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Originally Posted by The_Dunedan
The Feds went after Koresh because of an honest paperwork error concerning a Class-III weapon. The BATFE thought that Koresh was in posession of an NFA weapon upon which a $200 tax was owed.
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Cite sources please, but let's go with what you said anyway.
OK, so the feds show up to your door and say you owe taxes on something you don't even own. Do you A) tell them politely that you don't own it and therefore cannot owe taxes on it, or B) slam the door, hole up in the house with your multiple 12 year old wives, claim you're Jesus, and threaten to kill anyone who gets near? It may or may not have been an honest paperwork mistake, but once Koresh escallated it from a simple tax issue to a raving-lunatic-in-a-fortress issue, then frankly what the hell did he expect? Was WACO a huge bungle? Yeah, obviously, of course it was. Heads rolled, and more heads should have rolled. The government screwed up.
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The Clinton DoJ was seriously considering the idea of folding the BATFE into the FBI at the time, and the BATFE brass wanted a high-profile bust in order to justify their continued existance.
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Let's review some facts. First off Koresh was a known violent nutjob. He took posession of that compound in 1987 by having a crazy, old west-style shootout with it's previous occupant, George Roden. He'd been feuding with Roden for awhile because Koresh was having sex with Roden's 60 year old mom.
In 1992 the local sheriff told the ATF that a huge shipment of explosives was being delivered to the compound. They started interviewing members of the Branch Davidian cult.
That's where they found out about the child molestation. They also discovered he liked to paddle children for almost an hour until they bled, made the adults stand in raw sewage, and when a girl reached age 10 or 11, she was given a star to wear, which signified she was now ready to have sex with Koresh.
In further investigation it was found that the cult had spent around 200 grand on weapons including 300 assault rifles and the ammo to go with them, 200 grenades, 30 pounds of potasium nitrate (explosive ingredient), and hundreds of parts for making machine guns.
It was not the tax issue that the ATF raided the compound on - it was because he was stockpiling machine gun manufacture parts without a license to manufacture machine guns. That's a violation of federal law. Where the ATF screwed up was trying to arrest him in the compound. That was stupid. They should have arrested him when he ran errands in town. Their other mistake was alerting the media that they were going to raid the compound. The media got there before ATF. When you see 8 or 9 TV cameras, a few live trucks, and a sat truck show up outside your house and start taking pictures of your property, you can safely assume something's up. So Koresh and his gang were waiting for the ATF when they arrived. (source for all of this, Ronald Kessler's NYT articles and his book The Bureau, which is a not-very-kind look at the FBI and the agencies that work with it)
So yes, the government screwed up, was even criminally negligent in its execution of the raid, but the plan to arrest Koresh was legally justified and had nothing to do with taxes.