saying, as this one did, either you serve an affidavit of means or you will go to prison, then I would have been on my bike down to the courthouse like a shot. The contempt was that I had not filed an Affidavit of Means. The moment the order was duly served on me (in prison), I served the affidavit without any problem--I have nothing to hide. (c) If Judge Mitchell had really stated, in effect, that I had perjured myself in the affidavit he would hardly have ordered my immediate release from prison, rather the reverse. He in fact expressed anger and astonishment that I had been committed to prison, and asked the Creditors in this action why they had not merely asked that I should be produced. Well, you and I know the answer why people wanted to see me in prison, but they could hardly tell Mitchell that. I.e., let's see the Australian Minister's source for Mitchell's alleged remarks. Further and Better Particulars, please! Besides, natural justice would have required that the Minister ask me to comment, not on press reports that I had been imprisoned for contempt of court as he did (at the last moment, almost as an afterthought), but on the alleged remarks by Mitchell as reported by the Jewish Chronicle; I could then have set out an answer as in the above paragraph. The sting of this episode was not the Contempt, but my alleged untruthfulness in an affidavit; and about that I was not asked to comment, indeed I did not see the Jewish Chronicle report until weeks later. Should we ask the Jewish Chronicle to confirm that they did not have a reporter in court, and their report is based on second hand sources? Page 18, top, reference to the finding by the German authorities that Mr Irving's presence in that country infringes public security. This is evidently an arbitrary finding, by faceless left-wing officials; I have had no chance to test that finding, to give testimony, or whatever. Since they refer lower down the page to the finding having been made in November 1993 they are referring in fact to the arbitrary decree of the Munich Kreisverwaltungsreferat, a municipal city body with quasi-police powers but, extraordinarily, countrywide effect. My lawyer Hajo Herrmann is fighting that municipal decree, but the city of Munich has so far failed even to provide their case files to him, the first stage in an appeal to the Verwaltungsgericht (administrative court); evidently they are not too sure of their case. Yours sincerely, [signed] David Irving
Mr Ed Wall | ||||||||
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David Irving