Pause to remember: Two Easter Eves ago, Elian was seized as picture of Jesus was trampled.

Deroy Murdock is a senior fellow with the Atlas Economic Research Foundation and a policy advisor to the Cato Institute.

Saturday's Nacht-und-Nebel-style seizure of Elian Gonzalez by armed U.S. agents resembled Munich 1940 more than Miami 2000. The abuses of power and excessive force in this revolting episode epitomize a federal police state that has goose-stepped from Ruby Ridge to Waco and now to Little Havana.

At 5:14 a.m. -- while attorneys for the young Cuban refugee negotiated his status with Justice Department officials -- eight Immigration and Naturalization Service officers used a battering ram to knock down the front door of Elian's great uncle, Lazaro. Wielding machine guns, the body-armor-clad agents knocked over a picture of Jesus Christ and a statue of the Virgin Mary on Easter Eve. They then kicked down another door inside the Gonzalez home.

According to Elian's cousin, Marisleysis Gonzalez, federal agents held her at gun point while one screamed, "Give me the f - - - ing boy or we'll shoot you." An NBC cameraman said federal gunmen kicked him in the stomach, hit his sound man with a rifle butt and yelled, "Don't move or we'll shoot."

A Border Patrol agent in a helmet and goggles soon pointed his assault rifle at Elian and the man who shielded him in his arms -- Donato Dalrymple, one of the fishermen who rescued him from the Atlantic Ocean last Thanksgiving. As Elian hollered, "Help me! Help me!", he was whisked away in a white van driven by yet another federale whose face was hidden in a ski mask. Onlookers, meanwhile, were kept at bay with pepper spray.

This nauseating episode -- captured by TV cameras and Alan Diaz, an intrepid Associated Press photographer -- looked more like a kidnapping than an official act of the United States government. Then again, very little about this case has been kosher.

This raid supposedly was triggered after Attorney General Janet Reno decided that talks with the Gonzalez family had collapsed. Attorneys for the Gonzalezes say they spoke by phone with Reno and her subordinates late into the night and faxed proposals back and forth to Justice headquarters in Washington.

"For Janet Reno to say that negotiations had broken down at the time of the raid was an utter, utter lie," Barbara Lagoa, one of Elian's attorneys, told Fox News Channel.

The president previously urged the Gonzalezes to follow the rule of law -- and who better than Bill Clinton could make such an admonition? Nonetheless, it appears that federal officials trampled the rule of law when they burst into Lazaro Gonzalez's private property with a dubious search warrant. As Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe wrote in the April 25 New York Times, "it was not a warrant to seize the child. Elian was not lost, and it is a semantic sleight of hand to compare his forcible removal to the seizure of evidence, which is what a search warrant is for." Tribe, a veteran liberal, added: "Ms. Reno's decision to take the law as well as the child into her own hands seems worse than a political blunder. Even if well intended, her decision strikes at the heart of constitutional government and shakes the safeguards of liberty."

Furthermore, the 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruled April 20 that Elian Gonzalez himself may have the right to seek political asylum in the United States, even against his father's wishes. The decision that Elian is entitled to a day in court -- specifically a May 11 INS asylum appeal hearing -- argues against his immediate transfer to his father. Juan Miguel Gonzalez is currently influenced, if not thoroughly controlled, by Cuban functionaries. His parents are reportedly in a Cuban government compound, perhaps held as collateral until their son returns to Fidel Castro's "workers' paradise." Juan Miguel has spent nearly his entire sojourn in America in the home of a senior Cuban diplomat. Imagine a North Korean boy who had escaped to Seoul awaiting a court hearing in the "neutral" territory of an apartment occupied by the Pyongyang regime's attache.

The Circuit Court also chastised the Clinton Administration for ignoring Elian's desires. "According to the record, plaintiff - although a young child - has expressed a wish that he not be returned to Cuba," the three-judge panel wrote.

"It appears that never have INS officials attempted to interview plaintiff about his wishes.

"It is not clear that the INS, in finding plaintiff's father to be the only proper representative, considered all of the relevant factors -- particularly the child's separate and independent interests in seeking asylum."

Fox News analyst Dick Morris joked that Hillary Clinton's next book will be called "It Takes a SWAT Team." The thuggishness of the Clinton Administration, reputedly the best friends a child could have, likely will scar Elian for years. Just last April 17, the Justice Department released a letter from Dr. Irwin Redlener claiming that "Elian Gonzalez is now in a state of imminent danger to his physical and emotional well-being in a home that I consider to be psychologically abusive." Perhaps the Clintons and Janet Reno believed Elian would find federal gun muzzles psychologically soothing. As Reno helpfully explained: "Elian Gonzalez is a child who needs to be cherished."

