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New York Press
12-8-99
vol 12 no 49
Film
American Holocaust
By Godfrey Cheshire
What’s the most disturbing movie you’ve ever seen? When I was
a kid, the low-budget nuclear-horror drama Panic in the Year Zero took
the prize; it gave me nightmares for weeks. In the 80s, the 10-hour expanse
of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah proved as haunting as it was horrifying; its
images are with me still.
But I have to say, now, that the single most disturbing movie I’ve
ever seen is the 1997 documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement, in
which families are burned alive not by Russian bombs or Nazi crematoria
but as a result of actions instigated by U.S. law enforcement officials.
Waco documents a homegrown holocaust, one for which redress and rectification
are still outstanding.
I first saw the film only a couple of weeks ago. When it had its original
New York opening in June 1997 at the Human Rights Watch Film Festival
(followed by a run at Cinema Village), I was commencing a summerlong
stay in Iran, where people sometimes remark that Americans seem not
as aware of their government’s control over the media as Iranians are
obliged to be of theirs. But I wouldn’t say that more than two years
after the fact is too late to be reviewing this film. On the contrary,
there’s perhaps nothing more valuable I could do in December 1999 than
to urge anyone who hasn’t seen Waco: The Rules of Engagement to do so.
It is out on video; you can even get it at Blockbuster. Easily the most
important American documentary of the past decade, it has a timeliness
that only increases as the case it chronicles continues to unfurl in
the media, the legal system and public awareness.
Writing about the film now also provides occasion to reflect that
any film is a lot more than just its contents. It is also its career
in the public sphere, its impact on the minds of people who see it and
on the culture surrounding it. In these senses, the significance of
Waco is extraordinary–and ongoing. The film devastatingly probes the
U.S. government’s responsibility for the deaths of some 80 members of
the Branch Davidian community outside of Waco on April 19, 1993, and
the coverup that followed. But more than that, it has done its work
at a time when the major U.S. media has largely been content to let
the government’s obfuscating myths about the Waco disaster stand unchallenged.
Funded and distributed privately, the films unveils truths that others
have been unwilling to show or to see; in doing so, it has encountered
few competitors and no rivals in the difficult, crucial task of focusing
public attention on the most lethal use of police muscle in U.S. history.
What was "Waco" all about? If you’d asked me a month ago, I would’ve
answered the way that most Americans probably still would. Roughly:
David Koresh was the diabolically charismatic leader of a backwoods,
personality-based religious cult involved in shady activities (gun running?
drugs?). When the law came knocking, the group opened fire and gunned
down several officers in cold blood. Resisting arrest, the heavily armed
cultists then barricaded themselves in their rural compound and spent
two months bluffing for delays until the federal authorities, concerned
for the kids inside, finally pumped tear gas into the compound to force
Koresh’s followers to come out. Instead, the cornered fanatics committed
group suicide with guns and by setting their home ablaze. The FBI et
al., who never fired a shot and acted with maximum restraint throughout,
were as shocked as anyone at the self-annihilation.
Waco uses a vast array of source materials–along with very little
narration and no dramatic recreations or the like–to paint a strikingly
different picture. The initial Feb. 28 raid on the Davidians, a Seventh-Day
Adventist offshoot that had been around for decades and that regarded
Koresh as an inspired Bible interpreter and leader, was aimed at securing
favorable publicity for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms,
which had performed disastrously in the recent Ruby Ridge debacle and
was only a week away from a crucial appropriations hearing in Congress.
After alerting the media (thereby compromising its own security), the
ATF, which could easily have arrested Koresh jogging, mounted a showily
dramatic SWAT-style strike employing 80 agents in full combat gear–along
with a stunning paucity of common sense, communications equipment, contingency
medical plans and legal justification (their warrant cited Koresh for
child abuse, which is not under ATF jurisdiction). The result, not surprisingly,
was a bloody disaster.
The film provides compelling evidence that the ATF cowboys fired first,
and were sent into fumbling disarray when the Davidians shot back in
self-defense, as allowed by a Texas law that proscribes the use of excessive
force in arrests. The gun battle lasted 50 minutes; at the end four
ATF officers and six Davidians were dead. Enter next the FBI for a 51-day
standoff-cum-media circus during which the feds blared horrid tapes
(rabbits being slaughtered, obnoxious music, etc.) and blinding lights
at the Davidians, mooned and made obscene gestures at them, while keeping
up a round of spurious "negotiations" in which Koresh seems to have
spoken in consistent good faith while the FBI prevaricated wildly (the
tapes we hear are appalling).
