-Caveat Lector- The truth seeps out http://www.free-market.net/spotlight/waco/ Not too long ago, it appeared that the Waco tragedy was a dead issue. Anybody suggesting that the feds had dropped the ball in the 1993 Waco siege would get looked at cross-eyed. You had to be a crank or worse, (whisper this) an antigovernment type. The reason for such disinterest was obvious. The surviving Branch Davidians failed in their courtroom effort to hold the federal government responsible for the deadly 1993 conclusion to the standoff between members of the religious sect and the FBI -- a fiery climax that left 76 people dead, including 27 children. Then Special Counsel John C. Danforth released his official report on the incident, which largely excused federal agents from any blame. The one question mark was a ruling by the Supreme Court that Judge Walter Smith stepped outside the law when he handed out heavy sentences to Branch Davidians convicted of minor charges. Wrinkling their noses at the judge's actions, the justices more than halved the federal prison sentences of five Davidians and cut five years from the sentence of a sixth. The court's skepticism may have been bolstered by the presence of the former forewoman of the jury in the case, who was on hand to support the Davidians' pleas. But now the dead issue of Waco has been revived by a new study that finds major holes in Danforth's Waco report, and a documentary that suggests that some of the evidence for Danforth's conclusions was at least questionable, if not fraudulent. In the Cato Institute's "No confidence, an unofficial account of the Waco incident," Timothy Lynch writes: Although the "official" investigation of the incident now places all of the blame for the carnage on the Branch Davidian leader, David Koresh, numerous crimes by government agents were never seriously investigated or prosecuted. If those crimes go unpunished, the Waco incident will leave an odious precedent -- that federal agents can use the "color of their office" to commit crimes against citizens. What sort of crimes did those federal agents commit? How about battery, for starters. Writes Lynch: On February 28, 1993, several ATF agents physically attacked a local television camera-man named Dan Mulloney. Mulloney was on the scene at Mt. Carmel covering the ATF raid for KWTX-TV. ... When several ATF agents noticed what he was doing, they screamed obscenities at him and actually punched and kicked him while others tried to steal his camera. Because Mulloney kept his camera rolling during the entire episode, this assault, battery, and attempted theft are captured on film. Not a single agent was prosecuted for an attack that would have landed a private citizen in prison. Lynch goes on to detail the inappropriate use of at least potentially lethal force and incidences of perjury by federal agents. He raises the possibility that the original raid by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms featured indiscriminate strafing runs by National Guard helicopters -- a charge vigorously denied by the government in the face of strong evidence. Also of concern to Lynch are accusations that, on the final day of the siege at Mt. Carmel, FBI agents fired on Branch Davidians who tried to escape the burning building. While Danforth's official report found, with "100 percent certainty," that agents kept their fingers clear of their triggers, Lynch points out that experts with credibility at least equal to that of the government's consultants insist that infrared videotape of the incident recorded gunfire directed at the burning structure. In summary, Lynch says, Danforth's report "was soft and incomplete." The question of FBI gunfire is also of interest to Mike McNulty, one of the filmmakers behind the Oscar-nominated "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" and the follow-up "Waco: A New Revelation." The second film was largely responsible for launching Danforth's investigation with its discovery of spent pyrotechnic tear gas canisters from the fiery final assault -- an inconvenient bit of evidence for government officials who'd spent years vigorously denying the use of any such devices. McNulty's discovery was backed up by Texas Rangers, who made it clear that they weren't pleased with the feds one bit. Before the dust could settle, a Texas-based federal prosecutor publicly announced that Justice Department officials had been actively hiding evidence and documents relating to the Waco disaster. Within days, U.S. Marshals raided FBI headquarters to seize videotape of the fatal final assault. McNulty's new documentary, "The F.L.I.R. Project," examines the Special Counsel's expensive recreation of the final conflagration, which was an attempt to determine if flashes of light captured on infrared film were in fact gunfire. That recreation led to the official report's conclusion that federal agents resisted the temptation to gun down people fleeing a burning building. McNulty found that the Special Counsel's recreation used guns with longer barrels than those actually present at Waco, as well as ammunition formulated differently than that actually loaded in those guns. Those two significant deviations from the actual conditions at Waco would have been enough to produce results that could lead the official report to claim that no shooting took place at Mt. Carmel. In an interview with online news site WorldNetDaily, McNulty says: The conclusions Danforth offered on the subject of federal gunfire were based on flawed results. The special counsel's team, out of ignorance or deceit, has destroyed the credibility of the March 19, 2000, 'Waco Recreation' at Fort Hood, Texas, and the scientific analysis that followed. McNulty's own conclusion is that federal agents did shoot at people attempting to escape a fiery death. While criticism of the official version of events at Waco should be welcomed by anybody interested in finding out what actually happened during an incident that drove a wedge between millions of Americans and the U.S. government, it's not clear that mainstream journalists are among the interested parties. Lacking only pom-poms, many members of the distinguished media hung up their professional skepticism in 1993 and acted as cheerleaders for the government at Waco and for years thereafter. As the iconoclastic leftist writer Alexander Cockburn wrote in a syndicated column: The ashes of the murdered Branch Davidians and their children ... were still glowing as almost all the nation's major news institutions rousingly endorsed the decision of Attorney General Janet Reno and her boss, President Clinton, to give the FBI (and, as it turned out, the Delta Force) the go-ahead for an operation that ensured massacre. Print and broadcast pundits demonized the Branch Davidians, painting them as weirdos and child-abusers for the folks watching at home. The Davidians were just too religious, too well-armed, too different to win the affection of professional scribblers and talking heads. Can that indifference be breached by new reports exposing the Danforth report as, at best, flawed and possibly nothing more than a continuation of government efforts to escape blame for a lethal screw-up? 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