Waco

The April anniversaries of the King killing and the Abu Ghraib pictures remind us of watersheds in the shaping of the American psyche. There is another April event that demands our attention, however, the perpetrators of which cannot be explained away as bad apples in the vein of James Early Ray or that criminal mastermind, Lyndie England. That event is Waco.

I remember watching the news that night. I was 13, and still without the faculties to doubt the government's version of events. As I revisit the facts now, however, armed with a good decade-plus of aging, travel, love, and heartbreak, I bring a different set of eyes to Waco, and I am horrified by what I find.

The Branch Davidians were called a "cult" by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). Two parenthetical notes here. Firstly, alcohol and tobacco go together, but alcohol and firearms do not. Or should not. Secondly, who deputized the ATF to pontificate on matters theological? Utterly unsurprisingly, the media adopted the ATF's characterization of the "cult".

After the ATF had determined that the group was a cult, they claimed to have information indicating that the group (I lack the self-importance to label it a "cult") had illegal weapons, and a search warrant was obtained for the Branch Davidian's compound.

The morning of the "search warrant", the ATF contacted local and national media, tipping them off to the impending show, eager to bolster its public image after shooting dead a woman and child in Rudy Ridge, Idaho while executing a similar warrant. While the ATF took care to call the media, they began the raid without calling any ambulances. Priceless.

As video of the event shows, the ATF did not execute a knock-and-enter warrant. Instead several heavily armed men in body armor approached the compound. And they started shooting into the building, which housed dozens of men, women, and children. The shooting continued for hours. At the end, when the Davidians allowed the ATF agents to retreat across open terrain without shooting at them, four ATF agents were dead.

At this point, of course, the shit had hit the fan. Federal agents were killed, and nothing else mattered. Looking back, of course, other things did matter. Why, for example, was the ATF serving a warrant accusing a "cult" leader of "child abuse"? Why did they make no attempt to knock and enter? Why did they not announce their approach? Why did they shoot first?

The deaths of the agents erased the absurdity of the raid, the provocative nature in which it was executed, the dubious legality and premise of the entire exercise, and the revolting staging of the "show" by the ATF. And this one fact remained, although it was ignored: any American citizen has the right to use violence to defend himself against any person, including an employee of the government, if that person uses unprovoked force.

In fact, a jury acquitted all the Branch Davidians of murder, finding that the shootings of the ATF agents were justifiable homicides carried out in self defense. Indeed, the footage of wounded ATF men being allowed to retreat across open land without being fired upon belies the image of the homicidal cult. By the time these acquittals were obtained of course, most of the defendants had been roasted alive or shot or gassed to death by their own government.

After the deaths of the agents, the quintessentially American "show" began in earnest. A flood of feds and reporters swamped the area. And the siege began. A siege that included the use of flood lights and extremely loud music to cause sleep deprivation. Just warming up for Abu Ghraib, in retrospect.

During the siege, two things happened. Any person in the compound who wished to leave was allowed to do so by the "cult". Many did. Also, no life was lost by any party. Then, one day, the federal government decided that that was no longer tolerable.

And here began a sequence of events that, in many ways, said more about what kind of country we're living in than anything else that has happened in my lifetime.

Government tanks (yes, tanks) approached the compound early in the morning. From the tanks, FBI agents fired cyanide gas canisters into the buildings. Cyanide gas is a chemical weapon which can commonly cause death among the small or weak, especially when in enclosed areas. It is not tear gas.

Just say it: cyanide. Sound familiar? That's because it's used in lethal injections. Every wonder why the condemned are strapped so thoroughly to the chair? It's because cyanide causes muscle spams so intense that they can break bones. The government fired cyanide into a building full of women and children and wounded men. On TV.

Next, in a pedestrian preview of 9/11, an American tank with a steel truss attached drove directly into the building. Then it backed up. And did it again. And again. So far, the FBI has introduced chemical gas into an enclosed environment known to hold dozens of children. And it has repeatedly driven a tank into that building, slicing a steel truss through the structure. And it's barely breakfast time.

During this assault, there are also agents on the ground, protected by the tanks, firing into the buildings, which explains why nobody escaped alive during this phase of the assault. We can only assume that the armed Davidians fired back, which people tend to do when you use tanks on their women and children. Just ask the Arabs. And then, the fire.

Having introduced massive quantities of chemical gas into the structure, firing copious amounts of automatic gunfire, and destroying fuel tanks, the building caught fire. Fueled by the chemical dust left from the gas, it created an oven of toxic gas. The government, being the government, had no plans for a fire, other than to bar a local fire engine from approaching, for fear of the lives of the fire fighters.

And speaking of lives, 80 people died that day, more than half of them women and children. Shot and burned alive by their own government for the audacity of questioning their authority in actual, rather than academic, terms. These people though that the 1st and 4th amendments applied to them. They thought wrong. Especially the toddlers. But you know how naive children can be.

After the fire burned itself out, the crime scene was razed and evidence was destroyed wholesale. Of the 24 victims found to have been shot as well as burned, we were left to wonder why they would have shot each other. Indeed.

When I was 13, the government murdered 80 citizens on television. They used tanks against infants. They did this because the adults had odd religious beliefs, and the government was concerned that some of them were abusing children. At least now they couldn't be abused anymore. They used tanks, cyanide gas, and automatic gunfire that killed 80 people, and then said that those people had shot themselves and set themselves on fire.

I don't think FBI men woke up that April day and decided to kill children. I think that the government forgot what it was long before that day. And when they tried to violate the religious freedom and physical privacy and security of real American patriots, those patriots, however bizarre their beliefs, showed an actual, concrete belief in the constitution.

When an utterly tyrannical act was properly resisted, the government had a crisis of conscience. It turned to what had gotten it into the mess in the first place: arrogant and disproportionate and unreasoning violence. With this in mind, can we really put Timothy McVeigh in an entirely different moral universe? Devastatingly, no.