Finally, when someone in Washington decided to pull the plug despite
evidence that Koresh was close to surrender, the FBI attacked the group’s
complex with tanks that injected potentially lethal doses of CS gas
while also ramming the building in ways that left gaping holes, giving
the structure the ventilated updraft of a potbelly stove. The subsequent
fire that rapidly ravaged the Mt. Carmel complex, killing most of its
remaining residents, including 53 women and children, was effectively
inevitable.
Did the FBI intend to exterminate the Davidians in Mt. Carmel? There’s
still a lot of dispute over whether the fires were started accidentally
or deliberately, and whether the cause came from outside or inside the
complex. (The FBI claimed for six years that it shot no incendiary grenades
into the building; then, in September, the retrieval of a grenade shell
casing found inside the ruins caused Janet Reno to reverse that denial
and order a new investigation.) But the crux of Waco comes in the section
where a set of Forward-Looking Infrared Radar (FLIR) videotapes taken
by a surveillance plane are examined by an expert. He points out what
our eyes seem to confirm: clear signs of gunfire aimed at the complex
from the outside rear, the side hidden from the long lenses of the national
media’s kept-at-a-distance cameras.
If government shooters were gunning down Davidians as they attempted
to flee, the feds’ murderous intent is irrefutable. Still, while my
scrutiny tells me what I’m seeing is gunfire, the FLIR images are bit
like that famous scene in Blow-Up or the Zapruder film: tantalizing
proof of the final ambiguity of mechanical images. Lacking corroboration,
such pictures will always admit different readings. But what of it,
ultimately? What the government meant to do may remain open to argument.
What it did is bad enough: single out a group for what was essentially
a religious persecution; deny them due process and their civil rights;
bombard children with lethal doses of gas in order to make their parents
surrender (this in the name of "protecting" the kids); bungle, lie and
cover up at every turn; ignore the opportunities for a peaceful resolution;
and elaborately create the conditions for that cataclysmic inferno.
Given all this, it hardly seems crucial who tossed the first match.
Above I’ve just sketched in the largest features of the film’s argument,
which is at once complex, powerful and remarkably careful. I say "argument"
deliberately. Waco doesn’t try to be "balanced" in the point-counterpoint,
phony-neutral way of bland tv news shows. Rather, it is a balance–a
vital counterweight to the official propaganda that America has been
deluged with since 1993.
All the same, watching the film several times over has left me with
tremendous respect not only for the skill of its telling, which weaves
an epic’s worth of material into a little over two hours, but also for
its efforts to provide conventional balance within its corrective. Toward
the end, in the testimony before Congress of an FBI man who professes
his own religious faith and belief in core American ideals, the film
gives us one of Waco’s most tragic aspects: that even the bad guys thought
they were doing good.
Nor does the film whitewash David Koresh. Since he bedded a number
of the females in his flock, some as young as 12 (with the sanction
of their parents), supposedly in order to father the 24 "elders" who
would lead the postmillennial Davidians, the film lets us know that
he was almost surely guilty of statutory rape (although, again, the
ATF had no jurisdiction in this area). But what Waco does, in striking
contrast to the news reports of 1993 that uniformly demonized him as,
in the words of one newspaper headline, the "Sinful Messiah," is to
give us Koresh in context.
Born Vernon Howell, he took his name from King David and from Cyrus
("Koresh" being the Hebrew version thereof), the Persian king who overthrew
Babylon and released the Jews from their captivity. Like many of his
flock he was schooled in the Seventh-Day Adventist creed, with its intense,
peculiarly American focus on the books of Daniel and Revelation and
belief in the approach of the End Times. While the Davidians had been
around since the 1930s, the group Koresh assumed leadership of in the
80s was no loony, inbred cracker sect. It was international, multicultural
and interracial. A number of black Britons relocated to Waco after hearing
Koresh expound on the Bible in England. One of his black American followers,
Wayne Martin, was a Harvard-educated lawyer.
