WACMUR

In analyzing the events at Waco, it is useful to understand the mindset of those inside Mount Carmel. It is no less important to understand those outside. The Bureau: Inside the Modern FBI (Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995) by Diarmuid Jeffreys, provides unexpected revelations about the process which lead to the conflagration.

According to the jacket notes of The Bureau:

...investigative journalist Diarmuid Jeffreys...[a]fter protracted negotiations...persuaded the Bureau to grant him and a television team unprecedented access to its agents and operations. The result, after almost three years of filming and research, is a four-hour public television series and this compelling, groundbreaking book.

...What becomes clear is that if Hoover's influence has not disappeared altogether, the FBI is well on the way to reinventing itself and, for the most part, succeeding in its difficult mission.

What becomes clear is that Hoover's tenure at the FBI was something the Bureau had to live down. Hoover's name was "synonymous with scandal," and the Bureau "has survived the many embarrassments and exposes in the years since Hoover's death..." (p. 6) The embarrassments and exposes were not delineated in Jeffreys's book, but he seemed to believe the FBI had changed. His account of Waco, unfortunately, didn't confirm that belief.

Chapter 7 dealt with WACMUR, Bureau-crypt for WACo MURders. As the jacket notes suggested, Jeffreys described Waco even more exclusively through the eyes of the FBI than had Frontline. It was taken for granted that the Davidians were a cult and their beliefs were strange. Koresh was described at different points as "the cult's self-styled Messiah," psycopath, a paranoid, and a man afraid of homosexual rape if imprisoned. Though fear of rape in prison is not unreasonable, it was presented as somehow a negative indicator of his character. The rest of the Davidians were as faceless in Jeffreys's account as in Frontline's. The inter-racial nature of the Davidian community and the "Rodney King" banner displayed at Mount Carmel were not features of Jeffreys's rendition.

True, Jeffreys was puzzled over why the BATF hadn't simply arrested Koresh on any of several opportunities when he was away from the home. But that telling fault was merely mentioned in passing, without any attempt to fathom its meaning.

And the conduct of the FBI was also carefully handled. The Rules of Engagement showed discussions at Congressional hearings on the FBI's use of "flash bangs" at Waco. Flash bangs can take off a hand or a face; they can kill. They are used to disable suspects without endangering people nearby. Jeffreys wrote that Davidians occasionally had attempted "to leave the confines of the buildings and walk around the compound. Each time, the FBI drove them back with 'flash bangs,' tiny explosive charges that gave off bright light, smoke, and noise." (p. 225) Jeffreys wrote as if the Davidians were confined to their home by a silly fear of firecrackers.

Could such a "tiny explosive charge" ignite a highly flammable gas?

Jeffreys, like Frontline, had the cooperation of the FBI. Even so, he was unable to clarify the circumstances surrounding child abuse claims passed to Janet Reno:

Then the agents told Reno more about the children. According to one of those present, an agent said that a Davidian who had left the compound earlier had talked of babies being slapped around. "Let me get this clear," said Reno, "Do you really mean beaten?" "Yes," the agent replied. Reno was left with the clear impression that the FBI believed children were being abused at the time. Only later did she find out that the allegation was an old one and not necessarily still relevant. (p. 229)

Splendidly vague, isn't it? An unidentified someone, through another unidentified someone, passed an imprecise and not necessarily relevant claim to the attorney general of the United States. This established not the fact of child abuse but Reno's "impression that the FBI believed" in that abuse, which secured authorization for gas attacks to save the children from that unspecified abuse.

According to Frontline, a subsequent FBI investigation was unable to identify the person who passed the abuse information to Reno. Jeffreys also reported that the FBI could not identify the agent involved.

