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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:27 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
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Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   1/10
Message-ID: <479.2CDFB15C@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:49:11 PDT
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Gunning for Koresh
by Daniel Wattenberg
from _The American Spectator_, August 1993, pp.31-40

It was only when their funding was up for review and a pattern of
sexual harassment emerged at their agency-that the federal Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms decided to make an example of David
Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers.

Appearing before the House Judiciary Committee nine days after the
incineration of David Koresh's Mount Carmel Center and most of those
who dwelt within its walls, Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms
director Stephen Higgins referred to the search and arrest warrants
his agents had tried to execute two months earlier. The affidavit
filed in support of the warrants, said Higgins, detailed some of
Koresh's "clear messages that he and his followers were bound together
in a vision that promised them all--and others who were in their
paths--death."

Although Higgins mischaracterized the warrant, he did faithfully
encapsulate the government's theory of the Texas barbecue of the
Branch Davidians: Koresh -- or Vernon Howell, as he was originally
called -- set himself and his followers ablaze on April 19, and this
mass self-immolation represented the inevitable self-fulfillment of
his apocalyptic teaching. By now this is the generally accepted
theory.

It is nonetheless a theory predicated almost wholly on forgetting.
Forgetting, for example, that while it was Koresh who purportedly
willed an apocalyptic showdown, it was the ATF that dictated -- twice
-- the timing and setting of confrontation. Koresh seems to have taken
no steps toward fulfilling any deadly vision except on two
extraordinary occasions -- February 28, when a hundred heavily armed
ATF agents arrived unannounced at his door, and April 19, when combat
engineering vehicles began tearing holes in his domicile and suffusing
it with a severe chemical irritant known as CS.

Had the members of the House Judiciary panel carefully read their
copies of the affidavit, they might have questioned whether it
warranted Higgins's confident conviction that Koresh willed the two
part holocaust that claimed the lives of four ATF agents and more than
eighty Branch Davidians. Indeed, they might have questioned whether
the ATF affidavit even established grounds for believing that Koresh
was apt to commit a violent crime or endanger anyone beyond the
boundaries of his property.

They might even have considered another possibility that has not yet
made its way into the popular consciousness: Maybe the bureau never
seriously tried to tailor its enforcement means to the size of the
actual threat. Maybe it did the reverse. Maybe it first choreographed
its lightning strike on the Davidians and later -- for bureaucratic
reasons best known to itself -- fabricated from the disparate
investigative materials at hand a threat of such frightening
proportions that it licensed the otherwise inexplicable means. Close
inspection of the publicly available material on the ATF investigation
of David Koresh invites just such a hypothesis.

The Aguilera Affidavit

Certainly, Higgins erred in his assertion that the ATF search warrant
detailed "messages" imputed to Koresh that his religious vision
"promised them all -- and others who were in their paths -- death."
This l5-page single-spaced document contains only one fragment of
conversation that might possibly be construed as a "clear message" of
the kind cited by Higgins.

The dark prophecy in question was related third-hand to ATF Special
Agent Davy Aguilera, the ATF's lead investigator in the Koresh probe
and the author of the affidavit. On December 7, 1992, Aguilera
interviewed ATF Special Agent Carlos Torres, who had assisted his
investigation of the Branch Davidians. Torres mentioned an interview
three days earlier of Joyce Sparks, a child-abuse investigator with
the Texas Department of Human Services, who had twice visited the
Mount Carmel Center to investigate reports that Koresh was "operating
a commune type compound" and "sexually abusing young girls."

According to Aguilera's affidavit, Sparks told Torres that on her
second and final visit to the compound on April 6,1992, "Koresh told
her that he was the 'Messenger' from God, that the world was coming to
an end, and that when he 'reveals' himself the riots in Los Angeles
would pale in comparison to what was going to happen in Waco, Texas."
Koresh explained to Sparks, according to the affidavit, that his
self-revelation "would be a 'military type operation' and that all the
'non-believers' would have to suffer."

One might quarrel with Higgins's cavalier assertion that this single
reported exchange supports the view that Koresh welcomed the deadly
events of February 28 and April 19 as the fulfillment of some
idiosyncratic eschatological vision. This would be an idle quibble,
however, because the Aguilera affidavit is wrong. Koresh did not tell
Sparks on her visit to the compound that "the riots in Los Angeles
would pale in comparison" to his self-revelation in Waco. Unless the
man really was a prophet, he could not have told her this. The Los
Angeles riots broke out on April 29, 1992, more than three weeks after
Sparks had last visited Koresh.
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:27 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
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Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   2/10
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Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:49:11 PDT
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   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]


Was Koresh a Threat?

On February 28, 1993, a hundred ATF agents converged on the Ranch
Apocalypse "cocked and locked," as Koresh was to put it. They had been
drilled in a plan to enter the front door within seven seconds after
scrambling from two goose-necked cattle trailers, and to gain control
of the compound within sixty seconds. Not much margin for reflection
and reaction by Koresh, "kinked up" (the FBI's phrase) as he already
was by an expose of his unorthodox community that had begun just the
day before in the local paper. Still, not an injudicious use of state
power, I would say, if the purpose was to protect a community
terrorized by a nest of heavily armed and criminally violent monsters.
But deployed in pursuit of one individual inside on charges of
violating somewhat technical provisions of federal weapons laws, such
means raise the question of proportionality.