There’s a fascinating new book, A Place Called Waco, by David Thibodeau,
one of the nine people who survived the Mt. Carmel holocaust (Public
Affairs Press). Thibodeau was a rarity among the Davidians in that he
wasn’t brought up religious. He was a rock drummer who met Koresh in
a Los Angeles guitar shop and gradually was drawn to the man and his
teachings. He shows us Koresh as a guitar player and songwriter who
drank beer, worked on cars, joked around and hung out like many another
Texas-born rock ’n’ roll band guy. He was not charismatic, the kind
who hypnotizes you with his intent stare and droning voice, Thibodeau
says, agreeing with everyone in Waco. Though Koresh was runty and dyslexic,
the one thing that set him part, according to admirers and detractors
alike, was a native genius at interpreting Scripture, especially those
mysterious books that deal with the world’s end. In his followers’ eyes,
he was a prophet of the Final Days who would lead them through the Apocalypse
and millennium.
According to James Tabor, a professor of religious studies at the
University of North Carolina-Charlotte who appears in the film and co-authored
the book Why Waco? (University of California Press), one key to the
event’s tragedy was that the authorities refused to understand the group
in terms of its religious beliefs. If they had, Tabor suggests, it would
have been relatively easy to find the language of conciliation and resolution.
Instead, the Feds derided and mocked Koresh’s "Bible babble." In this,
alas, there’s plenty of precedent. Harold Bloom’s book The American
Religion, which traces the burgeoning of homegrown American faiths (including
the Seventh-Day Adventists) from the 19th century onward, reminds us
of the official persecution and murder visited upon the early Mormons,
whose contravention of conventional sexual morality has obvious parallels
with Koresh’s.
There is something particularly late-20th-century, however, about
the suspicion and derision of religion evidenced at Waco: it assumes
a similar prejudice in high places, in the media and crucial segments
of the public. Still, this was just one element in a scenario that seemed
to combine numerous contemporary delusions and afflictions into a unique
recipe for tragedy. In addition, Waco gives us evidence of: the hegemonic
arrogance of the federal agencies, which ran roughshod over the authority
of the Texas Rangers and local law enforcement; the ways the trumped
up "wars" on drugs, guns and (cough) international terrorism have led
to an unholy alliance between rubber-stamping judges, the federal authorities
and the military (the ATF patently lied in charging the Davidians with
drug violations in order to secure training facilities at Fort Hood);
and the separate manias over "cults" and "child abuse," real concerns
that reached their peaks of dizzily excessive, institutionally enforced
hysteria around the time of the Mt. Carmel siege.
All the foregoing notwithstanding, the two things that disturb me
most in Waco I haven’t even mentioned yet. They are: (a) the pervasive
implication that the U.S. government, far from being the protector of
religious difference and personal freedom that our traditions assert,
may now be so far from popular control as to make a true accounting
for the Waco disaster all but impossible; and (b) the sense that the
major media is now so complicit with the political establishment that
no story that the government doesn’t want "broken"–in the big, meaningful
way that Watergate, say, was–is likely to make its way into full public
consciousness.
Regarding the government, the record so far is consummately discouraging.
Congress held hearings on the Mt. Carmel disaster in 1995, and we see
plenty of them in Waco, but the results aren’t pretty. On the phone
last week, one of the film’s writer-producers, Dan Gifford, summarized
the hearings’ dynamic for me. "The split," he said, "basically came
down to this: The Democrats were protecting the new administration;
the Republicans were out to get Bill Clinton, which put the Democrats
on the defensive. The Democrats were also protecting their key political
babies. To really get into Waco is to get into undoing the war on drugs,
the war on guns, child abuse and other things that get politicians face
time and that police departments get money for...You also have the other
factor on the Republican side, which is that the FBI is involved. That’s
the closest thing we have in this country to an untouchable institution.
Everyone who’s in official life in DC is scared to death of that agency,
because it has the dirt on everybody and can make up dirt when there
is none."
As Gifford put it, what the public saw in the congressional hearings
"was political theater. Nobody wanted to really get at the facts of
the case, with the exception on the House side of perhaps three or four.
And as a couple of reporters pointed out to me, all of those, except
I believe Bob Barr [R-GA], lost elections, because they were then open
to a charge of being ‘antipolice’ and ‘antigovernment.’ You have these
real nuclear strikes in politics these days." If the film has a Snidely
Whiplash, it is the oily, despicable Rep. Charles Schumer (D-NY), who
heaps scorn on the rare testimony that sounds remotely credible and
revealing of the Feds’ real actions.
But surely the deepest malaise that Waco limns belongs to the media.
Waco represents "a major failure of the press in this country," writer
Dick J. Reavis aptly declares before Congress in the film. Reavis, a
Texas leftist whose The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation (Syracuse University
Press) provides a vivid and penetrating overview of the disaster, told
me last week that he figured he’d be hailed as a hero by his journalistic
brethren when his book (which The New York Times Book Review called
"a damning portrait of official hubris, incompetence and deceit") came
out. Instead, he couldn’t find work for four years.