Assessing the FBI's performance on the issue of child abuse and Reno's acceptance of the gas plan, Jeffreys asked, "...why didn't the FBI correct her assumption that it was ongoing?" (p. 235) Thus, a story fed to Reno became a misconception held by her which the FBI, tragically, failed to rectify. "After a few weeks," according to The Bureau, "the heated investigations began to simmer down as the American public accepted that no matter what had happened at Waco, David Koresh was ultimately to blame." (Empllasis added.) Surviving Davidians were acquitted of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, but doubts about Davidian guilt were not well founded:

Asked for her comments on the verdicts, Attorney General Janet Reno said that despite the acquittals...the jury clearly failed to believe the Davidians' claims that they acted in self-defense. (p. 237)

Really? The jurors didn't believe the Davidians and acquitted them anyway? Were the jurors bought off? Did the prosecution throw the case? Why were the survivors acquitted of crimes for which the dead paid dearly? The Bureau ventured no opinion.

Jeffreys produced his account after "protracted negotiations" for "unprecedented access" to agents and operations. In other words, the FBI carefully defined the areas that Jeffreys could examine and then gave him free reign to see everything they wished him to see. Is it surprising that the Bureau exonerated itself on camera-or that television accepted the Bureau's view so uncritically?

Reporting the pronouncements of government agencies is a legitimate function of journalism. But along with assumptions about the FBI, Jeffreys also brought with him assumptions about the media:

An ABC poll showed that 95 percent of Americans believed he [Koresh] was responsible for the disaster. Further speculation was put on hold as the media broadly agreed to give the official inquiry process a chance to come up with answers. (p. 234)

Hello, George Orwell. Where did Americans get their beliefs about the Davidians if not from the news? News control --- holding the press at the perimeter, not releasing videos of Davidians other than Koresh, bandying irrelevant accusations, demonizing the Davidians, withholding evidence from the public and from a subsequent Congressional inquiry, etc. --- became media agreement not to speculate until the Bureau had a chance to come up witll answers.

On September 8, 1999, Janet Reno selected former Missouri senator John C. Danforth "to lead an independent re-examination of the tear-gas assault on the Branch Davidian compound by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1993..." (The New York Times, 9/9/1999, p. 1. Note the use of the word "compound.") This was, according to the Times, "a choice to quiet critics."

Critics of whom-Reno or the FBI? According to the Times, the new developments "badly undercut her [Reno's] credibility by showing, despite the agency's denials, that the F.B.I. agents had fired combustible tear-gas rounds into a concrete bunker near the sect's compound." In other words, the FBI did not admit to firing pyrotechnic devices into the home-only near it.

This is progress of a sort. The FBI once denied using any pyrotechnic devices at all. Now we know that they used two-flashbangs and tear-gas grenades.

It had not occurred to me that the recent disclosures undercut Reno; they were far more damaging to the FBI, which had withheld facts from Reno or misrepresented them. The New York Times saw matters diferently, and concluded that the disclosures do not prove the Bureau ever intentionally lied to anyone.

Discussing the infra-red evidence, The New York Times offered this puzzling claim about the use of tear gas grenades:

[F]or more than six years the Bureau failed to say that it had infra-red videotapes that clearly showed that agents had obtained approval to fire the tear-gas rounds. (P. A17)

Infra-red radiation, of course, carries information about heat, not indications of approval.

The New York Times said nothing about heat signatures from automatic weapons fire on any infra-red images.

Jim Yardley, reporting on the Texas Rangers inquiry into the Waco seige (The New York Times, 9/14/1999, p. A19), wrote that the Davidians tried for murder and conspiracy were convicted. In fact, they were acquitted. The investigation by the Texas Rangers is an interesting development because they have turned up possible evidence of automatic weapons fire directed at the home by the FBI. The FBI has long maintained that they never fired a single bullet at the home at any time during the entire seige.

As a final note on the mindset of those outside the Davidian home, consider Garry Wills's editorial in the Chicago Sun-Times. ("Waco probe a must --- and meaningless," September 13, 1999) Wills is an adjunct professor of history at Northwestern University.

According to Wills, a re-examination of the murders at Waco, Texas, is one of the modern rituals surrounding any disputed event. "Facts are not really what's at stake," he contends; political preferences and ideology are behind this probe. The new investigation will be costly and resolve nothing. As head of the blue-ribbon panel on Waco, former Senator John Danforth will perform as admirably as did Earl Warren in 1964, when the crime under investigation was the murder of President Kennedy.

My God, what if Wills is right? What if the Danforth Commission matches the Warren Commission's feat?

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