Posted on 04/19/2010 1:46:54 AM PDT by Cindy
My point is that there should have been no confrontation. BTW, the only people we have to testify as to who shot first aren't exactly impartial. The BATF knew the raid had been compromised at least a half hour before.
You don't mount a raid with 100 armed agents unless you are expecting a gunfight.
If you are expecting a hostile reception and know the raid has been compromised, you either call the raid off, or find another way unless it is absolutely essential the raid happen.
It wasn't.
They didn't.
No one, once fired upon, harrassed, etc. is going to just run out the door. The gentleman who tried to get into the facility was gunned down and left to hang on the fence.
Would you think you were going to just be allowed to surrender?
Blame who you will, but the people who could have prevented unnecessary deaths in all of the examples I cited were the Feds.
Different and less confrontational tactics might not have made grandstand video for the six o'clock news, but the job would have been done without unnecessary bloodshed, even if it made for a less spectacular story.
Again, I acknowledge your viewpoint it never would have happened if the government hadn’t screwed up in the first place.
But the end game remains Koresh was insane, and he got his followers killed for no gain whatsoever.
Your point is irrelevant. The BATFE is the guilty party here. Koresh "might" have been guilty of some firearms technicality, which might have been a misdemeanor or a very low grade felony. The BATFE escalated it into mass murder. The BATFE had NO reason whatsoever for the tactics used, none, other than chest-thumping glory-hounding agency pride.
And no, it's not the same as the Jim Jones case. Jones wasn't under military assault (or at least not yet).
I can't blame him for not surrendering. He was likely a nutjob, but we have laws and due process. None of those things were respected by those who were sworn to uphold them.
‘Your point is irrelevant.’
Tell that to the dead.
Again, I don’t dispute the government screwed up.
Koresh, however, got those last 80 plus holdouts killed by his decision not to surrender at some point during the 50 plus day standoff.
They’d all be alive today if he had not made that insane decision.
Thanks for the link, I’m familiar with it.
The fault lies with those who initiated the confrontation, which was not Koresh. You can beat the point to death, it won't make you right. ALL lives lost sit at the doorstep of the BATFE, not David Koresh.
My ‘point’ is Koresh was a nutcase and a poor leader. And on that one point, I’m 100% correct.
I have yet to dispute any claim about the government screwing this up, from start to finish.
But hey, build a strawman to knock down if you really feel the urge, no problem here.
Can’t really argue with that. Both sides screwed up, but ultimately the decision was his.
Perhaps, but as I said, irrelevant. It wasn't HIS leadership, good or bad, which caused things to happen.
"I have yet to dispute any claim about the government screwing this up, from start to finish."
Yeah, but you are putting the ultimate blame on Koresh instead of the BATFE, which is where it belongs. And no, that is NOT a "strawman" argument. It is straight to the point of who is responsible for those who died...which was and is the BATFE.
It was his lack of leadership in the end that got 80 plus people killed.
We’ve beaten this one to death. I don’t dispute any of the assertions you’ve made as to the government screwing up big time.
But sorry, the last decision was the worst of the bunch. JMHO.
Sorry, but your insistence on setting the final blame on Koresh just won't wash. Yes, Koresh could have surrendered at any time, but by the same token, the BATF could have pulled back at any time. But at EVERY decsision point, the BATF escalated the situation. None of those escalations were instituted by Koresh. ALL were instituted by the BATF (and perhaps later by the FBI). The guilty parties here were (and are, for those still alive) the government thugs, none of whom have ever suffered any consequences.
This comment has rankled me, and now I know why.
The news crew asked the mailman for directions to Mt Carmel, not wanting to be late for the 'big raid'--they even knew what time they had to be there (helicopters on the way??). They did not know the postman was a Branch Davidian. The call went to the Davidians warning them that there was a raid coming over 1/2 hour before the op kicked off. The BATF knew this, because the phone lines were tapped and had been for quite some time. It did not come out for weeks afterward that the college students renting the house were agents, so don't let the retrospective stories fool you. (And listen again to the 911 call. Have you ever heard the phone ringing on the line before you picked up the phone?) The tape is from a source tapped in from the caller's end.
If this was an investigation over the many claimed excuses for it, then it would have been handled better by:
Grenade casings:
Walk up to the door with one or two agents and a warrant, not a platoon in battledress. The Davidians had a cottage industry which bought and sold at gun shows, (which the BATF was well aware of) and we've all seen the "complaint dept. --take a number" novelty pineapple-style grenade novelties. There had been no reports of explosions there (as if someone was testing a grenade). There had been reports of what 'sounded like machine-gun fire', but these had been shown to be the result of a trigger operating device which allowed the rapid actuation of a semi-automatic firearm, and not inherent modifications to the firearms to make them machine guns. The devices were perfectly legal.
Had grenade casings been part of the original warrant, you would suspect that they would have been mentioned in the earliest news stories.
