Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - What You Need to Know About Waco with Scott Horton

Episode Date: November 16, 2023

In 1993 the US Federal government murdered 86 men, women and children in a show of force. Since then the FBI and ATF have tried to cover their tracks by pinning the deaths on "religious extremism" and David Koresh. In this talk Scott Horton will tell you the truth about that day.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, thanks you guys. I really appreciate that. Okay, so this speech is about the Waco Masker 30 years ago. And I've never really given this as a speech before, although I sure have presented it a lot of times on the radio, including just a couple of weeks ago. I went to L.A. and I sat down with the guy that produced the best documentary about Waco. His name is Dan Gifford, and the movie is called Waco, the Rules of Engagement. David Hardy, who wrote the best book about Waco called This is Not an Assault.

And I sat down with them for two days in a morning and interviewed them about the entire story all the way through. And then plus interspliced clips with religious experts, gun experts, infrared experts, and the best journalists and all of that. The entire thing edited down is 13 hours long. but it's the 30th anniversary and I decided that somebody's got to do it there are three new books out that basically represent the ATF's point of view there's a new documentary that they put out on Netflix

that again emphasizes the ATF's point of view and I thought and I had a conversation with Dan Gifford that we really shouldn't let them get away with that so as long as they're going to exploit the anniversary to, you know, reestablish their narrative, then I think those of us who know better should, you know, live up to our obligation

to tell a different version of what happened there. So, and I guess at the end I'll talk about why I think this is still important, because after all, I was 16 years old, 30 years ago when it happened. And so what the hell is the point anyway? All right, so first of all, Well, I mean, this story is pretty commonly known, although I know that there are some young people here, and I spoke to a couple earlier who had never heard of the Waco incident in any context whatsoever, so I'll try to not assume how much knowledge all have, but the common story, of course, is that this very culty group, much like Jim Jones or the Charles Manson cults or something like that, got into a conflict with the ATF when they ambushed them.

one sunny Sunday morning, and then they later killed themselves in a mass suicide by fire, leaving the FBI very upset. And that's, you know, essentially the common story, you know, as told by TV and, you know, received conventional wisdom, again, retold in this latest documentary on Netflix. So, but it does raise the question of who were these people, first of all, and what were they doing there in this, it is a strange building. TV and the government, of course, insist we call it a compound, pretend that there's a wall around it, even though there was no wall,

pretend that it was multiple buildings, even though there were no multiple buildings, and it's actually not a compound, but they demanded that we call their house a compound to sort of try to militarize the situation from the very beginning. And what it really was is sort of like a redneck mansion, right? It was a giant plywood and sheet rock house that were, you know, somewhere like a hundred, 120 people lived. And it was, you know, sort of a commune, and it was their church and their dormitory where they lived.

The sect had been there since, well, they'd been in Waco since the 1930s, I believe, and they had been at this property at Mount Carmel since the 1950s. So this group had long predated their leader, David Koresh, and essentially it was a breakoff group from the Seventh-day Adventists. And the Adventists are Protestant Christians who emphasize the Book of Revelations and the End Times and the Seven Seals and all this kind of thing, founded in the mid-19th century. And by the time you get to the Branch Davidians, this is, I think, a break-off group of a break-off group. maybe had one more in there. And this is something that's very common in American religious history and especially among, you know, lower social class Protestant sex that a lot of times they divide off into much smaller and smaller separate groups.

And, you know, I guess to put all the cards on the table here is an important part of the story, certainly from the government's point of view, was that the leader of the Branch DeVittians, Vernon Howell, aka David Koresh, was not a very good guy. He clearly was exploiting his position of power over these people. He wasn't only their minister. He claimed to be foretold in the Bible as the final Lamb of God who will come and interpret the seven seals

before the end of the world. And so quite contrary to claims by the FBI, and the television media, especially at the time. He never claimed to be Jesus. They were Christians and worshipped Jesus. He claimed to be this other figure prophesied in some of the Bible passages, who had the special talent to interpret the seals. And then he used his followers belief in that, really to exploit them.

