WASHINGTON -- Attorney General Janet Reno and President Clinton say snatching Elian Gonzalez at gunpoint was necessary to preserve the rule of law.
Yes, that would be the same law-abiding Bill Clinton who was impeached for covering up an affair with an intern, which he vehemently denied until DNA evidence proved him a liar.And that is the same Janet Reno who insisted to Sen. Orrin Hatch that she never saw sufficient evidence to appoint an independent counsel to probe possible financial abuses by the 1996 Clinton-Gore campaign. Somehow, the chiefs of the FBI and her own investigative team did see it and urged such appointment.
Between Good Friday and Easter, the administration's view of the law sent officers wielding assault weapons to strip Elian from the arms of the same fisherman who rescued him from the ocean. The photo of it is a new symbol of America and freedom.
The administration still insists in federal court that Elian has no right as a child to seek asylum here and must be returned to his father -- even if that means returning to a communist dictatorship from which his mother died trying to flee.
The law may say that (even though people such as Hatch disagree). But laws also can be unjust -- even in America.
Ask the Africans who were brought here legally to be slaves. Ask fugitive slaves who were legally caught and returned to masters. Ask even our country's forefathers who felt that "legal" actions by King George III were so unjust that they revolted.
Actually, I had a chance to do just that (sort of) on vacation last week in Colonial Williamsburg, Va., where costumed actors and historians play the roles of such people from the past.
On the day we visited Williamsburg, all acted as if it were an April day in 1775 when word arrived from Massachusetts that the British Army fought with local militia in Lexington and Concord.
Some loyal to the crown argued that the king and his colonial governors were within the law to send the army to seize local gunpowder they feared could be used in insurrection against them.
They said the king and Parliament were also within the law to impose taxes on the colonies to help pay off war debts. When the colonies complained, the king was allowed by law to take steps to stop insurrection.
Others argued Parliament violated their God-given freedoms by new laws and steps that prevented a trial by a jury of peers, controlling their own taxation through local representatives and freedom from invasion of their property without due process.
Such cries for freedom, despite what the law may say, would lead to the American revolution.
Other Williamsburg actors described how slaves lived. One historian kept repeating that the only thing that made some people slaves and others free was the law.
One historian talked about an excavation at a slave quarters. They knew it was common to dig a 3-foot pit underneath beds to store property. But they found pits that were 6 feet deep. It didn't make sense until someone figured out that runaway slaves could be hidden there. Of course, that would be illegal -- right?
A bloody civil war would come before slavery laws changed.
To Cuban-Americans, the Elian Gonzalez case is about much more than whether a boy should be returned to his father. It is about freedom -- which they say the boy will lose if sent back to Cuba.
The Washington Post this week sent a reporter to Elian's hometown to describe conditions there. It concluded that they aren't so bad. The town lacks only one thing: freedom.
It quoted one unnamed woman there who said, "There's no freedom of expression. I can't decide where I'm going to work, where I can travel. I can't be free."
But the administration contends that U.S. immigration law doesn't allow consideration of such things in Elian's case.
Maybe Charles Dickens had the sharpest reply to such things when he wrote in "Oliver Twist" (about another motherless child): "If the law supposes that . . . the law is a ass -- a idiot."
Deseret News Washington correspondent Lee Davidson can be reached by e-mail at leed@dgs.dgsys.com