The Fire Last Time

Jacob Sullum from the May 1998 issue

(Page 2 of 2)

The BATF initially claimed that an official videotape of the raid would show the Davidians started the shootout; then it said the tape was inexplicably blank. The bureau aborted its own investigation of the raid when the Justice Department started worrying that interviews with the agents who had been at the scene would produce contradictory accounts or other material that could be useful in defending the surviving Davidians--evidence that the prosecution would be legally obliged to share. We know this because a Treasury Department official explicitly said so in a memo.

And then there is the notorious steel door. The BATF claimed the shootout started when the Davidians fired a fusillade through the front door of Mount Carmel. But one of Koresh's lawyers, Jack Zimmerman, said he had examined the door, and almost all of the holes puckered inward. The door itself, which presumably could resolve this dispute, survived the fire and promptly vanished. During a recent debate with Kopel at NYU Law School, Ron Noble, who oversaw the Treasury Department's report on Waco, seemed sincerely exasperated by this little mystery: "Where's the door? I wish I knew. It stinks of a cover-up."

The other major issue that remains unresolved is who started the fire at the end of the FBI siege. Both the book and the movie note that the blaze did not start until five or six hours after an FBI bug in Mount Carmel recorded a conversation about spreading fuel, usually taken to be evidence that the Davidians deliberately set the fire. During this time, the FBI was knocking into the building with tanks, which closed off escape routes and created vents that made the fire spread more quickly. The tanks pumped in an aerosol consisting of CS powder, a chemical warfare agent that causes tearing, temporary blindness, nausea, and vomiting, and methylene chloride, a toxic and volatile carrier that forms flammable mixtures when exposed to the air. The FBI also shot the powder into the building in cannisters. It later insisted that it did not fire any incendiary rounds, but two were recovered from the site. Whoever actually ignited the fire, the FBI clearly made it more deadly.

What the FBI admitted about its tactics may be just as horrifying as what it denied. Waco: The Rules of Engagement shows a bureau spokesman explaining that the idea behind filling Mount Carmel with CS was to torture the children (who had no gas masks) until their parents surrendered. "We thought that their instincts, their motherly instincts, would take place and that they would want their children out of that environment," he said. "It appears that they don't care that much about their children, which is unfortunate." According to experts cited in the book and quoted in the movie, the CS powder probably incapacitated Davidians who otherwise might have fled and may even have killed some of them. The powder can be fatal in high doses, and it turns into cyanide when burned.

If Koresh did order the fire, then obviously he and his accomplices bear much of the responsibility for the ensuing deaths. In any case, he and several other Davidians died of gunshot wounds they apparently inflicted on each other to avoid surrendering or dying in the fire. But, as Kopel and Blackman note, "the government gave David Koresh unnecessary help in his misguided quest for martyrdom."

In the movie, Clive Doyle, one of the surviving Davidians, asks a good question: "If they thought that we were all brainwashed and such a bunch of crazies, why would the FBI push David and the rest of us to the limit?" The movie and the book document the FBI's many gratuitous acts of provocation: shining bright lights and blaring obnoxious sounds (including Nancy Sinatra singing "These Boots Are Made for Walking") to prevent the Davidians from sleeping, destroying cars and children's go-carts, mooning the women and giving them the finger, deliberately and repeatedly running over a Davidian's grave with a tank. Despite this harassment, note Kopel and Blackman, the FBI negotiators tried to reassure the Davidians that the government wanted a peaceful resolution, saying, "nobody's going to run tanks through buildings that contain people" and "the last thing that's going to happen is for the government to take any kind of offensive action....You know, we don't hurt babies. You know, we don't hurt women. We don't do those types of things."

And yet they did. In the documentary, Alan Stone, the Harvard professor of psychiatry and law who reviewed the Justice Department's report on Waco, tells an interviewer: "When I was first asked to be involved as a member of the panel, I thought the main problem was going to be understanding the psychology of the people inside the compound. But as I got into it, I quickly became aware that the psychology of the people outside the compound was more important."

The men who confronted the Davidians were angry, tired, and frustrated. They did not understand this weird "cult" and did not care to. They saw the people who lived at Mount Carmel as mindless drones under Koresh's control, when in fact the Davidians included many intelligent, well-educated people, who were attracted by Koresh's religious message rather than his personal charisma (of which he had little). In Waco: The Rules of Engagement, the surviving Davidians come across as rational and articulate, especially in comparison to raving demagogues like Rep. Schumer. "I liked them," says the local sheriff, Jack Harwell, who describes the Davidians as "good people"--courteous, well-groomed, unassuming. But the FBI did not want the public to sympathize with the Davidians, so it kept the press at a distance and held back a videotape shot inside Mount Carmel during the siege, which showed not crazed cultists but apparently normal, decent folks with strong religious beliefs. Had Americans seen the Davidians in this light, surely their response to the government's actions would have been outrage rather than applause.

Dehumanizing the enemy is a part of a military mind-set, and one of Kopel and Blackman's main themes is the need to sharpen the distinction between soldiers and peace officers. They recommend a series of reforms aimed at demilitarizing federal law enforcement, from getting rid of black, Ninja-style uniforms to eliminating collaboration with the National Guard and Pentagon. They note that the police function has been militarized largely as a result of the war on drugs--a fact reflected at Waco, where the BATF obtained military training and support by falsely claiming that the Davidians were manufacturing methamphetamine. The drug war has also been the excuse for Supreme Court decisions undermining Fourth Amendment rights, creating a legal environment conducive to poorly justified, overreaching search and seizure operations like the BATF's raid on the Davidians. Kopel and Blackman call upon Congress to roll back this erosion of civil liberties with legislation.

No More Wacos proposes many sensible reforms, including stricter rules for obtaining warrants, remedies for victims of unreasonable searches, training for federal agents in religious and constitutional sensitivity, and a requirement for Cabinet-level approval of large raids. But while these changes would help reduce abuses of federal power, Kopel and Blackman recognize that the ultimate solution is to reduce federal power itself. Given the way things turned out, it's easy to forget that the chain of events leading to the incineration of Mount Carmel was set in motion because the BATF could not stand idly by knowing that some people in Texas might possess illegal machine guns. Yet even leaving aside the Second Amendment (which congressional investigators were eager to do), nothing in the Constitution authorizes the federal government to forbid intrastate possession of particular firearms (or drugs, for that matter).

If the federal government exercised only those powers actually granted by the Constitution, as the Framers intended, such matters would be left to state and local authorities. And even if the Davidians were suspected of violating a state gun law, it's hard to imagine someone like Sheriff Harwell staging a massive raid to obtain evidence of this victimless crime. If he wanted to serve a warrant, he probably would have just knocked on the door. Since the Davidians had never threatened their neighbors, he might even have let the whole thing slide. "They had different beliefs than others," he says in Waco: The Rules of Engagement, "but basically, they were good people. I was around them quite a lot. They were always nice, mannerly. They minded their own business. They were never overbearing." The federal government could have taken a lesson from the Davidians.