Aaron Krug

1/25/05                                                                                                   

UNST 121D

Professor Newlands

Waco Reflection

            This week in our Freshman Inquiry class we watched a rather disturbing documentary on the events that occurred with the Branch Davidian church in Waco, Texas on April 21, 1993. We also received a set of questions to be thinking about while watching the film, and these are my answers to those questions.

            The first question was ‘Did religious persecution take place?’ I would have to say yes and no to this, mostly because I think in the end persecution took place, but that was really only as a cover for the fact that the ATF royally screwed up. They made these people out to be much more of a cult than they were and portrayed them as psychotic deluded individuals, which is, at least from what I’ve seen, pretty far from the truth. So yes I think it happened, but only as an afterthought, not as the main objective.

            Next is ‘Was there a conspiracy?’ I would say by all means yes there was, and more than one if you ask me. There was the original conspiracy by some members of the ATF to make the whole thing a public spectacle, then there was the second conspiracy to kill the members of the Branch Davidian church by the members of the ATF and FBI at the scene, followed by the last conspiracy to cover up the earlier conspiracies by members of the government at large, including, but not limited to, high level members of both the ATF and FBI, the attorney general Janet Reno, members of congress, and anyone else who stood to lose from the government being blamed for this incredibly bad foul-up. Now, you may think I have lost it and that I am seeing conspiracies everywhere, but you have t remember, a conspiracy, by definition, is an agreement by two or more people to conceal or distort the truth in any way, and I think that for congress to arrive at the decision that the Branch Davidians set fire to themselves after hearing the same testimony we saw in the movie that there had to be at least these three incidents of conspiracy.

            Can this be ethically justified? No, I don’t think so, and I hope that the people who perpetrated this know this and can’t sleep at night because of it. This has totally skewed the notion of being able to trust those who are put in place to make sure I am following the law, and denied our stated goal of being diversity conscious. These people lived differently than we do, but that in no way made them a cult and it didn’t make them dangerous either. Many gun owners own an illegal gun right now, but you don’t see the ATF coming in with a small army of officers to arrest them, do you? These people were targeted by the ATF because they were different from the surrounding population, like the Mormons or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. They chose to live differently, and in the end they were killed for it. The fact of the matter is that the amount of force used in this scenario far exceeded the amount necessary.

            This movie presented the other side of the story for me, because when it happened in 1993 I was 9, and I remember hearing about it, but I still trusted my government at the time and assumed they had done the right thing and never gave it another thought. I think this relates to the course goals of making us more aware and more active in the governing process, as well as heightening our ability to think critically about the information we are receiving now from our government. This is necessary to become a better college student but also a better person.

            The Waco incident relates to another book we read this term, called The Sorrows of Empire by Chalmers Johnson, in that it points out that many of the trusts we have placed in our government and its agencies have been grossly misplaced and abused. Johnson brought the big picture view, showing us how the people in charge of our government were using it to further goals that were not the same as the American people. The Waco incident is the small picture view that makes us take that point to heart, because it shows the human element of those goals as well as the very real consequences. In the book we were given examples of how the Army is taking advantage of foreign nations, but in the movie we saw the people they sacrificed, saw their faces, heard their voices, saw where they lived. We became almost intimate with these people, empathizing with their plight, knowing what the eventuality was but being able to do nothing to stop it.

During the film we were shown one of the most terrible things I have ever seen in my life, something that I am not likely to forget any time soon. We were shown the body of a young girl, twelve at the most, whose body had been ravaged by the raging inferno that engulfed the building, charring her flesh and distorting her features, but before that had happened, her own body had turned against her. The lethal mixture of CS gas mixed with hydrogen sulfide to form hydrogen cyanide, the same thing used in gas chambers, had caused her muscles to spasm so violently that she had broken her own back, and one can only pray that this provided her what must have been the sweet release of death. Her body, burned and U-shaped, lying on the evidence tarp, will be an image that haunts me whenever I think of this incident.

            The two key points in the film for me were the decisions made by the agents at the scene and the findings of the congressional hearings. The agents on the scene used lethal gas in order to detain these people, setting the stage for the horrible fire that was to follow. They used tanks to threaten and taunt the people inside, as well as eventually delivering the gas with them. They shined bright spotlights on the entire house throughout the night in addition to playing the sounds of rabbits being killed and Nancy Sinatra songs at a decibel level that could be heard no matter where you were in the house. They tortured these people, and they did it in the name of justice. They used their mandate from the people of this country to make life hell on earth for 51 days for this group of people. I don’t see how we can forgive ourselves for the lack of actions taken against these people.

            The findings of the congressional hearings were the part where we are to blame. In the republic that we live in, within our borders these people did what they did, and our representatives did nothing to those people. We should have voted these representatives out for what seems to me to be a gross miscarriage of justice. The finding that the Branch Davidians set fire to themselves and that the FBI never fired a shot is absurd, even to the casual observer such as myself, and the fact that these people could even say it shows their ability to lie to the American public. In 1999 the FBI “uncovered” new evidence showing that military grade tear gas was fired from the helicopter that was flying over the building. This type of tear gas is highly incendiary, and the rounds that were fired were in the parts of the building that experts believe the fire started in. How could this not be brought out into the public eye, and how can we sit idly by, knowing that these people were murdered in cold blood?