He was taking advantage of very young kids, not prepubescent, but right at the line, young girls. and even though it's legal in the state of Texas, or at least it was then, I'm not sure now, but it was legal to marry 14-year-olds with parental consent in Texas at the time. He was clearly guilty of statutory rape, marrying, quote-unquote, and having sex with girls as young as 12 and 13 years old. And he was also taking the wives of his followers and saying that, well, it says here in the Bible that these should, live as celibates and the lamb should be able to create this ruling council of 24 children

to take over the planet after Christ returns and whatever and these are going to be my 24 children and all this so by telling the people this and convincing them this he was taking advantage of his followers wives and young girls that much is true and he was guilty of statutory rape and if he'd been convicted for it he probably would have gone to the penitentiary for it in the state of Texas. It's not a federal crime. There's nothing that has no part of David Koresh's sins against his own followers, which he didn't sin against anyone else, but no part of what he did against his own people there that we would consider transgressions, whether they thought so or not. None of that has anything to do with federal law whatsoever. And any mention

of that, frankly, is a red herring by the war party, who uses that as an excuse to demonize not just Koresh, but then of course all of his followers as bad people and people who therefore aren't worth protecting. And

it was a huge part of their narrative. But the charge was a gun charge. What they did was they said that this group was stockpiling all these weapons in preparation for Armageddon. They were going to take all these rifles, and they were going to march on downtown Waco

and take the place over and kill everybody and next thing you know, they'll be rolling on Saudi Arabia and guess. But that was the threat. And the reality was the only reason the Davidians were interested in guns is because it was a business. It wasn't part of their religious beliefs at all. And in fact, as I recently learned,

they weren't even interested in guns at all until 1991, two years before. this group that had been around all this time. And the only reason they became interested in guns was because a friend of theirs who was not a Davidian but was interested and was sort of a fellow traveler with them owned a gun business and recommended to them that, hey, don't you know the Democrats are getting elected?

You should buy AR-15s and other semi-automatic rifles in quantity, wait till the Democrats pass their assault weapon span and then sell them at a higher price. And that was the only reason they did it. It was simply an investment. And as so many libertarians do, and Democrats seem like they're going to win. It's time to invest in rifles and ammunition that are about to go up in value. And that was the basis of it.

And in fact, you know, they had a thriving gun business where they would go to gun shows. And so that massive stockpile of weapons that the government said was for violence was really just an inventory for their business. They are no more interested in murdering anyone than all the people at the Porkfest here this week walking around with guns on their hips. It had nothing to do with that. Now, if you're a liberal Democrat from Washington, D.C., you might not understand that Texans are just into guns.

We don't consider them murder weapons at all. That's not what they're for. They're for fun and for self-defense and for keeping tyranny at bay for some day that never comes. But they're not for initiating a violent act. What are you crazy? And this is a Christian group. None of them were in trouble with the law for any reason.

They tried to conflate the Branch Devidians with like the Charles Manson cult. But the Charles Manson cult was pure criminality from beginning to end. And if you read Daryl Cooper or listen to that podcast, you'd find out all about how the government was aiding and abetting the Manson cult all along as part of their fun and games in that era. But the Branch DeVatians were nothing like that. None of them had criminal records. There's certainly, you know, nothing current and nothing violent, nothing like that whatsoever.

They're decent folks. It's all they were. But the ATF essentially had a problem of public relations. Now, they had been caught at what was called the Good Old Boys Roundup. And they had been filmed, and there were photographs of all these ATF agents posing in front of a Confederate flag, and I'm pretty sure not in a fun love in General Lee, the Orange Dodge Challenger kind of a way, but more like actual really hate black people kind of a way. And they were selling N-word hunting licenses at this rally. And they had made

60 minutes, did a big presentation on it. They were also being sued for sexual harassment and racial harassment of female and black employees of the ATF. And I know y'all are familiar. at least, you know, superficially with what had happened at Ruby Ridge in the summer of 1992. It was really the federal marshals that killed the boy, and it was the FBI hostage rescue team that killed the wife. But it was the ATF that set Randy Weaver up in the first place and got the whole thing kicked off. So among the fraternity of federal police agencies, ATF got the blame for that. Now, when Clinton was running for president, some of the oldsters might remember that Al Gore had this gimmick called Reinventing Government. We're going to cut waste, fraud, and abuse, right? The margin, in other words, maybe nothing.

But one of his ideas for reinventing government was, let's abolish the ATF, or let's take it from the Treasury Department, and give it to justice. Well, the ATF is already the red-headed stepchild compared to the FBI. But if they were taken away from the Treasury Department and put at the Justice Department, they would basically be hunting moonshiner's only, and the FBI and those guys would have just taken all of their authority away. And so this was an absolute crisis, not for America, but for the BATF. So they needed a public relations stunt. This is after 12 years of Reagan and Bush. and Bush. Now the pendulum swing in the other way, and it was 1993-era version of woke,

political correctness at that time. Everything was recycling and Captain Planet and baby blue UN flags and Bill Clinton and his feminist co-president wife who's coming into power at all this time. And so at ATF, they said, we've got to impress these Democrats. And here's how we'll do it. will pick on these mullet-headed rednecks out in the country, even though they're the ones at the redneck rally selling N-word hunting licenses. They're going to find some right-winger's to beat up on to impress the Democrats.

