Book of Revelation
Craig Goodrich
Rant Magazine
January 2000
The arts of power and its minions are the same in all countries and in all ages. It marks its victim; denounces it; and excites the public odium and the public hatred, to conceal its own abuses and encroachments.
-- Senator Henry Clay (Whig, Kentucky), 1834We often hear, from our graying elder TV pundits and our ingratiating, trust-me politicians, that Modern Society requires adjustments (always minor ones, of course) to Constitutional guarantees of personal freedom. Surely the Founding Fathers can't have meant this political philosophy, or pictures like that, or powerful guns like those, or drugs like these when they framed the First or Fifth or Second or Fourth Amendment. Obviously we have to (carefully and reluctantly) suppress this or that or the other in the name of [all together now] Public Safety, so our society and values can survive into the [everybody ready?] Next Millenium.
With all due respect, O Exalted Airheads, yes they did. The Bill of Rights is not about large-capacity magazines or flintlocks. It's not about networked computers, television sets, handbills, or quill pens. It's about the relationship between the people and their government. It says nothing whatever about what the people are allowed to do, but specifies clearly and unambiguously what the government is absolutely forbidden from doing, for any reason, under any pretext.
Because the Founding Fathers were well aware that when a government is allowed to place any consideration above the personal freedom of its citizens, it becomes the worst possible threat to the security of the people and the survival of the society.
And to anyone who doubts that this even more true today than it was in the 1790s, I present Exhibit A: the recently-published book A Place Called Waco, by former Davidian David Thibodeau (and Leon Whiteson, Perseus/Public Affairs 1999, 365 + xviii pages, $25).
The book is Thibodeau's first-person account of the Davidians, from his first encounter with David Koresh at a guitar shop in Los Angeles (Koresh, a guitar player, was getting together a band to do spiritual rock; Thibodeau was trying to make it as a drummer) through the conflagration of April 18, 1993 and its denouement.
Let's review the events at Waco. I know you don't want to. I don't want to. Nobody wants to. Just when you thought it was safely forgotten, somebody has to write a damn book about it. Sorry. No pain, no gain.
In the OfficialNewYorkTimesNBCTimeNewsweekCBS version, the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) bravely attempted to serve a search warrant for illegal machine guns and explosives on the fortified compound of a violent, heavily-armed cult, but was ambushed when they arrived on February 28, 1993, because the Davidians had been tipped off. Then the FBI took over, and after many weeks of intense, fruitless negotiations attempted to use tear gas to end the standoff. But the Davidians, totally under the control of the charismatic Koresh, opted for mass suicide and set fire to their compound. Nearly all of them died in the fire on April 18.
That's the story you get when you run reality through your Ted Koppel Secret Decoder Ring. Well, at least the dates are right.
Anyone with even a casual interest in the case has known for years, from alternative publications, the Internet, and televised hearings on CSPAN (unfiltered by newsroom agendas), that a much more accurate version of events goes something like this:
The BATF had suffered a spate of bad publicity concerning both endemic, chronic sexual harassment in their offices and their destruction of the Weaver family in the 1992 Ruby Ridge disaster. They badly needed some kind of heroic event to improve their public image prior to the Congressional budget hearings in mid-March. In their files they discovered that a box containing gun parts and dummy hand grenades, addressed to a group near Waco, had broken open in shipment, and UPS had reported it. BATF's Waco office did a cursory investigation of the Davidians, discovered some old allegations by an ex-member of the group, and reported the likelihood that there were a lot of guns in the hands of an offbeat sect at Mount Carmel.
So, with visions of laudatory headlines and "confiscated arsenal" photo-ops dancing in their heads, the BATF bureaucracy planned the raid, hoked up enough of an affidavit to give their favorite judge an excuse to issue a search warrant, and put out the word to their friends in the press. To provide even more impressive action for the TV coverage they arranged to borrow military helicopters, on the pretext that the Davidians were operating a methamphetamine lab on the premises.
(Like the many "Drug War" exceptions to the Bill of Rights, there is an exception to the Posse Comitatus Act: military involvement in domestic law enforcement is absolutely prohibited unless illegal drugs are involved. Doesn't that give you a warm fuzzy feeling?)
One of the several small businesses the Davidians operated to provide the revenue to run their church was selling items such as custom-made camouflage hunting and camping gear at gun shows. One popular novelty was a dummy grenade mounted on a wooden base labelled "Complaint Department" (that's why they ordered quantities of dummy grenades). The Davidians sold guns quite legally through a Federally-licensed Waco gun dealer, Henry McMahon; in fact, on February 28, most of the crates of guns the BATF expected to find and display to a properly- horrified press had been hauled off to a weekend gun show to be resold.
At Congressional hearings in the 1970s, twice again in the 1980s, and yet again in the 1990s, BATF officials had sworn to reform the agency, which had the worst record for thuggery and incompetence in the entire Federal government -- quite an accomplishment -- long before 1993.
