daswig

There were certain "irregularities" regarding Waco. First and foremost, it was a blatant violation of Posse Comitatus. The BATF got the TANG involved claiming that the Davidians had a secret methamphetamine lab running, when they knew that wasn't the case. If there had been a meth lab, it would have been legally justified, but they knew that there wasn't, so it violated the law. Secondly, there were serious problems with the search warrant.

The raid went down because BATF had their budget meeting a few days after the initial raid, and they wanted headlines to justify a budget increase. Additionally, one of the major reasons given for the raid was that Koresh was sexually abusing children. Apparently BATF had a silent (CSA) in their name somewhere, giving them jurisdiction over child sexual abuse cases. There had been accusations of child sexual abuse before, and the Texas DPS investigated and found the charges to be unsubstantiated. Strangely enough, when the DPS investigated it, nobody died, probably because they didn't take a hundred agents in a cattle truck to the church and open fire with machineguns, they went up and rang the doorbell. Go figure.

Then ATF and the FBI said they didn't use pyrotechnic devices at the church. This is pertinent because they claimed that the Davidians set fire to the church, not the HRT. It became something of an embarrasment when the forensic evidence turned up the remnants of pyrotechnic devices (that were in a State evidence locker) that were only available to the government in the wreckage.


Then, of course, you get into the whole issue of the FLIR tapes. Parts of the final tragic act were filmed by the Government, and those films showed what appear to be muzzle flashes from outside going into the doorways that the Davidians had to try to escape from. HRT claims that they fired no shots and wanted the Davidians to get out of the burning building, but the evidence suggests otherwise.

Then you get into the constitutionality of the "screaming rabbit" tapes, and if they constituted "cruel and unusual punishment". Then, of course, you have the APC knocking down stairways to trap the Davidians in the top part of the burning structure while introducing highly flammable CS gas (which turns into cyanide gas like what used to be used in gas chambers when heated) into the structure, and the government's refusal to allow rescue services to approach the scene until everybody was reasonably expected to be dead.

Was the initial raid unconstitutional? Was the final slaughter unconstitutional? For the most part, we'll never know, because BATF, living up to their previous reputation, saw to it that all of the evidence was destroyed by fire and almost all of the people died. This isn't the first time that such a thing happened, and dead people tell no tales.

Are there problems at BATFE (they added the (E) a little while ago)? Sure. You've got an institutionalized problem with perjury (there was a guy named "Busey" who used to head the NFA branch who was stupid enough to be caught on CCTV during a training session instructing new agents that perjury under oath regarding the NFRTR was SOP, and it appears that it is STILL SOP). You've got a long history of running entrapment operations. You've got a long history of their shredding registration documents, which turned the filers of those documents into "instant felons" even though they complied with the law. And you've got a long history of their deliberately burning people to death, because a funeral is apparently much easier for them than a trial with due process of law. Has this changed since they were moved from Treasury to Justice? Not as far as I've seen.