David Koresh had never been convicted of a crime, violent or
otherwise. He had complied peacefully with lawful authorities at least
four times. He had surrendered himself to the local sheriff in 1987 on
a bizarre attempted murder charge far more serious than the weapons
violations the ATF suspected him of. (A hung jury voted 9-3 to acquit
him.) Koresh had not interfered with a Michigan judge's decision in a
child-custody case to remove 12-year-old Kiri Jewell from the
compound. As recently as February 1992, he had escorted local
sheriff's deputies and child-abuse investigators through the compound
after they had called beforehand to say they were coming. Koresh even
invited one of the deputy sheriffs to come back and fish in their
lake, according to McLeMan County Sheriff Jack Harwell. "He was real
nice to him, real congenial," he says.

In the eyes of local law enforcement, Koresh and the Davidians were
private and territorial, but no threat to the surrounding community.
"They were like living in another little country out there," observes
Harwell. "They had their property line, and they were basically good
people. All of 'em were good people. I don't know about Vernon Howell.
I think he really believed he was what he told everybody he was, and I
think he was probably sincere in everything that he taught. But the
other thing that he did was to teach the philosophy that once anyone
crossed that property line out there, it would be just like someone
invading the United States."

The Firearms Cache

From June 4, 1992 to June 23, 1992, the ATF aggressively investigated
Koresh for federal weapons violations. He had been accumulating
firearms, mostly legal semi-automatic AR-15s. But, the ATF suspected,
David Koresh wanted to "rock and roll"--that is, to convert semi-autos
into machine guns.

The media have almost invariably characterized the Davidian arms cache
as breathtakingly large. But that is a matter of interpretation. Texas
Rangers recovered about 200 guns from the ashes of the Mount Carmel
Center, roughly two per resident. Statewide in Texas, 17 million
people own 60 million guns, or about four per resident. Still, it
represents a large concentration of firepower in one place.

Machine guns, which fire more than one shot automatically with one
pull of the trigger, are not unconditionally outlawed in the United
States. In Texas, 16,500 residents own them. Prior to the
McClure-Volkner Act of 1986, machine guns were legal, provided the tax
on them had been paid to obtain the necessary license. Today, one may
still legally own a registered machine gun manufactured before May
19,1986.

Machine-gun parts can be legally sold. With the right combination of
machine-gun parts and conversion parts, semiautos can be converted to
fire full-auto, and a skilled machinist can, with the right parts,
manufacture a machine gun. Under the National Firearms Act, a machine
gun is defined as any "combination of parts designed and intended, for
use in converting a weapon into a machinegun, and any combination of
parts from which a machinegun can be assembled if such parts are in
the possession under the control of the person."

Machine-gun conversions of the kind for which Koresh was under
investigation constitute a new and tricky area of the law. "This is a
very, very convoluted, technical, angels dancing-on-the-head-of-a-pin
kind of argument," says Robert Sanders, former enforcement chief of
the ATF. "And there are no published rulings telling you what is and
what isn't [a violation]."

Aguilera himself mischaracterized the legal definition of a machine
gun in the second paragraph of his affidavit. Citing his familiarity
with federal firearm laws, he stated that "any combination of parts
either designed or intended for use in converting any firearm into a
machinegun" is "unlawful." As we have seen, the applicable provision
defines a machine gun as "any combination of parts designed and
intended for use in converting a weapon into a machinegun." Aguilera's
blunder is significant in the context of an investigation to determine
whether there was probable cause to believe Koresh's legal
acquisitions of (unspecified, in the warrant) M-16 parts were intended
for the purpose of illegal machine-gun conversions.

   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:27 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
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Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   3/10
Message-ID: <481.2CDFB15E@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:49:11 PDT
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Lines: 104

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

Other Aguilera goofs raise further questions about his reliability. At
one point he mistakes the legal definition of "destructive devices"
(bombs, grenades, etc.) for that of "firearms." Elsewhere, he refers
to two "M-16 E-Z" kits or "M-16 machinegun EZ kits" that were shipped
to Koresh. In reality, these kits are known as E-2 kits. (And whether
an M16 parts kit is a machine-gun kit depends on what M-16 parts are
inside, and how they are used.)

That Aguilera was involved in establishing violations of a
confoundingly technical area of the law may be just part of the
explanation for his miscues. Aguilera apparently composed his l5-page
brief in considerable haste between February 23 and February 25, 1993
(the ATF assault followed on the 28th), long after the information he
had gathered about suspicious weapons shipments to Koresh would have
been fresh in his mind. Indeed, it appears that the ATF had collected
no reliable new information on suspicious weapons parts shipments to
the Davidians after June 23, 1992, eight months before.

Stale Information

It is worth noting here that one test of a search warrant's validity
is the timeliness of the evidence it presents. Dick DeGuerin, the
Houston lawyer who represented Koresh during the Waco siege and now
represents his mother, Bonnie Haldeman, argues that the ATF was
working on "stale information," under standards derived from the 1932
Supreme Court case Sgro v. United States. Says DeGuerin, "The
magistrate [has to] conclude that what they are searching for is there
now, not that it was there at some time in the past."