Clearly, the powers that be among the major media do not want the
Waco story told, not really, not in the comprehensive, damning way it
needs to be told. Individual writers may occasionally do good, responsible
work, but from the time the Texas media cooperated with ATF’s disastrous
raid, through 60 Minutes spiking its story as too sensitive (this is
the tale The Insider should have told), up to the present moment, the
press’ actions institutionally have only participated in and added to
the disgrace. Nor was the media’s complicity in the official obfuscation
confined to the newsrooms. Entertainment got on board too. As the campaign
to demonize Koresh gathered steam, shows like Oprah and Donahue energetically
did their parts. Do you suppose they’ve ever recanted?
One person has, at least. In 1993 NBC rushed into production a fictionalized
tv movie titled In the Line of Duty: Ambush at Waco aimed at painting
Koresh as a monster and as valorizing the heroic law enforcement teams.
Though the film continues to air even now, Thibodeau’s book quotes its
screenwriter, Phil Penningroth, as offering this mea culpa at a 1997
memorial service for the Branch Davidians who died at Waco: "Within
days of the ATF raid, the Davidians, and especially Koresh, were demonized
as the Jews were in Germany before World War II. As we all know now,
the government and the media painted a portrait of Koresh and Davidians
that I now believe was insidious, malevolent, and ultimately destructive.
To my everlasting shame and regret, I added to that distorted view.
I pray that soon, very soon, other artists, other journalists, will
recognize the truth of what happened here four years ago."
Even while Mt. Carmel was under siege, it became a cause celebre for
various right-wingers, gun nuts and militia types. It might well have
remained their property. Reavis, an old SDSer and civil rights activist,
told me than when his book came out, these people were the only ones
who wanted to talk to him. A rare proof that films really can matter
in the public arena, Waco: The Rules of Engagement was inarguably the
single most important force in opening the Waco issue to other parts
of the political spectrum. Though it’s been an uphill struggle, and
the filmmakers had to distribute it themselves, the film did premiere
at Sundance, did get scads of great reviews from critics across the
nation and went on to play on HBO, win an Emmy and get an Oscar nomination.
Even when government and the major media were still playing hear-no-evil,
see-no-evil, the movie was doing its slow, steady work of changing minds
one at a time.
The film’s impact, though, both divides and unites viewers in ways
that call into question our customary schema of left- and right-wing.
Dan Gifford told me, "The reactions we’ve had from what I would call
the politically correct left and the statist conservative right have
been identical, which is that [the film] is antigovernment, antipolice
propaganda." Apparently some people find Big Brother’s looming presence
reassuring, and don’t want his excesses questioned. On the other hand,
Gifford’s wife Amy, one of the film’s executive producers, told me with
a laugh that a cinema in Portland, OR, that showed Waco was voted the
city’s best theater due to its "bringing together the tree-hugging left
and the gun-toting right."
The film’s credits list Dan Gifford, William Gazecki and Michael McNulty
as its producers and writers. Gazecki is additionally credited as its
director, McNulty as its researcher and Gifford (along with Amy Sommer
Gifford) as executive producer. Since the film was made, its principals
reportedly have had a falling out and gone in different directions.
Gazecki, I’m told, has moved on to other projects. While the Giffords
have made another, non-Waco documentary, they continue to promote Waco:
The Rules of Engagement and to maintain a website devoted to the issue
(it’s at www.waco93.com; great links to many Waco sites can be found
at yahoo.com). McNulty, meanwhile, has just finished another documentary,
Waco: A New Revelation, which was shown for the press and government
officials last month in Washington, DC.
After I spoke with Dick Reavis last week, he faxed me a letter of
afterthoughts, which included this: "When the press failed to read,
and hence, to respond to my book–the sensation of Waco having passed–I
came to believe that the ‘System’ that we as civil rights workers saw,
might still exist. It was a system of oppression, by governments and
economic interests, and it oppressed everybody, black and white. The
‘System’ had decided to keep the Waco events a secret, I decided, and
its press naturally cooperated; it was dedicated to paychecks and ratings
and promotions and good restaurants, not to any truth or any justice.
Mr. McNulty, to his apparent credit, never lost faith that, as the saying
goes, ‘the system works.’ He never lost faith in what is called American
democracy."
I hope to review Waco: A New Revelation as soon as it hits New York.
Godfrey Cheshire
© New York Press
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