And they had an appropriations hearing coming up in just two weeks. That's why the raid on the Branch Divideons was called Operation Showtime. This wasn't about David. Koresh, it wasn't about guns. It was about the power of these bureaucrats to maintain their power. Simple as that.

Now, the investigation of the Vidiens was an absolute farce. Again, they were completely innocent of any crime. If they were guilty of any offenses, it's possible that they owed a $200 tax. There is some evidence

and some admission and reason to believe that they did have a few fully automatic rifles on their premises at the time. Now, again, if you're a liberal Democrat from Washington, D.C., you might not understand that that's perfectly legal if you pay your $200 tax for your machine gun license. That's the law. In fact, in case I forget, I'll say now,

after this whole thing was over, Koresh's lawyer asked the federal prosecutor, if you guys had proverbially just gotten Koresh while he was out jogging or shopping at Walmart, as everybody says. And he had been found guilty on all the original charges in the search warrant. What would he have been facing? And the federal prosecutor said about five years, probation. So it's all it was, it's a technical violation, not a crime,

an offense against a state edict was all. but man you should read that warrant and we have it in the show notes of the recent podcast it is really nothing but an exercise in conspiracy theory truth or crap they say well this branch dividian got caught with pot at the Mexican border in 1983 and this branch dividian got caught with pot at the Canadian border in 1985

and the UPS man says that they got some beakers in the mail. So we're pretty sure they're running a methamphetamine lab. It all fits, like Russiagate. And it's the same with the gun charges. They say, well, the UPS man

found some dummy hand grenades. But that's exactly what they were. Dummy hand grenades. You know, like a pineapple hand grenade from the old Vietnam War movies, right? But there's no gunpowder in them. And what the Davidians were doing, with them was they were making novelties. You may have seen these at a gun shop.

It says complaint department, take a number. But you have to pull the pin from the grenade to take a number. Hilarious, right? 80-something people died over that. Because the UPS guy called the cops. And the cops called the ATF. And they opened up this investigation.

It's one of the avenues that this investigation started. But if you read the warrant, it's nothing but tiny little tidbits of nothing. No honest judge could read that warrant and say you have demonstrated probable cause that you're going to find evidence of a crime if you raid this place. There was nothing like that in there.

It was just a bunch of crap. And it was full of mistakes, which demonstrated that they were in a real hurry. They had not investigated a case, found that they had probable cause to believe there were crimes, and then had to go and arrest the perpetrators and enforced the law like in their writ.

It wasn't like that. They needed a stunt, and they found somebody to beat up on, so now they had to build a case, which is exactly what they did. In fact, if you watch the documentary, Waco, the Rules of Engagement, you can see there's a clip from the congressional footage where the friend that I mentioned who got them into the gun business, his name was Henry McMahon, and he had a retail store, I'm almost certain, had a retail store with a front door,

where he bought and sold guns. And one time the ATF came to his store and started asking about David Koresh. So McMahon, I don't know, maybe being a loyal friend, went in the back and got on the phone and called David Koresh and said, hey David, I got the ATF right here and they're asking about your guns. And Koresh said, we'll send him on over. And I know this because we have the testimony from Henry McMahon before Congress, but I also just interviewed Paul Fata, the surviving Branch Vivian, who was standing right next to. David Koresh on the other side of the phone call. And David said, send them on out. We'd be happy to show them all of our weapons.

And they said, no, no, don't go, don't go. And then they got so mad at Henry McMahon. What are you doing? You could have blown our whole thing. We didn't tell you to do that. They wanted a raid. They didn't want to show up invited to inspect. Then they sent an undercover agent, not an informant, but an actual agent of the ATF named Robert Rodriguez, and they sent him undercover inside the Branch Divideons for weeks. And they all knew he was a cop, and they told them over and over

again, no problem, and they just tried to teach him the Bible and went him over. And he reported back to the ATF that these people really aren't bad people. And they said, ah, see, they're getting you too, huh? In the morning of the raid, Robert Rodriguez was there. And what happened was the ATF had notified all the media to be there. Something big is going to happen at Waco, gave him the address and everything. Well, the cameramen from KWTXNBC, Waco, were already there in the front yard, waiting for the shootout to start.