Davy Aguilera's affidavit, submitted on February 25, 1993, contained no
information less than eight months old on suspicious parts deliveries
to the "Mag-Bag" metal shop the Davidians ran outside the compound, or
to the Mt. Carmel Center.  Stranger still, Aguilera reports no
information of any kind pertaining to his Koresh investigation
collected between June 23 and December 7, 1992, with three minor
exceptions. For almost six months, his investigation of Koresh appears
to have been virtually moribund.

In their reporting on the ATF investigation, the media appear to have
been struck dumb by the amount of evidence stuffed into Aguilera's
15-page affidavit. But Aguilera's brief is larded with filler, like
the trivial exceptions to the five-and-a-half month hiatus in the
Koresh probe.

On November 13, a lieutenant in the County Sheriff's Department told
Aguilera that an anonymous UPS employee had told him that "Marshall
Keith Butler, a relative of the person who wishes to remain anonymous,
is a machinist by trade, and is associated with Vernon Howell." But
what is this doing in the warrant? There is no indication that Butler
had any expertise in firearms. His association with Koresh is not
specified, and his name never crops up again in the search warrant.

Also on November 13, a local deputy sheriff told Aguilera of hearing a
loud explosion on the Mount Carmel Center grounds and observing a
large cloud of gray smoke dissipating from ground level. Was it an
illegal explosion? The warrant supplies no more evidence in support of
such an assumption than it does in support of an assumption that the
explosion was innocuous, related perhaps to the Davidians' continuing
construction work on their property.

After the five-and-a-half-month lapse, the ATF investigation resumed
in December 1992. Despite intensive efforts in June, the ATF had
failed to establish probable cause to believe that Koresh was
illegally manufacturing and concealing machine guns and destructive
devices. "Congressman Fish asked me if we had probable cause by
February," Director Higgins testified to the House panel in April. "We
had a review in here--in the headquarters office in December with
respect to whether we had probable cause. We decided at that point we
did not, so we continued to gather information."

All those documented M-16 parts and grenade hulls and no probable
cause? How's that? By now an attentive reader should have the answer.
Higgins did: "What we were dealing with [in June] were parts, as well
as explosive materials, that only become violations if you make
something out of them."

Stale Witnesses

If the purpose of the flurry of interviews forming Part II of the ATF
investigation was to build on the ATFs previous work and bolster case
for probable cause, then it must be deemed a near total failure. The
warrant reports on interviews conducted after December 1992 with six
former Davidians who had resided for varying lengths of time at Mount
Carmel. With one exception, none said anything about what Koresh might
have made with the weapons parts and explosive materials he acquired
in 1992, which formed the basis of the ATF case. With one shaky
exception, none of them could have. Because the parts and materials
acquisitions so painstakingly documented by the bureau in June all
occurred during 1992. As can be readily verified by anyone who would
trouble to plot the relevant dates on a timeline, five of the six
former cult members contacted each left the compound, left Waco, and
left David Koresh and his sect behind well before that time.

   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:28 1993
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Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   4/10
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   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

Robyn Bunds, a former Davidian and the mother of a child by Koresh,
was interviewed on December 11, 1992. She had left the commune in
1990.

Jeannine Bunds, Robyn's mother, was interviewed on December 12. As a
member of Koresh's harem, the House of David, Mama Bunds, like her
daughter, had slept with Koresh, each in the conviction, shared by all
the other women in the House of David, that procreation was the
function of sex with Koresh, and an extraordinary type of procreation
at that: they believed they were receiving the seed of the Lamb of God
and bearing God's grandchildren. (Doubtless, Robyn and Jeannine had,
with the aid of "cult deprogramming," come to view Koresh's
mother-daughter feat quite differently by the time they cooperated
with the authorities, and one might legitimately question the
objectivity of the information they supplied.) Jeannine left the group
in September 1991.

Robyn's sister-in-law Deborah Sue Bunds was interviewed in January
1993. Her date of departure is unspecified and unnecessary to specify:
she testified only that four years earlier she saw Koresh fire what
she assumed was a machine gun and shortly thereafter overheard him
discussing machine guns with associates. (If it was a machine gun at
all, it obviously was not fabricated from the parts shipped four years
later. Conceivably, she saw Koresh at play with a frivolous toy he
possessed, a "hellfire" device. A spring attached to the trigger, the
"hellfire," causes a gun to fire erratic three-round bursts
automatically. Upon hearing of complaints from neighbors about his
"hellfire," Koresh asked the McLennan County Sheriff's department to
have a look at it, and he was assured the gadget was legal.)

Mrs. Poia Vaega, interviewed by telephone from her New Zealand home,
resided at the compound for all of ten days back in March 1990.

Interviewed in January 1993, Marc Breault lived at the Center from
early 1988 until September 1989. After breaking with the Davidians, he
became a Koresh nemesis, a one-man whistle-blower prophesying doom for
the sect to whoever would listen. Breault claims no knowledge of
illegal weapons or explosives possessed by Koresh. Curiously omitted
from Aguilera's account is the fact, widely reported elsewhere, that
Breault is blind. (Yet, according to Aguilera, Breault "participated
in firearm shooting exercises conducted by Howell" -- which under the
circumstances surely was illegal.)

