FROM MOUNTAIN MEDIA
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE DATED SEPT. 25, 1999
THE LIBERTARIAN, By Vin Suprynowicz
'To still the drums of conspiracy'
The Wall Street Journal has one of the better editorial pages in the
country -- informative, thoughtful, and largely free of the poisonous
Political Correctness that turns most modern American rags into mere shills
for the collectivist police state.
Unfortunately, the regular gang seems to have been on vacation when
someone penned and placed in the position of the Journal's lead editorial
Sept. 21 as hateful and devious a screed as I can ever remember seeing ...
leaving aside the Los Angeles Times.
Headlined "Revisiting Waco," the main gist of the essay was that former
U.S. Sen. John Danforth had better get to the bottom of the Waco debacle
"in part to defuse conspiracy theorists who already believe the government
is out to get them."
"Mr. Danforth will need a thorough investigation and candid report to
still the drums of conspiracy," the Journal reiterates, somewhat further
along.
So the purpose of such government commissions is now straighforwardly to
"defuse" hostility to the federal government? But what if the facts
demonstrate that the only way to preserve our liberties is precisely to
grow more hostile -- a whole lot more aggressively hostile -- to a federal
government that has usurped powers never delegated it to the people?
Gerald Ford sat on the Warren Commission, and in later years was honest
enough to admit that august body never met as a committee of the whole more
than once or twice, seeing it as their job to merely sign off on whatever
theory the professional staff could generate to pin the blame on a lone
assassin, the better to "reassure" the populace and "quiet" their concerns
and fears after the shocking death of John F. Kennedy.
Once such a purpose is admitted, why go through the motions of conducting
an "investigation" at all -- let's cut out the middlemen and write the
damned report, per instructions, right now.
But the most hideous assertion comes in this editorial's eighth
paragraph. Two successive sentences state, in full: "The Branch Davidians
were a particularly deranged sect, and four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms agents were kiled in the initial raid that started the seven-week
siege. But we will probably never conclusively learnwho or what started
the fire that killed dozens of Mr. Koresh's followers that day."
Taking the points in reverse order, it is indeed probably true that we
can never now reconstruct the precise causes of the deadly fire of April
19, 1993. But why? The Journal is silent on why. The reason is that federal
agents bulldozed the site to the ground and hauled away much of the rubble
to a location whose secrecy is protected by invoking the old canard about
"national security."
Since this was done by federal agents who knew full well that helicopters
had fired murderously into the building in February, and that bullets and
incendiary projectiles were fired into the building again on April 19, this
constitutes purposeful tampering with evidence of a capital crime by those
with a motive to cover up that crime -- a felony under Texas law, one would
imagine.
But of course the question of "who or what started the fire" is largely
irrelevent, under a well-established legal doctrine which the Journal also
carefully avoids mentioning.
Let's suppose you or I go downtown and rob a bank. While we're holding
the tellers and customers at gunpoint, one drops dead of a heart attack.
Will we ever know precisely "who or what caused that poor fellow to drop
dead" at that moment? Might it be contributory that the bank's air
conditioning wasn't working properly, or that he failed to take his heart
pill that morning?
Perhaps. But it doesn't matter. What matters is who is legally (start
ital)responsible(end ital) for that death, and the answer is: the bank
robber. It doesn't matter that the robber didn't mean to kill anyone; it
won't even help if he can prove his gun was loaded with blanks. If a
wrongful death occurs during the commission of a felony, and you're the
felon, you're going to be charged with manslaughter regardless of your
"intent."
The ATF agents at Waco in February of 1993 had the kind of warrant which
requires the server to knock on the door -- it was not a "no-knock"
warrant. Yet the ATF agents in their bulletproof vests shot the dogs in
their pens with their machine pistols as they ran toward the church, and
also climbed ladders to the roof and sprayed submachine gun bullets into
the upper-story windows, before anyone made any attempt to serve that
warrant -- if indeed any such legitimate attempt was made, at all.
Seven weeks later, on April 19, 1993, the FBI was aided in their final
assault by active-duty U.S. Army Delta Force personnael, though the Clinton
White House insists they had no White House authrization to be there. This
is a federal crime, violating the Posse Comitatus Act, which forbids the
use of U.S. military personnel against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.
In addition to that, it is undisputed that the attacking forces used
armored vehicles to collapse escape routes and spray CS gas -- outlawed in
war by the Paris accords -- in a flammable suspension into a church which
they knew contained children and elderly persons for which that gas might
prove deadly, in a plywood building heated by keroene lanterns and heaters
(the government had illegally shut off the electricity), further barricaded
against government bullets with bales of hay -- while fire engines and TV
cameramen were purposely held miles away. This was, at the very least,
conduct grossly negligent of its likelihood of causing the deaths of many
innocent women and children.
