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Knowing Too Much and Saying It Too Well: Bernadette McAliskey Barred from US national |
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news report
 Monday February 24, 2003 02:29 by The Blanket - A journal of protest & dissent Belfast
 You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane And all they will call you will be deportee - Woody Guthrie Knowing Too Much and Saying It Too Well: Bernadette McAliskey Barred from US With the issue now set to traverse the public domain I rang Bernadette McAliskey to get her view. When she came to the phone I greeted her with, 'so I am speaking to a bona fide deportee.' Her laugh, the offspring of an indomitable spirit, wasted little time in persuading me that while she may have been angry she was undaunted by her ordeal. ‘So what did you do to fall foul of Uncle Sam?’ I asked. She didn’t look Arabic and they hardly thought she was French. ‘Just did things the way the Americans ask that they be done,’ she told me. She had travelled to the States with her daughter Deirdre intending to stay a week. She had completed her paperwork in the same manner that she had been doing since 1989. Everything was in order and she expected the trip to be pretty much like the numerous others she had made. On arrival in O’Hare, she sensed trouble when her name was announced over the tannoy system. ‘I was told right away that I was being treated as if I was Mrs Al Qaida.’ A ‘very jumpy’ immigration official approached her and she was advised to accompany him, not to lift anything, nor try to escape. A fax had been sent to O’Hare from an American immigration official in Shannon wrongly telling US officials that that Bernadette was not entitled to a visa waiver and that she had fraudulently filled in her documentation. She found the behaviour of the O’Hare immigration officials ‘very threatening and aggressive.’ She was informed that she had no rights to which she responded that she had human rights and the US government was obligated to uphold those rights. This was greeted with contempt. Those detaining her told her that there were no rights for anyone not of US nationality since 9/11. When she insisted on her rights she was informed by a Mr Squires, ‘if you tell us again that you have rights you will be handcuffed and led to prison.’ Mr Squires’ gofer, obviously not impressed with the refusal of Bernadette to emulate himself and slavishly take orders from Mr Squires, warned her, ‘don’t mess with my boss as he can shoot you. He shot over the head of a Russian last week.’ The officials then insisted on photographing and fingerprinting the detained woman. She objected and was told that it would be imposed upon her by force. After her demeaning experience, throughout which she was denied access to a lawyer, she was escorted to the plane by an armed guard and sent back to Ireland. Bernadette says that she is lodging complaints and what she wants to know from the Irish government is who is responsible for protecting her rights from abuse by an American official on Irish soil. The Shannon based immigration official arbitrarily sent information to Immigration and Naturalization at O’Hare which led to her rights being violated. These included freedom of the security of her person, freedom of expression and freedom of movement. ‘I want to know what is my right. I want to know who is going to protect me from the actions of a foreign government official working in my own country.’ McAliskey said her detention and expulsion from the US was a symptom of President George Bush’s abuse of authority at a time when he was preparing the country for a war on Iraq - all dissenting voices had to be shut down. A woman who has travelled consistently to the US over the past three decades has arbitrarily been deemed by the State Department as someone who ‘poses a serious threat to the security of the United States.’ Her daughter Deirdre rubbished such a notion: ‘I can't imagine what threat they could think she poses to US security. Unless the threat is knowing too much and saying it too well.’ |
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Comments (5 of 5)
Jump To Comment: 5 4 3 2 1tHE MORONIC bUSH AND THE CLIQUE OF VICIOUS CORPORATE GANGSTERS ARE MERELY CONTINUING A PROCESS BEGUN BY AMERICAN GOVERNMENTS AFTER WW1 AND GREATLY ACCELERATED FOLLOWING WW2. THE MILITARY MENTALITY IN THE USA CURRENTLY IS IN MANY WAYS SIMILAR TO THAT EXISTING IN NAZI GERMANY UNTIL 1945 BOLSTERED IN THE CASE OF THE US BY THE SUPERMAN BULLSHIT FROM HOLYWOOD DEPICTING MILITARY THUGGERY IN HEROIC TERMS.
