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Waco as Metaphor
Mass murder and U.S. foreign policy

On April 19, 1993, agents of the U.S. government assaulted the Branch Davidian "compound" at Waco, Texas – a religious community of Adventists under the leadership of David Koresh – killing 74 men, women, and children, including 12 children younger than five years of age. It was an act of state terrorism so blatant that our government and its media enablers have spent 12 years, several official reports [.pdf], and a lot of time and energy lying about the circumstances surrounding the event and covering up the truth. The parallels with the Iraq war are all too obvious in that, first of all, the Waco attack was an act of U.S. state terrorism. Even more striking, however, is the propagandistic penumbra that hung over both events, generated, of course, by the government and its apologists, one that only dissipated well after the smoke over the battlefield had cleared. When the "fog of war" lifted and the truth came out, the reality of what had occurred sunk in – and questions about who we are, and what we as a nation thought we were doing, began to be asked.

As in Iraq, so in Waco: the government was fed false "intelligence" by officials with their own agenda, who, in turn, were given information about the Koresh group by a number of "defectors." Sound familiar? These ex-members claimed that "child abuse" was rampant among the Koreshians, although a nine-week investigation conducted in 1992 by the Texas Bureau of Child Protective Services found zero evidence of this....

...In the aftermath, a series of exculpatory reports were issued that tried to whitewash the role of law enforcement in precipitating the tragedy, but the truth came out in any case – and it wasn't pretty. The main justification for going in there and trying to arrest Koresh to begin with had been his alleged possession of illegal firearms – purportedly a massive cache of deadly high-grade automatic weapons – but the warrants authorizing the entry were sealed for the duration of the siege, and their contents were only made public in June 1993.

What evidence was there that these firearms existed and that they were illegal? The answer is: none. Koresh had been brought to the attention of federal authorities by a suspicious UPS delivery man who had delivered a box of empty hand grenade shells to the Branch Davidians' home. A federal agent then inspected UPS records and found similar deliveries of weapon-related materials, but according to the report issued by the Department of the Treasury, two weapons experts examined the same records and concluded that not a single illegal weapon had been delivered to Koresh.

No weapons of mass destruction! Now doesn't that ring a bell?...

...However, the U.S. government wasn't about to convict itself of mass murder. The Treasury report disregarded both logic and the facts to come to the conclusion that the raid had been justified after all, but not without getting highly creative. The method they used to arrive at their predetermined verdict was to anticipate the theory behind the Bush Doctrine. They rationalized the assault on Waco as a preemptive strike against what Koresh and his followers might have done under certain conditions....

...Waco and Iraq – in both instances, we're talking about the slaughter of the innocents, in the case of the latter as many as 100,000 innocent civilians. These twin atrocities were engineered by agenda-driven U.S. government officials and covered up by a campaign of lies, government propaganda, and a complacent media – all of it finally culminating in an orgy of destruction and mass murder.

It is, I fear, a sign of the times. The Clinton administration came up with the doctrine of military preemption long before that son of a Bush ever dreamed of the White House – and, what's more, they applied that doctrine on our own soil, against Americans. The liberals went along with it, and so did the neoconservatives – who were horrified that the reaction of most real conservatives was to become more militantly "anti-government." (Alas, to no avail.) To all those liberal Democrats out there who are horrified by the Iraq war and its consequences, just remember this: before there was a Donald Rumsfeld in the Pentagon, there was a Janet Reno in the Department of Justice.