Re: "You have no right to 'defend' yourself against an officer serving a warrant, even if he shows up at your house in a tank."
I take this, first off, as an admission that it was you who were were wrong concerning the first move on the part of law enforcement.
I'm not wrong that forces surrounded them before an attempt to serve a warrant was ever made, and I'm not wrong that Koresh had been served a warrant in the past without incident, pleading the case peacefully in court as you and I believe should happen. No, the actions of the ATF and the FBI were outrageous, at best, because the first move was a failed armed assault of the Davidian home by Air and ground.
No one claimed Ebert is an expert at law. Never-the-less, I can't believe you seriously disagree with his statement which I bolded. If you disagree with that, I can't believe you understand the law of this land called America.
The adjectives you attach to the local Sheriff do nothing to dispel his certainly honest testimmony. I understand HE was the guy who notified the feds of the inventory of weapons existing with the Davidians, at the request of Davidian "neighbors".
The bottom line is truly that the Davidians shouldn't shoot and kill law enforcement officers serving warrants. However, if the first move of the ATF officers "serving warrants" was to move in by ground and air in an offensive guns drawn manner and shooting first, the Davidians would certainly be wholly justified to shoot back. To the best of my knowledge we don't know who shot first, and potential evidence was destroyed immediately by bulldozer the same day as the fire, and/or lost by authorities.
Here's another interesting tidbit from another review of the film Waco: The Rules of Engagement, Re: "The film offers ballistic evidence that the BATF fired first. but we may never know the truth about the initial engagement on February 28, because the FBI subsequently "lost" the most conclusive evidence (the front door). And the duplicity of the FBI's actions following the assault is equally disturbing. One of the most dramatic scenes records FBI agent Jim Cavanaugh's negotiations with the Davidians. Cavanaugh repeatedly and adamantly claims that there were "no guns on those helicopters" that day. Koresh screams, "Now Jim, you're a damn liar....You're sittin' there and tellin' me that there were no guns on that helicopter?" Cavanaugh replies, "I said they didn't shoot," and Koresh again calls him a liar. The agent answers, "Well, you're wrong, David," but later modifies his story again. "What I'm sayin' is that those helicopters didn't have mounted guns, ok?"
For nearly two hours that day, Davidian Wayne Martin--one of the first blacks to graduate from Harvard Law School--was yelling at the various 911 operators on duty, "Stop the shooting, and we'll stop shooting." The firing finally stopped when the BATF raiders ran out of bullets and grenades. The film shows them backing up, with their hands up. The were sitting ducks. Why didn't the "evil cultists" just pick them off, one by one? Maybe the Davidians were not "turn-the- other-cheek" Christians. But they certainly weren't the aggressive monsters that the BATF and FBI claimed they were." - waco93.com
Dan B |