When the cattle trailer of BATF agents arrived at Mount Carmel, they began shooting as soon as they dismounted, killing the Davidian's dogs. Simultaneously armed agents pounded on the front door. When Koresh -- unarmed -- answered the door, other agents, possibly confused by the gunfire killing the dogs and still more bursts of gunfire from the helicopters, opened fire on Koresh, wounding him seriously.
As to the BATF's actual intention to serve the search warrant, they hadn't even brought it with them. More than sixty agents with machine guns, yes. Grenades, ladders, helicopters, radios, yes. Armored vehicles, yes. TV cameras, of course. Search warrant, no.
At this point one or more Davidians may have returned fire. In any case, the crowd of BATF agents began firing wildly into the house, a flimsy wooden frame structure containing dozens of women and children. Four agents died, at least one of them by gunfire from some fellow agent: he was killed by a Federal Hydra-Shok bullet, a brand of ammunition used by the BATF but not by the Davidians. (It's quite expensive, especially if you're spraying it around with submachine guns like the BATF's. But it's only tax money, after all.) Autopsies, if any, on the other three agents have not been made public.
There was, in fact, little credible evidence that the Davidians fired back at all. A video taken during the initial assault on Mount Carmel shows several agents crouched behind cars firing their submachine guns into the building, while other agents walk around erect behind them, apparently unconcerned that they might attract return fire. No bullet holes are apparent in the cars from which the agents are shooting. And the front door, through which the BATF later claimed the Davidians shot at them, mysteriously disappeared while in Federal custody before the surviving Davidians' trial. Witnesses who recalled seeing it during the later siege said that all the bullet holes in it had dented the sheet metal inwards, meaning they had all come from the BATF.
Under Texas law, by the way, it is perfectly legal to defend yourself by any necessary means against grossly excessive force from a police official.
After the BATF's bloody fiasco, the operation was transferred to the FBI's Hostage Rescue Team (HRT), which cut off the Davidian's phone and electricity and constantly undermined its own negotiators by such puerile tactics as running their military APCs over the children's new tricycles and go-karts and vandalizing the Davidians' cars.
Finally on April 14 an agreement was reached whereby Koresh and the rest of the Davidians would surrender peacefully once Koresh had finished writing his interpretation of the Seven Seals (in Revelation 6). Before he could complete it, however, the FBI violated the agreement and attacked the building with tanks, knocking out major supporting structures (including the stairway leading to the second-floor nursery and women's quarters) and filling the building with an unbelievably high concentration of disabling pepper gas (CS, an extremely powerful Mace-like compound) and toxic, highly flammable methylene chloride.
The Davidians had been using kerosene and gasoline lamps for lighting, since the power had been cut off, and April 18 was a hot, dry, windy day. Bales of hay had been placed along several walls to help deflect bullets. The ferret rounds used to fire the gas canisters into the building were highly incindiary when used at close range, as were the flashbang grenades that the HRT agents enjoyed tossing like giant firecrackers at any Davidian who tried to come out to talk during the siege. Davidian survivor Renos Avraam, in a broadcast interview, explained "One of the tanks knocked over a gas lantern, and it started a fire under some bales of hay that were lying around. The fire wasn't started by us."
Once the fire started, the FBI insured that the building burned to the ground by holding back fire trucks from Waco -- which the FBI itself had alerted earlier -- miles from the scene. The Davidian's main water tank had been riddled with bullets by the ATF back in February.
The FBI also carefully pushed rubble across the only exit from the concrete room (formerly used as a large pantry) where they knew many women and children had fled during the early phases of the tank assault, before the FBI cut off access to it by destroying the stairway leading down from their quarters. A tank then blasted a large hole in the ceiling of the room, killing many with the falling concrete, fired the incindiary pepper gas / methylene chloride canisters into the crowded room at point blank range, and withdrew to allow the fire to complete its work.
And to top it all off, agents were firing at anyone attempting to escape from the burning building, as claimed by several Davidian survivors at the time and shown in infrared film finally pried out of Federal hands by a Freedom of Information suit in the fall of 1999, after nearly five years of government delaying tactics and obfuscation.
Once Mount Carmel Center was destroyed, Federal agents continually and systematically interfered with efforts by Texas authorities to investigate the site, and bulldozed the ruin and surrounding area as soon as possible, effectively precluding any further investigation.
When eleven of the surviving Davidians were tried in January 1994, the jury found them Not Guilty on the most serious charges; according to later statements by the foreman, the consensus of the jury was that three to five years at most were warranted for any of the defendants -- this after a rigged trial where every judicial decision went in favor of the government, and where evidence crucial to the reconstruction of the alleged crimes -- such as the front door -- had mysteriously disappeared while in government custody. The judge at the sentencing hearing overturned the jury's verdict on a technicality and sentenced the defendants to terms ranging from twenty to forty years.
I repeat: all of this information, backed by convincing evidence, has been available to any interested party from various "alternative press" sources for at least the last four years. It is a measure of the laziness and corruption of American journalism that so little of it has appeared in the established media, and that any mention of this scenario results not in a serious attempt at refutation but in being reviled as a "conspiracy nut."*
Thibodeau's book confirms and amplifies this summary account, and although it contains no major new insights into the sequence of events, the minor details he provides -- in a remarkably non-polemical tone -- illuminate the real character of the Waco holocaust much more than does some new bit of evidence of Federal mendacity in a Washington Post headline.