The mailman gets stopped by, I forget if it was a federal cop, I believe he was a federal cop, and he says, hey, you better. get out of here. There's about to be a shootout out of that cult compound over there. But the mailman was David Jones. He was a member of the group. So he went home and told them. There's about to be a raid. So, oh, and I'm sorry, I forgot, I have to say, nine days before, Robert Rodriguez and two of the other undercover ATF agents, not informants, but full-bore cops. They came to the branch Davidians and said, hey, do you guys want to go shooting? They brought the guns, the cops, the Devidians brought the ammo.

And the cops handed David Koresh their gun, I believe, I forgot exactly, I think of 38, and an AR-15 to shoot. David Koresh shot their guns and handed them back. And they said, hey, good shooting. No problem. So that's what the ATF agents actually thought of David Koresh. They actually thought that he was not dangerous at all. They were perfectly happy to hand him an AR-15 with a full magazine to shoot.

He's having a good time. So that morning, the cameraman's there. Perry, David Jones, the mailman is warned. The element of surprise is lost. And you'll hear this from the ATF agents now. They'll even throw their bosses under the bus and say they knew the element of surprise was lost and they sent us anyway and they shouldn't have done that.

And that's true. They shouldn't have. And the element of surprise was lost and that's a pretty crazy way to launch a massive SWAT raid. But you see baked in there is a lie. That's why the Branch Divideans ambushed us and killed us because they were ready for us because the element of surprise had been lost.

And if only it hadn't been, then the raid would have been a great success. But that's just not true. It's great the way, it's interesting, the way they're able to sneak that argument in with the element of the surprise being lost in this story. The cops pulled up, and they're in two big cattle trailers covered in tarps.

One of the names for it was Operation Trojan Horse. Somehow what? They're supposed to look like. like they're lost or something turning around in the Divideon's driveway. I don't know. They have two big cattle trailers full of cops. It was something like 75 ATF agents. After about an hour and a half gun battle,

four of them had been killed. That is proof right there that it was not an ambush. Two of them died on the roof. May have been shot by friendly fire, although that's not entirely clear. Certainly one ATF agent, was shot by a friendly fire. I don't think he was killed, though. And one of the agents who was

killed was in the front, and this is according to their own version of the story after several minutes of gunfire at the front before this agent was killed. And I'm sorry, I don't know the location of the fourth. But the fact that they did not take massive casualties, wounds or deaths in the initial minutes of the raid is proof that it was not an ambush. And there's absolute multiple witness, I mean, I don't know, 10 different people, including, I believe, some of the ATF agents admitted that David Koresh came to the door, opened the door, and some say even came outside, and said, whoa, whoa, stop, stop, there's women and children in here. And they opened fire. They shot the dogs. They shot Koresh in the side and in the hand, I believe. And then

one of the bullets went under his arm and shot his father-in-law in the sternum. And he ran back inside and the ATF just opened up on the place. And you can see in their own footage, no, you can't see in their own footage, they destroyed all that and lied about it, but you can see in the news footage where the cops are just absolutely opening up mag dump at walls, at windows that they cannot see in, and they don't know who's in there. They do know that there are women and children in there by the scores, and they're blindly firing through the walls, emptying their magazines in there.

They killed six Branch Devidians in the raid. And I forgot how many they wounded, 17 or something like that. Two of the killed Branch Devidians almost certainly were killed by National Guard helicopters. Texas National Guard helicopters on loan from the Texas government to the ATF in the name of the war on drugs, in the name of the outright lie that the Branch Devidians had a meth lab in there or that any of them were criminals or involved in the drug trade in any way whatsoever

or even consuming illegal drugs in any way. And under that excuse, they used helicopters, Huey's from Vietnam. That they came and killed Winston Blake as he sat on his bed eating breakfast and killed... I'm so sorry, the name of the guy was on the tip of my tongue

who was essentially working I believe scraping rust in the water tower and who went up to see what was going on and you can see in rules of engagement the helicopter flies by as he drops to the deck and it is possible that he was shot by a sniper from the ground and that the helicopter flying by is just a coincidence there but that's what the footage shows

and now if you watch the recent documentary on Netflix or if you watch recent interviews of the ATF agents telling their story here, it's just completely preposterous. They say that the Branch DeVidians had 50 caliber machine guns. That from the moment that they pulled up, the Branch DeVidians opened up with a cascade of fully automatic weapons fire. In an interview with KWTX, an ATF agent

claimed that the Branch DeVidians fired 100,000 rounds that day. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. He says they fired over 10,000, and that the ATF fired 1,000. I believe the ATF fired 1,000. I don't believe the British Divideans fired even that many when you look at how many ATF agents were engaged and involved in that firefight on that first day. How am I doing on time, by the way?

