The Elian snatch trampled on half of this hallowed document.

By Deroy Murdock, Senior Fellow, Atlas Economic Research Foundation.

The Bill of Rights encompasses ten amendments. By snatching Elian Gonzalez from his great-uncle's Little Havana home, the Clinton-Reno regime either tiptoed around or trampled on at least half of these protections. It would be bad enough had the Department of Transportation perpetrated this. The fact that the Department of Justice conducted this affront to American liberty is breathtaking.

Here, in order, are the provisions of the Bill of Rights that now lie tattered on the floor:

The First Amendment's freedom of the press could not shield an NBC News crew from the abuses it endured during the raid. Federal agents kicked cameraman Tony Zumbado in the stomach and both yanked an audio cable from his camera and otherwise disabled his gear. He told NBC's David Bloom that the feds "put their foot on my back and told me not to move or else they were going to shoot."

Soundman Gustavo Moller was struck in the head by another officer's rifle and ordered to stay still or be shot. Moller told me he suffered a small gash, "but because it was the forehead, it was bleeding a lot."

NBC has asked the INS to explain its actions and why, as NBC News vice-president Bill Wheatley told the Associated Press, "our people weren't able to do their work because of the actions of agents."

mmigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner Doris Meissner told CBS that overwhelming force was necessary due to "the possibility that there might be guns" in the Gonzalez home. So what? The Second Amendment guarantees the right "to keep and bear arms." If the mere presence of firearms on private property justifies such federal behavior, residents of the 40 percent of American homes with guns should sleep with their eyes open.

"Knock, knock."

"Who's there?"

"U.S. Census Bureau. Hands up or we'll shoot!"

*By using an improper search warrant, the Justice Department violated Fourth Amendment restrictions against "unreasonable searches and seizures." This document was signed not during business hours by K. Michael Moore, the federal district judge hearing Elian's case, but on Good Friday at 7:20 p.m. by a magistrate unfamiliar with the matter. The warrant application claimed Elian was "a concealed person," which he wasn't, and that he is "an illegal alien," which he isn't. The affidavit also failed to mention Lazaro Gonzalez's alleged weapons that supposedly required a SWAT team's response.

Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, a Clinton ally, dismisses this warrant and says the administration, "acted lawlessly." As he told Fox News: "It's a dangerous day for all Americans."

he Sixth Amendment includes the right to "the assistance of counsel" in criminal proceedings. Elian is no crook, but the spirit of this amendment suggests that he may see the lawyers who are arguing his asylum case. Elian's attorneys cannot contact him now, nor even observe his condition while surrounded by U.S. Marshals.

Even worse, the only lawyer in touch with Elian is Greg Craig, his father's counsel, who is working to vacate the Cuban castaway's asylum application. This is like having Leonid Brezhnev represent Alexander Solzhenitsyn in court.

*The 10th Amendment reserves powers "to the States respectively, or to the people" that are not constitutionally delegated to the federal government. Nonetheless, Washington intervened in a child-custody matter routinely handled by state authorities.

Second, Justice alerted recently-resigned Miami police chief William O'Brien before "Operation Reunion" and reportedly ordered him not to inform Mayor Joe Carollo. The vocally anti-Castro mayor had grown close to the Gonzalez family and might have publicized this news. Still, federal officials should not have meddled with a local government by constructing a wall of silence between a police chief and his popularly-elected boss.

The Department of Justice's contempt for the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals insults the separation of powers. DOJ was not deterred by the court's refusal to grant an order to transfer Elian from his great-uncle to his father. When a three-judge federal panel rejected her plan, Jackboot Janet executed it anyway. Of course, all this could have been avoided had Reno simply waited until May 11 to make her pro-family-reunification case before a judge.

Bill Clinton and Janet Reno harbor neither respect nor reverence for the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. They merely use them to line the federal Leviathan's cage.

And yet an April 24 Gallup survey revealed that 60 percent of Americans applaud the extra-legal abduction of a six-year-old boy by a machine-gun-toting, pepper-spray-blasting battery of 151 federal agents. Whatever. Why should fat and happy Americans care?

This matters gravely, because if the president and attorney general skate past this abuse of power, the next time federal agents storm a private home, waving a flimsy search warrant and beating journalists along the way, the door they batter down won't be Lazaro Gonzalez's. It might be yours.

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