March 28, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

The standoff in Texas ended in flames Monday, but an investigation of how the conflict rose to that extraordinary level of violence must continue. Whatever the eventual findings of who set the fire, federal agents should long remember the 51-day siege as an operation in which everything went wrong.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms began this tragedy by trying to serve a warrant to the Branch Davidians for illegal arms and explosives. In the end, nearly 100 people were killed over that warrant. In between, the FBI and ATF’s multi-million dollar standoff demonstrated a wide range of missteps and miscalculations before a media pack eager for action.

The FBI knew David Koresh was crazy, and it knew that crazy people often don’t care whom they harm. They forced the conflict anyway. Monday’s attack was reminiscent of the 1985 bombing by the city of Philadelphia against the Move radicals. They too had barricaded themselves against the government, holding their children for safety, whose lives eventually didn’t stop Mayor Wilson Goode. The bomb, dropped from a helicopter, started a fire that was allowed to burn for 35 minutes before firefighters responded. There, 11 people died, 61 houses were burned to the ground and 250 people were left homeless. In both Philadelphia and outside Waco, the government acted out of frustration, and in its violence caused more harm than the besieged had.

Whether David Koresh ever intended to surrender will never be known, but 86 followers, including 24 children, died in the pyre, and the FBI cannot excuse its actions by blaming those who may have set it. The Branch Davidians were alive when the federal assault on the compound’s walls began and they were dead soon after. The possibility of a mass suicide was well-known to the federal agents.

The FBI’s reasoning in its attack, according to FBI spokesman Bob Ricks, was that the mothers inside the compound would protect their children once the tear gas was released. “We had hoped the women would grab their children and flee,” he said. That is, the feds thought mothers who would willingly hold their children in a compound for 51 days under the strain of the federal siege with all its psychological warfare would instantly have a change of heart and release the children once the walls came crashing in. That’s a pitiful bit of reasoning.

From the lack of initial surveillance on David Koresh to the order for Monday’s attack, the federal government must shoulder the blame for a wide range of mistakes. Attorney General Janet Reno amply demonstrated that even newcomers could fit into the federal government’s wrongheaded approach. Her approval of the battering and tear-gas attack contributed to one of the more embarrassing and harmful episodes in FBI history.

The disaster outside Waco is over. But examination of the gross mishandling of the standoff must include answers to prevent such tragedies from happening again.


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