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Waco Fire Continues to Burn on the
Web
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Given that rumors and conspiracy theories are difficult to prove and even more difficult to disprove, it should come as no surprise that those who persist in trying to find the "truth" about Waco have greeted these verdicts with scorn and skepticism. The death of David Koresh and his followers is no longer only a matter for forensic investigation; for those who remain concerned about what really happened at Waco, the events of March and April, 1993, have attained the status of myth.
The Davidian religious community - a multiracial and surprisingly liberal group - has been transformed into unlikely martyrs for a variety of causes: patriots, militia sympathizers, Second Amendment activists, would-be revolutionaries, and full-blown apocalyptic paranoiacs.
The Internet is a perfect medium for those who remain dissatisfied with official accounts of the government's handling of the Waco case. But we shouldn't conclude that the hundreds of Web sites focusing on these events are maintained and read only by conspiracy crackpots and Timothy McVeigh sympathizers. Substantial questions remain that were not addressed nor resolved in either the Danforth investigation or in the civil trial - a trial in which the judge excluded a substantial portion of the plaintiffs' most damning evidence.
The credibility gap on Waco is immense: an August, 1999 Time magazine poll showed 61 percent of the American public blaming federal law enforcement officials for the fire at Waco. Danforth's report claimed that the persistence of such charges is unreasonable in light of the "overwhelming evidence exonerating the government from the charges made against it, and the lack of any real evidence to support the charges of bad acts." But reasonable people and responsible scholars continue to raise questions about Waco that remain unanswered.
Disputed Issues in the Waco Investigations
The controversial documentary Waco: Rules of Engagement is at least partly responsible for keeping Waco in the public eye and thereby forcing the government to reopen the case. Hundreds of thousands of viewers have been exposed by this Emmy award-winning film to a battery of disturbing images and evidence.
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Among the most incendiary charges made in the film: that government tanks deliberately introduced lethal doses of poisonous CS gas into enclosed, unventilated spaces housing women and young children, and that federal agents fired numerous rounds into the burning building - presumably to keep inhabitants from escaping. This last charge was so grave - receiving serious treatment by the Washington Post, among other credible media outlets - that former Senator Danforth felt it necessary to stage a re-enactment of the gun battle in order to ascertain whether the government's Forward-Looking InfraRed (FLIR) footage was open to misinterpretation.
The Danforth report concluded that comparison of the 1993 FLIR footage with the infrared video of the spring, 2000 re-enactment reveals that the heat signatures that some experts interpreted as gunfire was merely the product of sunlight reflecting off debris in the area surrounding the Branch Davidian complex.
This conclusion, of course, has been subjected to scathing attack. Rules of Engagement producer Dan Gifford, in a recent Salon interview, attacks the supposed independence of the government's expert analysts.
"The Waco reenactment [of the infrared footage] is always presented as if it was done by an independent firm, implying that it has no axe to grind, no connections, and is completely free to come to whatever its conclusions are," Gifford said. "Fact is, that firm is [mostly] owned by Anteon Corporation, one of the largest defense contractors, holding major contracts with the FBI for training and for software and also with the Treasury Department and the ATF for training."
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The Danforth report fails to note these connections, and makes no mention of the analyses of the 1993 FLIR footage by credible independent experts. Since the making of Rules of Engagement, one of these experts, Edward Allard, has suffered a stroke and was unable to testify at the trial.
A second expert, Carlos Ghigliotti, who had analyzed the FLIR tapes for the Congressional committee investigating the events at Waco and who supposedly found definite evidence of gunfire, was found dead in his office in April, 2000. Avid followers of the Waco case naturally speculated that Ghigliotti's suspicious death was linked to his investigations of the infrared footage.
There's no evidence so far that the government has orchestrated a cover-up that extends to murder of key witnesses. But, in spite of Danforth's exoneration, there seems to be good reason to suppose that officials of the ATF, the FBI, and the Justice Department acted with extreme negligence, if not malice, and have actively attempted to squelch inquiries into these events.
- The government denied for years that pyrotechnic rounds had been
used in the final assault on the compound, until physical evidence
of such rounds were turned up in investigations by the Rules of
Engagement filmmakers - and until Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill
Johnston went public about the suppression of this
evidence in a letter to Janet Reno. (The preceding link is a PDF
file.)
While the Danforth report concludes that the pyrotechnic rounds did not cause the fire, it also states that "the failure of certain government officials to acknowledge the use of pyrotechnic tear gas rounds until August of 1999 constitutes , at best, negligence in the handling of the evidence and, at worst, a criminal effort to cover up the truth."