Adding further to all this intrigue is the fact that Dr. Redlener is a pediatrician, not a psychologist. As such, he is as qualified to comment on Elian's state of mind as a psychologist is to treat him for chicken pox. Beyond that, Dr. Redlener never even spoke with Elian. Unless Dr. Redlener is clairvoyant, he seems entirely unable to evaluate Elian's psyche. Redlener, it transpires, also served on Hillary Clinton's health care task force in 1993 and chaired the 1992 Clinton-Gore National Health Leadership Council. He is little more than an Administration flack with a stethoscope.

Add to this that Juan Miguel Gonzalez is represented by President Clinton's top-dollar impeachment attorney, Greg Craig. Nothing about the Elian Gonzalez case is as it seems. An adorable six-year-old boy is the latest victim of a lawless regime seemingly bent on serving the political wishes of Fidel Castro, even at gunpoint. So it goes these days in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

Question:

1) What happened to the AP photos of the feds' thuggery inside the house? Does the AP ordinarily suppress its own photos?

2) Do you believe as I do that it's Elian who got W elected? The Cubans had been voting less Republican in recent years - but that stopped in 2000, when they turned out big for Bush, and helped him win Florida by a whisker. 3) Do you believe with Tom DeLay that Elian had the hand of God on him, from the moment the dolphins came to his aid in the sea - - - - and perhaps up to this very point in time? 4) Do you believe Reno, Clinton and the media will ever be held to account for getting Elian keelhauled back to Castro? 5) Why didn't Elian's defenders place him, at least while the heat was on, with a gay couple in Miami? The media and Clinton would have immediately dropped their insistence that he be shipped back to Castro.

19 March 2002

On the eve of the two-year anniversary of Elian's seizure at gunpoint by INS

thugs who ought to have been arresting Islamic terrorists, the Washington

Post published this pathetic follow-up, which, despite the reporter's

fundamental, blind acceptance of Elian's return to tyranny, is worth

reading:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A60888-2002Mar8.html

[those inclined should write to letters@washpost.com and

ombudsman@washpost.com]

19 March 2002

To: Eugene Robinson, Assistant Managing Editor, Washington Post

From: Scott Holleran

Subject: Looking for Eilan

cc: Letters

Dear Mr. Robinson:

I read your story, Looking for Elian, with interest; the headline caught

my eye since not one reporter has laid his eyes on an unaccompanied Elian

since he was seized by the INS in a pre-dawn military raid two years ago.

From the beginning, I knew that finding Elian was unlikely, because he

lives in a communist dictatorship where there's no such thing as freedom of

the press, which is why those of us who think communism constitutes child

abuse opposed sending him back to that hell you described.

I found your story well-written and often involving -- until the end,

when you write: "The Cuban government has kept journalists away from [Elian

and his Cuba family], and the truth is that this is a good thing."

Good --- for whom? For Elian Gonzalez, who is shut off from freedom? For

the press, which is shut off from reporting? Perhaps you mean it's good for

the communist regime, which must repress dissent in order to survive.

Any reporter who regards being completely cut off from the media and

from any independent evaluation as good for any human being, especially a

child, should never should be sent to Cuba, let alone be assigned a story

about a child's life in Cuba.

Your viewpoint makes the whole premise of looking for Elian a lie -- why

bother looking for one who, according to you, will be harmed by your

reporting?

Knowing the history of the Soviet Union and China and that you're in the

grip of Castro, did it really never dawn on you that Elian might be shut off

from the free world because Cuba's totalitarian regime doesn't want you to

know how he lives? Are you seriously willing to take the word of a

second-rate bureaucrat mouthing Havana's dictates as the final arbiter on

the fate of a child whose life you are assigned to chronicle? Is that all it

takes to shoo the Washington Post away from following up on the biggest

story of 2000 --- a few words from a heel-clicking communist?

If so, the Post applies a higher standard to terrorists at Guantanomo

Bay than to a child whose mother died to bring him to America. What a

twisted hierarchy of values.

You refer without attribution to "a constant stream" of reporters from

whom Elian presumably must be protected, as if a reporter is more dangerous

than that thug who sure made an impression on *you*, a grown man. And that

thug is a daily presence in Elian's life, not a passing moment of danger in

an assistant managing editor's notes.

Journalism is the relentless pursuit of truth; you ostensibly went to

find Elian Gonzalez and, being told by threat of force that you are not

welcome, you abandoned that journey and blindly accepted the ideas of those

who refused you.

Looking for Elian? You weren't looking for Elian. The article is written

as if you were looking for vindication of a nation that, in one of its

darkest moments, forcibly returned a child refugee from communism *to*

communism.

If you were looking for such vindication--or at least moral

neutrality--you sure came away empty-handed. When the INS should have been

arresting Islamic terrorists, they were forcing a child at gunpoint to live

in tyranny. Now even the mighty Washington Post can't get a lousy photograph

to prove he exists, let alone report how he lives.

This nation ought to be ashamed of turning its back on that child -- and

on our founding principle of inalienable individual rights -- and your

half-hearted, failed attempt to find him demonstrates why.

Sincerely,

Scott Holleran

SCOTT HOLLERAN

sholleran@earthlink.net

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