Well, like how much, am I halfway through? Okay, okay. It's a long story. I got to try to keep it in proportion here. And they also claim in the new Netflix documentary that the Branch Civians are throwing hand grenades at them. And yet we still only have four dead. They're just lying.

It could not possibly be true. In a 90-minute firefight that four ATF agents were killed when the Branch Civilians just opened up at them with fully automatic rifles, including a 50-calibre machine gun and throwing hand grenades at them and the rest. It's just fantasy. It did not happen.

And, in fact, the first thing that did happen on the inside of the house, you know, right around the time of the first fire being returned anyway, was that Wayne Martin, who was the second black man to graduate from Harvard Law School and was a religious scholar who was living there with the Branch of Divideons, picked up the phone and called 911. And you can hear the audio in the new podcast and in the movie Rules of Engagement. Help, help, there's 75 men surrounding our building. They're shooting at us.

We got women and children in danger. Call it off. But the local sheriff's department, well, first of all, criminals don't call 911, okay? Secondly, the sheriff's department had no ability to communicate with the ATF. So even though the Branch Divideans are begging for a ceasefire from the very first moments of the raid. They can't negotiate one.

There are no position to communicate with the ATF whatsoever. It takes more than an hour and a half. Finally, a college police officer was able to get, was able to communicate with the sheriff's department and head out there and get in contact with the ATF. And then the negotiation to even get a ceasefire and the ATS withdrawal from the house that morning was a jumbled mess.

and people were still getting shot and killed even while they supposedly had ceased fires and all this because the communication was so absolutely poor. And they just had no backup plan whatsoever. The only thing to be thankful for about that rate is that they never gained access to the inside of the house other than a couple of agents on the roof

went into a room that supposedly was a gun storage room and very quickly came back out again. And this is where I think the question of the friendly fire comes in. But they were not able to do anything like a room-to-room sweep operation through that house. And thank God for that. There's no telling how many people would have been killed that they'd been able

to get inside that front door and any real numbers at the beginning of the raid. So the Branch Devidians finally negotiate a ceasefire. The ATF's just out of ammo. The Devidians let them come and get their wounded and they don't snip them. They do not

shoot out them one bit. They're begging for a ceasefire the whole time. And once the ATF ceases fire, the Branch DeVians respect it. They get their men and they leave the property. At that point, of course, first of all, the public relations machine goes into full gear. This is Charlie Manson. This is Jim Jones. These people are murderers. They somehow lured and tricked our ATF agents into raiding them and then ambushed them with fully automatic weapons. And our hero, police of law enforcement have been forced to withdraw

and the crazy call, then we're going to do something. And that was how the story started. And then the FBI came, pulled rank on ATF, took over the crime scene. Now, the official policy during the siege was to negotiate. And I think anybody here who's seen a Hollywood movie featuring a FBI negotiator knows exactly how this is supposed to go. The negotiator is good cop. And I respect you.

I'll work with you and I'm a friend of yours and I'll get you a pizza and I'll get you some cigarettes and what can we do to come to an understanding here? You have a guy who was a bank full of hostages? What do you do? You placate them. You try to figure out how to save those people's lives. And to be honest, the FBI negotiators, I think, would have liked very much to negotiate an end to this thing. But they were never allowed to. What happened was they brought in what's called the hostage rescue team. Now, the FBI has probably hundreds, certainly dozens of SWAT teams. The hostage rescue team is different.

They're really not police. They're soldiers. They're trained as green berets or like Delta Navy SEALs. They're like second-tier special operations forces. So if you think about the Rangers or Delta or SEALs doing night raids on civilian homes in Afghanistan in the war, that's essentially the HRT's job. They're not police officers. They just cash checks that say DOJ on them.

But they are essentially part of the special operations community. And here they have an enemy to destroy. And they'll be damned if they're going to let a bunch of assisting negotiators get in the way of that. These people are cop killers and worse. Worse even than killing a cop. They disrespected our authority. They thumbed their nose at us, said they're not coming out to submit to arrest. And so they have to pay.

So throughout the whole 51-day siege, almost seven weeks, no matter what progress the negotiators made, the hostage rescue team would immediately sabotage it. They have a successful negotiation. The Davidians send out some women and children. The HRT shuts off the lights. they make a concession David Koresh has a few more people come out they spend the whole next day driving their tanks

back and forth over the shallow graves of Peter Gent was shot on the water tower and they would drive back and forth across Peter Jen's grave pull down their pants and show their parts to the women in the compound through the window and this kind of thing and do everything they could to sabotage the negotiations now we play the audio in the new podcast again you can see it in rules of engagement

it's one of the more infamous parts of the story i think is how they started playing rock and roll and really bad rock and roll nancy sinatra these boots are made for walking i don't think that song is about growing up to be a federal cop and crushing the liberties of innocent civilians but maybe that was certainly how they played it and they played achy-breaky heart the worst song of the 1990s over and over and over again. And that was how it kind of started

the psychological warfare operations against the Davidians. But then, of course, they quickly escalated. And pretty soon they're shining military-grade searchlights in all the windows all night long. And they're playing on like spinal tap, turn it all the way up to 11.