They weren't. In fact, the first heard of them was during the Congressional Hearings, which came after the Oklahoma City bombing.
Allegations of a Meth Lab:
There had been an old one on the property when the Davidians moved in. It had been reported, cleaned up, etc. The Davidians did not operate it.
Meth Labs are not the purview of the BATF, but that of the DEA/FBI.
OSHA and the DEA each offered a course on Hazardous materials associated with taking down a Meth lab, and the DEA course was also on how to stop the process safely if the lab was in operation so the evidence was not destroyed.
NOT ONE of the people on the raid had taken EITHER course. (Meth lab allegations were crap, plain and simple).
The media and the "Sinful Messiah":
Stories broke in the papers claiming the 'sinful messiah' was a :
polygamist
Child molester
child abuser
et cetera.
This was apparently timed to reduce sympathy for the Branch Davidians and provide moral justification in advance of the raid, and had the dual purpose of villifying a sect of a known but not widespread religion as a 'cult', Koresh as a "madman"--or worse, and casting a cloud of occult and evil behaviour over the entire communal church group.
It is a sad commentary on our culture that most understand and are more willing to believe in anything evil than anything good, and an especially damning concept that in a land of "innocent until proven guilty" so many are willing to condemn without finding out the facts, but the propaganda ploy worked well enough with people supporting the idea of the raid because there were 'children being abused', even though Texas CPS had investigated the facility and the children before (repeatedly) and found no evidence of wrongdoing.
All those are the jurisdiction of Texas Child Protective Services and local police agencies, not the BATF, and not reason to assault the facility with a hundred armed agents (not just pistols, but MP-5s and more) in full battledress.
"AMBUSH!":
Balderdash!
The Davidians had a half hour notice.
They had two Barretts, and (allegedly, claimed after the fact) had over fourty 'machine guns', converted from semi-automatic rifles. (When, and in fact, if the Davidians did so is questionable, they had two months to improve weapons while under siege, and the BATF has been known to modify the bejeebers out of a confiscated firearm in order to claim it is a 'machine gun'.)
In a reasonably well thought out ambush, the Barrets would have been manned by the best shooters in high places, and the 'machine' guns spread out in the facility, near windows. As the BATF rolled in with two pickups and two cattle trailers covered with canvas, the second an agent jumped out, the barrets would have taken out the tow vehicles (one through the engine block), the remainder (the alleged machine guns) would have shredded the cattle trailers from back to front, making the live climb over the dead and wounded to get out--and there would have been few, if any survivors.
What happened there was a reaction by the Davidians, not an ambush.
How far did the media go?
As is evident by the MSM unwillingness to let go of the Anthropogenic Global Warming scam, they hang on, even if they are wrong.
The media were covering for the BATF to the extent that when CNN televised the opening hours of the Congressional Investigation into the incident at Waco, they televised (on a 5-minute rule) the five minutes of Democrats asking questions, waving (unburned) firearms in the air, and political grandstanding, then cut to commercial for the Republicans question periods--for well over an hour of opening remarks in a set of hearings which went on for days. Only one side came out on TV, unless you watched C-SPAN, and the effort to see what they did show there was phenomenal, with the hearings brouacast at unspecifiec time slots stretched over an 11 hour period--far longer than the longest VHS tape, which is what was available at the time.
The media tried to justify the raid (even though their 'justifications' were not the purview of the BATF). The media glossed over the actions of the BATF/FBI/Delta and others involved in burning the evidence and most of the Davidians, and then the media covered their collective butts by keeping the investigation buried as well as possible when the theater involved no longer served the purpose of reinforcing the meme.
Those pesky Branch Davidians, of the Branch Davidian of the Seventh Day Adventist faith, would not go quietly into the vans (what vans? what bus for the arrested/detained?) and go to 'camp'.
You cannot polish the actions of the BATF, you can't put a high shine on using helicopters with armed agents who allegedly shot downwards on the building, you can't excuse using carburretor cleaner (Methylene Chloride) and a compound known to be lethal in enclosed spaces (CS) to all but the most healthy or well protected, pumped in to a building containing elderly and children in quantities leading to concentrations unacceptably high for a street riot, you cannot justify children dying of blunt force trauma as concrete ceilings are collapsed upon them by driving tracked military vehicles over (known) tunnels where they are taking shelter, you cannot justify igniting the building (after pushing doorways shut and disrupting stairwells with the boom used to inject combustible mixtures into the building--which also opened holes to cause a flue effect in the event of fire) with pyrotechnic CS rounds, nor burning the evidence, bulldozing the site and cordoning it off.
Blame those actions on Koresh if you think you can.
Either you know little about what went on down there, and most of it from CNN and derrivative sources, or you just do not want to look at the eggregious and murderous excesses of federal force utilization in that incident.
Even the investigation of FLIR camera evidence was tainted by the untimely death of three experts in the field of FLIR interpretation, within a couple of months.
