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By Stephen Hunter
Now, "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," an ambitious if agenda-driven documentary, seeks to penetrate that smoke. But by the end you're still coughing. No event in recent history has called out more loudly for sound, clear, fair professional journalism than the events on that windy prairie over those 51 long days. It still does; this isn't it. In "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," the filmmakers' anger clouds their news judgment and obscures some real scoops. It gets away from its central -- and excellent -- examination of the events that led to the cremation to push a theory of massacre by the FBI that seems far more an issue of subjective interpretation than actual evidence. More fundamentally, the film seems not to know what it is, and from that stems its principal problem -- it doesn't know who its audience is. Is it an example of preaching to the converted, a cri de coeur to the hard gun right, which sees the Davidians as martyrs to the trashed Second Amendment? Is it a journalistically valid examination of difficult materials that few mainstream news organizations have been willing to look at rigorously? It tries to be both; consequently one must view it with caution. But first, there's an issue of style. The movie, directed by William Gazecki, feels somehow too slick and professionally persuasive, like an episode of "Ancient Mysteries of the Bible" or some other over-produced cable schlock. It shows -- for the first time on the big screen -- home video shot by the Davidians themselves within the compound during the siege. We see the faces and hear the voices of the ultimately burned. Far from robots under the spell of a charismatic sociopath, they seem like reasonable, earnest people. And their children, the true victims in this tragedy, will break your heart. They are, after all, not Davidians, they are just kids. Yet so powerful is that imagery -- giving faces to those who were so routinely demonized -- that one wonders at the extent to which it is overplayed. Are the strains of tragic violin really necessary? Don't the faces of the dead speak eloquently enough without the musical amplification? And the frequent dissolves to the conflagration make a point literally that should be left to the audience to make metaphorically.
Finally, there's the issue of muzzle flashes. Using tape from an FBI FLIR (Forward-Looking Infrared) camera in a circling aircraft, the producers bring in infrared expert Edward Allard, a specialist with impeccable credentials, who claims that flashes in the eerie tape can only be muzzle blasts, suggesting that FBI shooters accompanied the tanks and were offering suppressive fire for the armored vehicles, which effectively kept the Davidians trapped amid the flames. That amounted to murder. Even though other analysts disagree with that conclusion (see sidebar), the material is questionable without reference to other sources. Clearly the tape contains not merely thermal information, but also visual information -- that is, we can see the tanks moving on the buildings, we can see clouds, we can see shadows. Thus there's no guarantee that the odd cracks of incandescence are registrations of the heat of muzzle blasts; they could be reflections of shiny debris or puddles, odd optical phenomena. Part of the problem here is epistemological. It proceeds from the assumption that somehow everything can be known. Everything can be decoded. But even if we share God's viewpoint, only He can know all: We are looking into an unbelievably volatile situation, with tanks grinding into buildings, dust floating, mirage and smoke filling the air, mud, fuel and water saturating the ground. It's impossible to account for the variables, and the attempt to find answers from what cannot be anything but interpretations is doomed to be unconvincing.
But where it breaks new ground is its examination of the cowboy mentality of the besiegers. We expect and deserve more from professional, highly trained law enforcement officers on the firing line. My God, if these guys can't control their middle fingers -- one creditable survivor reports much "bird flipping" at the Davidians -- how can they be counted on to control their trigger fingers? There's a chilling bit of home video in which an FBI sniper, lounging in a vehicle under a pair of expensive shades, proclaims gleefully to his buddy behind the Camcorder, "I'm honed to a fine edge. I'm honed to kill." As Harvard professor Alan Stone, who investigated the events for the Justice Department, says, "I began to see that the key to the situation wasn't the psychology of the people inside, it was the psychology of the people outside." And thus one sees the crucial miscalculation that made the events of April 19 almost preordained: The SWAT people are trained to action. They have refined shooting skills, extraordinary courage, tactical finesse on a world-class level. They are exactly the kind of guys who should not be parked in the rain on a perimeter for 51 days, because they grow restless, edgy and embittered and their judgment falters, as it clearly did, until they're willing to pump massive amounts of noxious, potentially poisonous CS gas into a ramshackle wooden structure filled with kids who could not even wear gas masks, creating a tinderbox that any odd spark could ignite. Combine their reckless will toward resolution with a White House inexperienced in applications of force, and the tragedy was almost unstoppable. The bitter truth is, it didn't have to happen. As a wise friend says, "Nothing happened down there that a mile of concertina wire and a few deputy sheriffs wouldn't have solved eventually." Yes, the Davidians might still be down there, but at least the children would be alive. Waco: The Rules of Engagement, at the Key, is not rated, but it features grisly photos taken during autopsies. ©1997 The Washington Post Company |
At least metaphorically, the shroud of choking smoke still
hangs over the ruins of the Branch Davidian compound at Waco, Tex., where on April
19, 1993, 76 people, including 25 children, were cremated in a botched FBI attempt
to bring the 51-day standoff to an end.
There's also some attempt to revise the image of David Koresh,
to legitimatize the theological underpinnings that led him to sexual activity with
girls in their very early teens. This is hard to swallow; more important, it misses
the larger point, which is that this isn't an either/or situation. It's not necessary
for Koresh to be good for the government's actions to be bad. This isn't melodrama,
it's complex reality, and therefore it's quite possible that Koresh was a child molester
by legitimate legal standards and the government acted unwisely through the two agencies
-- the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI -- involved in the situation.
"Waco: The Rules of Engagement" does good work in challenging
several components on the original record. It offers what appears to be film of ATF
helicopters firing on a Davidian during the initial raid, when ATF has maintained
its choppers were unarmed. It uncovers an ATF negotiator acknowledging that men in
the choppers fired, while sticking to the feeble explanation that there were no mounted
guns on the helicopters. It pokes nasty fun at some of ATF's and the FBI's congressional
apologists during the House hearings, including one pitifully deluded representative
who thinks that "flashbang" grenades -- classified as destructive devices
by federal law -- are harmless.LinkExchange Member
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