They have on absolute full blast. And they're playing all night, night after night day after day the sounds of rabbits and horses being slaughtered dogs being slaughtered

and they did this for weeks I don't if you guys saw the new Star Wars series Andor this is how the evil empire tortures the lady as they put headphones on her she can't take off and makes her listen to the sound of dying

aliens, dying animals I wonder if the writers for that were going off of Waco and I'm telling you like even as a grown-ass man it's not very nice listening to the sounds of rabbits and horses and dogs being cut to pieces that's kind of left to your imagination exactly what machine are they being put through here and then you wonder like did they actually kill them

just to record them for the Divideans were these freshly murdered dogs that they did this just for the Davidians? Who are they doing? And, of course, on the Davidian side, David Koresh said that God told them not to come out yet. And so to the vast majority of his followers,

God said. If Koresh says God said, then God said. And we're not going. And so you had a situation where the Davidians were so dead set on their own point of view. Instead of trying hard to work with that point of view and within the context of that point of view, the FBI could only just confront them. These people don't believe. These people don't have faith in Jesus.

They're cop killers. They're methamphetamine dealers. They're Charlie Manson cultists. so nothing they say is sincere. All of it is just a ruse. Never mind whether God told David Koresh to wait. We don't even believe

that his followers believe that God told them to wait. The whole place is just a den of criminals waiting to be held to account. It's the only way that the cops could see the situation. Meanwhile, inside the compound, everything, the house,

everything that's going outside is straight out of the book of Naham, dude. It says right in Naham. They're going to bring tanks. They're going to have these chariots of fire. It says right here in the book of Nabakabak. And it fits with this verse of Daniel and this Psalm and this seal. Don't you see? And from the point of view of the branch Davidians, the only way to understand what was happening to them was through the eyes of biblical prophecy. What does the Bible tell us about what is happening out there right now? That's our first sense.

Another five or seven come after that. So this is a bunch of civilians between Iraq and a very hard place here, as you can see. So there's two things happening at the same time towards the end of the siege. The first one is, The negotiators have been sort of en run, and there are two religious scholars who figured out they really understood the book of Revelation, and they really understood what David Koresh was talking about. It's James Tabor and his friend Philip Arnold. And what they did was they went on the radio, and they made sure the Divideans were listening, you know, turn your satellite dish 180 degrees if you're tuned in today, and then they did. they would do it. That's how they kind of communicate. And Tabor and Arnold came up with this

brilliant thing. And they say, look, it says in the Bible here that the Lamb of God has to accomplish XYZ, and he must speak to all nations and all these things. But so our message to Koresh is Koresh, nobody knew who you were. You had 120 followers. But everyone in the world knows who you are now. So if you will come out, And even from jail, after all, Paul wrote from jail. And so many great biblical figures wrote from imprisonment. You can write in prison in America, and you can tell the whole world what you have to say,

but you can't do that if you're killed dead here. So now, and it says in the Bible, he shall speak for a period of a season or days, but days means years. Everybody knows that. And so, Koresh, this can't end here. and they won him over and

Koresh made a new deal and he said I am now going to write my interpretation of the book of revelations before God told me never to write it down now he told me to write it down and of course he doesn't have to learn how to be a good writer all he's doing is giving his sermon

and his assistants are recording it on a dictaphone belt and transcribing it all and the first seal is the longest seal and they had completed it by April the 18th and they told the negotiator we'll send it out in the morning as a show of good faith we'll get to work on the second seal tomorrow

the negotiator told them don't worry there's no time limit you guys go ahead and one of the surviving branch Davidians brought out a CD, or maybe it was a floppy disc, with the sermon written on it, with the first seal. And not only did he have the first seal, but he had also written an outline of all seven seals and where to copy and paste in. Psalm this and Psalm that and passage this and Daniel that. They didn't have time to put them in yet, but he said, here's where I want to cite all these

verses to make my point. And they had that whole outline was already done. In other words, it's just an unquestionable proof that he was living up to his agreement and was working diligently on riding the Seven Seals. And he had promised that he would come out as soon as they were done. But same time that was going on that Tabor and Arnold were solving this problem, The FBI had already lost patients weeks ago. And in the middle of March, they had settled on a tear gas attack

with what's actually not tear gas, but CS powder, much harsher than tear gas, banned by the Geneva Conventions. But it took them weeks to prepare the combat engineering vehicles, which are essentially tanks, with the boom and the, sorry to use the same word in a different context in the same sentence, and with tanks, like a, if you picture like an oxygen tank or a propane tank, it was like a bottle, a metal bottle tank, full of the CS powder, diluted or mixed, dissolved in a chemical called methylene chloride. And they had to settle this up, and it took a while.

