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Shame on Janet Reno
It was Fidel Castro, not the Miami González family, who kept Elián from his father.
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[04/25/00]

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All weekend, conservative opponents of Reno's move were fixated on a pair of photographs: the horrifying image of a federal agent with a gun confronting a crying Elián, and a reassuring reunion photo released by Gregory Craig, attorney for Juan Miguel González, showing the boy smiling and embracing his father.

Also Today Shame on Janet Reno It was Fidel Castro, not the Miami González family, who kept Elián from his father. By David Horowitz The Elián metaphor If we really cared about Cuban children, we'd end the embargo. By Joe Conason

The bash-Clinton industry immediately got busy insisting the reunion photo was faked, a claim first made by the Miami relatives and their attorneys. Both Lucianne.com and then the Drudge Report carried the photos side by side, to argue that Elián's hair was longer in the reunion photo, and that baby teeth he was missing in the Associated Press photo taken in Miami were visible in the photo released by Craig.

Because I'd written about the power of the competing images on Saturday, all weekend long my e-mail in box was clogged with messages from conservatives, often attaching the photos, trying to convince me I'd been duped. There were various explanations for the differences between the two pictures, but most people seemed to think Fidel Castro had provided photos taken before the boy left Cuba, and with help from Craig -- President Clinton's impeachment attorney, remember -- managed to pass them off as current.

Suspicion of Castro, Clinton and Craig didn't surprise me. It may even be justified. What's remarkable, though, is how unconvincing the conservatives' claims were when you looked at the two photos side by side. The difference seemed to be literally and figuratively a matter of perspective, and easily explained. For one thing, the reunion photos were taken with a cheap camera, and they're darker and grainier, which created the appearance of more hair on the boy's head. (It's really just darker, not longer.) The matter of the teeth seems like a more willful misrepresentation of fact -- Elián is missing a bottom tooth in the AP photo, but his bottom teeth aren't visible in the reunion shot.

What to make of the campaign to discredit the photos? It's an unsettling reminder of the depth of hatred toward the Clinton administration, a disturbingly widespread belief that the president will do literally anything to advance his agenda -- and will get away with it. It's strong enough to create a mass hallucination, letting the right see what it wants to see even in photographs. But that probably shouldn't be surprising from the crowd that accused Clinton of having a hand in Vince Foster's death, as well as cocaine addiction, fathering children out of wedlock with prostitutes, even killing children in Arkansas.

By Sunday night, Craig had released yet another set of reunion photos, showing the boy still happy to be with his father. The number and quality of those pictures made it hard for the right to claim they were fakes. An AP photo editor examined both sets of reunion photos and pronounced them as near as he could to genuine.

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