Friday, July 11, 2014

I'd forgotten Holder was right in the middle of the Elian Gonzales kidnapping

“Tell me, Mr. Holder,” Judge Napolitano asked on April 23, 2000, “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…”
Yeah.  Sensitively.

Borrowing from Doug,
The Elian Gonzalez episode was shameful,
but I didn’t realize at the time that Holder played such a big role in that goat-rope.
Not surprising, really, since we were lied-to all during the event by media, Clinton Administration flying monkeys, and feelgood RINOs.
Thought you folks might want to read up on it, you know, considering …

(What? Well, yeah, he waaas a Cuban, so Progs wouldn’t consider him a real refugee or a real Hispanic.)

One more thing: I'm of the theory that one reason so many feds started wearing masks was that picture: they don't LIKE it when people know who the clown holding the subgun is.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You didn't also happen to 'forget' (like the media would love us all to do) his pivotal role in the pardoning of marcrich and the faln boys as well, did you? (with)holder has a wonderful track record...............

Firehand said...

Remembered those.

markm said...

There's one thing I can say for the goon with the subgun: as best I can tell from the picture, he's following at least some of the rules of gun safety. His finger appears to be not quite on the trigger, and the muzzle isn't covering the kid, although it may be covering the adult who is next to the kid. Unlike a couple of cops I know of, you're not likely to hear about this guy "accidentally" killing someone because he tripped or bumped his elbow "and the gun went off". (On this blog, I don't have to explain what BS that is - but both of those manslaughtering cops got off scotfree.)

OTOH, there are no excuses for his bosses.

1) He shouldn't have been there at all at that time. The case was still in court. There was a lot more that could have been done to check out the documents from the Cuban government supposedly giving custody to Elian's natural father (as in, never married to or living with Elian's mother, and never having contributed significantly to Elian's support).

2) I very much doubt that a SWAT raid was the safest way to take possession of the kid, with or without full due process.

3) What do you NOT see in that picture? A badge or any other indication that subgunner and his accomplices are cops rather than any other gang of home invaders decked out in mall ninja gear. And that's not his fault, he didn't pick the gear, but his boss's fault. Based on that picture, if Elian's relatives had gunned down the INS team and I was on a jury, I'd have found them not guilty because there was no visual indication that these guys were cops.

He actually does have a badge, it's a patch on his chest behind the gun. Back at that time, I tracked down the rest of the filmstrip (on Newsweek's website, IIRC), and in a half-dozen shots of him crossing the room, there's just one where enough of that patch is visible to be identifiable as a badge - assuming you're sitting down looking at pictures with time to study the details, rather than being a homeowner with about half a second to try to identify the invading gang.

Anonymous said...

markm:

1A) The child was being seized for return to Cuba, on the say-so of a murderous totalitarian state, one that has a fifty-year record of sponsoring terrorism. Totalitarian states do not regard objective truth as relevant.

Let me expound on this a bit.

Once upon a time, around 1965, Pravda would publish pictures of the Eight Cosmonaut-Heroes of the Soviet Union on the front page. Then there would be a ghastly accident on the launch pad at Baikonur and five would die. The next day Pravda would publish shrill denials that anything untoward had taken place, plus a crudely airbrushed photo of the Three Cosmonaut-Heroes of the Soviet Union, with the five dead men crudely airbrushed out above the waist, but the three men would still have sixteen legs and feet. Anyone who noticed this and remarked on it in public, of course, was a good candidate for a one-way trip to Siberia, if not the Lubyanka.

The truth is not in them. They will not speak the truth except by accident.

So why are we sending jackbooted thugs, all mugged up in body armor and armed with the latest thing in automatic weapons, to kick down the door and tear the terrified child away from his family, to return him to the maw of a state that can produce someone claiming to be his father then deny that it ever happened, just as easily as they deny the deaths and even the prior existence of four dead cosmonauts?

It still horrifies me. The Left in this country never met a foreign enemy that they didn't love more than they love America, from Lenin to Stalin to Ho Chi Minh to Pol Pot to Castro to the Ayatollahs to Osama bin Laden. Of course they want to return the boy. They'd round up all the rest of the Cuban exile community, and any of their kids who didn't vote for Obama, and ship them all back too, even as they violate every law on the books letting in hundreds of thousands of diseased wetback criminals and blocking every attempt at removing them.