A Canadian's view of America's shame:
The wacko version of Waco catches on
Mark Steyn
National Post
I owe my New Hampshire neighbour Tom an apology. Tom has
wild, flowing white hair and an extensive range of T-shirts, all of
them about the right to bear arms: He is, in other words, a fully
paid-up right-wing crazy. A few weeks back, at a rally for Dan
Quayle, I asked Tom what he thought was the most important issue
in the 2000 presidential election. "No doubt about it," he said.
"Waco."
My natural inclination was to hoot with derision. But I was sensitive
enough to appreciate why, six years on, the bloody end to the
Waco stand-off might still resonate with Tom: Driving past his
house, I'm always pleasantly surprised to find it's not yet under
siege by federal agents, who like nothing better than spending
millions of taxpayer dollars staking out guys who earn $12,000 a
year. I use the prosaic designation of "house," though doubtless, by
the time the feds show up to take him out, Tom's place will have
been upgraded to the more glamorous "compound." The precise
point at which a "house" or "farm" or "ranch" becomes a
"compound" is not clear -- the Branch Davidians religious cult had a
"compound" at Waco, white supremacist Randy Weaver had a
"compound" at the Ruby Ridge shoot-out -- but it doesn't seem to
have caught on with the realtors ("Beautifully remodelled executive
compound with drop-dead views!") as much as it has with the feds
and their pliant media chums.
Still, as Attorney-General Janet Reno told the FBI publicity guy
after the siege's incendiary finale, "No one cares about Waco."
And, on that blistering July day at the Quayle rally, I tended to trust
Janet's political instincts over Tom's. But I was irritated by Quayle
for showing up an hour late, so I told Tom he definitely ought to
take it up with the candidate. As I left, Tom had the former
vice-president wedged into a corner, methodically going through the
new evidence as Quayle looked frantically around for an escape
route.
But here we are five weeks later and Waco's all over the front
pages. A very literal smoking gun has turned up: After six years of
denying that they fired flammable materials at the Branch Davidians,
the FBI has conceded that, in fact, they did. They're not in as deep
water as former Clinton cabinet member Henry Cisneros, who last
week pleaded guilty to one felony count of lying to the FBI. But
then, fortunately for the feds, although it's a felony for a citizen to lie
to the FBI, it's not a felony for the FBI to lie to the citizens.
Nonetheless, Janet Reno has professed herself shocked, shocked
to discover this sort of thing going on under her nose and promised
to tackle it with the same rigour she's applied to, er, Clinton-Gore
fundraising illegalities, Chinese nuclear espionage, you name it.
What happened at Waco was the federal government got a yen to
shut down a fruitcake cult. Its leader, David Koresh, liked to go
down to town fairly regularly and could easily have been picked up
for questioning down at the convenience store. But the watchword
at federal law enforcement is: If you've got it, flaunt it, baby! So
instead they decided to send in 700 armed men with machine guns
and tanks. Instead of pepper spray, they poured in CS gas, which
the U.S. government is prohibited by the Chemical Weapons
Treaty from using against foreign countries but reserves the right to
deploy against its own citizens. In case that wasn't enough, they also
called in backup from the top secret military Delta Force.
Unfortunately, the hotshots in the combat gear bungled the element
of surprise and began firing wildly, killing several Davidians. Finding
themselves under attack, the cult loonies fired back. At the end of
the day, four agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and
Firearms were dead, and 10 Davidians, including Koresh's
two-year-old daughter. So the feds cut off the compound's water
and electricity and bombarded them with deafeningly loud tapes of
animal screams. For 51 days. Then they lobbed their flammable
gas.
Eighty-six people died that day, including 24 children. The official
explanation was that the children were being abused, so (if I follow
correctly) the government decided to end the abuse by going in and
killing the kids. But those who followed Janet Reno's career as a
zealous Florida prosecutor of alleged paedophiles should have
known what was coming next: There proved to be no evidence of
child abuse. Next, the government tried the line that the cult had
been selling illegal drugs and stockpiling arms. But over the years
those explanations were also abandoned: There was no evidence of
drug dealing and the number of guns per capita was lower than the
Texan average. So we're left with nothing but the body count: The
federal government plucked some cult out of the Yellow Pages,
went round, and killed 86 people. For no reason. What happened
was as nuttily irrational and rather bloodier than the Columbine High
School massacre.
Whatever one feels about the feeble APEC enquiry, the fuss over
the RCMP's use of pepper spray is in stark contrast to American
insouciance over its own national police forces' use of machine
guns, tanks and chemical weapons. There is at least a broad
consensus in Canada that agents of the state do not have the right to
kill their own citizens with impunity. In America, the feds can and
do. At Ruby Ridge in Idaho, they killed Randy Weaver's wife and
child, again for no reason: No one went to jail -- though eventually
the FBI was happy to settle out of court with Weaver for $3-million
(US).
Yet, through it all, the U.S. media have been massively indifferent.
It's hard to believe they'd have been so lethargic if the government
had murdered members of an eco-commune or a gay group. But
one of the most striking features of the American scene is the
absence of principled left-wing indignation. During Bill Clinton's
recent impeachment difficulties, you couldn't help noticing that the
only left-wing journalists in the U.S. with any appetite for attacking
the president were a couple of English public schoolboys --
Alexander Cockburn and Christopher Hitchens. During the
impeachment trial, David Frum and I shared a latte with a liberal
columnist and asked him where the left-wing opposition to Clinton
was. He shrugged and said, "In the end, he's our guy." Apparently,
this dispensation also extends to killing gun kooks and religious nuts:
They're not our kind of people, so who cares? The commentator
Carl Rowan summed up the establishment view when he said he
now supports an inquiry because too many good people in the
government are being hurt by these allegations. So that's what's
important, not that too many crummy people -- social misfits,
creeps, losers, nobodies -- have been hurt, fatally, by the
government.
It's a very strange world when it takes The New York Times six
years to catch up with my friend Tom. The right-wing wacko
version of Waco has at least been consistent, while the FBI's and
Janet Reno's have shifted from month to month. But Tom's wrong in
one respect. There was no government "conspiracy" to kill the
Branch Davidians. They didn't need one; they were just indulging in
their usual extravagant, wasteful, pointless, money-no-object,
accountability-not-a-problem, women-and-children-our-speciality
style of federal law enforcement. The really crazy guys are the ones
outside the compound.
nationalpost.com |