So it doesn't matter who "started" the fire -- Mrs. O'Leary's cow could
have kicked over one of those lanterns, and the people responsible for
those deaths would still be the lawbreakers who purposely and in violation
of law set the conditions, just as a bank robber sets the conditions for
the death of one of his hostages -- the felons in this case being agents
of the FBI and the U.S. Army's Delta Force.
# # #
But finally let us get to that sentence which should enter the hall of
propaganda infamy: "The Branch Davdians were a particularly deranged sect,
and four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents were killed in the
initial raid that started the seven-week siege."
First, what is the evidence that the Branch Davidians -- a 45-year-old
offshoot of the Seventh Day Adventist Church -- were or are "a particularly
deranged sect"?
It appears that David Koresh practiced plural marriage. So do some
Mormons. Does the Wall Street Journal hold the Latter Day Saints are or
were "a particularly deranged sect"? Disapprove of polygamy if you will: It
is not a capital crime, and criminal statutes against fathering children by
more than one mother are rarely enforced nowadays, at all (or there'd be
gaping holes in the starting lineups of several NBA teams.)
Were some of the Rev. Koresh's brides under age? No evidence has been
presented that he married without the consent of the ladies' parents, and
the age of consent in Texas is 14. But let's concede that a man never given
a chance to defend himself in a court of law (and who now never will) may
have broken laws in this regard: So what? Federal revenue agents have no
authority to investigate violation of such Texas state laws, nor to
enforce them. Nor was investigation of marriage or sexual customs listed on
the ATF warrant.
When a disgruntled rival for power with David Koresh over leadership of
the congregation reported the church to Texas state child welfare
authorities, those state authorities came and investigated these charges,
and gave the church a clean bill of health.
The members of the Branch Davidian congregation had been integrated into
the Waco community for three generations. The local mailman lived at the
Mount Carmel church. The neighbors said they had no problems with the
Davidians. At the time of the February 1993 raid, one of the church members
who picked up the phone and dialed 9-1-1 -- as any law-abiding citizen
would -- was a Harvard law school graduate.
So the premise isn't even true. But now look again at the way this
sentence links two separate ideas with a comma. Suppose we were to say:
"Orthodox Jews observe some unusual religious rituals, and in the past
three years several Christian infants have been kidnapped and later found
disemboweled within 50 miles of the synagogue."
The writer of such a hypothetical, loathesome sentence will not have
actually (start ital)accused(end ital) our hypothetical Orthodox Jewish
congregataion of ritual infant disembowelment. Oh no -- he will merely have
linked the two unrelated facts and left the reader to draw his own
conclusions.
Yes indeed, four Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents were
killed in the initial raid that started the seven-week siege. The Branch
Davidians survivors were put on trial, charged with their murder. They were
unanimously acquitted of all the capital charges by a Texas jury. The
Branch Davidians stand innocent of those charges.
Why? The prosecution promised to bring forth autopsy evidence of the type
of bullets which killed those agents, but never did so.
Who on earth presents a murder case and fail to present evidence that
might link the defendants' weapons with the fatal projectiles? There can
only be one logical explanation for such a failure: The four ATF agents
were killed by 9mm Hydrashock rounds fired that day only by fellow ATF
agents using Heckler & Koch MP-5 machine pistols -- they were the victims
of accidental, incompetent, fraternal fire by their own brother "officers."
Yet the Wall Street Journal would imply -- in the face of a finding of
innocense by an all-American jury -- they these four armed thugs were
murdered by a "particularly deranged sect."
Well, as it turns out, they were. But that "particularly deranged sect" --
which daily violates its members' sacred oaths to protect and defend the
Constitution, including the Second Amendment -- is not the Branch Davidians
Church. Rather, we know it as "the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms."
Vin Suprynowicz, assistant editorial page editor of the Las Vegas
Review-Journal, is the author of "Send in the Waco Killers," available at
$21.95 plus $3 shipping through Mountain Media, P.O. Box 271122, Las Vegas,
Nev. 89127; or at 1-800-244-2224, or via web site
http://www.thespiritof76.com/wacokillers.html.
***
Vin Suprynowicz, vin@lvrj.com
"The evils of tyranny are rarely seen but by him who resists it." -- John
Hay, 1872
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and
thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series
of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken
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