President Clinton and Attorney General Reno said that they had no choice - that the military-style raid on the home of the Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez was necessary to enforce "the rule of law."

They are wrong. The raid was instead a denigration of the rule of law and an elevation of the rule of terror - the same type of terror that reigns in the nation from which the boy was taken by his mother.

What does the term "rule of law" actually mean? It means that in a free society, people are able to govern their conduct according to well-defined laws that have been duly enacted and to judicial judgments interpreting the laws.

On the other hand, in societies governed by the "rule of men," people must govern their conduct through obedience to the arbitrary, constantly shifting dictates of government bureaucrats.

Reno and the INS claim that their terroristic, predawn raid was justified because the INS had revoked the "parole" under which it had given custody of Elian to the Miami relatives. Thus, in the classic bureaucratic style that has come to characterize such agencies as the IRS and the ATF, they commanded the Miami relatives to turn over the boy to his father and threatened the use of force in the event of recalcitrance or disobedience.

But the government had another remedy when its orders were not immediately and unconditionally obeyed - the same remedy that every citizen of the United States follows when an agreement is purportedly breached. The government could have gone to court to enforce the parole agreement and secure the necessary judicial orders for the change in custody, pending the outcome of the boy's asylum claim in the federal Court of Appeals.

Why would this have produced a different result?

One reason is that a judicial proceeding, unlike a predawn raid, allows both sides to be heard before a fair and impartial judge, and that's important, especially to the losing side.

Another reason is that Cuban-Americans, like most other Americans, have a deep and abiding respect for America's judicial system. If either a state or federal court had issued a final order commanding the Miami relatives to surrender the boy forthwith, on pain of contempt for failing to do so, there is little doubt that they would have complied, especially because their attorneys would undoubtedly have advised them to comply.

The difference between a bureaucratic edict and a judicial order is the difference between night and day, especially for people who have fled a society whose very existence is based on the rule of men and the rule of terror rather than the rule of law.

Clinton, Reno, and INS Commissioner Doris Meissner justified the raid by their purported concern for the welfare of the child. But how can that "concern" be reconciled with the forcible extraction of the child at the point of an assault rifle from the arms of the fisherman who had saved the boy's life at sea? More important, their own justification for the military-style assault belies their claim that they had the welfare of the boy at heart. For if there was any chance whatsoever that a shootout would occur, morality and the welfare of the child dictated that the raid not take place at all. After all, wasn't it Clinton's and Reno's concern for the children that cost the children their lives in the Waco inferno?

Clinton's and Reno's claim that they simply wish to reunite a father with his son is also overshadowed by the official longstanding policy of the Clinton-Gore administration to repatriate Cuban refugees back into communist tyranny. Let's not forget that only recently, in a desperate attempt to capture defenseless Cuban refugees before they reached American shores and to repatriate them into communist tyranny, U.S. Coast Guard officials attacked them with water cannons and pepper spray in the middle of Miami harbor.

Make no mistake about it: Father or no father, forcible repatriation to Cuba is what would have happened to Elian if U.S. government officials, rather than Donato Dalrymple, had found him clinging to that inner tube.

The winner in all this, of course, is Fidel Castro, who has every reason in the world to be celebrating. Not only has he converted a sitting U.S. president, attorney general, and INS commissioner into his emigration agents, he also has displayed to the world that the U.S. government behaves just like his.

Mr. Hornberger is president of The Future of Freedom Foundation (www.fff.org) in Fairfax, Va. A detailed account of his trip to Cuba last year is posted on the Foundation's website.

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