For example, at the time of the February 28 raid, Davidians Mike Schroeder (in his 20's, like Thibodeau) and "old Bob Kendrick" (62; in failing health after several heart attacks) were working at their auto repair shop about four miles down the road from Mount Carmel. When they learned that the church was under attack, they grabbed their handguns and started back. Since the road was blocked, they had to walk the last two miles, and Mike, being in much better shape than Bob, was the first to encounter the Federal agents. Thibodeau, p. 187:
The agents, thirteen of them, later claimed that Mike had opened fire and that they fired back. But Bob, hugging the earth close by, heard the first shots -- fired from a rifle, not a pistol like Mike's -- coming from the direction of the barn where the raiders were based... The coroner's report stated that Mike was hit four times in the body and the left leg, which likely happened during the firefight. However, there were also three wounds in his skull, which must have been inflicted at close range, after Mike had collapsed and was bleeding to death from his internal injuries. The fact that no powder burns were found around those bullet holes was probably due to his woolen cap, which later conveniently vanished and has never been found, not even when the Texas Rangers searched for it during their later crime-scene investigation. (The Rangers' investigations were hampered by the FBI, who blocked the officers from returning to the place where Mike was killed for ten days, giving them access only when the rain had washed away any incriminating footprints.) Mike's body had been left hanging on a fence for four days, until the Rangers released his corpse. Coyotes had chewed off one of his legs....
So on the day of the original assault, when the BATF was ostensibly in charge of the operation, there is evidence strongly suggesting that Mike Schroeder was murdered in cold blood by Federal agents. And on the day of the final assault, when the FBI was ostensibly in charge of the operation, the only exit from a concrete room known to house a large number of women and children was deliberately sealed off, the ceiling blown in, and a totally disabling quantity of CS pepper gas inserted in combination with toxic levels of a highly flammable chemical, under circumstances making the spread of fire inevitable.
Any military officer who ordered these actions in wartime would be hanged. Yet no BATF or FBI official was fired, or even demoted, because of the Waco holocaust -- let alone tried for any crime. (In fact the BATF agents in charge of the original assault -- Philip Chojnacki and Charles Sarabyn -- were dismissed, then reinstated with their records expunged, presumably because they blackmailed their superiors with threats to release additional evidence of Bureau chicanery.)
The Israeli mother of my friend Pablo Cohen, herself a survivor of the Nazi death camps, said that never in her worst nightmares did she expect her son to die by gassing and incineration in America. (p. 276)
Even after all this horror, Thibodeau somehow manages to retain the vaguely liberal but basically apolitical attitude towards government and the press that he had as a New England yuppie growing up, and as an aspiring Southern California musician. He praises a law journal article by Denver attorney David Kopel, "in spite of [his] connection with the NRA." He mentions that at first he felt uncomfortable speaking before militia and "extreme Constitutionalist" (whatever that may mean -- Eek! Maybe he means me!) groups, but "they were the only people that seemed to be interested in what happened."
(And of course he's right; more than one civil libertarian of the American left has commented on how disgraceful it is that most of their "movement" friends have been content to simply swallow whole the Government line on Waco; and in the years since then, the situation has gotten even worse. Where were the campus riots over the bombing of Yugoslavia? Answer: In Germany, Italy, and Greece....)
But perhaps this apolitical, nonthreatening tone is part of coauthor Leon Whiteson's effort to help Thibodeau fit back into the mainstream middle-class society of Austin, Texas, where he now lives with his post-Waco wife and child. One can only wish them the best.
Whiteson probably also deserves most of the credit for the book's lucid, readable style and clear organization -- no mean accomplishment, given the complexity of the event and the fact that much of what is known about it was pieced together from fragments of evidence discovered afterwards. Whiteson's only previous book is about gardening, of all things; he's also the architecture columnist for the Los Angeles Times.
So buy this book. Read this book. And when you have sufficiently recovered from it, think about two questions that Thibodeau doesn't raise:
First, suppose the BATF's original plan had succeeded? The result would have been the demonization and destruction of a harmless, Constitutionally-protected group, with many lives shattered by draconian prison terms on trumped-up charges, all for the sake of a One-Day-Wonder media circus lionizing the Bureau and providing it with ammunition for the perpetual Washington budget battles. Forgotten "old news" within a week. How many times has this happened since Waco? And how many times had it happened before?
Second, what kind of America do you want your children and grandchildren to grow up in?
My daughter Elaine was born the same year as David Thibodeau. She and her generation will determine what kind of a country this is in the next century.
Melissa Morrison was barely 6 when she was gassed and burned at Waco; she won't be able to grow up in any kind of America at all.
This one is to Elaine, for Melissa.
-- Craig
Computer guru Craig Goodrich lives in a house in the woods in Elkmont, with his wife, two children, and four cats. He is a member of the Libertarian Party of Alabama, a smoker, and a gun owner.
