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The information related below comes from two documentaries --- Waco: The Inside Story (Frontline with the Kirk documentary Group, Ltd., 1995), and Waco: The Rules of Engagement (Fifth Estate Productions, Somford Entertainment, 1977). Watch them back to back, and they might change your mind
On February 28, 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the BATF, lost a long shoot-out against the Branch Davidians, a religious group living at Mount Carmel near Waco, Texas. The Davidians were dealing in guns; it was said that they had fully automatic rifles and a milion rounds of ammunition. After hours of heavy firing, the BATF ran out of bullets and went into retreat. Had the Davidians chosen to pursue, they certainly could have killed many agents. But the Davidians held their fire and allowed the BATF to transport its casualties. The Federal Bureau of Investigation placed a tactical unit in control of the area around the home, and a facility at an airfield five miles away was set up for a negotiating team to arrange the surrender of the Davidians. On April 19, fire destroyed Mount Carmel. Nine Davidians escaped the flames; seventy-five did not. What happened at Waco?
The Rules of Engagement adressed the BATF raid in detail. Frontline's Inside Story began with the retreat of the BATF, the arrival of the FBI, and the presumption of Davidian guilt for something. That something was described by an FBI agent as "the murders" --- meaning the deaths of four BATF agents in the raid. Frontline did not explain that the BATF had gone in with armed helicopters and ground troops to serve a search warrant. Frontline neglected to point out that months before the raid, Davidian leader David Koresh had offered to let the BATF inspect the premises without a warrant.
Throughout the seige, the language of the authorities distorted and militarized the situation. Koresh was a "cult leader;" the home was a "compound;" their inventory was a "stockpile." With fateful irony, the FBI brought in their tactical specialists, the Hostage Rescue Team.
Who was being rescued? What sort of criminals were the Davidians, who called 911? Was that cunning or naivete?
The Branch Davidians separated from the Seventh Day Adventists half a century ago and settled in Texas. At the time of the raid, about 130 people lived at Mount Carmel. There were elderly people; there were children who had been born and raised at Mount carmel. One of the first black graduates from Harvard law school lived at Mount Carmel. Yet the images from inside the home presented by Frontline were exclusively of a wounded Koresh with his children, played over assertions that he was using psychological warfare to manipulate the FBI. The Bureau had lots of videos of other Davidians --- a young mother wounded while holding her child, a black family from England who came to Waco to study the Bible, and others. The FBI withheld those videos to avoid generating sympathy for the Davidians.
For its protection during the siege, the press was kept back, although they could still see the home through telephoto lenses. The Davidians wrote messages on sheets and hung them out the windows. One banner read, "Rodney King, we understand."
The Davidians may have understood, but did anyone else? The Davidians needed an intervening entity to preserve any chance of justice. So they hung another sheet from a window: "God help us, we want the press!" Didn't they already have the press? Hadn't the press thoroughly covered FBI news conferences on the standoff?
The negotiators had briefly arranged a trade --- radio sermon time in exchange for children "released." So Koresh could reach the religious community, negotiators also dangled the prospect of TV time on a Christian network ("Ted Koppel, I mean, who's watching that?" a negotiator asked.) While Davidian pleas for coverage were taken as efforts to influence public opinion, continuous government spin control managed perception of events. In the end, there was no intervening hand. Safely outside the perimeter, the press watched through telephoto lenses and government handouts while the Davidians went to their deaths.
The Inside Story showed a tank crushing a small structure on the grounds of Mount Carmel, acompanied by a conversation between a Davidian and a negotiator. The negotiator had no knowledge of the event, stating simply that he knew the tactical unit was not supposed to be doing such things. Negotiators learned from the Davidians that agents had been dropping their pants and mooning the home. Was there no command structure to curb those excesses?
At one point during the seige, the Davidians were allowed to bury one of their dead in front of the home. Afterward, a tank ran back and forth over the grave --- an episode which deeply impressed the Davidians. Was that part of the negotiation process? Or was the negotiator/tactical schism (good cop/bad cop) built into the operation from the beginning? Frontline repeatedly invoked the division between the negotiators and the tactical unit as a factor in the tragedy at Waco. How could such a division persist? As the Davidians listened to rationalizations and diminishment of actions they could see from their windows, how could they not lose faith in negotiations?
On April 19, the standoff ended. CS, a powerful incapacitating chemical, was dissolved in a volatile liquid. Specially outfitted tanks spread the mixture throughout the home while a negotiator told the Davidians over the phone that it was not an assault. The original plan was for the CS to be injected over two days. In fact, all of it was expended in two hours, as the tanks ripped holes in the building. The weather bureau had forecast strong winds, but the FBI didn't heed the report. When fires broke out, the flames were well fed and they swept through the building.
Six minutes after the blazes erupted, the fire department was called. The firemen, for their protection, were then held at the perimeter. Frontline reported that the FBI had evidence which "seemed to show" the Davidians set those fires. The FBI commander declared that when the fires began, his first thought was that the Davidians were destroying the crime scene.
Without doubt, Mount Carmel was destroyed. The Rules of Engagement included infra-red footage shot from an airborne camera when the conflagration began. The images revealed two explosions at the back of the home, only a second apart, as a tank stood by that location. Almost simultaneously, a fire started at another point breached by the tanks. The FBI denied shooting a single bullet at any time, but the infra-red camera recorded the heat signatures of automatic weapons fire directed at the home.
Some Davidians left the home during the siege; nine escaped the inferno. Eleven were tried for murder and conspiracy to commit murder in the deaths of the BATF agents. All eleven were acquitted. But you probably already knew that. Wasn't it all over the news?
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