To the editor:

We admire Rich Shapiro and Lindy Ellis’s courage and commitment to justice in their support for Tanveer Hussain. They stood by him in the face of the outrageous and extralegal attempts at intimidation that Rich Shapiro reported in his Guest Commentary, and which we first learned about there.

One of us (Chuck) was Mr. Hussain’s English tutor and has studied the transcript of the Facebook messages between him and the purported victim. I (Chuck) am professor emeritus of linguistics at the City University of New York (Queens College and the CUNY Graduate Center) and was chair of a department that included a teacher-training program in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). This experience leads me to feel confident in my judgment that Mr. Hussain’s English language proficiency was extremely low when the events leading to his arrest took place last year. I find plausible Shapiro’s assertion that Mr. Hussain could not have written or understood the damning messages on his Facebook page, and that in fact they were composed by a ghostwriter in India (who was only slightly more proficient than Mr. Hussain in English); Mr. Hussain then copied and pasted them into Facebook.

An important part of this story, which deserves the greatest possible publicity, is that a community of people in this area came together in the name of justice to support and defend Mr. Hussain. We now know that Shapiro and Ellis’s effective and energetic leadership occurred despite the harassment Shapiro reported in your paper, and this increases our respect.

We firmly believe that Tanveer Hussain is innocent in every sense of the term: He did not perform the acts that he was indicted for, he is free of significant moral flaws, and he is naive in the world. We hope that he can soon return home free from threats of further calumny.

Chuck and Helen Cairns

Ray Brook