Who Is Janet Reno?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, May 22, 2000 | by James P. Lucier

The furor about the attorney general's role in the Elian Gonzalez case offers as good an occasion as any for Americans to examine who we are and where we are. For Janet Reno is a very predictable character in the transition of our civilization from government by law to a kind of totalitarian democracy and consensus of the moment -- one that shows overwhelmingly popular support for arbitrary and brutal enforcement of administrative policy.

The late C.S. Lewis, novelist, Christian apologist and writer of charming books for children, saw what was coming in 1946. In That Hideous Strength, the third novel in his science-fiction trilogy, he described a world in which an academic group, the National Institute of Coordinated Experiments, or NICE, conspires to seize control of the university, the press, the government and law enforcement. They do this by promising the scientific reconstruction of the human race. Behind this pseudoscientific facade, the organizers of NICE are operating under diabolical power.

All the public pronouncements of NICE are elegant examples of Clinton-style spin -- yes, Lewis could see it coming. But in private, the members are a little more direct: "Man has got to take charge of Man. That means, remember, that some men have got to take charge of the rest which is another reason for cashing in on it as soon as one can. You and I want to be the people who do the taking charge, not the ones who are taken charge off."

But just what were they to do? "Quite simple and obvious things, at first -- sterilization of the unfit, liquidation of backward races, selective breeding. Then real education, including prenatal education. By real education I mean one that has no take-it-or-leave-it nonsense -- whatever he or his parents try to do about it. But we'll get on to biochemical conditioning in the end, and direct manipulation of the brain.... It's the real thing at last." Of course, the recruiter went on, they just could not state plainly what they were doing if they wanted to win the hearts of the people. Instead of saying that they wanted to experiment on criminals, for example, they would explain that they merely sought the reeducation of the maladjusted.

This eerie Lewis portrait of the future came to mind as the news arrived about Reno's ex parte actions in the Gonzalez case: The determination to send little Elian back to a communist country; her Stalinist police action, taken in defiance of the refusal of the 11th District Court to give her the authority; the fake medical advisers who examined the boy from several thousand miles away; the flight surgeon and psychiatrist who transformed him from a frightened and defiant little boy into a beaming photo-op; the solitary confinement of Juan Miguel lest he change his mind and try to stay here; the isolation of little Elian from the press and his American friends; the gilded little prison awaiting him in Cuba, complete with a battery of more experts in psychiatry and reeducation.

Lewis even was prescient in his character of Miss Hardcastle, the head of the private police force of NICE -- its attorney general, as it were:

"Mark found himself writhing from the hand-grip of a big woman in a black, short-skirted uniform. Despite a bust that would have done credit to a Victorian barmaid, she was rather thickly built than fat and her iron grey hair was cropped short. Her face was square, stern and pale, and her voice deep. A smudge of lipstick laid on with violent inattention to the real shape of her mouth was her only concession to fashion, and she rolled or chewed a long black cheroot, unlit, between her teeth." Miss Hardcastle specialized in blackmail, falsifying evidence, getting acquiescence by threatening false prosecutions and isolating her victims.

Reno does not smoke cheroots, which now are politically incorrect. But while she was prosecutor in Miami, she took on the case of Bobby Fijnje in which the 13-year-old boy was accused of molesting younger children who, after they had been worked on by Reno's psychiatrists, testified that Fijnje opened graves and ate baby corpses. The boy was taken away from his parents for more than two years, then tried as an adult at age 16 so that if convicted he would be thrown into prison with adult sex-offenders. Reno herself came to the courtroom to hear the verdict -- which was not guilty. The Fijnje family was so devastated they went to start life over in another country.

Then there was the case of Frank and Eliana Fuster, charged with child molestation in the Country Walk daycare case. Both were charged, but Eliana flipped after Reno had her placed in solitary confinement in a Dade County jail, according to her Miami attorney Jack Thompson. She was stripped naked, supposedly because she was "suicidal," but Reno visited her 30 times in jail. In court Reno sat beside her and held her hand.

The Wall Street Journal recounted the case of Grant Snowden, the most decorated police officer in the history of the South Miami Police Department. Also charged by Reno with child-sex offenses, Snowden was placed in solitary confinement to keep him from getting mail and communicating with the outside world. Snowden was convicted and sentenced to seven years confinement but the appellate court threw out the case.