From:
http://www.weeklystandard.com/magazine/mag_5_30_00/caldwell_ed_5_30_00.html
Editorial April 17, 2000/Volume 5, Number 30
The "Justice" Dept. and the Rule of Law
by Christopher Caldwell
One of the first news photos of Juan Miguel Gonz�lez arriving at
Dulles International Airport to reclaim his son Eli�n showed him
in mid-stride, so you could see the soles of his shoes. They were
unmarred by any contact with pavement; they'd obviously been in a
box when the plane took off from Havana. Had he bought himself a
new pair of shoes for the trip? Unlikely, once you looked at his
shirt-collar, which was two inches too big for his neck. Clearly
it was the Cuban government that had decided how to present Juan
Miguel to the American public, and that should not be surprising.
With the collusion of the Clinton administration, they've called
the tune of this custody battle since last Thanksgiving, when
Eli�n was found tied to an inner tube three miles off the Florida
coast.
Standing in his fishy suit, Juan Miguel gave a bizarre speech.
"For exactly 137 days," he said, "I have lived unjustly and
cruelly separated from my son." Whose injustice would that be?
Whose cruelty? "I became aware how during this time my son was
being subjected to cruel psychological pressures intended to
influence his character. . . . And as if that were not enough,
Eli�n has been exhibited in parades. . . . " When? What parades?
Most stunning was his description of the L�zaro Gonz�lez family
of Miami as "distant relatives he had never seen or who had met
him only once." Your father's brother is hardly a "distant
relative." And "met him only once" is a dismissive way to
describe the extraordinary two-week visit that L�zaro and Delf�n
Gonz�lez made to Cuba in 1998, for the express purpose of
visiting Juan Miguel and his son. Said Juan Miguel Gonz�lez to
his Cuban TV audience on the night of his arrival, "Those people
really don't want the best for my son." That's a weird way to
characterize the very people Juan Miguel phoned the day after
Eli�n's departure to alert them that their nephew was on his way.
Mr. Gonz�lez's statements since arriving from Cuba last Thursday
to claim custody of his son have been so far removed from reality
as to raise the possibility that he is out of his mind. But we
pass no judgment on Mr. Gonz�lez's decency or his fitness as a
father. We do not underestimate the pressures he is under,
political and otherwise. NBC reported last week that Mr.
Gonz�lez's mother, who remains in Havana, has been moved to a
secure government building for the duration of his trip. We think
it likely he is operating under coercion, or at least strong
influence.
There is another possibility, of course-that Mr. Gonz�lez is the
sincerest of Communists. There's some evidence for this. He has
been described in press accounts as a doorman, security guard,
cash register operator, and the employee of a tourist agency-a
protean job description that fits many an Interior Ministry
secret policeman. Mr. Gonz�lez lives in a protocol house in a
diplomatic neighborhood, of the sort the writer Gabriel Garc�a
M�rquez lives in; he has air conditioning in a country where many
lack electricity.
There may be a good explanation for Mr. Gonz�lez's cushy setup
and his strange comportment in the United States. But whatever
that explanation is, we don't yet have it, and only a court of
law can give it to us. So why is the Clinton administration doing
everything it can to keep this case out of a court of law?
To listen to the Clinton administration, the sudden visit of Juan
Miguel Gonz�lez, after four months' absence spent largely
calumniating the United States, should arouse no suspicion and
requires no explanation. "The law is very clear," says Attorney
General Janet Reno. "A child who's lost his mother belongs with
the sole surviving parent." What law is that? The
Child-Who-Lost-His-Mother Law? If this is what the debate was
about, why didn't you tell us in the first place?
Because this is the exact opposite of what the administration
argued in the first place. The administration now insists
emphatically that it has no way to stop the process of hustling
Eli�n back to Cuba. (Although it claims to prefer that Juan
Miguel and his Castroite handlers stay until the appeal by
Eli�n's Miami relatives of the INS decision reaches the appeals
court.) But the administration's insistence is simply not true.
The INS can issue a no-exit order for anyone-including you or
me-at its discretion. It can mandate that Eli�n stay by the very
same authority under which it now mandates-yes, mandates-that he
be sent back to Cuba.
Nor has this always been the administration's position. In the
days following Eli�n's rescue, spokesmen for the U.S. Border
Patrol announced that Eli�n could stay, the INS issued a
statement that Eli�n's fate was a matter for state court (or
family court if it came to a custody battle), and the State
Department concurred. It's the INS that paroled Eli�n to the
L�zaro Gonz�lez family to begin with. Then in December of last
year, two things happened. First, Castro demanded that Eli�n be
returned within 72 hours, implicitly threatening to send a
flotilla of unsavory refugees towards South Florida. Then he
agreed, in an unprecedented, if minor, act of neighborliness, to
accept the return to Cuba of eight Cuban nationals who had been
rioting in a Louisiana prison.
