HUMBERTO FONTOVA: ERIC HOLDER AND THE ELIAN GONZALEZ CASE
http://townhall.com/columnists/humbertofontova/2011/04/27/when_eric_holder_earned_his_spurs_elian_gonzalez,_april_22,_2000
The New Black Panther Party threatened Philadelphia voters with billy clubs and Eric Holder’s justice department couldn’t be bothered. CAIR was accused of fundraising for Hamas, and Eric Holder shrugged.
But back when Fidel Castro demanded the return of an escaped slave, Eric Holder snapped to attention, clicked his heels, and sprung to action. Scrupulous legality, we’re given to understand by Mr Holder, prevents his Department from prosecutions against the New Black Panthers and CAIR.
But regarding scrupulous legality, FoxNews Andrew Napolitano had (then Deputy) Attorney General Eric Holder’s number way back in April 23rd, 2000. Here it is thanks to The Media Research Center:
Napolitano: Tell me, Mr. Holder, why did you not get a court order authorizing you to go in and get the boy (Elian Gonzalez)?
Holder: Because we didn’t need a court order. INS can do this on its own.
Napolitano: You know that a court order would have given you the cloak of respectability to have seized the boy.
Holder: We didn’t need an order.
Napolitano: Then why did you ask the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals for such an order if you didn’t need one?
Holder: [Silence]
Napolitano: The fact is, for the first time in history you have taken a child from his residence at gunpoint to enforce your custody position, even though you did not have an order authorizing it. When is the last time a boy, a child, was taken at the point of a gun without an order of a judge…Unprecedented in American history.”
Holder: “He was not taken at the point of a gun.”
Napolitano: “We have a photograph showing he was taken at the point of a gun.”
Holder: “They were armed agents who went in there who acted very sensitively…”
Thanks to the ritual MSM-Castroite collusion most people forget (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy — which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM-Democratic complex) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.
The evidence — frantically buried by the MSM-Democratic complex) — was overwhelming. Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!
Elian’s Miami uncle, Lazaro, explained it repeatedly and best: “I always said I would turn over Elian to his father, when Juan Miguel would come here and claim him. But I (along with practically everyone with experience under communism from Cambodians to Hungarians and from Lithuanians to Cubans) knew such a thing was impossible. He couldn’t do that. I knew it wasn’t Juan Miguel requesting Elian–it was Fidel.”
The legal-weasels forgot (or missed) that on Dec, 1st 1999 the INS asserted that Miami-based uncle Lazaro was indeed Elian’s legal custodian and Florida’s family court indeed the place to arbitrate further issues.
Then on Dec 5th, 1999, Castro clapped his hands and his MSM minions snapped to attention. Within weeks Clinton’s INS had turned its initial decision on its head. Within months this same INS was kicking down Lazaro’s door, pummeling camera men and elderly ladies to the ground with jackboots and wrenching a screaming Elian from his legal custodians in a blaze of pepper gas and machine guns. When asked for the legal authority for this, they brandished either a search warrant to seize evidence that didn’t exist (and would not have been hidden anyway.) or an arrest warrant to seize someone who no one claimed was a criminal or even a lawbreaker!
“They never made it clear just what kind of warrant” it was. And neither would it have been legal,” patiently explained Alan Dershowitz (no less!)
So why did Elian’s father change his tune?
Remember Godfather II? Remember the Senate hearings where Frankie Pentangeli, under FBI protection, was prepared to testify against Michael Corleone? The stage was set. Looked like a done-deal for the Feds. Then Frankie looks up and sees his bewildered brother Vincenzo from Sicily, sitting next to Mikey.
Whoops! Frankie sure changed his tune, didn’t he?
Think of Juan Miguel as Frankie Pentangeli. The gun Fidel Castro held to Juan Miguel’s head was as invisible (to those without experience with Communism) as the one Mikey held to Pentangeli’s head was to most spectators at those hearings.
After Elian’s shanghaiing, the New York Times’ incomparable Thomas Friedman probably spoke for most of his colleagues: “Yup, I gotta confess, that now famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S.”
Recently Uncle Lazaro Gonzalez who suffered ten years in Castro’s dungeons and torture-chambers) provided an update: “The Castro regime won’t allow us to contact the boy “and the entire family is forbidden to speak to us. Every time they detect a call from us in Miami, the line drops. I’d love to go and see Elián, talk to him. But they’ll never let us.”
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