From: strom@watson.ibm.com (Rob Strom)
Subject: Re: Waco survivors 1715 19 April
Disclaimer: This posting represents the poster's views, not necessarily those of IBM.
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In article <C5sEGz.Mwr@dscomsa.desy.de>, hallam@dscomsa.desy.de (Phill Hallam-Baker) writes:

|> 
|> In order to reject the word of the FBI and BATF it is neccessary to beleive
|> the words of a man who has just murdered 17 children and ordered the 
|> suicide/murder of his other 80 followers. According to the account given
|> the BATF attempted to serve a warrant upon Koresh at the ranch and were met
|> by gunfire in a deliberate attempt to murder them. The Koresh/gun supporter
|> claim that the BATF started shooting simply does not stand up. If the 
|> AFT had gone there to start shooting they would have gone with heavier
|> grade weaponry than standard issue handguns. For all practical purposes
|> they were unarmed, the B-D followers had automatic weapons.
|> 
...
|> The people who do not want gun control must obviously discount the entire
|> government story. This is simply rationalisation. It is not enough for 
|> them to simply dismiss the government as incompetent. That would require
|> them to come up with a solution themselves. Instead they have to come
|> up with a government conspiracy theory whereby the government decided to
|> set out to murder 80 people just to set up some sort of scare to alow them
|> to get gun control legislation through.
|> 

I must object to the characterization of those opposed to the
government's handling of the Waco situation as "gun supporters".
Your argument tries to paint the BATF critics as right-wing
gun nuts, and just mixes up two issues.

I am one of the BATF/FBI critics, and yet I am a liberal
and just as anti-gun as you are.  I just happen to believe
that everyone has civil rights, even religious crazies.
They're all human beings, not some nest of wasps that
you're trying to exterminate.

The BATF created the crisis situation by the way they handled
the original raid.  It was well known that Koresh regularly
went jogging outside his property.  He could have been served
with a search warrant then.  He could have been arrested if
he had refused to comply.  Instead officers armed with grenades
invaded the property.  This escalated into a shooting war
with tragic deaths on both sides.

Those were the first two mistakes:  the bad judgment of
asking for a no-knock warrant, and the bad and probably
illegal way the already-unwise warrant was served.

At this point, the situation escalated to where it was
described as an armed standoff and a hostage crisis.
That's when the government started covering their traces,
sealing the warrant, revising their reported history of
the incident, etc.

Things were already building up to disaster.  Now the
government could have simply closed the supply routes
and waited.  But according to Janet Reno, that option
had "never been seriously considered".  So, supposedly
because the agents were "frustrated and fatigued", and
because there supposedly were no backups, they felt
they had to go in.

Now it's entirely possible that Koresh was responsible
for the fire.  If that's so, he deserves the blame
for the deaths of the people in his compound.

But the government's hands are far from clean.
Their first raid demonstrated bad judgment plus
contempt for the 4th amendment.  The motivations
for the second raid are just too unbelievable.
And their coverup of the events of the first
raid undermines their credibility in anything
they do thereafter.  We have only some very
biased FBI agents' word for what happened.

And please let's not turn this into a pro-gun vs. anti-gun
discussion.  Anti-gun people do not believe that gun-owners
deserve to get frontally assaulted by armed government
agents.  And Koresh's civil rights exist whether his
guns were legal, illegal, illegal-but-should-have-been-legal,
or whatever! 


-- 
Rob Strom, strom@watson.ibm.com, (914) 784-7641
IBM Research, 30 Saw Mill River Road, P.O. Box 704, Yorktown Heights, NY  10598
