Anniversary of an Outrage — Elian Gonzalez

Anniversary of an Outrage — Elian Gonzalez
Humberto Fontova
Friday, April 09, 2010

Castro’s Stalinist regime just released pictures of 16-year-old Elian Gonzalez, resplendent in the uniform of a Communist Party youth. The timing of the photo-release may coincide with the 11th anniversary of Elian’s shanghaiing from the U.S., which hits on the 22nd of this month.

The magnitude and methodology of the snow-job Fidel Castro, with the aid of his ever-faithful MSM and Democrat allies, pulled on the American public (69, per cent of whom fell for it and embraced Castro’s position on the kidnapping) is partly explained here.

Thanks to MSM-Castroite collusion most people forget (or missed) the crucial legal and ethical details of this circus/tragedy — which were mostly established during the first week after Elian’s rescue at sea, after his heroic mother’s drowning. The “son-belongs-with-his-father” crowd, for instance, “missed” (with the help of the MSM) that Elian’s father was initially delighted that his motherless son was in the U.S. and in the loving arms of his uncles and cousins.

The evidence — frantically buried by the mainstream media — was overwhelming. Mauricio Vincent, a reporter for Madrid newspaper El Pais, wrote that during that first week he’d visited Elian’s home town of Cardenas and talked with Elian’s father, Juan Miguel, along with other family members and friends. All confirmed that Juan Miguel had always longed for his son Elian to flee to the United States. Shortly after Elian’s rescue, his father had even applied for a U.S. visa!

In phone call after phone call from Elian’s Cuban family to Elian’s Miami family, the Cuban Gonzalez family always made themselves very clear: “Please take care of Elian. His father’s on the way....even if he has to row over in a washtub.”

The Miami Herald reported that on November 26, 1999, the day after Elian was rescued, Juan Miguel had obtained certified copies of Elian’s birth certificate and his marriage certificate to his deceased ex-wife, Elizabeth. These documents are the first order of business for Cubans seeking a visa to the United States.

Please notice the date — Juan Miguel was preparing for a Cuban exit before Castro intervened in the Elian case, which he did on December 5, 1999. Elian's Miami uncle, Lazaro, explained it repeatedly and best: “I always said I would turn over Elian to his father, when Juan Miguel would come here and claim him. But I (along with practically everyone with experience under communism from Cambodians to Hungarians and from Lithuanians to Cubans) knew such a thing was impossible. He couldn’t do that. I knew it wasn’t Juan Miguel requesting Elian--it was Fidel."

The legal-weasels forgot (or missed) that on Dec, 1st 1999 the INS asserted that Miami-based uncle Lazaro was indeed Elian’s legal custodian and Florida’s family court indeed the place to arbitrate further issues.

Then on Dec 5th, 1999, Castro clapped his hands and his MSM minions snapped to attention.

“To be a poor child in Cuba may be better than to be a poor child in the U.S.,” Eleanor Clift told a visibly stunned Bill O’Reilly.

NBC’s Jim Avila piled on: “Why did she [Elian’s mother] do it? What was she escaping? By all accounts this quiet, serious young woman, who loved to dance the salsa, and was living the good life.”

Larry King joined the herd: “Elian Gonzalez’s father said something I guess would be hard to argue with, that his boy’s safer in a school in Havana than in a school in Miami. He would not be shot in a school in Havana.”

Bryant Gumbel pointed the finger at the real enemy: “Cuban Americans have been quick to point fingers at Castro for exploiting the little boy. Are their actions any less reprehensible?”

Dan Rather’s services to Fidel Castro I’ve already mentioned.

Within weeks Clinton’s INS had turned its initial decision on its head. Within months this same INS was kicking down Lazaro’s door, pummeling camera men and elderly ladies to the ground with jackboots and wrenching a screaming Elian from his legal custodians in a blaze of pepper gas and machine guns. When asked for the legal authority for this, they brandished either a search warrant to seize evidence that didn’t exist (and would not have been hidden anyway.) or an arrest warrant to seize someone who no one claimed was a criminal or even a lawbreaker!

They never made it clear just what kind of "warrant” it was. And neither would it have been legal — as patiently explained by Alan Dershowitz (no less!)

On January 31, 2000, a Christian evangelical minister from India, the Reverend Kilari Anan Paul, visited Cuba. The reverend was closely following the Elian saga from his native India and was severely miffed by those malicious Cuban-exile crackpots in Miami. The reverend stood shoulder to shoulder with Castro on this one, completely in favor of the United States returning Elian to Cuba and his father, as every vestige of logic, legality and decency clearly dictated. Toward this noble end, the reverend attempted to meet with Juan Miguel Gonzalez at his Cardenas home — but found him under house arrest.

So why did Elian’s father change his tune?

Remember Godfather II? Remember the Senate hearings where Frankie Pentangeli, under FBI protection, was prepared to testify against Michael Corleone? The stage was set. Looked like a done-deal for the Feds. Then Frankie looks up and sees his bewildered brother Vincenzo from Sicily, sitting next to Mikey.

Whoops! Frankie sure changed his tune, didn’t he?

Think of Juan Miguel as Frankie Pentangeli. The gun Fidel Castro held to Juan Miguel’s head was as invisible (to those without experience with Communism) as the one Mikey held to Pentangeli’s head was to most spectators at those hearings.

