USA Ban for 10 Years
With aircraft stuck in the States, having been deported in leg irons earlier this year, I now had an appointment for an American visa. I trained it from Cardiff to Paddington to an entertaining but predictable day first in the Royal Courts of Justice and then in Grosvenor Square.
I was to witness yet another travesty of justice in that building. Vivacious Charlie Seven, seen here earlier [ photo gallery] , sitting on some protestor' motor bike outside UK's main court building, speaks to Lord Justice Collins, at length with a gallery of chronic litigants cheering her on! Just how is it defendants in her case, involving alleged theft, kidnap and harassment do not even need to turn up? How come the transcript of Judge Pumfrey's lower court was clearly at gross variance to the final judgment? She is refused a substantive hearing.
Five years she has been at it, apparently, but still believing this West-End theatre, with no ice cream or pop corn in the interval, was the place to obtain justice! ‘Justice' ah, I remember Judge Blom- Cooper telling me once, in incestuous Guernsey, that justice was a just a man made concept. Only at it for five years, a mere fledgling, I thought but a pretty one and went off to knock on Her Majesty's Treasury Solicitor's door in the very same building. Rather like the Crown Prosecution Service with its offices in the Barry police station!
No answer, not in again! Is the man never here? Now this was getting stupid. Without my being consulted, at the height of my demanding a Trial by Jury back in 2003, the HM Attorney General had ordered I be ‘certified' but needed a vast team of HM lawyers to achieve it. I was here in London, again, to try and get to the bottom of an apparent conspiracy between the South Wales Police and Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons. I had in my hand a pile of leaked internal memos between the HM Solicitor General, HM Privy Council and The Home Office, to name but a few, that had just happened to have ‘come my way'. My Lewis machine gun off the old DH2 biplane was outside as I knew she would not make it through the metal detector at the court's main door.
Feeling a trifle frustrated I stepped out into the sun shine and hailed a taxi cab for the US Embassy. Still ringing in my ears were Mr Justice Andrew Collins's quotes before me, from his government's, two year in the making, dossier suggesting my forty odd Judicial Review Applications had had ‘no merit'. "No merit"? "Had no merit"? Perish the thought. My recent £15,000 judgment against the Home Secretary for yet another false imprisonment Collins J had previously blocked for over a year! Now all I need to find is the Home Secretary's house for Patrick, my burly Irish bailiff, to seize her furniture and ‘tele'.
Now the US Embassy was a nasty experience but, perhaps, if I had stopped and thought and compared the morals applied in that building to one I had just left there would be no doubt as which one would finally come up smelling of roses.
Now to get into this US fortress in the centre of London you must first say hi to ‘Ike', not the strong wind that nearly smashed my cub, last week, sitting patiently in Texas for me. No, I mean the grand statue of General Eisenhower, Supreme Commander for the 6th June 1944 D-day landings, the very week I was conceived.
It was no photographs allowed and at the first check point it was also made very clear my mobile phone was not getting through either. Already late for the appointment I hurriedly buried the phone in Uncle Sam's front garden but it not was until I was in the building I remembered I had forgotten to switch the dam thing off.....well there was soon much activity, to long to recount just now but as the friendly policeman said later, armed to the teeth with automatic weapons, "At least we did not need to cordon off a two mile square of London and call in the sniffer dogs"! So I hid it somewhere else.
Five and a half hours I was in that building naively thinking I could persuade the team my deportation from Texas in May had been triggered off by a little misunderstanding and a ‘communication breakdown'.
The lady referred to the US Department of Homeland Security's report from my weeks in a Texas jail, awaiting deportation. Part of which had been sent to the UK's Civil Aviation authority causing immediate suspension of my pilot's licences. She then accused me of operating around the world under an alias name, a ‘Mr William something Garcia'!
"No I did not land on Mr Bush's front lawn", "No, I was not ‘engaged in criminal activity' as written on the DHS charge sheet", "No, I was not ‘endangering the general public'", also written on the charge sheet. No visa despite my telling the embassy staff that, upon my release from Austin Lunatic Asylum, their certificate, confirming my sanity on the day of examination, stuffed well deep in my pocket, the FAA had telephoned to re assure me there had been no offence committed. My telling them my actual landing of the cub, outside the P49 prohibited zone, five miles from the US President's ranch in a field full of cows, also appeared to fall on deaf ears.
I was simply trying to deliver a ‘thank you' letter to the Commander in Chief of US Coast Guard who had just saved my life from the sharks, a hundred miles off the Dominican Republic in the Caribbean. It still makes me shudder when I recall my Texas experience. Just what is going on in this crazy, crazy world?