- The preceding point begs the question as to when "negligence in
handling evidence" crosses into the terrain of criminal coverup. Suspicions
are aroused by the fact that numerous crucial pieces of forensic
evidence have simply disappeared or were destroyed when the government
bulldozed the still-warm ashes of the Branch Davidian's home (surely
an odd thing to do at the scene of a criminal investigation!).
Perhaps the most problematic "missing link" is the left side of the large metal front door of the main Davidian building, which would have indicated bullet trajectories in the initial gun battle on February 28, proving or disproving government claims that Koresh and his followers opened fire on Federal agents. The BATF's own videotapes of the initial raid have also never been produced.
- There is considerable evidence that
contrary to their repeated denials, BATF agents in cruising helicopters
fired down into the Davidian complex in the first few minutes of the
raid. The Danforth Report dismisses these "entirely meritless" allegations,
but fails to address any of the evidence, which ranges from video
recordings to ample eyewitness testimony.
- There are troubling questions about measures that were or were not
taken in anticipation of fire. One ambiguous
report claims that federal agents had notified a Dallas hospital
early on the morning of April 19 to stand by for burn victims - before
the fire had begun. On the other hand, the Waco fire department was
NOT told to stand by, and in fact was not called until eight minutes
after the fire started. Further, fire engines were not allowed into
the complex until the building had been almost completely consumed.
FBI spokesmen justified this decision at the time by claiming that they did not wish to expose firemen to heavy shooting coming from besieged Davidians - but no evidence has ever been produced (such as bullets or damaged equipment) that the Davidians shot at firemen or law enforcement officials during the final stages of the assault and burning.
- The Dallas Morning News reports that contrary
to the Attorney General's directive, a flammable gas, methylene
chloride, was used as a propellant for the insertion of tear gas.
Again, Danforth dismisses the possibility that methylene chloride
could have contributed to the fire's spread while failing to confront
the evidence of the gas's flammability under the conditions in
the Waco complex.
Suspicions are aroused by the fact that numerous crucial pieces of forensic evidence have simply disappeared or were destroyed when the government bulldozed the still-warm ashes of the Branch Davidian's home
- Perhaps the most striking fact about the Danforth Report is that it confined itself to examining the events of the April 19 fire, while explicitly rejecting any consideration of "whether it was appropriate for ATF to execute a raid on February 28 or for the ... FBI to execute its gas insertion plan on April 19, 1993", on the grounds that "these issues require an evaluation of judgment, an evaluation that is outside the scope of the Attorney General's mandate." One might say, precisely - and wonder whether such an evaluation of the propriety (not to say criminality) of the judgment of our government officials can ever be expected from any independent investigation.
One could go on, further and deeper. (For more information, see "Waco Sites on the Web.") There are more charges, counter-charges, more contradictory and missing evidence, and most of all, more unanswered questions. Some citizens, but very few reporters, have the patience to dig deeply in search of the truth of what happened at Waco from February to April of 1993, but they are usually (and sometimes with justification) dismissed as obsessive anti-government ideologues. The unfortunate fact is that anyone who attempts to go beyond the denials, contradictions, and outright lies that have characterized official accounts of this tragedy is likely to be typecast as a paranoid crank.
Journalist Dick Reavis, whose book The Ashes of Waco remains one of the best analyses (albeit early and incomplete) of the whole debacle, has been unsuccessful in drawing the attention of the mainstream press to the story.
And while the film Rules of Engagement may have helped to force the government to re-open its investigations, the media spotlight that might have forced those investigations to definitively confirm or refute the most damning allegations has been nowhere in evidence.
All the investigations to date - from the original Justice Department analysis, the criminal trial of the Davidian survivors, two Congressional inquiries, the Special Counsel's report, to the civil suit for wrongful death brought by the survivors - have failed to answer or even address the most important questions about the Waco operation. We are no closer to the truth of what happened; and an honest assessment leads inevitably to the conclusion that we will probably never reach the truth.
Worse yet, if the truth ever does come out, it will likely not be believed. The paranoia of many Waco activists will cause them to discount anything that the mainstream press publishes or that the government is ever able to admit. Given this impossible situation, it's no surprise that most people throw up their hands and refuse to think about it. One cannot expect government agencies to open up and admit to negligence or culpability in the 88 deaths that followed from their horrendous error of judgment.
It would, however, serve the causes of democracy and accountability if the press would do more with this issue than roll over and play dead. As long as the right questions are not only unanswered, but unasked, by the mainstream media, we can expect that the fires of Waco will continue to smolder. Stephen D. O'Leary is an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
Stephen D. O'Leary is an associate professor at the USC Annenberg School for Communication.
© 2000 Online Journalism Review
