KICKING IN DOORS ALL OVER AMERICA

This sort of thing just doesn't happen in America. At least that's the
unexamined assumption behind the fullplumed 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. That’s not America."

"I couldn't imagine something like that could happen in America,"
echoed 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 machine guns at a home where all that you had were
patriotic, law-abiding, humble, working men, women and children."

But 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 lawabiding, 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.

And where was the voluble mayor three months ago, when a SWAT team,
heavily armed and dressed in black, burst into the home of Tracey Bell
- - another humble, hard-working (and nine months pregnant) south
Floridian with no criminal record. Bell claims she was hauled to the
floor and handcuffed in front of her two small children while the
officers searched for drugs. There weren't any. Is there, in Carollo's
words, any "excuse whatsoever" for his silence in these cases?

And 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"?

Or did Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.) protest of "an abuse of power ... a
violent abuse of power" when black-hooded policemen shattered the
bedroom windows in Tracy White's apartment in Los Angeles? They did
not find the drug dealer they were looking for (who, incidentally,
didn't live there), but in the process they held a gun to the head of
White's 12-year-old niece and terrified her three young children. But
did anyone hear Graham complaining about the raid leaving "a scar deep
in the mind" of these children, as he complained of the scar "deep in
the mind" of Elian?

And when 8-year-old Xavier Bennett was accidentally shot and killed by
police during another predawn raid, this one in Atlanta, why didn't we
hear DeLay say that he was "ashamed" and that "we ought to hold people
accountable" for what had been done?

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," says
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. It's not just violent drug dealers who are targeted
but hundreds of thousands of Americans suspected of some involvement
with drugs. The photos not being seen are the tens of thousands of
children exposed to paramilitary police tactics in their homes because
some family member is suspect." 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 can now 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.