If the eight-month-old information on parts shipments was vulnerable
to legal challenge as stale, then the material from the "new"
witnesses is even staler. All of the information in the warrant
gathered from these five former Davidians is at least eight months
old. Overwhelmingly, it is far older than that. Maybe a strong motion
to suppress could have been filed. But more importantly, these five
offered no evidence that Koresh was assembling or converting those
parts listed by the ATF into machine guns or other illegal destructive
devices, because they were long gone from the scene by the time these
parts were acquired.

Later Information

This is not to say the ATF's resumed investigation added no evidence
to the case for probable cause it had begun in June. On January 25,
1993, Aguilera interviewed ex-Davidian David Block. At least the dates
of his brief residence at Mount Carmel (March-June 1992) match up with
those of the parts acquisitions. While there, he saw a metal lathe and
milling machine usually operated by Donald Bunds (Robyn's dad,
Jeannine's ex), who, he said, had "the capability to fabricate
firearms parts." Moreover, according to the affidavit:

Mr. Block was present on several occasions when Howell would ask if
anyone had any knowledge about making hand grenades or converting
semi-automatic rifles to machineguns. At one point he also heard
discussion about a shipment of inert hand grenades and Howell's intent
to reactivate them.

With the exception of one ATF undercover agent, the Block interview is
the last one recorded in the affidavit. Coming so late in the
investigation, Block's story may strike some ears as a little too pat,
but it does constitute evidence relevant to the investigative
spadework done seven months before on parts and materials shipments.
(Still, it raises questions about the claims of other former cult
members that they saw Koresh firing machine guns years previously. If
he was observed firing machine guns in February 1989 and talking about
adding to his collection, why would he ask advice on how to convert
semi-automatics three years later?)

Block also recounts observing Donald Bunds designing a "grease
gun/sten gun" -- a World War II -- vintage British machine gun -- on
an Auto Cad computer on the premises. Whether a computer design
constitutes probable cause for a weapons search is open to question,
but there is no question that Aguilera had serious doubts about the
reliability of Block's weapons knowledge, noting that he mistook a
British Boys .52 anti-tank rifle for a .50 caliber rifle.

The dates in the affidavit don't match, and so far as the original
weapons charges are concerned, the two halves of the investigation
don't mesh. Indeed, they only touch, a little suspiciously, at one
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:28 1993
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Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   5/10
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   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

point in David Block's testimony. And if the purpose of phase two was
to build on the probable cause foundation so meticulously laid in
phase one, it can hardly be counted a success. But maybe that was not
its primary purpose.

The Second Phase

Phase two of the investigation is of a very different nature than
phase one. It is diffuse, undisciplined, deceptive, urgent, ominous,
and concerned with alleged deviations from moral norms that fall far
beyond the jurisdiction of the ATF.

Starting in December, the ATF begins to caricature David Koresh as the
Antichrist. Phase two renders, or constructs, the portrait of a
militarized, polymorphously criminal Caliban on a hair-trigger ruling
over a squad of zombiefied zealots blankly awaiting zero-hour for the
damned, a bomb ticking out the days on a piece of East Texas scrubland
before blasting through the cosmos into eternity on a signal from
Koresh.

Confronted with this scary composite, one can easily see why U.S.
Magistrate Judge Dennis G. Green hastily approved search and arrest
warrants on Koresh, without pausing long over the particulars of the
bloated Aguilera affidavit. This composite might even have caused
Green to swallow any doubts he might have harbored about the scale of
the impending ATF raid-assuming, that is, that the ATF had clued him
in. But, scary though the composite seems, many particulars turn out,
on inspection, to be less so. Space permits a look at only some of
them.

Robyn Bunds, according to Aguilera, said that "residents were
subjected to watching extremely violent movies of the Vietnam war
which Howell would refer to as training films." Omitted are the names
of these movies. It turn out they were Oliver Stone's Oscar-winning
Platoon, Stanley Kubrick's anti-war satire Full-Metal Jacket, and
Hamburger Hill, a critically admired Hollywood failure that was not
transparently hostile to the U.S. role there. Robyn also told Aguilera
that Koresh even kept a gun "under his bed while sleeping."

Aguilera's records search revealed that "most" of the forty or so
foreign nationals who at some point gave the Mount Carmel Center as
their local point of contact "have over stayed [sic] their entry
permits or visas and are therefore illegally in the United States." Is
the ATF in the business of policing our borders?

David Block stated "that he observed at the compound published
magazines such as, the Shotgun News and other related clandestine
magazines." But Shotgun News is hardly clandestine: page 22 of the
June issue of American Rifleman, the NRA's flagship publication,
displays a column-length advertisement for the magazine, which,
incidentally, accepts MasterCard and Visa! The other related
"clandestine" magazines are left unidentified.

Koresh told Marc Breault, writes Aguilera, "that he was interested in
acquiring the 'Anarchist's Cook Book', which I know is a publication
outlining clandestine operations to include instructions and formulas
for manufacturing improvised explosive devices." And Block,
two-and-a-half years later, during his stint at the compound, "heard
extensive talk of the existence of the 'Anarchist Cook Book.' "
However nefarious the book may sound, there remains no allegation that
Koresh ever had a copy in his possession.