But by the time the negotiators are coming to them on the 14th and saying we have a new deal with Koresh and then they're coming to them on the 18th and saying, gee, he swears he's written the first seal and they're going to come out as soon as he's done with the 7th. They didn't want to hear it. They were already sunk-cost fallacy

on this tank attack. And they refused to even entertain the possibility that Koresh was dealing with them in good faith whatsoever. And so even though on the night of the 18th, the negotiator told the Davidians, there's no time limit, go ahead, get it done. And even though they knew that the Davidians had virtually zero drinking water left, and that the time was absolutely ticking on, you know, they had just collected some rainwater, and it was almost gone, and the feds knew it. Instead of waiting them out, which is what they said they were doing, it was seven weeks

already the policy is we don't want to hurt these people we just want to wait them out and instead they went in the next morning with a massive tank assault and gas attack on the house now very briefly here not to defend janet reno but to accuse the FBI they lied to her she was new and she was stupid and they buffaloed her into it to authorizing their attack that's not really to acquit her because after all, she could have just said no. I don't give a damn what arguments you give me. We are not doing that. And she didn't. She gave in to them. But they lied to her and they said that they knew for a fact that David Koresh was beating babies. Not just, oh, he's harshly punishing older children with spankings or something. Babies means under one year old, right? He's fighting them. He's kicking their asses in there.

and so and they lied to her that the negotiations are going nowhere we've made zero progress in weeks and she just believed them and they basically framed it where lady if you don't let us go in there and stop this man from beating these babies then you are authorizing him to beat these babies and that's what we're going to tell everybody too and she gave in and told them go ahead Now, she asked them, Jesus, is this stuff dangerous for children? They knew their children in there. And they said, no, you know what?

We actually know for a fact that at one time a child was exposed to CS and there was no permanent damage. But as Dave Hardy points out, that kid almost died. That kid had to go to intensive care. They barely saved his life. He was caught in the middle of some cops on a hostage negotiation. And he was 10 years old. not under five, not a little toddler, a little baby.

And Janet Reeson, well, if he's fighting the babies, I guess we got to gas the babies. So she told them yes. Now, the attack that they, sorry, 15 minutes, the attack that they proposed was we're going to put in a little bit of gas and a little bit of gas and they're going to come out. But there was an asterisk. if we claim that the Davidians have fired a single shot at us we get to tear up the plan and go full bore and that's exactly what they did within I think six minutes certainly within 10 minutes so the beginning of the tank of salt

and the insertion of the gas the powder dissolved in liquid they went to full escalation and dumped every bit of the poison gas that they had into the building and still the Davidians didn't come out I asked David Tibido, why not, man? He said, because we thought we'd be shot if we came out, which is true. So he didn't come out.

Now, the adults had gas masks, so it was extremely uncomfortable for them in there, but they could take it, I guess. The children, there were no gas masks that could fit the children, so they were all moved to the one concrete room and covered with wet blankets and towels, and that door was sealed shut, and that presumably kept them. safe for most of the time.

Eventually, of course, the cops just lost patience. And they went straight through the front of the house, knocked that door in to that one concrete room, and dumped in the words of FBI spokesman, Bob Rick's massive gas in there.

We knew it was women and children in there. We knew that their gas masks had to be failing. And we thought that their motherly instincts would kick in and they would get their children out of there, but apparently they don't care very much about their children. So we had the, that was the avowed policy.

It was not even to torture the adults, but to torture the children to the degree that it would make their parents make a decision and change their mind and take them out of there. But of course they were trying to protect their children. That was why they were in the concrete room. Now I'm sorry, I'm over time on this story here, but let me say very quickly that At the beginning of the raid, 6 o'clock in the morning, and the first things that they did was they gassed the buried school buses

at the north end of the building, which was a storm shelter, and there was a trapdoor at the north end of the building where people could escape and get down to the buses, and then presumably they could have been rescued from there. They could have been taken out from there. The first thing the cops did was seal off that escape route with their gas. And the fire broke out at noon. And I believe that the preponderance of the evidence shows that it was the government that started the fire.