When the time comes, you may decide to placidly walk out the door (provided you will be permitted to) with your emblem (yellow star, pink triangle, green clovers, whatever) properly displayed, and quietly be loaded into the bus. If you make it that far, have fun in camp.
Send us a postcard.
One last time. I don’t disagree with most of what you said - I won’t quibble over the various kook aspects to be blunt - but sorry, with the entire world watching by DAY 50, they could have walked out of that firetrap, been arrested, gone to jail and trail...AND BE ALIVE TODAY.
That last part suggesting they’d be taken by van or bus to ‘camps’ is simply ludicrous given the high profile world wide coverage.
You want to put it all on the government, and give the kook David Koresh, the guy that claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ, who stated HE would rise from THE DEAD three days after his death, a ‘pass’ in this affair.
That alone is ridiculous, and avoids the one single point I have in difference overall with you.
They’d be alive today if Koresh the Messiah had made a good decision, and come out.
Once there were dead people, to suggest ANY government entity ‘back off’ is absurd.
You know that was never going to happen, and you know ‘why’.
Koresch could have saved his followers. He chose not to, for his own self aggrandizement.
He got it. Posters like yourself are still giving him a ‘pass’, even though he claimed he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
Pardon me for doubting that one (sarcasm setting: extreme)
Which is why government "enforcement" agencies, and especially rogue agencies like the BATFE are long overdue to be reined in, or preferably, disbanded.
"You know that was never going to happen, and you know ‘why’."
I know no such thing. Please explain it to ignorant ole me.
They could, quite reasonably, have handed the situation off to, for instance, the Texas Rangers. Instead they chose to escalate to the point of using frickin' army tanks. What is it about "escalation" that you don't understand.
"Koresch could have saved his followers. He chose not to, for his own self aggrandizement."
Neither you, I, or anyone other than God will ever know that.
"He got it. Posters like yourself are still giving him a ‘pass’, even though he claimed he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.
To use your own logic, no, we're not giving Koresh a pass, but he is NOT the primary villain in the piece, which is what YOU are painting him as.
Your position is "yeah goverment made mistakes, but it's all Koresh's fault".
My position is that "Koresh made mistakes, but it's all the Feds fault". The Feds initiated the violence, escalated the violence, and hence bear the primary burden of fault.
No. My position is Koresh could have walked out and saved his deluded followers from a painful death.
And I’ve said only a dozen times on this thread the government screwed this up from the very beginning, so your reading comprehension skills need some serious work.
You are only seeing what you want to see in my comments, in short.
My view has remained consistent. The government screwed up big time. But Koresch, who believed he was the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, was a nutcase that got his people killed in the end due to his refusal to surrender after over 50 days.
The Branch Davidians had a real history of kicking dcwn doors, shooting the doga, and stomping kitties, didn't they?
Since the Kenyon Ballew incident, the BATF has been one to shoot first, ask questions later. That incident, too, could have been handled by simply knocking on the door and asking to see the (inert dummy) grenade, rather than kicking the door in.
You are ignoring a long history of abuses of power and treating the Waco incident as a lone anomaly rather than one in an escalating string of abuses of power.
That is a trend we, the people ignore at our peril.
As for "kook" aspects, I'll grant that Koresh's and the Branch Davidians' religious beliefs more than a couple of standard deviations from the mean, but they have a Right to believe what they will, so long as they aren't hurting anyone. They have a right to have firearms. They have a right to be secure from unwarranted search and siezure. Name another incident in the history of the country where a church group was served a warrant by a platoon of armed agents wearing military-style battledress.
You want to put it all on the government, and give the kook David Koresh, the guy that claimed to be the Second Coming of Christ, who stated HE would rise from THE DEAD three days after his death, a ‘pass’ in this affair.
The world is full of harmless (even armed but harmless) 'kooks'. I find it interesting that you blame one kook for the abuse of power by the Federal Government, lethal in result, going to the highest levels, over one 'kook', who was such a threat the government imperiled over 100 men, women, and children--and killed over 80--(something we don't even do in Iraq) to 'get him', when all they had to do was pick him up in town.
The government held all the options, the entire op was not necessary, and knowing the apocalyptic mentality of Koresh and his followers, provoked the only reasonably expected response.
You're damned right I blame the Government. BATF expected to wash off some of the egg they had on their face from Ruby Ridge with a grandstand operation, and instead, they landed in a cesspool of their own making. We would be foolish to forget.
It is apparent to me that you are unfamilliar with the testimony of the survivors as well, who, on the last day, said they were fired upon as they exited the burning building.
FLIR, interestingly enough, doesn't pick up broken glass 'sparkles', but it will pick up the heat signatures of weapons discharging.
That last part suggesting they’d be taken by van or bus to ‘camps’ is simply ludicrous given the high profile world wide coverage.
Your comment indicates you either did not read my post, or incapable of understanding it. Thanks for playing.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.