Child Abuse

One of the December interviews is with Joyce Sparks, the Texas Child
Protective Services (CPS) investigator we met earlier. CPS was looking
into complaints that Koresh was "running a commune-type compound, and
that he was sexually abusing young girls," Aguilera notes
portentously. With the magistrate in mind, he deftly waves his red
cape. On Sparks's first visit, Mrs. Koresh would not speak with her,
because "she had strict orders not to talk with anyone" unless Koresh
was present. On her second visit, Sparks saw a buried school bus with
the seats removed, and "at one end of the bus she could see a very
large refrigerator with numerous bullet holes." She "felt the entire
walk through the compound was staged for her by Koresh." And yet she
cites not a single instance of sexual abuse. This vignette is the
closest we get to child abuse: "She talked to a boy about seven or
eight years old. The child said that he could not wait to grow up and
be a man. When Ms. Sparks asked him why he was in such a hurry to grow
up, he replied that when he grew up he would get a 'long gun' just
like all the other men there." That's child abuse?

And what conceivable jurisdiction could the ATF have over child abuse?
According to DeGuerin, "It was thrown in there simply to stink up the
case."

Worse, Aguilera suppresses the fact that this child abuse
investigation was closed on April 30, 1992, having failed to produce
any evidence. "None of the allegations could be verified," according
to an April 23, 1993 case summary released by the Texas Department of
Protective and Regulatory Services. It reported, moreover, that no
further allegations of child abuse had been received since the
investigation closed, and that even interviews with children released
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:28 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
Sender: ufgate@mechanic.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   6/10
Message-ID: <484.2CDFB162@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:50:11 PDT
Organization: FidoNet node 1:3603/20 - Florida Mail Hub/NE, St Petersburg FL
Lines: 104

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

from the compound during the 5l-day siege "have not confirmed any of
the allegations or described any other incidents which could verify
our concerns that they have been victims of physical or sexual abuse."

The government cannot be expected, of course, to give both sides of
the story in an ex parte search warrant. But a bad-faith omission of
this kind falls in another category. DeGuerin implied that, had Koresh
lived, he would have petitioned to have the warrant nullified on
grounds first established by the 1978 Supreme Court case Frank v.
Delaware- which held that if an agent knowingly falsifies or misleads
the magistrate in the issuing of the search warrant then the search
warrant is invalid "If he says they've been investigated for child
abuse," says DeGuerin, "and yet the outcome of that investigation was
they were cleared of it, then that's misleading."

How much of what we think we know about Koresh and child abuse and
sexual contact with minors is true? How much of what can be verified
is actually against the law? How much of it is the product of
sensationalized reporting, ignorance of Texas law, and panicky,
irresponsible exercises in official self-justification, like Attorney
General Janet Reno's wild claim (later repudiated by the FBI) that she
ordered the FBI to smash and gas because "babies were being beaten"
inside?

Remember Sparks's little fiction about her encounter with Koresh in
the compound when he promised to make the L.A. riots look like a tea
party? When I first asked her about it she confirmed it. "That's a
fact," she said. I asked if she was sure of the April 6 date. She
hedged, but repeated that it took place in the compound. "I don't
remember the date. To be truthful I haven't really looked at that,
that's been over a year and a half ago, so I'm not, I couldn't just
get the dates for you, um, but on one of my visits, yes, he did say
that," she said. Told the exchange could not possibly have happened on
one of her visits to the compound (her final visit was April 6, the
riots were on April 29, the case was closed April 30) she responded,
"We made several visits, and I continued to have conversations with
him even after the case was closed." She maintained telephone contact
with Koresh, because she was convinced, despite all the denials, that
"the children were in danger." She "objected," she says, to her
agency's decision to close the case. "The [McLennan County] Sheriff's
Department sabotaged our intervention," she claims. "We were ordered
to close the case."

Is it possible this family crisis intervention specialist's definition
of "child abuse" is somewhat broader than that of her colleagues, than
that of the McLennan County sheriffs, than the norm in the rural East
Texas community where she works? Pressed to specify what kind of
danger the children were in, Sparks answered, "There were indications
that food was being with held as punishment." As in being sent to bed
without dinner? Is that an uncommon practice in McLennan County?

Her other example has been widely repeated. "There were indications
that babies were being beaten." There is ample evidence that Koresh
was a stern, even severe, disciplinarian. He believed in spanking
children. He sometimes used a wooden spoon. But in my scouring of the
records -- the ATF warrant, two quickie books on Koresh, voluminous
case files and press reports -- I have found just one specific and
detailed allegation that Koresh beat a baby. In an affidavit filed in
a Michigan trial over custody of Kiri Jewell (a child who lived with
her mother at the compound), ex-Davidian Michelle Tom alleged that
Koresh had beaten her eight-month-old child Tara's bottom until it
bled. Perhaps we will never learn if these practices were isolated or
routine. What we know is that a few defected and deprogrammed
Davidians alleged child abuse, and many more loyalists, while they
lived, denied it.

We know that Koresh had an unchecked libido, a filthy vernacular that
he failed to clean up in the presence of children, that he had a harem
of women of varying ages, and that, dating from his announcement of
his "New Light Doctrine," he insisted on male celibacy in the
compound, excepting only himself. We also know that his sexual
relations with his female followers were consensual. I have never
heard an allegation to the contrary. And they were linked explicitly,
in somewhat Victorian fashion, to procreation.

