Burning Questions

Jacob Sullum from the March 1996 issue

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After you read about this little misadventure, it's not so hard to believe that BATF officials would choose to proceed with the "surprise" raid even after they learned that the Davidians were expecting them (though Reavis doubts the element of surprise was ever considered that important, since the BATF was accustomed to bad guys who surrendered when confronted by overwhelming force). Four agents and six Davidians were killed in the ensuing shoot-out.

In a sense, The Ashes of Waco answers the question of who fired first: BATF agents, shooting the Davidians' dogs. Under the circumstances, it would not be surprising if residents of Mt. Carmel responded to these initial shots by firing at their attackers. But Reavis concludes there's not enough evidence to decide if that's what happened, or if, as the Davidians claimed, the BATF fired at them first. Tabor and Gallagher note that "the surviving videotape footage of the shoot-out shows BATF agents firing heavily and randomly at the building, but the cars and trucks behind which they are crouched show no signs of return fire--windshields are intact, no dust is being kicked up around them. As Reavis reports, the two attorneys who visited Mt. Carmel after the raid said they saw bullet holes consistent with the Davidians' claim that they were fired upon from a helicopter. In this context, the indignation displayed last summer by Rep. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) at the very suggestion that the BATF might have fired first is almost as silly as his amazement at the price of breakfast cereal.

Reavis, who is meticulous and fair-minded in sifting through conflicting accounts, also remains agnostic on the question of how the final conflagration started. He does not rule out the possibility that the government's tanks helped start the fire by knocking over lanterns and cans of fuel, and he notes that the rounds of tear gas (technically, CS powder) that the FBI fired into the building contained the petroleum derivative methylene chloride. "Used in a confined space," he writes, methylene chloride "threatened to create conditions conducive to fire, explosion, and death by poison gas." Reavis suggests that the fire may have been ignited by incendiary devices used by the Davidians against their attackers. "Those tanks are not fireproof, you know," Koresh had warned the FBI in March.

Whoever started the fire, the government clearly made it more lethal, and not just by failing to have fire-fighting equipment nearby, despite fears that the confrontation would end in flames. "Rather than creating escape routes," Reavis writes, "the tanks that rammed Mt. Carmel closed them. They demolished the stairways connecting the building's first and second floors, and also pushed debris over a trapdoor leading to a buried school bus, whose exit opened to the fresh air outside. The bodies of six women were found within feet of the trapdoor, dead of smoke inhalation."

Six other women and children were killed by falling chunks of concrete knocked loose during the attack (which was accompanied by the incantation, "This is not an assault," over the FBI's loudspeakers). In light of these details, President Clinton's summary of Mt. Carmel's demise--"some religious fanatics murdered themselves"--is obscene.

As these books show, that was just one of the more egregious whoppers in a pattern of public deception that began the moment the BATF raid became known. With almost complete control of information reaching members of the press, who were not permitted to contact the Davidians or approach Mt. Carmel, FBI officials were free to pass propaganda off as news. Some of their lies were petty, such as the claim, dissected by Reavis, that the Davidians refused to accept a delivery of milk for their children. Others had serious consequences, such as the recycled allegations of child abuse, carefully examined by University of Texas sociologist Christopher G. Ellison and doctoral student John P. Bartkowski in Armageddon in Waco, that Attorney General Janet Reno claimed had motivated her decision to approve the final attack. "We had information that babies were being beaten," she said.

But Ellison and Bartkowski find that, while the Davidians (like millions of parents throughout the country) did use corporal punishment, the allegations of severe beatings were based on accusations by a few apostates prior to 1990. While they reserve judgment on the accuracy of those reports, they note that Texas investigators did not find evidence to substantiate them and that the children released during the siege, who seemed genuinely fond of Koresh, showed no signs of abuse. Reno also suggested that the children were suffering because of unsanitary conditions at Mt. Carmel, but she failed to note that the siege had contributed to those conditions (by preventing the Davidians from disposing of human waste, for example). On the other hand, Ellison and Bartkowski conclude that Koresh probably did violate Texas law by having sex with teenage girls (with their parents' consent) as part of his effort to produce offspring that he believed would play a special role in fulfilling biblical prophecy.

As Reavis reports, much of the government's incompetence and duplicity was revealed at the trial of 11 surviving Branch Davidians in 1994. The jury rejected the main thrust of the prosecution's case, acquitting the Davidians of conspiring to murder federal agents. (Because the prosecutors argued that the defendants joined the conspiracy by becoming Koresh's followers, the "crime" essentially consisted of adopting certain religious
beliefs.) Three Branch Davidians were found not guilty on all counts. Seven were found guilty of aiding and abetting the voluntary manslaughter of federal officials; of these, five were also found guilty of carrying a firearm during the commission of a violent crime. Two were found guilty of the weapon violations that were the pretext for the BATF raid that set the whole fiasco into motion. Subsequent comments by the forewoman made it clear that the jurors expected the convicted Davidians to be lightly punished. "Even five years is too severe a penalty for what we believed to be a minor charge," she said.

But the jurors made a mistake. They were not supposed to find the Davidians guilty of carrying a firearm during the commission of a violent offense unless they also found them guilty of the murder conspiracy charge. Judge Walter Smith Jr. initially said he would resolve the inconsistency by setting aside the firearm conviction. Later he changed his mind, declaring that the Davidians were guilty of conspiracy to murder the BATF agents, even though the jury had found the opposite. Smith imposed 40-year sentences on five of the defendants and gave three others sentences of 20, 15, and five years, respectively. He ordered each of these eight to pay $1.2 million in restitution to the BATF and FBI.

After relating this final outrage, two of the books conclude by alluding to verdicts yet to come. In Armageddon in Waco, Dean M. Kelley, counselor on religious liberty for the National Council of Churches (and author of a fine retrospective on Waco that appeared in the May 1995 issue of First Things), notes that history sorts out the great religions from the obscure cults. Centuries from now the Davidians who died at Mt. Carmel may be remembered as saintly martyrs. Reavis closes The Ashes of Waco by noting the survivors' confidence that God will vindicate them on the Day of Judgment, when Koresh will return to Earth. The record of the government's dealings with the residents of Mt. Carmel suggests that it's more reasonable to hope for justice from heaven or history than to expect it here and now.