EXCESSIVE-FORCE RAIDS DO HAPPEN IN AMERICA

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.