Excuse me, but there are NO similarities between the Gestapo and what the INS did. Aside from getting a warrant from a judge, aside from trying for months to get the "family"--distant relatives who had never seen the boy before November--to return the boy to his father, aside from one negotiation after another being "close" only to fall apart when the "family" wouldn't agree to one thing or another--the INS took the boy to his father. The Gestapo took people (including my own, my wife's, and friends' relatives) to a place where they were killed. Your analogy is far far worse than the analogies made in the late 60s and 70s comparing J. Edgar Hoover to the "Nazis".
The Gonzalez "family" in Miami used the boy for their own personal and perhaps political purposes. The uncle was unemployed until this fiasco occurred, all of the sudden he has a job to which he doesn't even have to show up, all of the sudden he has celebrity, a purpose. His daughter gets a child of her own. Isn't she a saint. They kept the boy a prisoner in their home for months, called it freedom. If you don't see any similarity between kidnapping and what they were doing (though it wasn't, to be sure, exactly the same as kidnapping, just similar to it), then we don't have "enough of a common frame of reference to even discuss the matter further."
There are two sides to this tale. And Elian didn't represent any "threat" to Clinton or Reno's power. They were trying to do the right thing in returning the boy to his father. Believe it or not, some people would actually prefer to live in Cuba with its poverty than the US. |
