Just wanted to be sure everyone saw this:
Americans don't care, do they?
Excessive-force raids do happen in America
May 6, 2000
BY ARIANNA HUFFINGTON
This sort of thing just doesn't happen in America. At least that's the
unexamined assumption behind the full-plumed outrage at the "excessive
force" used during the predawn raid to get Elian Gonzalez. "When you see
those photographs of those INS agents in combat gear with automatic weapons
entering that house . . . and snatching the kid away," fumed Sen. Orrin
Hatch (R-Utah), "that's not America."
"I couldn't imagine something like that could happen in America," echoed New
York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. "My first thought," protested Sen. Trent Lott
(R-Miss.), "was that this could only happen in Castro's Cuba."
My first thought was: You gotta be kidding, right? Can these savvy
politicians really be oblivious to the thousands of SWAT-like night raids
that take place every year in America in the name of the drug war? The only
thing missing from them are AP photographers leaping fences to capture the
action--and media eager to disseminate it around the world.
Truth be told, Elian's Miami relatives got off easy. These "dynamic
entries," as they are known, regularly involve tear gas, residents thrown to
the floor and handcuffed and percussion grenades--explosive devices intended
to disorient everyone present while the police move in. And the raids
usually take a lot longer than a surgical three minutes. But the elected
officials who were "sickened" by what Elian was forced to witness do not
seem remotely concerned by the fact that children are routinely exposed to
such un-American--or, in the words of Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.),
"intolerable, unnecessary, outrageous"--behavior.
"There was no excuse whatsoever," railed Miami Mayor Joe Carollo after Elian
had been whisked away, "to have a military force to come in, as a SWAT team,
with machineguns at a home where all that you had were patriotic,
law-abiding, humble, working men, women and children."
The spotlight-loving Carollo was nowhere to be found last year, when a SWAT
team at least 15 strong, armed with assault rifles and the wrong address,
stormed into the South Florida home of Eddie and Loretta Bernhardt--a
law-abiding, humble, working couple. They were roughed up, humiliated and,
in Eddie's case, hauled off to jail. Of course, if they wanted the Miami
mayor's attention, they should have had the foresight to be Cuban and cute.
Where were the "sickened" politicians when Accelyne Williams, a retired
75-year-old minister from Boston, died of a heart attack after being chased
around his apartment and forced to the floor by a 13-member Police Drug
Control Unit that had knocked down the wrong door? Did anyone hear Rep. Tom
DeLay (R-Texas) complaining that this was a "frightening act . . . and we
all ought to be very concerned"?
If Easter Eve in Little Havana was the first time all these politicians
noticed the use of excessive force, they've been missing a very important
trend: the militarization of our local police forces in the name of the drug
war. "What you saw in the Elian case," said Ethan Nadelmann, director of the
Lindesmith Center, a leading drug policy institute, "is standard operating
procedure in drug cases. Policing in the United States is becoming
increasingly paramilitarized."
So in the name of fighting drugs, we have not only gutted the principle of
"innocent until proven guilty," but also the Fourth Amendment, which
guarantees "the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses,
papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures."
Perhaps all the investigative zeal unleashed by the tactics used in Miami
now can be applied to hearings not on Elian's seizure, but on the drug war
raids that daily violate everything our outraged politicians claim to
revere: the rule of law, the Bill of Rights, freedom, children, the norms of
civilized behavior and the sanctity of our homes. That would be great, but
that sort of thing doesn't seem to happen in America. |