After Elian’s shanghaiing, the New York Times’ incomparable Thomas Friedman probably spoke for most of his colleagues: “Yup, I gotta confess, that now famous picture of a U.S. marshal in Miami pointing an automatic weapon toward Donato Dalrymple and ordering him in the name of the U.S.”

Sure, we’re getting plenty of Castro-issued pictures of Elian. But according to a BBC (no less!) story, access to Elian and his Dad hasn’t improved since the Reverend Kilari Anan Paul attempted an interview back in Jan. 2000.

"Attempts to interview Elián González come to nothing,” reported the BBC’s Ed Vulliamy from Feb. 21st, “Anyone approaching the house is questioned, photographers chased away."

"The Castro regime won't allow us to contact the boy,“ says Elian’s Miami uncle Lazaro Gonzales (who suffered ten years in Castro’s dungeons and torture-chambers) “and the entire family is forbidden to speak to us. Every time they detect a call from us in Miami, the line drops. I'd love to go and see Elián, talk to him. But they'll never let us.”
________________________________________________________
Kenneth, What Is the Frequency: How CBS and Dan Rather Set Up Elian Gonzalez
Posted by Humberto Fontova Feb 3rd 2010 at 3:47 pm in CBS, History, Justice/Legal, Television

“CBS, 60 Minutes — they built their careers on this. So, that’s the tradition I’m following in sort of a new age journalism.”

Careful, Mr O’Keefe ! Don’t go there! Nothing in the FBI affidavit even hints that you brushed with the type of swinishness and ethical squalor 60 Minutes was capable of, especially on April 16, 2000.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

On April 16, 2000, viewers of CBS’ 60 Minutes saw Dan Rather interviewing Elian Gonzalez’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. America saw a bewildered and heartsick father simply pleading to be allowed to have his motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. How could anyone oppose this? How could simple decency and common sense possibly allow for anything else?

“Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the “bereaved” father during the 60 Minutes drama.“A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, the voice of Juan’s drama school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the 60 Minutes prime-time audience could hardly contain their own sniffles.

Here’s what America didn’t see:

“Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig,” recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather’s in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily-guarded father. “Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather and Craig.”

Officially, Gregory Craig served as attorney for Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. This humble man worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $17. The high-rolling Gregory Craig, a Bill Clinton crony and until recently Obama’s White House Counsel, then worked for Washington D.C.‘s elite firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America’s highest-priced law firms.

Upon accepting the case, Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig’s remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a “voluntary” fund set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and “administered” by the National Council of Churches. The same MSM reporters and pundits, who routinely erupt with snide snorts midway through any statement by any Republican, reported this item with a straight face. But then, this media also reports that Castro’s Cuba provides free and exquisite health-care. And the explanation of Craig’s compensation issued from the same source. So no surprise. Said Porro:

It was obvious that Gregory Craig and Rather where on very friendly terms. They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified, under the constant vigilance of Castro’s security men. Craig was stage managing the whole thing—almost like a movie director. The taping would stop and he’d walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper, say something into his ear. Then Rather would read straight from the paper.

“At one point Craig stopped the taping almost like a movie director yelling “Cut!” I was confused for a moment,” recalls Mr Porro, until Craig complained that Juan Miguel’s answers were not coming across from his translator with “sufficient emotion.” “So Dan Rather shut everything down for a while and some of the crew drove to a drama school in New York. They hired a dramatic actor to act as a translator, and brought him back.”

Okay roll ‘em!

I probably should have walked out, but I’d been hired by CBS in good faith and I didn’t know exactly how the interview would be edited—how it would come across on the screen. I might have known, but you never know these things play out until you actually see it.

A week later, Janet Reno’s INS maced, kicked, stomped, gun-butted and tear-gassed their way into Lazaro Gonzalez’s house, wrenched a bawling six-year-old child from his family at machine-gun point, and bundled him off to a Stalinist nation (against his father’s true wishes.) They left 102 people injured, some seriously. Many of the injured were ladies who had brandished dangerous weapons. These weapons were rosaries.

No “60 Minutes” “investigative report” on that however.

As mentioned, upon accepting the case, Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba to confer with “El Lider Maximo” (translates almost exactly to Der Führer in German). To effectively stage-manage the boy’s shanghaiing, Craig explained to Castro, he needed Juan Miguel in the U.S. According to most accounts, Castro balked at this. No plantation owner likes his slaves traveling (unescorted) outside his plantation. Plus, Castro was no doubt privy to Juan Miguel’s early communications with his Miami cousins, thanking them profusely and saying he’d be soon make his own escape and join Elian.

So it took a little doing, but Craig finally prevailed—that Castro’s “escorts” would constantly accompany Juan Miguel in the U.S. (as witnessed by Pedro Porro) was probably the gist of the deal with Craig.

So in effect, the man who until recently served as Obama’s Chief White House Counsel, once agreed to function as a fully deputized agent for a Stalinist regime’s KGB-trained secret police, and arranged to have Castro’s child-kidnapping smokescreened by his chums at CBS.

And lest we forget, the Deputy Attorney General who draped the legal veneer over the above was none other than Eric Holder.