A Newsweek account gives a sense:

To many girls being chosen by Koresh was an honor they eagerly sought.
Koresh "wouldn't do it unless you wanted it," says Jeannine Bunds,
51.... "It wasn't about sex, but he was a very appealing, sexual
person.... He didn't say, 'Ooh, you've got sexy boobs.'" He just loved
the idea of womanhood...and he made you feel special...A union with
Koresh was spiritual, says Robyn Bunds, who met with Koresh when she
was 14 and slept with him when she was 17 . . . "He's perfect, and
he's going to father your children. What more can you ask for?"

Of course, there is a powerful social consensus that minors do not
have the emotional maturity to responsibly consent to sex, and thus we
have statutory rape laws. Not all support this consensus. First Lady
Hillary Rodham Clinton, for example, wrote some years ago, "The
so-called status offenses, incorrigibility, truancy, running away,
sexual precociousness, represent a confused mixture of social control
and preventive care that has resulted in the confinement of thousands
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:28 1993
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Sender: ufgate@mechanic.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   7/10
Message-ID: <485.2CDFB163@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:50:11 PDT
Organization: FidoNet node 1:3603/20 - Florida Mail Hub/NE, St Petersburg FL
Lines: 104

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

of children for the crime of having trouble growing up."

In a society afflicted with an epidemic of "children having children,"
it is clear that statutory rape laws are often unenforced, though in
many of these cases the children are abandoned by "deadbeat dads."
While Koresh did provide for the children of his "wives," he would
have been liable to prosecution on sexual assault charges,
second-degree felonies. While the age of sexual consent is just 14
under the Texas penal code's Indecency with a Child Statute, it is 17
under section 22.011, Sexual Assault.

There is an ironic socio-legal aspect here that has escaped general
notice. Under that Texas law, Koresh would have been off the hook if
his teenaged partners had been promiscuous before having sex with him.
Obviously, in many areas of the country, teenage sexual promiscuity is
rampant, and in some jurisdictions is tacitly condoned by the
distribution of condoms in high schools. But it is highly unlikely
that any of Koresh's teenage partners met this legal standard of
promiscuity, because in his capacity as sexual lawgiver at the
compound he rigidly policed the girls' sexuality, restricting them to
the procreative sex they had with him. Thus, though some will see him
as nothing but a wanton sexual predator, he in fact faced an unusually
large area of legal vulnerability because he was a repressive
regulator of sexual mores within his isolated realm.

Whether deterred by the daunting prospect of prosecuting these unusual
sexual offenses, or by the thought that state intervention and
dissolution of the Davidian families might be more damaging even than
the status quo, the local law enforcement authorities with
jurisdiction never stepped in to force this community to conform en
masse to the norms of the world from which it had voluntarily
withdrawn. Certainly, the ATF raiding party and the FBI gas attack
placed the Davidian children in far greater and more immediate danger
than any they had previously faced.

Why? Why does the ATF leave the evidence of illegal machine gun
conversions and grenade manufacture dangling somewhere below the level
of probable cause? And stuff its warrant instead with a circuit
jamming array of extraneous, manipulative, luridly alarmist material
bearing on subjects that fall well beyond the scope of the ATF's
ostensible investigation and its jurisdiction?

"The information about the child abuse establishes information
concerning the level of threat to life and safety which exists within
the compound," says ATF spokesman Jack Killorin. "The warrant is for
an imminent threat to the life and safety of everybody in that
compound. The warrant is for the illicit manufacture of explosives and
explosive devices which right away is an immediate threat to the life
and safety of every person in there."

An immediate threat to the life and safety of every person in there? A
boy who wants to grow up so he can carry a gun? The viewing of
Platoon? The leader s polygamy? Lapsed visas? On close inspection, as
we have seen, this material hardly establishes an immediate threat to
the life and safety of every person in there.

But quickly digested and taken at face value, this information would
likely be interpreted as Killorin suggests it should, as justifying a
massive raid on a split-second timetable that indiscriminately placed
in danger every person in the compound, from the suspected wrongdoer
to blameless infants and elderly and everyone in between. A
matter-of-fact case of suspected violations of the National Firearms
Act, on the other hand, would hardly have provided a reasonable basis
for such extraordinary enforcement measures.

A Raid, Regardless

By February 23-25, when Aguilera was drafting his affidavit, ATF
Special Response Teams from three cities were already at Fort Hood,
drilling for the imminent raid, and planning had been underway for
months. With the plan locked in, the affidavit would have to do more
than document probable cause to believe Koresh had violated the NFA --
it would have to leave a record justifying a military-style assault.

But why would ATF have decided on a high-risk military style raid when
they might have picked Koresh up on one of his regular jogs? Or,
alternatively, when he was out shopping, as he often was, with his
legal wife Rachel and their kids in local music stores and auto parts
shops? Or when he was at one of the many gun shows he regularly
attended?

Because the visuals wouldn't have been sexy. The ATF invited
television news crews along on this raid. Indeed, it was local
television cameraman John McLemore who, according to Harwell,
inadvertently tipped off a Koresh follower he encountered on the road
of the raid scheduled to commence later the same morning.

