20 years ago...Branch Davidians burned to death near Waco

bigtexxx · Mar 11, 2013

Bill Clinton and Janet Reno still have blood on their hands from this, as well as from the Oklahoma City bombing which was spurred by this.

What a shameful event in US history

http://www.chron.com/news/gallery/20th-anniversary-of-the-siege-at-Waco-57516.php

bigtexxx · Mar 11, 2013

"Davidians", that is. Any chance a mod could correct the title?

FranchiseBlade · Mar 11, 2013

bigtexxx said: ↑

Bill Clinton and Janet Reno still have blood on their hands from this, as well as from the Oklahoma City bombing which was spurred by this.
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Really? So you now believe that terrorist acts aren't the fault of the terrorists?

You think responsibility lies with perhaps a government that did something wrong rather than the terrorists who commit the act?

bigtexxx · Mar 11, 2013

FranchiseBlade said: ↑

Really? So you now believe that terrorist acts aren't the fault of the terrorists?

You think responsibility lies with perhaps a government that did something wrong rather than the terrorists who commit the act?
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no that's going too far

McVeigh was at fault

MadMax · Mar 11, 2013

I was there during that event...it was my freshman year at Baylor.

I remember:

not being able to get a seat at IHOP because it was so crowded with ATF and media

driving out to see it...spot lights all over it...with Billy Ray Cyrus' "Achy Breaky Heart" played over and over and over again...and even at 18 years old thinking, "Yeah, this seems like a really bad idea."

Choppers flying over campus all the time

seeing it burn...the whole world watching...and thinking how surreal it was that it was RIGHT THERE.

I think it was very poorly handled, to say the least.

FranchiseBlade · Mar 11, 2013

bigtexxx said: ↑

no that's going too far

McVeigh was at fault
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That's correct.

Nook · Mar 11, 2013

Hey it set the template for Bush and Obama to take a huge **** on civil liberties. Hey, if we could tolerate Waco, the Patriot Act (the worst legislation in modern US history) is just another step.

SamFisher · Mar 11, 2013

Nook said: ↑

Hey it set the template for Bush and Obama to take a huge **** on civil liberties. Hey, if we could tolerate Waco, the Patriot Act (the worst legislation in modern US history) is just another step.
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IS the patriot act really the worst legislation in modern history? I can think of at least 10 worse ones off the top of my head.

GladiatoRowdy · Mar 11, 2013

SamFisher said: ↑

IS the patriot act really the worst legislation in modern history? I can think of at least 10 worse ones off the top of my head.
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CSA is pretty bad, over a trillion dollars thrown in a hole without a single positive effect.

MoonDogg · Mar 11, 2013

SamFisher said: ↑

IS the patriot act really the worst legislation in modern history? I can think of at least 10 worse ones off the top of my head.
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Most anything related to the "War On Drugs" is a waste.

Northside Storm · Mar 11, 2013

I find it odd that you think this is an outrage, but you fully condone the Patriot Act and the worst of Bush Admin. excesses, which included the murder of detainees, and bombings that killed thousands in "collateral damage".

though I suppose wacky Christian radicals are part of your in-group, and wacky Muslim ones aren't.

bigtexxx · Mar 11, 2013

Northside Storm said: ↑

I find it odd that you think this is an outrage, but you fully condone the Patriot Act and the worst of Bush Admin. excesses, which included the murder of detainees, and bombings that killed thousands in "collateral damage".

though I suppose wacky Christian radicals are part of your in-group, and wacky Muslim ones aren't.
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You quickly try to change the topic, instead preferring personal attacks based on assumptions

tell me your thoughts on the Waco massacre

gifford1967 · Mar 11, 2013

bigtexxx said: ↑

"Davidians", that is. Any chance a mod could correct the title?
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I think that's what's known as a Freudian slip. Kind of reveals the real point of this thread.

bigtexxx · Mar 11, 2013

gifford1967 said: ↑

I think that's what's known as a Freudian slip. Kind of reveals the real point of this thread.
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cute, but no

Haymitch · Mar 11, 2013

From last year, but still a good read from someone who wrote extensively about the incident when and after it happened.

We’re All Branch Davidians Now

Nineteen years ago, just outside Waco, Texas, the FBI demonstrated once again that the state at its core is a killing machine. Monarchy, democracy, or republic – any government as conventionally defined is a legal monopoly on violence. The state is always inclined toward oppression, division, conquest, and bloodshed, because these are its tools of trade.

