A VIEW FROM HERE
by deb weiss

Being Janet Reno
August 30, 1999


The long standoff at Waco ended on April 19th, 1993. What had begun that February 28th with an ill-starred show of force by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (plagued by scandal, and desperate to redeem itself) now concluded with terrible suddenness, in fire and death and chaos.

Within minutes, the inferno had consumed David Koresh and his Branch Davidians -- more than 80 souls, many of them children.

EMAIL: DEB WEISS

Millions of us witnessed the final assault live, as it happened, albeit from the abstract distance of a remote lens, and through the filter of a highly politicized press.

Yet almost at once it melted into unreality. It was as if the facts -- the protracted siege, the shifting narratives, the sudden deaths of so many unseen, unimaginable people -- were too painful to contemplate.

At the White House, while the president ducked and covered, his War Room went to work to neutralize the potentially toxic effects of Waco.

Their greatest asset was the national press, which crumbled at once into stunning passivity, megaphoning White House spin and trotting out push-polls that asked the questions the White House wanted asked.

Did the people blame their government, the polls inquired: or did they believe that David Koresh had, in the infamous phrase, 'brought it on himself'? (This is the language rapists and wife-beaters use, to blame their victims.)

Instead of probing the official account and demanding answers to troubling questions (it took the internet to do that), many establishment journalists worked with the administration to silence and discredit its critics.

Through the power of the press, they transformed the Davidians from people who (whatever their tics) were mostly sincere, rather sad individuals who simply longed for the communion of faith, into monstrous cartoons -- cultists, child-molesters, subhumans who, having resisted their government, deserved to die.

Overnight, the press remade Attorney-General Janet Reno as a kind of secular saint, adored for her mournful declaration, endlessly repeated, that she accepted full responsibility for Waco. She did it, as we know, for the children.

Yes. Well. This is the Clinton Era, and 'accepting full responsibility' means never having to say you're sorry.

To this day, at any whisper that she should perhaps have stepped down as a sign of genuine contrition, Ms. Reno sullenly reminds us that she herself has suffered dreadfully because of Waco, that no-one will ever know how deeply she has suffered, and that she would give anything for it never to have happened, so that she might have been spared all that suffering.

But it did happen: and it happened despite the fact that many of the charges brought against the Davidians were controversial at best.

The lurid charge that David Koresh had sexually abused children in the compound (it was this one, predictably, that galvanized the spinsterish Ms. Reno into authorizing the final assault) had been investigated in 1992 and dismissed as unprovable and very probably unfounded.

Even the more substantive charges involving violations of gun laws can hardly have justified the deadly initial attack on a compound filled with women and children: or the long siege, with its bizarre psychological tactics that so intensified the terror within the compound.

Recent revelations have torn this old scar wide open. We've learned that despite persistent official denials, the government did use pyrotechnic devices on the last day. We've learned that members of the elite Delta Force were present, and may have played an active role in the assault.

After six years of denials, plausible scenarios, and agitprop, government officials, along with pro-Clinton journalists, now play a wary game of chicken, trying to gauge the nature and scope of the material evidence so that they can shape the story to fit the known facts.

Janet Reno isn't accepting responsibility, this time around. Instead, she claims, querulously, to have been deceived, and promises an investigation.

Even Democrats have a hard time pretending to take her seriously.

The Clinton War Room is hard at work, denouncing the new evidence as meaningless, or claiming that it's not really new: or, alternatively, that it's been hatched by sinister pro-Bush elements within the Texas Rangers.

And always, always, they chant that whatever errors the BATF and FBI may have made, David Koresh brought it on himself.

At some point, though, they, and we, will have to come to terms with the fact that on a windy April day in 1993, scores of human souls were condemned to an agonizing death at Waco, on the flimsiest of pretexts, without benefit of trial, for the simple reason that their government had the power to make it happen.

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A VIEW FROM HERE archive

The Ghost At Our Banquet -- August 26, 1999

Solving Maleness -- August 23, 1999

The Media: A Nose Like a Vacuum Cleaner -- August 19, 1999

A Voter's Guide To The 21st Century -- August 16, 1999

A Good Town -- August 12, 1999

Singing The Praises Of Government News -- August 9, 1999

The First Couple's Chamber Pot -- August 5, 1999

Lifetime's Woman of the Year -- August 2, 1999

Thinking Over This Tax Cut Thing -- July 29, 1999

The John John Show -- July 26, 1999

America's One China, Two Alka Seltzer Policy -- July 22, 1999

The Politics of Speaking Ill of the Dead -- July 19, 1999

The Nasty Legacy -- July 15, 1999

All in a Slow News Week... -- July 12, 1999

Traps For The Young -- July 8, 1999

Remembering Michael Dukakis -- July 5, 1999

R.I.P., O.I.C. -- July 1, 1999

Mr. Clinton's Post-War Vengeance -- June 28, 1999

Guns, Cuisinarts and the Bill of Rights -- June 24, 1999

Attack of the Concerned Advocates -- June 21, 1999

FTC Nation -- June 17, 1999

The Very, Very Coincidental World of Bill and Hillary Clinton -- June 14, 1999

Water-boiling in Our Time -- June 10, 1999

Crisis and Peace -- June 7, 1999

Reinventing God -- June 3, 1999

On This Memorial Day -- May 31, 1999

The Un-McCarthy Era -- May 27, 1999

Unspeakable Spin -- May 25, 1999