By William Safire. The New York Times. April 24, 2000
WASHINGTON -- Photograph #1 shows a helmeted, goggled, grimacing man pointing a fearsome automatic weapon toward a terrified child being protected by the man who rescued him from the ocean five months ago.
Photograph #2 shows the same child hours later, posing smiling and relaxed in the arms of his father.
The first photo was shot by Alan Diaz of The Associated Press, who will presumably provide its reporters with full details surrounding the politically dismaying spot-news photo. Diaz, who was waved into the house by its residents' shocked attorney, could respond credibly to such questions as:
Were other shots taken in the instants before and after? Was anything posed? Who was first to grab the child? What were the subjects saying? The news organization is objective; we'll believe its report.
The second photo was credited "courtesy of Juan Miguel González," carefully posed for propaganda purposes. It was taken -- after nobody knows how much cajoling -- by Gregory Craig, President Clinton's personal lawyer, who was hired by the left-wing church group serving Fidel
Castro's interests.
Attorney General Janet Reno's spokesman, Eric Holder, admonished us yesterday "not to focus on" the photo taken by the free press. "The picture that Americans should focus on," he says, is #2, of the happy family taken and distributed by the Clinton-Craig-Cuban connection.
Which photo do you believe illuminates the truth of this drama -- the spot-news shot or the propaganda pose? Will Clinton-Reno Justice be remembered for the happy reunion or by the brutal excess of police power that brought it about?
I've been among the majority who believed that, in the close judgment between a father's custodial rights and a child's opportunity to live in a free society, the father had the edge. Let the courts decide, we thought; in due course, Mr. González would prevail and the rule of law be
grudgingly obeyed.
But Reno, prodded by Clinton, who wanted to teach Cuban-Americans a lesson, could not abide further challenge to executive fiats. When the lawyer Craig turned down the final compromise that had been agreed to by Elián's relatives in Miami, she caved in to Craig's pressure and sent in
the troops.
In so doing, she made three mistakes that discredited her office, disgusted the fair-minded and demeaned the United States.
Mistake 1: I am the law. No executive officials can arrogate to themselves the notion that they are "the law"; they merely execute laws passed by legislatures and interpreted by courts. The genius of the American system is that the individual can with impunity fight the federal
government in federal courts and in Congress. In this case, the Clinton administration circumvented a federal appeals court decision that encouraged the relatives' case; instead, the can't-wait enforcers took the law into their own heavy hands.
Mistake 2: Treating Elián as a hostage. When hostages are endangered, the government can trick the terrorists by stringing them along and then striking in the dead of night with overwhelming force. Wrongly construing Elián to be a hostage, Reno talked with the relatives' lawyers
on the phone, supposedly negotiating, even as her agents in body armor smashed down the door.
But Elián was no hostage; nobody was harming him or threatening anybody's life. In this civil case, lawyers for the boy's loving relatives were disputing the Immigration Service's demands in a court of law. For Reno to claim "intelligence" (from the F.B.I.?) that the
Cuban-Americans' arguably legal defiance was backed up with hidden weapons -- and therefore that she was urgently required to launch a cruel and violent assault by a score of our most ferocious-looking agents -- is ludicrous. Clinton Justice plainly lost its head.
Mistake 3. In the dead of night, nobody would see. Clinton may have realized that by pressing Reno to smash into a peaceful citizen's home in darkness to search and seize, the only visible injury would be to the spirit of the Fourth Amendment. He counted, as usual, on not getting caught in
the act. That was the crowning mistake: a photographer showed up to record the nation's shame. |