To: <Irish Republican Lists:>
Sent: Friday, February 28, 2003 9:48 AM
Subject: trio of Bernadette stories....
Irish Echo
February 26-March 4, 2003
Vol 76 No. 8
McAliskey barred from U.S., threatened, daughter says
By Stephen McKinley
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Veteran Irish activist Bernadette McAliskey has been refused admission to the U.S. after being told at Chicago's O'Hare Airport that Immigration and
Naturalization Service officials consider her a "threat to national security."
According to McAliskey's daughter Deirdre, her mother was threatened with arrest, jail and even being shot, by the officials.
McAliskey, from Coalisland, Co. Tyrone, flew to the U.S. last Friday after passing through U.S. immigration successfully with Deirdre at Dublin airport. The five-day trip was a surprise visit to see friends in New York and to attend a christening. At O'Hare Airport, the two were collecting their luggage when an INS official approached, calling out McAliskey's name.
"Mummy was taken to an interview room," Deirdre McAliskey said on Sunday in New York, still visibly shaken by the experience.
"When I got to her, she was already angry and distressed. [The official] asked if she had ever been arrested and she said she had a 1969 conviction for rioting, but that she had been told by the U.S. consulate that that would have expired in 1989 after 20 years, and that she didn't need a visa."
Deirdre McAliskey said that she and her mother were horrified at their treatment by INS officials.
One said to her, 'If you contradict me one more time, I am going to slam cuffs on you and haul your ass to jail,'" she said.
Two officers, one whom the daughter said was surnamed Squires, threatened to jail the famously outspoken republican activist who is 56 and has
visited the U.S. on speaking tours many times since the start of the Troubles.
Said Deirdre: "The other guy had a name like Fenton, and he said to mummy: "If I were you, I wouldn't upset my boss, because I saw him fire a shot at a Russian guy last week and the bullet whizzed past my head. He's the kind of man who would do that and he has the authority."
"I asked Squires on what basis the decision was made and he said that he didn't have to tell us. Then he said he would tell us anyway.
The decision was based on a State Department review of her file and she was determined a 'real threat to the U.S.' "He told me that the fax came from the
country of > origin. To consider her a threat is outrageous."
The younger McAliskey was told she was free to return home or continue her journey in the U.S. She and her mother decided that it was best if she went to New York and told Bernadette's friends and colleagues what had happened.
Over the years, Bernadette McAliskey has been awarded the freedom of New York and San Francisco and many other peace awards.
After her contentious interview with the INS, she was told that she would be fingerprinted and photographed and then sent back to Ireland.
"She was told that they would do this with her consent or by force," said Deirdre McAliskey, who added that her mother is not in the best of health and had complained an hour before their plane that she was fatigued and that her legs were hurting.
McAliskey was a witness to the Bloody Sunday massacre in 1972 and she and her husband were seriously injured in an assassination attempt by loyalist paramilitaries in 1981.
The family has said that they have lodged a formal complaint with the U.S. embassy in Dublin and that they are seeking legal counsel.
New York attorney Eamonn Dornan, experienced in dealing with immigration cases, said that he had been consulted "informally" about the case. He said he was not sure how McAliskey should proceed, because "there's legally no way to challenge this particular refusal." He continued: "It will have to be a hallenge on the political side," referring to the possibility of friends and supporters of McAliskey putting pressure on the State Department. "It has always been the case that anyone who enters on the green I-94 visa waiver form has no right to a hearing before an immigration judge," Dornan said, referring to the document that all tourist visitors to the U.S. must fill in.
New electronic surveillance used by the State Department and the INS is "bringing about results like this," he said. "Someone gets on a plane and leaves for the U.S. Fifteen minutes later, information goes to the INS or State Department and when the person arrives, they are not allowed to enter the country."
Speaking through her daughter, McAliskey said she wanted to warn all Irish people who might be traveling to the U.S. for St. Patrick's Day to think carefully about their trip, because "this is how you can expect to be treated by the Bush regime."
Many friends and supporters of McAliskey have expressed their anger and frustration about the incident. Former gunrunner and republican activist George Harrison said that McAliskey was to have visited him in Brooklyn.
He attacked the INS for preventing her from entering the U.S. with strong words: "Like a soul afire, the contempt I feel for the despots who prevented this revolutionary flower from seeing me is matched by the respect I have for her and her brave and noble kind, both living and dead."
A U.S. Embassy spokesperson refused to speak about the case, saying that the embassy did not comment on individual cases.
This story appeared in the issue of February 26-March 4, 2003
====================================================
Irish Echo
February 26-March 4, 2003
Vol 76 No. 8
Editorial: Bernadette badly treated
Bernadette Devlin McAliskey might not be everyone's political cup of tea, but she is no threat to U.S. national security. The decision to bar her entry to the U.S. last week was, quite simply, wrong.
Indeed, it was foolish in its potential implications for other visitors from Northern Ireland and the Republic. If the likes of Devlin McAliskey pose a threat to the United States, this page could quickly run out of room naming others who would fall into the same category, some of them rather famous.
We live in dangerous times and the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service bears a heavy burden in its efforts to maintain secure borders. But those borders are less secure when time is wasted interrogating and denying entry to a woman whose political career includes the Freedom of the City honor from more than one U.S. city and former membership of a British parliament, which did not bar her from entering its inner precincts despite her avowed hostility to the British presence in Ireland.
The law can all too easily be abused and brought into disrepute, more so in nervous times such as these. But it's the rule of reasonable law that distinguishes us from those we perceive as being a threat to our national security. The treatment of Devlin Mcaliskey at O'Hare Airport in Chicago speaks more to a sense of national insecurity than anything else. Devlin McAliskey should be allowed enter the U.S. She also deserves an apology from the State Department.
---
Fourthwrite
24 February 2003
Bernadette McAliskey deported from USA
Tommy McKearney
One of Ireland's leading human rights campaigners and best known political figures of the last fifty years was deported on Friday past (21st February) from the USA. Immigration officials at Chicago airport detained and then deported the legendary civil rights activist ostensibly on the grounds that Mrs McAliskey poses a threat to US security.
The absurd notion that Bernadette McAliskey is any danger to the United States or any of its citizens is ridiculous. Only the regime currently in the White House would attempt to justify such a ridiculous idea. Mrs McAliskey has, of course, often been a trenchant critic of the US Government and its employees but only ever in that they were abusing the rights and dignity of its own or other people. In fact many liberal Irish Americans are now rather proud of the stand Bernadette McAliskey took in the late 1960's when she visited the US and identified herself with the cause of civil rights for the Afro-American community in the 'States.
Bernadette McAliskey is without doubt an exceptionally capable orator and is also a remarkably clear political thinker. She has therefore a huge ability to identify and castigate the politically intolerable. In a situation where jingoism and hyperbole have replaced logic, Bernadette has a gift for exposing the charlatan and discomfiting the propagandist.
It says a lot about the current United States, that it has joined that unlovely list of regimes that has been or is now afraid to hear any criticism or even risk hearing criticism of itself. The world's only super power is unwilling even to risk hearing itself criticised by a voice that would not have accessed any mainstream media outlet is no longer a flag bearer for democracy and it might not be much longer before it becomes a threat to it.
Eric Hayes Patkowski [EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://irsm.org (Pairt� Poblachtach S�isialach na h-�ireann)
http://www.wageslave.org/jcs (James Connolly Society)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/connolly (James Connolly Archive)
http://irsm.org/irsp/free_dessie (Free Dessie O'Hare)
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Tax Center - forms, calculators, tips, and more
