Message #22 (40 is last): Date: Tue Sep 21 16:48:29 1999 From: murphy@MYBLUEHEAVEN.COM (Phil Murphy) Subject: Shunned Waco documentary now sees light To: AZRKBA@asu.edu
Dear Friends and "forwarded ones" --
The following article is being forwarded to the powers that be at FOX News so we can try to see if Dan will get invited back for the ubiquitous "We told you so" this story demands (and has demanded for years), but, more importantly, if *YOU* and yours haven't seen it yet, get your ass down to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video and rent the damn thing!
Look, your neighbors won't ridicule you anymore. This brilliant film's Emmy Award win(!) that followed its Academy Award Nomination has finally made it palatable to the talking monkeys. You don't have any excuses left. These brave people -- whom I'm proud to call my friends -- risked their reputations and futures in Hollywood to make this film.
All you're risking is the nauseating feeling that you've been dead-ass wrong about Waco for the past six years.
Phil --
By Beverly Kees Pacific Coast Center
9.21.99
BERKLEY, Calif. — Dan Gifford was Mr. Lonely Guy for a few years, even though his documentary film, “Waco: The Rules of Engagement,” had won an Academy Award nomination and later would win an Emmy.
A few art houses ran the film. Most theaters shied away from it, no public relations firm wanted to handle it, most journalists ignored it.
Gifford, the films executive producer, told the California First Amendment Assembly on Sept. 18 after a screening that h believed journalists ignored the documentary because most newsrooms are liberal, anti-gun and somewhat suspicious of deeply religious people. They didnt want to be seen siding with gun-toting “wackos” against the U.S. government. Few journalists these days have been in the military or handled firearms and “they are extremely deferential to law enforcement in these matters,” Gifford said.
Giffords appearance at the Assembly was sponsored by The Freedom Forum Pacific Coast Center.
<Picture>The two-hour-plus documentary traces thehistory of the Branch Davidians and their beliefs and their violent, fatal encounters with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Four federal agents were killed when they stormed the sects Mount Carmel Center. Later 76 men, women and children who belong to the Branch Davidians were killed, although the FBI asserted at the time that its agents never fired a shot and that the sect members committed suicide. In recent weeks, an FBI agenthas admitted that wasnt true.
Giffords documentary, which premiered in January 1997 at the Sundance Film Festival, shows film of government tanks tearing out large sections of the centers walls and shooting in flammable tear gas; thermal film shows rapid-fire gunshots aimed at the center; other film shows corpses with parts of their bodies sheared off — most likely by the tanks. The film contains interviews with a Texas coroner and Texas Rangers grumbling about the FBI taking and then “losing” evidence and destroying the crime scene.
How was Gifford able to obtain this damning evidence that was never seen on television newscasts or in newspapers? From the Branch Davidians lawyers. “Everything in the film was available in 1993, but politically no one cared,” Gifford said. “Anything that deviated from the official record was deemed not true.”
No one from the federal government would agree to be interviewed in the film, but there is a lot of footage of officials in news conferences and giving sworn testimony before Congress.
The FBI is careful in its choice of language. “What for 50 years had been the Mount Carmel Center became the ‘compound, " Gifford said. "The Branch Davidians became a ‘cult. ” The words were chosen to create a certain response and the news media picked them up, he said.
Journalists were kept two to three miles away from the center and could not see what was happening in the rear. What, Gifford was asked at the Assembly screening, should journalists have done?
“Make yourself a pain in the ass. Thats what yure there for. You are the surrogate witness for everyone,” he responded.
Other Assembly participants asked if Janet Reno or congressional committee members attending the 1995 hearing on Waco had seen the documentary.
“Its available, but they dont want to see it. They dismiss it as ‘Ah, thats just right-wing conspiracy stuff, ” he said, and dismiss him as a right-wing nut.
Gifford, former newsman with ABC News, CNN and the "MacNeil-Lehrer Report" on PBS, is on the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California — “You know,” he joked, “that well-known right wing group.”
Ironically, Gifford is now a hero in militia circles, where federal law enforcement is held in contempt. One radio broadcaster happily assured Gifford that he was making copies of “Waco” and sending them to militias all over the country.
But there is comfort for Gifford now. A week before the Assembly, he and his wife and business partner, Amy Sommer Gifford, were sharing their dinner table at a New Yorkhotel with their newly won Emmy award for investigative journalism for the Waco documentary that aired on HBO. Strangers came up to have their pictures taken with the Giffords and the Emmy.
Its not so lonely anymore.