MY EXPERIENCE IN AMERICA SHOWED ME THAT generally AMERICANS WERE MORE GULLIBLE THAN EUROPEANS. I DO NOT MEAN THIS IN A RACIST WAY BUT ATTRIBUTE IT TO THE INTENSITY OF NATIONALISM AND RELIGION AND THAT SOCIAL PLAGUE THAT IS REFERRED TO AS 'THE MORAL MAJORITY.
gIVEN THE PREDATORY MINDSET OF CORPORATE AMERICA AND THE INSATIABLE DEMANDS OF ITS CAPITALISTS AND ITS VICIOUS MILITARY ESTABLISHMENT AND THE BURGEONING ASPIRATIONS AND ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT OF STATE-CAPITALIST CHINA THE FUTURE MUST LOOK BLEAK FOR HUMANITY.
MY 14 YEAR-OLD GRANDSON ASK ME ONE DAY HOW A COUNTRY WITH A SO-CALLED 'SMART' BOMB CAN HAVE AN ULTRA STUPID PRESIDENT..
Could this be some kind of revenge by the US government at Shannon for the demonstrations against the warport? Does the US government (or its bureaucrats in the field) have any reason to associate Ms. McAliskey with these protests? If she hasn't been involved and if the "authorities" know this, could this simply be their way of arbitrarily reminding us "screw with us, we'll screw with your people"?
I don't have any answers, but these are the questions that come to mind.
Shannon has become the property of the US Govt. protected by the Irish army. This is a violation not just of Irish neutrality but of Irish sovereignty. Have Ahern and his gang no shame.
Comment posted here has been edited as it is a copy and paste from www.newsday.com but no longer seems to be available on that site.
Finding Trouble in U.S.
Jimmy Breslin
February 24, 2003
"I'm a 55-year-old granny with a gammy leg after years of to'ins and fro'ins, and I'm here on a cheap holiday in New York, sourced on the Internet by my daughter," Bernadette Devlin McAliskey was saying yesterday.
"We were going for our luggage. We were in Chicago. The cheap flight takes you to New York that way. We didn't have to go through immigration, they pass you through in Dublin now. The loudspeaker calls out 'McAliskey.' We go up to your man and say yes, and we're immedately surrounded by three men and a woman. They grab the passports out of our hands. One of the men says to me, "We've a fax from our agents in Dublin. It says you're a potential or real threat to the United States.'
She told them to look at the name on the passport, which says Bernadette Devlin McAliskey.
"I've been coming back and forth to this country for 30 years," she told them.
"You've evaded us before, but you're not going to do it now," one of the immigration people, the oldest one, said.
"Look at the passport. Read the name. I was a member of Parliament."
"What year?"
"Nineteen sixty nine."
"That made you 21 years old," one of them said. "Come on." He motioned toward an office.
She was 21 then, and she was famous all over the world, but fame comes and goes in a minute and here were four people who not only never heard of her, but were detaining her.
She remembered yesterday that she said, "This is crazy."
The older agent said, "If you tell me one more time that this is crazy, I'll put handcuffs on you and throw you into a cell."
"All right, I won't say one more time that this is crazy. But it is crazy," she said.
Then Bernadette Devlin, who for so many years showed Catholics in Northern Ireland how to breathe and be as unafraid as she was, and by doing so placed the first jobs they ever had into their lives, this small woman with music for a voice who thrilled so many Irish in New York, wound up in an office, where she was fingerprinted and photographed.
Humiliate them. Then frighten them. "I'm going to throw you in prison," the older man said.
He tried the wrong party. "You can't do that," she said. "I have rights. I have the right to free movement. I have human rights. I have the right to be protected under the Constitution of the United States."
The daughter overheard one of them say, "After 9/11, nobody has any rights."
It was common mouthing and behavior from a government that daily shears people of their rights.
"This must be the way they treat every Mrs. McAliskey," she was saying yesterday. "That was the most disturbing."
Under John Ashcroft, a prayer breakfast man who probably prays against people, the Justice Department doesn't believe in the Bill of Rights. Ashcroft is useless in a big Justice Department case against such as Enron. How could he be? Even he says he accepted big donations from them.
