Roy Inglee
Delaware

I witnessed my father being kidnapped by strange men from our front door and bundled into an unmarked car. Can someone from the Bush Administration explain what we are to do, now that they have deported our father? Where is the justice in the Justice Department of the U.S. for my family and me? …

Our dad explained to us the harassment his family suffered at the hands of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. A police force that only protected the interests of the loyalist and unionist community. The British government is known to have colluded with loyalists in the murder of nationalists and particularly human rights lawyers.

Dad was a member of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. Aren’t civil rights something worth achieving and defending? The RUC were intent on framing my father, so they said he was involved in terrorist activity and planted weapons where they arrested him. My father escaped from the prison to which he was taken, because he knew that—like many others in Northern Ireland back then—they would have imprisoned him for most of his life for something he didn’t do.

We demand that our father be returned.

Sean McNicholl

[John McNicholl, an Irish Republican activist who entered the United States in the mid-1980s, was deported by the U.S. government to the United Kingdom on July 18. He had escaped from the infamous Maze Prison near Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1976 where he was being held on frame-up charges of having killed an RUC cop and wounded another. He was deported after being arrested outside his home in Philadelphia as he headed to work. McNicholl had been appealing a deportation order since 1997.— Editor]

Haddad deportation
In a previous letter, “Haddad Deported,” I concluded, with undue pessimism, that “it looks like he will now be in prison in Lebanon.” Although agents took him from U.S. prison to the plane in complete secrecy, his FBI escorts on the plane allowed him to make a collect phone call midway to Lebanon to his wife in Ann Arbor, who alerted family and friends to meet him at Beirut airport. At the time I wrote the letter, Haddad’s mother in Lebanon was waiting 4-6 hours after the plane arrived while he was apparently being interrogated by Lebanese authorities.

The U.S. government has announced that it will deport 13,000 immigrants from among the 86,000 Middle Eastern males over 16 who complied with required interrogations by INS.

As the wife of Rabih Haddad, the founder of a Muslim charity seized by Federal Authorities in response to 9/11, Sulaima Rushaid has been a quiet symbol of standing up for one’s rights with dignity during these mass deportations. The deportation of Sulaima Rushaid, Haddad’s wife, and children, a week later, was more public than the secret “disappearance” to Amsterdam of Haddad himself. The Free Rabih Haddad Defense Committee had a rally of about 50 people outside the Detroit Immigration Building, and Rabih Haddad spoke to supporters through a cell phone hook-up.

Denis Hoppe
Ann Arbor, Michigan
 

Black unemployment
I found the article on black unemployment to have a confusing statement. “If they had stopped trying, the government would have stopped including them in their calculations.” As far as I know there is not a national poll on who is looking for work. The government calculates who is “looking” for work according to who is on the unemployment rolls. These figures always grossly understate the number of true unemployed. They can also be just plain wrong, as was the case recently where unemployment went “down” from 6.4 percent to 6.2 percent. The new figure did not represent people not looking for work or getting jobs (job losses went up!), but that unemployment checks are running out for many before they can find a job.

Rick Young
Chicago, Illinois

[Official statistics count not only those who receive unemployment benefits or who have filed claims for unemployment insurance. The Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts a monthly population survey that attempts to include those looking for work, like, for example, those registered with state unemployment services as seeking employment. —Editor]

The letters column is an open forum for all viewpoints on subjects of interest to working people.

Please keep your letters brief. Where necessary they will be abridged. Please indicate if you prefer that your initials be used rather than your full name.  
 
 
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