This looks like a "rice bowl raid," undertaken to boost the agency's
standing among the Washington bureaucrats and legislators who fund it.
It was appropriations season in Washington. The bureau's annual
appropriations hearing was scheduled for March 10 1993. Videotape of
the bureau's precision raid on an armed and dangerous cult leader
would have been fresh in the minds of congressional appropriators. In
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:29 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
Sender: ufgate@mechanic.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   8/10
Message-ID: <486.2CDFB164@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:50:11 PDT
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Lines: 104

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

normal times, it would likely have served as a powerful symbol of ATF
enforcement prowess for years to come, much as the bureau's tracing of
the gun John Hinckley used has served for years as a powerful symbol
of its investigative prowess.

But these were not normal times for the agency. Its public image and
morale had been devastated by a January 12 expose on "60 Minutes." The
segment broadcast graphic allegations by female ATF agents that they
had been sexually harassed on the job by male colleagues and that the
agency intimidated and punished victims and witnesses who had pressed
sexual harassment claims. One agent, Michelle Roberts, charged that
agents had left dildos and other sexual devices on her desk. She also
charged that after an undercover assignment, one agent had pinned her
against the hood of a car while two others tore at her clothes. While
the segment didn't air until January 12, by which time planning was
underway for the raid on Mount Carmel, it had been in production for
some time. And "60 Minutes" had first contacted ATF personnel around
mid-November 1992, according to Bob Anderson, who produced the segment
for CBS. In other words, the character of the ATF's Koresh
investigation changed radically in the weeks just after bureau
officials would have learned that "60 Minutes" had them in its sights.

For the first time in twelve years a liberal would be in the White
House, and with Congress still in Democratic hands, Washington was on
the threshold of a new era of liberal activism. What a first
impression the ATF would make on its new bosses! Sexual harassment!
Could there be a better way of washing away this taint of troglodyte
sexism than mounting an operation against the self-proclaimed prophet
they had under investigation down in Waco, this white, male, sexually
predatory, patriarchal, tax-resisting, gun-loving religious nut with a
fierce will not to be governed by secular authorities?

Self-Defense?

Whether the ATF succeeded in establishing probable cause or not, they
had legal search and arrest warrants, signed by a magistrate. If, as
the government contends, Koresh, after detecting the impending raid on
the morning of the 28th, prepared his followers for armed resistance
and sent them to their battle stations to repulse a legally authorized
raid, then he and those who followed his commands are responsible for
the deaths of four federal agents. They are murderers.

Unless the government fired first. There is no law anywhere that
requires someone to offer himself as target practice, to federal
agents or anyone else.

The outlines of the government's case have already been sketched in
ATF affidavits filed after the initial shootout in support of charges
against released cult members for conspiring to murder federal
officers. Early on the morning of the 28th, David Jones, a Koresh
follower and Mount Carmel resident, went out for a newspaper. On his
return, he saw a driver who appeared to be lost, and stopped to offer
help. Jones, it happened, was a postman, who made his rounds in his
own car, which bore the postal service logo. The driver asked Jones
whether he was a postal employee, and Jones assured him -- twice --
that he was. John McLemore, a cameraman with Waco's KWTX-TV,
identified himself to Jones and warned him that agents would soon be
on their way out there, prepared for a shootout. Jones hot-footed it
back to Koresh.

Inside, Koresh was providing a biblical exegesis for Robert Rodriguez,
an ATF undercover agent who had infiltrated the cult in early January,
posing as a neighboring graduate student. (Rodriguez gathered little
evidence to bolster the government's case against Koresh. In the one
interview he has given, he described poignantly how a steady diet of
Koresh's biblical teachings had almost hooked him. Asked by Dallas
Morning News writer Lee Hancock if Koresh ever got to him, he answered
in a cracking voice, "He was close.") The Davidians had long since
divined his true identity. How to warn Koresh without tipping off the
undercover agent that surprise had been lost?

A ruse was devised. One version has David Jones interrupting Koresh to
ask him to step into another room to take a long distance call from
England. Another has a Davidian calling a relative instructing that
relative to immediately call back and ask for Koresh.

In ATF agent Earl Dunagan's account in his affidavit, the details are
left vague, but the meaning is clear:

Early in the morning of Sunday, February 28, 1993, the undercover
agent entered the Mount Carmel Compound and met with Vernon Howell,
Steve Schneider, and other residents of the compound. Vernon Howell
was then summoned from the room by a fellow resident of the compound,
Perry Jones, leaving the agent in the foyer area. At about the same
time, David Michael Jones, an associate of Vernon Howell, had arrived
at the compound after learning that the compound might be raided that
day. A short time later, Howell returned to the room where the agent
waited, and exclaimed that the ATF and the National Guard were coming
to get him. Howell continued, saying, "Neither ATF or [sic] the
National Guard will ever get me. They got me once, and they will never
get me again. They are coming; the time has come."

Shortly thereafter, the undercover agent left the compound.
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:29 1993
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Sender: ufgate@mechanic.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Wattenberg on Waco   9/10
Message-ID: <487.2CDFB165@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:50:11 PDT
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Lines: 104

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]


The government will use Koresh's chilling final words to the plant in
support of its argument that Koresh methodically ordered his people to
grab their guns and man their battle stations to repulse the expected
raid. But is the Rodriguez account precise? At the moment of the
alleged words, a panicked Rodriguez feared for his life. "They opened
the door for me to get out, and I said to myself, 'They were going to
shoot me in the back,'" he told the Dallas paper.