Matters are no different here. The myth of a free America was always seen with bitter irony by those not blessed by such freedom. In the founding generation, as half a million labored in slavery, many who fought in the Revolution genuinely believed in liberty, but for the ruling elite who chided them on, liberty was hardly more than a slogan. This has always been true of our political leaders. The Father of the Country was a centralizing slaveowner. Old Hickory talked up freedom as he threatened war on South Carolina and forced the Cherokee to flee from their ancestral land on a barbarously murderous walk of shame. The Great Emancipator turned America into a military dictatorship and abolished the revolutionary right of secession. Wilson’s New Freedom was cover for a Prussianized war machine generating revenue for his profiteering buddies on Wall Street. Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms failed to include the freedom not to be drafted or interned in a concentration camp. Ronald Reagan threw the word freedom around as he trained Latin American torturers and raped the Bill of Rights in the name of fighting drugs. The United States has never lived up to its rhetoric.

But the events from February 28 through April 19, 1993, still stand out in my mind as a watershed. It was the post-Cold War regime’s coming of age, signifying a major event in cultural history.

Everything about Operation Showtime was brazen, and it seemed like an overreach even by some of the government’s establishment defenders. Yet today Washington’s fixers must look back at these embarrassments as a hiccup at most, as growing pains on the way to establishing a militarized law-and-order apparatus of nearly unlimited power. That this stepping stone was reached on the eve of the Internet era, right before the old media began its decline in influence, was most convenient for the police state and its solidification.

The propaganda against the Branch Davidians was perfectly tuned to appeal to the masses, each adjustment in frequency coming just in time to keep the people listening. Religious fanatics with a meth lab, armed and dangerous, abusing their children – few wanted to stand up for these people during the siege. Even fewer wished to identify the Davidian response to the original raid for what it was: self-defense. The Davidians fired on the ATF so long as the ATF fired upon the Davidians, and when the ATF ran out of ammo, the Davidians held their fire. The government’s officials were the aggressors. What followed were fifty-one days of psychological warfare designed to isolate the Davidians – from water, from food, from the press, their lawyers and family – and break them down like any wartime enemy.

So preposterous was the standoff that eventually even the mainstream media began asking questions. A New York Times exposé on March 28 raised all sorts of troubling issues, which only multiplied in the days that followed. Federal agents said that supervisors had known they had lost the element of surprise, but decided to go ahead with the February 28 raid anyway. Agents were reportedly unhappy with their equipment and communication methods. The poor planning and lack of contingency options were exposed. No medical assistance had been prepared for the ATF's raid. Reports emerged that some of the ATF agents had injured or killed one another in friendly fire. There were hints that other agents might have even been captured and let go by the Davidians. The ATF intelligence chief stopped holding press conferences as the heat continued to mount.

On April 19, tired from the boredom and bad publicity of just standing around outside the "compound," the FBI drove a tank through the Davidians’ home, pumped it full of CS gas, launched incendiary devices at the building, and watched it go up in flames. As soon as the stakes became higher, as soon as questioning the feds meant implying they had committed mass murder, the media stopped barking defiantly and jumped back to the government’s lap.

The Democrats, home of America’s center-left, oversaw this exceedingly important event in the development of the police state. Unsurprisingly, every respectable liberal defended the government and believed Clinton’s people when they demonized the Davidians. The entire respectable right went along with the bloodletting, too. Why wouldn’t they? It was a raid planned by George H.W. Bush’s ATF, carried out by the Clintonistas, and ultimately rubberstamped by the Republicans in Congress, and so everyone could get behind it. Some libertarians wavered, including Randians and other proponents of violent national secularism, and much of the radical left went limp too.

The Oklahoma City incident two years later was spun by the media as an example of anti-government extremism somehow being a greater threat than the government itself. It became increasingly un-PC to bring up what had happened in Texas. The election of Dubya and 9/11 washed away the paranoid anti-statist instincts of much of the Clinton-hating right.

Waco, from the raid’s planning to the cover-up and show trials, taught the U.S. government what it could get away with – which is to say, practically anything. It can gas innocent children with internationally banned chemicals. It can hoist a federal flag atop a torched American home, claim victory, and see its public image improve. It can throw grenades at people trying to escape a building and claim they are being held hostage. In the name of protecting these "hostages" and children, it can watch as they burn and keep the firefighters away. And the massacre will be tolerated, even applauded.

Dozens of people of color died at the hands of the federal government, and the official Civil Rights movement hardly spoke up. Dozens of people were targeted for their religion, and it hardly bothered many of the very conservatives who allege a war on religion waged by DC. The largest federal-military killing of civilians on U.S. soil in a century has now become one more notch on the progressive left’s timeline of major events in anti-government extremism, as opposed to a principal example of government extremism where a tiny minority community was virtually exterminated.