But he can sweep the rights of individuals out of the room, and do it while humming prayer songs.
In one week in this city, an anti-war demonstration was blocked by the mayor and police commissioner, and now Bernadette Devlin is deported. That one comes from Washington. She is cleared easily by American agents in Dublin who knew she was in order. Suddenly, they are ordered to send a fax to Chicago to block her. Somebody in Washington, with the mind of a rodent, has to order that.
This has to be all about her making a speech against the war someplace and the British put in a complaint to our authorities.
At the Chicago airport, they asked Bernadette if she ever had been arrested. Yes, in Northern Ireland. Had she been in prison? Yes, for six months. "I told them I was convicted of an offense for civil rights demonstrating 20 years ago."
Her daughter, Deirdre, remembers one of them saying, "See, that makes her ineligible to be in the country. She knew that. She snuck past the people in Dublin."
Bernadette said yesterday, "I told them that it has to be two years in jail before you're ineligible to enter the United States. I was in for six months. That put me in bracket A of 211. My ineligibility was lifted. I've been going and coming to this country for 30 years now. Go look me up on the computer."
One of them whispered to her, "Don't make my boss mad. He shot at Russians here."
"I was going to tell them that I was shot in Northern Ireland, but now I was afraid that he would be upset and start shooting at me. Who knew what they would do? They were in a panic. Totally irrational. They had a fax that said I was a potential or real threat to America. I'm sitting there, an old nuclear warhead."
She started in again about them looking up her file in the computer. "It's there," she said. "They have a profile of me." Finally, the older agent went into another room. Minutes passed. When he came out he was different. "She's telling the truth," he told the others.
Then he said to her, "You're Bernadette Devlin."
"Yes, I am."
"Then you're right. It is crazy. I can't do anything about it. This fax says you can't enter the country. I've got to send you back."
She was seething with contempt. Amazingly, they let the daughter, Deirdre, go off to New York, so she could tell everybody what had happened. The agents hadn't looked at the luggage; Deirdre picked hers up and was gone.
Bernadette was escorted to the Aer Lingus flight back to Dublin. She had arrived at 5:20 p.m. Now, at 7:30 p.m. on Friday night, all this beauty was being deported.
She was found yesterday at her home in Coalisland, Northern Island.
is when they stop you entering the USA you have already sat through the deep vein thrombosis, chewed the nasty sugar sweets and watched the effin shite movie.
I prefer being stopped before hand. I propose a long list of all those deemed "unwelcome" in the USA be placed at all airports that serve the USA.
It could be phone directory sort of thing.
It has long seemed bery unfair to me that you can buy a ticket, cross the Atlantic and then at the last minute without chance of refund be refused entry.
B. Mc Aliskey is on a long list. So am I. So are over six thousand members of the Islamic Academic community. So are hundreds of Greens. So are hundreds of anti-capitalist activists. I really cant say that all these people know too much. I think rather the US know too little about the bad bad feeling it has systematically fostered in its own migrant communities.
Anyway I still smart somewhat over "my flight to nowhere" so check you´re not barred before you go.
And if you are really insistent, "no-borders" includes the USA on its global wishlist, and there are still several frontier crossing opportunities mostly on the Canadian side.
If you do "sneak" into the States, probably best not to do any high profile press conferences or charity gigs or even go on radio. But you could probably either go to the "Burning Man Festival" or get a job in a fast food restaurant.
Being deported is of course "de-rigour" in certain circles, and I suppose B. Mc Aliskey could hold her head high in a few circles now. But to have a really respected "no-borders" profile you have to have been either deported from an African state or "bought out" of an Asian prison.
Finally if the USA stops so many of us entering, and indeed junior partner UK makes it so nasty an experience with the C&E folk "lending a hand" why cant we do a reciprocal list of "unwanted"?
Quid pro Quo.
You dont want B Mc A!
=
we dont want Kissenger.
(you could of course make up your own list, you dont have to pick "high-profile" "air-miles heavy"
activists.