Perhaps Rodriguez quoted Koresh accurately. If so, Koresh's words are
strange indeed. Taken literally, they make no sense. Koresh never had
been taken by either the ATF or the National Guard. Any Davidians
present would surely have known this. Perhaps he intended those words
as a warning for Rodriguez to relay to his superiors. It is strange
that Koresh, allegedly readying himself for his long sought showdown
with the law, let an ATF agent go, rather than shooting him or keeping
him hostage. Koresh learned they were coming and let an agent go
unharmed. The ATF learned that they'd been snitched on and had lost
the element of surprise -- and proceeded.

There is another version of how the shooting started. Dick DeGuerin
relates what his client said when he visited with him inside the
compound during the long stand-off with the FBI:

He knew they were coming, and he was watching for them and saw these
two cattle trailers roar up, and people start streaming out of the
back of them, screaming at the tops of their lungs, not anything like,
"This is a search" or "We're agents" or "Put up your hands"or anything
like that. It was just screaming, yelling, like Marines storming the
beach.

He stepped out the door, held up his right hand and said, "Wait, go
back, there are women and children in here. Let's talk about this."

And he was met with, first, one shot that barely missed his head, hit
the door right by his head, and then a barrage of shots, and he ducked
back inside.... They didn't get him. They did kill Perry Jones with
that first barrage.... After that, those on the inside ran to their
rooms, got their guns and started firing back.

Of course, DeGuerin was not there at the time. This is his
recollection of what Koresh told him after he would have had time to
concoct at his leisure a version of events that indicated legitimate
self-defense.

Since DeGuerin offered this unsubstantiated account, the 911 tapes
have been released. Twice while under ATF fire, the compound placed
emergency calls to the McLennan County Sherif's 911 switchboard. In
the first call, Wayne Martin, a top Koresh lieutenant and also a Waco
attorney well known and liked in the local legal community, pleads
with Sheriff's Lieutenant Larry Lynch:

LYNCH: Mount Carmel?

MARTIN: Yeah. Tell them there are children and women in here and to
call it off.

LYNCH: All right. All right. Hello? I hear gunfire. Oh, [expletive
deleted].

MARTIN: Call it off.

Koresh himself places a second 911 call. After making grimly ironic
note of the lieutenant's name ("Hey, Lynch? . . . That's a kind of
funny name there."), Koresh, in real time now, in the fog of battle,
laments the government's failure to talk before shooting:

KORESH: You see, you brought your bunch of guys out here and you
killed some of my children. We told you we wanted to talk. No. How
come you guys try to be ATF agents? How come you try to be so big all
the time?

LYNCH: Okay, David.

KORESH: Now, there' s a bunch of us dead, and a bunch of you guys
dead. Now-now, that's your fault.

LYNCH: Okay, let's-let's try to resolve this now. Tell me this.

Now, you have casualties. How many casualties? Do you want to try to
work something out? ATF is pulling back, we're tying to-

KORESH: Why didn't you do that first?

In a third and final call, placed by Lynch, Martin repeatedly pleads
for a cease-fire, offers to arrange one, and claims at one point that
the people inside had ceased their fire, but that incoming fire had
continued unabated. "I have a right to defend myself," he says at one
point. "They started firing first.''

But a half-hour elapsed between the first call and the first radio
contact between the Sheriff's office and the ATF at the site. An hour
passed before Lynch could reach the ATF on a secure line. Sheriff Jack
   [ Continued In Next Message... ]


 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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From msc.edu!umn.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!sybus.sybus.com!palan!pdn!mechanic!f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG!Matt.Giwer Tue Nov  9 12:08:29 1993
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From: Matt.Giwer@f20.n3603.z1.FIDONET.ORG (Matt Giwer)
Sender: ufgate@mechanic.fidonet.org (newsout1.26)
Newsgroups: alt.conspiracy
Subject: Wattenberg on Waco  10/10
Message-ID: <488.2CDFB166@mechanic.fidonet.org>
Date: Sun, 07 Nov 93 08:50:11 PDT
Organization: FidoNet node 1:3603/20 - Florida Mail Hub/NE, St Petersburg FL
Lines: 29

   [ ...Continued From Previous Message ]

Harwell, the chief law enforcement officer in the jurisdiction, had
been largely left out of the loop by the ATF throughout the
investigation and the raid. Might the outcome have been different if
his and his department's accumulated insight into the ATF's prey been
adequately tapped? If their record of successful, direct interaction
with Koresh and his flock had been studied as a model? Maybe, maybe
not. With federal agents and Davidians alike dropping dead in the
furious crossfire a few miles out of town, the local sheriff's
department couldn't get a federal agent on the phone. But the cameras
were there to capture footage of a hundred black flak jackets and blue
ATF windbreakers swarming into Caliban's kingdom.

----------------------

Copies of Daniel Wattenberg's "Gunning For Koresh" are available for
$5 each; ten for $35; twenty five fro $75; one-hundred for $250.  Send
your order to:  The American Spectator, P.O. Box 549, Arlington, VA
22216-0549.



 -- SPEED 1.30 >01<: Hillary "the psychic" Clinton is running Billie Jeff.

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