DanRatherCastro1

“CBS, 60 Minutes — they built their careers on this. So, that’s the tradition I’m following in sort of a new age journalism.”

Careful, Mr O’Keefe ! Don’t go there! Nothing in the FBI affidavit even hints that you brushed with the type of swinishness and ethical squalor 60 Minutes was capable of, especially on April 16, 2000.

I’ll report. Y’all decide:

On April 16, 2000, viewers of CBS’ 60 Minutes saw Dan Rather interviewing Elian Gonzalez’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. America saw a bewildered and heartsick father simply pleading to be allowed to have his motherless son accompany him back to Cuba, his cherished homeland. How could anyone oppose this? How could simple decency and common sense possibly allow for anything else?

“Did you cry?” the pained and frowning Dan Rather asked the “bereaved” father during the 60 Minutes drama.“A father never runs out of tears,” Juan (actually, the voice of Juan’s drama school-trained translator) sniffled back to Dan. And the 60 Minutes prime-time audience could hardly contain their own sniffles.

Here’s what America didn’t see:

“Most of the questions Dan Rather was asking Elian’s father during that 60 Minutes interview were being handed to him by Gregory Craig,” recalls Pedro Porro, who served as Rather’s in-studio translator during the taping of the famous interview. Dan Rather would ask the question in English into Porro’s earpiece and Porro would translate it into Spanish for Elian’s heavily-guarded father. “Juan Miguel Gonzalez was surrounded by Castro security agents the entire time he was in the studio with Rather and Craig.”

Officially, Gregory Craig served as attorney for Elian’s father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez. This humble man worked as a hotel doorman in a nation where the average monthly salary is $17. The high-rolling Gregory Craig, a Bill Clinton crony and until recently Obama’s White House Counsel, then worked for Washington D.C.‘s elite firm, Williams & Connolly, one of America’s highest-priced law firms.

greg_craig_090409_ssh

Upon accepting the case, Craig had flown to Cuba for a meeting with Fidel Castro. Craig’s remuneration, we learned shortly after his return, came from a “voluntary” fund set up by the United Methodist Board of Church and Society and “administered” by the National Council of Churches. The same MSM reporters and pundits, who routinely erupt with snide snorts midway through any statement by any Republican, reported this item with a straight face. But then, this media also reports that Castro’s Cuba provides free and exquisite health-care. And the explanation of Craig’s compensation issued from the same source. So no surprise.  Said Porro:

It was obvious that Gregory Craig and Rather where on very friendly terms. They were joshing and bantering back and forth, as Juan Miguel sat there petrified, under the constant vigilance of Castro’s security men. Craig was stage managing the whole thing—almost like a movie director. The taping would stop and he’d walk over to Dan, hand him a little slip of paper, say something into his ear. Then Rather would read straight from the paper.

“At one point Craig stopped the taping almost like a movie director yelling “Cut!” I was confused for a moment,” recalls Mr Porro, until Craig complained that Juan Miguel’s answers were not coming across from his translator with “sufficient emotion.” “So Dan Rather shut everything down for a while and some of the crew drove to a drama school in New York. They hired a dramatic actor to act as a translator, and brought him back.”

Okay roll ‘em!

I probably should have walked out, but I’d been hired by CBS in good faith and I didn’t know exactly how the interview would be edited—how it would come across on the screen. I might have known, but you never know these things play out until you actually see it.

A week later, Janet Reno’s INS maced, kicked, stomped, gun-butted and tear-gassed their way into Lazaro Gonzalez’s house, wrenched a bawling six-year-old child from his family at machine-gun point, and bundled him off to a Stalinist nation (against his father’s true wishes.) They left 102 people injured, some seriously. Many of the injured were ladies who had brandished dangerous weapons. These weapons were rosaries.

No “60 Minutes” “investigative report” on that however.

As mentioned, upon accepting the case, Gregory Craig had flown to Cuba to confer with “El Lider Maximo” (translates almost exactly to Der Führer in German). To effectively stage-manage the boy’s shanghaiing, Craig explained to Castro, he needed Juan Miguel in the U.S. According to most accounts, Castro balked at this. No plantation owner likes his slaves traveling (unescorted) outside his plantation. Plus, Castro was no doubt privy to Juan Miguel’s early communications with his Miami cousins, thanking them profusely and saying he’d be soon make his own escape and join Elian.

So it took a little doing, but Craig finally prevailed—that Castro’s “escorts” would constantly accompany Juan Miguel in the U.S. (as witnessed by Pedro Porro) was probably the gist of the deal with Craig.

So in effect, the man who until recently served as Obama’s Chief White House Counsel, once agreed to function as a fully deputized agent for a Stalinist regime’s KGB-trained secret police, and arranged to have Castro’s child-kidnapping smokescreened by his chums at CBS.

elian

And lest we forget, the Deputy Attorney General who draped the legal veneer over the above was none other than Eric Holder.