Please take a moment to read an extremely important column by Arianna
Huffington:


Elian And The Drug War, Filed May 4, 2000

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. 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 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.

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 Mayor 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-NH) 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 Sen. 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
Rep. 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.