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Waco's lasting lessonBy Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Whatever the reason, as the weeks passed, the officials were growing frustrated and increasingly angry. The Davidians were humiliating them. This was clear from the television interviews with officials. They felt that they had given David Koresh more than enough chances. And then, as the tanks moved in and began pounding down the walls, the building went up in flames, killing more than 90 men, women, and children. The government killed them. Or least most people assumed so. Coming on the heels of several military aggressions abroad, big government appeared to be riding high after Clinton's 1992 victory, and with the dramatic increase in the size and aggressiveness of the federal police state, it seemed highly likely, even certain, that the BATF and the FBI simply decided to send these problem people to their deaths. What was to stop the agents from doing so? Does anyone really believe that these agents were just too caring and law-abiding to have done it? If that were true, the Feds wouldn't have tortured the people inside with recorded rabbit death screams played at high volume, cut off their water and electricity, and generally tried to drive them out of their homes, let alone pumped the church full of a poisonous tear gas banned for use against soldiers under international law. One by one the excuses for federal behavior evaporated: drugs, guns, child abuse, and aggressive political dissent weren't the reason. After the massacre, the denials began. Clinton said they killed themselves. Reno echoed that same view. At congressional hearings, all the officers involved denied setting the fire. Elaborate scenarios were concocted, without a shred of evidence, designed to show how Koresh had started the fire. The Feds were indignant that anyone would doubt their word, and insulting to anyone who questioned their motives. It's taken six years, but this may be coming to an end. Senior FBI types have always denied using any weaponry that could have ignited the church. But a former FBI official, Danny O. Coulson, has said that the FBI fired devices called M651 CS tear gas grenades before the compound went up in flames. This is the first time any government official contradicted assertions to the contrary. An Army training manual says that these devices lead to fires and sometimes even explode on impact. And yet even this whistle-blower doubts the devices led to the fire itself. That has led some people to doubt that Coulson himself is telling the whole truth. After all, his admission comes only after independent research got hold of pictures of the empty canisters held with other evidence by the Texas Rangers. Even if Coulson is serving as a front man, the Justice Department at first denied it. "We are aware of no evidence to support the notion that any pyrotechnic devices were used by the federal government on April 19." After all, agents have testified under oath that they did not introduce firebombs into the building. With reluctance, the FBI is now inching towards telling the truth. Janet Reno now says, "It is absolutely critical that we do everything humanly possible to learn all the facts as accurately as possible and make them available to the Congress and public." But her statement assumes she is somehow the victim of lies as versus the leading perpetrator of them. Are we to assume that the government has switched from a six-year cover-up to being a source of truth and justice? The government's handling of this case from beginning has been a moral outrage. It is not enough that the Justice Department targeted the peaceful Davidians for reasons that are still unclear. It is not enough that they attempted to starve them out of house and home and then massacred them. It is not enough that the Feds immediately plowed the land under and destroyed evidence, arrogantly planting a US government flag in the mass grave. But to continue to show no regret, much less remorse, about the incident, except to attempt to make martyrs of the attacking agents themselves, and to continue to tell lie after lie, raises fundamental questions. The federal law-enforcement apparatus is misnamed. For my perspective, it wouldn't affect the question of federal guilt if the Davidians did burn their own community. It is an outrage that the Davidians were targeted in the first place. It is an outrage that the government, filled with officials who have sworn to uphold the Constitution, tried to starve out a religious community. If it turned out that Koresh, driven crazy by the government, finally set the place on fire, it wouldn't change the fact that Waco represents an appalling abuse of power. But, as usual in these cases, suspecting the worst of the government is the best posture for getting at the truth. Anyone who has seen the movie, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" -- which shows that the FBI machine-gunned the burning building to prevent anyone from getting out -- or read any of the shelf of books out on the subjects, knows precisely who is to blame. And politicians and intellectuals wonder whatever happened to the civic pride of the good old days? The answer: it went up in flames at Waco. No amount of back peddling can change that now. Beyond the precise details of the case, Waco teaches us something important about the nature of government. It hates dissent, and it doesn't hesitate to kill its opponents. What happened to the Branch Davidians also happened to the Serbians, and continues to happen to the Iraqis. We are reminded once again that the State, as Albert Jay Nock explained, is the enemy of civilized life. Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr. is president of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama.
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If you were near a television set on April 19, 1993, you will never
forget the sight of the Mt. Carmel religious community in Waco, Texas,
going up in flames. For weeks we followed the standoff with
bewilderment. What precisely had these people done to justify the Feds
surrounding them with tanks? Yes, some members of the community shot at
some federal police, but in
self-defense: their home was being invaded by a horde, and evidence
suggests the Feds fired first.