The Independent On Sunday (London)
29 NOVEMBER 1998
Feds and Other Whackos
Waco: The Rules of Engagement
BBC2
By Nicholas Barber
Waco, Texas, April 1993. How best to describe the stand-off between
the American law-enforcement services and the besieged religious extremists?
A woman sums up the scene for the TV cameras: "It's like a big carnival!"
Around her, a mile from the Branch Davidians' base of Mount Carmel,
there are trestle tables piled with "Waco Wacko" T-shirts, and tourists
are charged $1 a time to peek through the locals' telescopes. International
news teams are treating events as a joke, the Dallas Ku Klux Klan has
joined the party, and the FBI is having some fun of its own. Its tactics
for exhausting and demoralizing the Branch Davidians include training
spotlights on their headquarters through the night, and playing Nancy
Sinatra tapes at deafening volume, while the lower-ranking operatives
intimidate the enemy by dropping their khakis and mooning. Alan Stone,
a Harvard professor of Law and Psychiatry, has studied the siege: "I
thought the main problem was going to be understanding the psychology
of the people inside the compound,'' he says. "But as I got into it
I quickly became aware that the psychology of the people outside the
compound was more important." On April 19, the carnival was over, and
76 people, many of them children, were dead.
It can't be many years before the release of Waco: The Movie. It will
be a fantastic black farce, like M*A*S*H, Mad City and Natural Born
Killers combined. Every ingredient is there: fanaticism, jingoism, bigotry,
sex, marketing, media overkill and gung ho militarism, all mixed up
in the insane crucible of the American South. Oliver Stone will probably
direct, and Brad Pitt will star as David Koresh, the man who believed
he was readying God's people for a battle with the forces of Babylon
at the end of the world.
Janet Reno, Bill Clinton's Attorney General, has already written her
script for the movie. And she has had no trouble selling it to the majority,
of news reporters. In her story, the villain is a polygamous, child-abusing
megalomaniac who brainwashes his acolytes and stockpiles weaponry. The
Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms plans Io raid his bunker, but
as its agents approach they are shot at by the Davidians. Four ATF men
are killed in the line of duty. The FBI closes in. and the crazed cultists
commit mass suicide by setting their building on fire. The end.
Dan Gifford's Waco: The Rules of Engagement, the jewel in the crown
of BBC2's "Storyville" series of feature-length documentaries, has a
divergent script. In Gifford's account, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco
and Firearms (the juxtaposition of those three products in one name
is the stuff of satire in itself) was a department in fear of a forthcoming
budget review.
It thought it might enhance its reputation by persecuting a peaceful,
law-abiding, religious teacher who had already invited them to search
his premises. Yes, Koresh could be justifiably described as wacko, as
the T-shirts would have it, but he didn't claim to be the Messiah and
he didn't use drugs or brainwashing, as was alleged. His credentials
for wackodom were his collection of armaments, and his belief that he
spoke with God - credentials shared by a worrying percentage of the
Texan population.
On February 28, 1993, the ATF knew that Koresh had been tipped off about
its raid, but rather than admit to being sloppy, its agents drove up
to the Davidians' front door in full combat gear and opened fire. The
residents shot back in self-defense, the survivors were cleared in court
of homicide---all the while phoning the emergency services and begging
for an end to the attack. The ATF withdrew only when it ran out of ammunition.
At this point, the Davidians stopped shooting, too.
Enter the FBI. Snipers were posed, tanks rolled into the area and in
its last act, the farce plunged into tragedy. This tank wasn't the nasty,
dangerous kind: it was 'a good rent-a-car'
On day 51 of the siege, the Federal troops resorted to gouging holes
in the Mount Carmel building with a tank, injecting the now well-ventilated
structure with highly flammable CS gas, and shooting into it. Earlier,
an FBI agent admitted on the phone to a Davidian: "The guys that gravitate
toward, you know. riding in tanks, jumping out of airplanes and stuff
like that are a little different mind set than you and I, right?" As
Mount Carmel was swallowed by fire, ATF men ran their own banner up
its flagpole.
The Rules of Engagement offered a relentlessly detailed, step-by-step
case against the Government forces, methodically stacking up the shocking
audio and video evidence. What makes the documentary one of the year's
most compelling films - and what renders any dramatized recreation almost
redundant - is that the proceedings were so extensively recorded at
the time. ATF agents filmed themselves in action; TV crews from all
over the world were present; and the subsequent congressional hearings
were conducted in front of the cameras. Inside the compound, Koresh
and his friends put their own feelings on video; and we have cassettes
of the Davidians' telephone negotiations with the FBI and the ATF.
Even if you discount the views of Gifford's endless parade of academics,
forensic experts, local lawmen and fire chiefs, not to mention disaffected
FBI and ATF agents, all of whom argue that this was a case not of mass
suicide, but of mass murder, there are horrifying scenes on film to
be answered for.
There is the footage of ATF agents pumping round after round of ammunition
into a building full of women and infants; of a helicopter shooting
an unarmed man, an occurrence which an ATF boss would later deny; or
a tank pushing holes in Mount Carmel's walls and roof, while a loud
speaker insists, "This is not an assault"; of Janet Reno sniggering
in the House of Representatives that this tank wasn't the nasty, dangerous
kind: it was "a good rent-a-car". Finally, there is the photograph of
an eight-year-old girl's blackened corpse, bent backwards by the muscle-tightening
effects of cyanide.
All a movie could add to this scrupulously assembled documentary would
be the expressions on the faces of the confused, terrified women and
children as they crushed together in their kitchen, hiding from the
raging fire, choking on poisonous gas, and believing, let's hope, that
they would soon be in heaven.
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