July 9, 2023
We’ve recently learned a great deal about the FBI’s election interference by hiding the truth about Hunter’s laptop, as well as its illegal persecution of Donald Trump. Sadly, this isn’t the first time the FBI’s gotten recklessly out of control.
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On February 28, 1993, more than 70 Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (“BATF”) agents, with help from three military helicopters, launched an attack on the Branch Davidians, an offshoot sect of Seventh-Day Adventism, operating under David Koresh’s leadership. The attack took place at the Davidians’ sprawling residence called Mount Carmel, in Waco, Texas.
The attack was spurred by allegations that Koresh and his followers had illegally converted semi-automatic rifles to full-automatic capacity and that nothing short of a massive military-style raid would make it possible to arrest David Koresh and properly search the residence. To build the public case, the government alleged that the Davidians were a child-molesting cult.
The BATF agents botched the raid. The result was that several were killed, and the remainder were forced into a humiliating retreat and ultimate surrender. According to one writer, the real reason for the raid was that the BATF “saw the Branch Davidians…as the perfect patsies for a high-profile raid that would make G-men look like heroes.”
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After the ATF debacle, the FBI was called in to deal with the mess. The FBI’s involvement ultimately ended in a fiery inferno. The FBI caused much of the main building to collapse on the Davidians, leaving 76 burned corpses buried in the smoldering rubble.
Image: The Waco Siege. YouTube screen grab.
A lot of people know that story. What few people know is that Joe Biden was a major player, and that’s true despite a criminal trial, two cabinet-level inquiries, and three sets of congressional hearings—and he had his work cut out for him in the cover-up.
If you want to know just how bad what really happened was, think about this: After hearing weeks of testimony during the Waco trial, the jury acquitted 11 surviving Branch Davidians of murder. Jury forewoman Sarah Bain bemoaned:
“We spoke in the jury room about the fact that the wrong people were on trial, that it should have been the ones who planned the raid and orchestrated it and insisted on carrying out the plan who should have been on trial.” (Emphasis added.)
After sitting through weeks of court testimony, Bain said that the jury concluded that “[t]he federal government was absolutely out of control there.”
Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, during her stint as District Attorney for Dade County, she had convicted a slew of child molesters only to have the cases overturned on appeal:
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Before her appointment by Clinton, Reno was district attorney in Dade County. There she catapulted to national attention on the basis of her prosecutions of child sex abusers: the only trouble was that the cases on which she achieved her fame were phony from top to bottom.
The reason was that these all arose from the preschool witch hunts that swept America, as ambitious prosecutors took seriously testimony from small children that was obviously physically impossible and plainly came from coaching. If Reno had ever had children, or even been around them, she might have realized this before becoming one of the many prosecutors who imperiously destroyed countless lives.
When she was Attorney General, the same lack of intellectual rigor popped up again when she was told that the Davidians’ babies were being beaten:
FBI documents uncovered by FRONTLINE confirm that as the Bureau was pressuring Reno to approve the gas plan, someone in the FBI told her that children were being abused at Waco. But the FBI knew that children were not being beaten during the stand-off. (Emphasis added.)
As Abrams tanks driven by FBI agents continually battered the Dravidian’s home, FBI loudspeakers broadcasted endlessly, “This is not an assault.” Evidently, demolishing someone’s home was supposedly no more annoying than a group of kids trick-or-treating on Halloween on their doorstep.
When Attorney General Reno testified to the House about Waco, she was challenged on the FBI’s use of 54-ton tanks to assault the Davidians. Reno moronically replied that the tanks were “not military weapons… I mean it was like a good rent-a-car.”
The media totally ignored Reno’s blithering “rent-a-tank” idiocy and instead praised her resoluteness and fortitude.
Grenade launchers on the tanks fired 400 ferret rounds of CS gas into the Mount Carmel building even though CS tear gas canisters come with a label warning against deployment inside buildings:
CS tear gas is outlawed on the battlefield. It can also be lethal, especially when used against children. Yet federal agents fired 400 football-sized canisters of the gas into the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, in an effort to end the 51-day standoff with the religious group.
[snip]
Amy Smithson, a chemical weapons expert at the Stims Center in Washington, says… “CS gas is only dangerous when it is used indoors and the canisters come with warnings against such usage.”
Ironically, the FBI not only used CS gas indoors, but it fired it into buildings in which there were children—the same children they were allegedly protecting. For everyone, but especially children, the experience would have been terrible:
Benjamin Garrett, executive director the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, expounded that the CS gas “would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly. Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell.”
In a policy analysis, the Cato Institute was highly critical of the FBI’s conduct, including the decision to fire potentially lethal CS gas into the Davidians’ building:
Firing ferret rounds into a building without knowing which adults are threatening and which are not—and without knowing where children are located—manifests an extreme indifference to human life. Such indifference is not only unconscionable but criminal. (Emphasis added.)
People whom the government deputized to analyze what went wrong were equally condemnatory. Dr. Alan Stone, a Harvard law and psychiatry professor who was a member of the Justice Department’s 1993 panel mandated to make recommendations in the aftermath of Waco, wrote a blistering article in which he described the FBI agents’ often bizarre behavior: “[F]ederal agents at times behaved not like professionals but like hooligans—for example, pulling down their pants and mooning the people in the compound.”
Although some facts emerged, a 1999 congressional hearing wasn’t really convened for that purpose. Dr. Stone opined that “The hearing process, instead of being a careful inquiry…was political theater of the absurd.” (Emphasis added.)
Significantly, although Reno started the whole debacle as a rescue effort, the FBI wasn’t interested in the plight of Branch Davidians who tried to escape the six-hour assault by 54-ton tanks. Documents showed “seven instances in which FBI agents threw or launched ‘flash bang’ grenades at Davidians as they attempted to leave Mt. Carmel earlier in the standoff.”
It also turned out that the FBI fired pyrotechnic devices into the compound, igniting the fire that incinerated adults and children.
Even worse are allegations from FLIR (Forward Looking Infrared Radar) pioneering expert Dr. Edward Allard who claimed to have detected automatic gunfire from FBI FLIR footage. The FBI was aiming that gunfire at the Branch Davidians while their home was burning down around them:
What we have is we have them [FBI] firing automatic weapons and they’re firing into the burning building and like some sort of cowboy movie they’re firing as they’re retreating. I cannot remember something more sickening than I had to do to witness this.
The Waco tragedy painfully demonstrates the consequences of unhinging federal agencies from the Constitution and not holding them accountable for their loathsome crimes.
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