We're beginning to see what the big rush is about. Clearly, the
administration has cut a deal with Fidel Castro, in which Eli�n
is a pawn. The officials involved in the case want to make sure
that this is taken care of before anyone has a chance to find out
what the terms of that deal are. We know certain of its
conditions-and they're an affront to America's conscience. One
was that Juan Miguel stay in the home of the head of the Cuban
interests section-and by what right does our government negotiate
with Fidel Castro about the movement of a human being on American
soil? The second was that Juan Miguel be given custody of Eli�n
with no questions asked-and by what right does our government
deliver a 6-year-old guest of the nation to a dictatorship his
mother died trying to escape?
In cutting this sneaky deal, the administration has contaminated
our own system with a little bit of the mendacity, opacity, and
brutality of the Cuban one. The INS, after having interviewed
Juan Miguel Gonz�lez only under the eyes of a Communist regime
that rules by terror, saw no need-had no inclination, even-to
conduct a fresh meeting once Mr. Gonz�lez arrived on free soil.
Mr. Gonz�lez's meeting with Reno and INS commissioner Doris
Meissner, meanwhile, seemed to consist of receiving unilateral
assurances that his suit would meet no obstacles. "All you had to
do was look at him and listen to him and see how much he loves
the little boy," said Reno, as if that were dispositive. (What
was that about the rule of law, again?) Reno's assistant Eric
Holder then added, "We have engaged psychologists, who have told
us it is in Eli�n's best interest to reunite him with his father
as quickly as possible." What psychologist-outside of Cuba-would
make such a judgment without having met Eli�n? President Clinton,
meanwhile, assures us that Juan Miguel is a "fit" father. On what
grounds? Are there any other custody battles he'd like to weigh
in on?
For all Janet Reno's pretty talk, this case is not about the rule
of law. The administration's ultimate weapon is not the courts
but its threat of criminal contempt charges against Eli�n's Miami
family if they refuse to abide by executive-branch dictates. Here
as elsewhere, the Clinton administration is invoking the "rule of
law" as cover for an increasingly arbitrary set of
make-it-up-as-you-go-along fiats and executive actions.
And in this power struggle, Bill Clinton's impeachment lawyer,
Gregory Craig, plays a murky role. We now know that at least part
of his legal fee is being paid by the National Council of
Churches. But we have plenty of other questions. Who hired him?
We'll bet it wasn't Juan Miguel who picked up the phone. If Mr.
Craig's client really is Juan Miguel and not Fidel, why was
Castro present at their Cuban meetings? Has Mr. Craig told his
client he has the right to meet alone with Americans-without
Cubans? If not, why not? Does Juan Miguel know his rights as a
client? Or is he being played for a fool in a game of raison
d'�tat?
There used to be an institution that could be trusted to remain
vigilant about the actions of Communist regimes, and to ask such
questions about the way they operated. It was called the
Republican party. But Senate majority leader Trent Lott has
refused to bring to the floor a bill to give Eli�n citizenship-or
even permanent residency-until he can be assured it will pass in
a rout. House speaker Dennis Hastert is AWOL. Steve Largent,
after a political career built on describing Christian worship as
a bulwark of citizenship, has suddenly agreed to deliver a boy to
a regime where Christian worship has been illegal for almost all
of the past 40 years. George W. Bush, preoccupied with trivial
education-policy speeches, has been more interested in snickering
at Al Gore's vacillation on Eli�n than in Eli�n himself. Shame on
them all.
It's a shame for the United States, but not just for the United
States. Whether we like it or not, Cubans view this situation
much as Fidel Castro does-as a straightforward power struggle.
They'll draw the correct, if demoralizing, conclusion-that the
one power that could have stood with them against communism
refused to do so, whether out of cowardice or outright Communist
sympathy. Here it's worth repeating the position of Cuba's
constitution on parenting. Parental rights exist "only so long as
their influence does not go against the political objectives of
the state." We are not returning Eli�n to Juan Miguel Gonz�lez;
we are returning him to Cuba. When Eli�n gets on the plane, Juan
Miguel doesn't get the little boy; Cuba does. Juan Miguel will
not make the final decisions that shape Eli�n's life; Cuba will.
Under the guise of the "rule of law," we're returning a little
boy to a world where no rule of law exists.
by Christoper Caldwell
� COPYRIGHT 1999, NEWS CORPORATION, WEEKLYSTANDARD, ALL RIGHTS
RESERVED.
###
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