Word: raid
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...allies in Washington, the pain of Saturday morning was an awful means to a joyous end. The reunion of father and son would, as Juan Miguel's lawyer Greg Craig said, "revive" Elian. For those who had come to view the Miami Cubans as well-meaning kidnappers, the raid by INS agents was nothing more or less than a rescue mission--unavoidable, long overdue and mercifully quick. The images were wrenching, but the outcome was a relief...
...might be guns in the house, or in the crowds outside; that old women would throw themselves in front of federal vehicles; that dump trucks filled with gravel would block intersections. The INS team wanted to go in before dawn, but Reno worried about the image of a nighttime raid. So grim was the picture the Attorney General was painting, it appeared to the aides that she would prefer to wait some more...
Finally, the question of the raid is one that also elicits much division of opinion. Many consider the operation a great success. We agree that the relatives were being evasive in their negotiations with Reno. But in our minds, the Gestapo-like tactics employed by Reno were absolutely unnecessary. Such tactics are reminiscent of the Castro government. Reno did not extinguish all her options: she should have obtained a court order that would have held the relatives criminally negligent if they did not return Elian. The negotiators for the family were nearing an agreement that morning with Reno...
...long barren waste of months stretches before us between now and November. I am not sure the American people can endure it. We are saturated. The partisan noise over Elian Gonzalez and the Reno raid has driven us almost to the edge of mental illness (and maybe bankruptcy - who is paying for all of this opulent security, by the way, and the plantation hideaway, and the little playmates being shipped up from Cuba, and the endless pizza eaten by the highest officials of the land?) That is enough. Let not the politicians (to use Dylan Thomas' words) "blaspheme down...
...senators, who included Florida senators Connie Mack, a Republican, and Bob Graham, a Democrat, would certainly find backing from such eminent liberal legal scholars as Alan Dershowitz and Laurence Tribe if their purpose is to question the constitutionality of the process by which the raid on the Miami house was ordered, but that's unlikely to be enough for those legislators fired up by the campaign to keep Elian Gonzalez in the U.S. Attacking Janet Reno for ordering an armed intervention at a time when a negotiated solution was supposedly within reach would take the inquiry into tricky waters...