Indeed, in 1993 the Davidians were only the most conspicuous and recent example in America’s long history of the demonized Other, the marginalized underclass in the official hierarchy of human worth. Slaves, Indians, Mexicans, Southerners, Catholics, Irish and German-Americans, Chinese immigrants, Japanese-Americans, Mormons, homosexuals, alleged Communists, rightwing extremists, and many others have played the role, often for their imagined association with the wartime enemy, but always for being out of step with the government’s accepted definition of legitimate humanity. Many look back at incidents of intolerance with disbelief that Americans could be so blind to oppression. Yet when the topic of Waco comes up, they will think only of those nutcases who, according to the government and media, attacked federal agents and then killed themselves.

In the nineteen years since Waco, we have seen the police state explode in every direction and now we are all ensnared. Some groups are always more threatened than others, but no one is truly safe. The prisons have swollen to the largest detention system since Stalin’s gulags. The police conduct three thousand SWAT raids a month. The war on terror has made a total mockery of what remained of the Fourth Amendment. Torture has lost its taboo. So has indefinite detention. The feds irradiate and molest airline passengers by the millions. People are jailed for taking medicine, buying Sudafed, sharing songs, and selling milk. The Kafkaesque regulatory state threatens people of all economic classes with crushing fines and a fate in a cage. The public schools, always authoritarian institutions, have become explicit adjuncts of the criminal justice system and military recruitment offices. Every major police department has tanks and battle rifles and drones are being used for surveillance and God knows what else. Each federal department has enough firepower to conquer a small third-world country. DHS alone has ordered enough ammo to shoot every American man, woman, and child. The president claims the right to kill American citizens anywhere on the planet on his say-so alone. And he exercises that power.

Why do some of us continue to fixate on Waco? If for no other reason, because April 19, 1993 was a squandered opportunity if ever there was one. The people could have risen up and said, "Enough!" They could have demanded the military occupation retreat from their own neighborhoods – both the federal presence and its satellite jackboots in the city police. They could have demanded an end to the gun laws, drug war, and federal war on crime, each of which was instrumental in ending the lives of more than twenty children at Waco. They could have turned against the media whose elites stood and applauded the White House as it announced and defended its latest killing spree. They could have seen the federal government for the clear and present danger it obviously poses – the only government that had militarily mass murdered American civilians on American soil since the collateral damage at Pearl Harbor. They could have turned their backs on the killers in DC, refusing ever to believe in their lies again, saving the lives of uncountable Americans, Serbians, Afghans, Iraqis, Libyans, Yemenis, Palestinians, and so many others who would bear the wrath of an unhampered imperial executive in the nineteen years to come, sparing the priceless liberties we have seen shredded on the altar of state power.

Instead, they looked the other way, they yawned, even cheered. There might still be time to turn things around. But the tanks are closing in.

http://lewrockwell.com/gregory/gregory246.html
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rimbaud · Mar 11, 2013

MadMax said: ↑

I was there during that event...it was my freshman year at Baylor.
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Wow, you are so old. I don't even think I was born yet. You know, because I am young. I am not getting old yet. Nope. You, though, are definitely old.

Deckard · Mar 11, 2013

Gosh, texxx, you couldn't find a way to blame the whole thing on President Obama? You're slipping. Yes, I remember that event. It was the year I bought my first walking cane and began daydreaming about hair implants.

Northside Storm · Mar 11, 2013

bigtexxx said: ↑

You quickly try to change the topic, instead preferring personal attacks based on assumptions

tell me your thoughts on the Waco massacre
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What do you think my positions are on civilian casualties, given my consistent positions against drones, Bush/Obama admin excesses, and "collateral damage"?

Assumptions? Ha.

bigtexxx

Good news on the extension. I'm willing to do my part for the war effort without complaining.

Don't forget that the Patriot Act is voted on every couple of years, so it's not permanent.
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http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showthread.php?t=99402

Now tell me this, how does your position for excessive federal power to curb criminality clash with your position against excessive federal power to curb criminality?

AroundTheWorld · Mar 11, 2013

Northside Storm said: ↑

What do you think my positions are on civilian casualties, given my consistent positions against drones, Bush/Obama admin excesses, and "collateral damage"?
Click to expand...

Nobody cares about your positions.

fchowd0311 · Mar 11, 2013

AroundTheWorld said: ↑

Nobody cares about your positions.
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any more than yours

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