It's their responsibility no matter what. If we go through our choices of options here, I think the idea that the Davidians deliberately set the fire to kill themselves in any mass suicide is virtually impossible. There's virtually no evidence whatsoever to say that. If some of them had made that decision for the others, fine. but the ones who survived had no indication that that was going on whatsoever. And despite all their claims, the FBI has never demonstrated that that is the case whatsoever. There's also an argument that the fire started accidentally, possibly from a lantern being knocked over,

or from the muzzle flash from a branch to vidi and firing at a tank, possibly igniting the fire. But the reason I think it's most likely that it was the government that did it is because they found six flash bangor. two at each of the origins of the fire. And they also found four different military-grade pyrotechnic tear gas rounds. Two of them inside the building, two of them fired away from the building, but still indicating that they definitely had them.

We don't know the negative of how many were not found. There's every reason to believe that when the gas attack failed, the FBI decided, fine, we'll just shoot them and burn them and kill them and end it. And here's how we really know, is the FBI was flying a plane overhead with forward-looking infrared, which is designed for combat, designed for the Department of Defense's Night Vision Laboratory for finding gunshots. And that's exactly what it did. And you can see the footage yourself in Waco, the rules of engagement, there's even better quality footage in the sequel, Waco, A New Revelation, as well as the third film by Mike McNulty, is called The Fleer Project.

And you can see it is just beyond dispute, no matter what government-appointed expert claims. You can see, in this infrared footage, air-conditioned black figures get out of the back of their Bradley fighting vehicles and fire machine guns into the house for more than an hour before the fire started, and all throughout the fire. You can see their machine gunning the back of the house, so no one can escape. And I got brand new to me from David Hardy, who again wrote the great book, This is Not an Assault. When I was in the middle of interviewing him, he asked me,

do you have the audio of Dick Rogers from HRT talking to Jeff Jamar during the fire? Do you have that from the helicopter? I said, no, I don't have that. What's that? He says, oh, it's on my YouTube channel you can get. I said, I'll do it. I'll rip it right in and I'll splice that right into our story here, which I did. The audio is on Dave Hardy's YouTube channel and you can find it in the new podcast. Where Dick Rogers, the commander of the hostage rescue team, is on the radio with Jeff Jamar during the fire. He says, we let the North End open so hopefully some children can escape, which again is not. not true. They gasped the north exit first thing. But he says we left the north exit open so hopefully some children can escape.

And Jeff Jamar, the FBI special agent in charge, says hopefully nobody else. And then he held the fire trucks back. Gas, gunshots, fire, withholding the fire

trucks. That's murder. At least second degree murder. 76 counts. Now, of course, there's a big hoax in the court where they were all acquitted by the jury who said that it should have been the ATF on trial, not them, but they compromised with a couple of thin blue line types on the jury and found them guilty of a minor gun violation. The judge said, well, I'm going to throw out the gun violation because you can't convict somebody for using a firearm in the commission of a felony when you acquit them of the felony. But then he said, you know what? After the long weekend, I've had a chance to consider.

The federal prosecutor made the case, and maybe he got a phone caller or a visit or had a nice round of golf, and decided that, you know what, actually, here's what I'm going to do with your inconsistent decision, jury. I think that you mean to say that they did use a gun in the commission of a felony, that felony being murder of federal agents. So I'm going to sentence them as though you had convicted them

of murder of federal agents with drug enhancements for the again completely imaginary methamphetamine lab and drug connection to this case and sent the Davidians to prison for 15 years. It's an absolute hoax

and its own atrocity although paling in comparison to the rest of the story. and interestingly the Supreme Court actually struck that down and set a few of those people free after five years now to wrap up here real quick I know I'm out of time

on February the 28th that's the anniversary of the raid 20 years ago now on the 10th anniversary 2003 I was standing out in front of the Texas State Capitol protest and by myself with a sign said forget Waco and that's because I think remember Waco kind of sounds too corny and trite, right? Remember Waco.

And also, I hate people and I'm mocking them and criticizing them for having already forgotten Waco. They never gave a shit about Waco in the first place. And you know what people said to me? What do you mean forget Waco? Right, because they had no idea what I was talking about. It was the 10th anniversary of the raid of a church on a Sunday morning that culminated in the murder of 80 people, and they didn't know or care about it all. But I had a point, which was we're on the eve of Iraq War II. And an AP reporter came up to me, and he said, what's the point here, man? You can't find it. They never ran it. But he took notes, and I explained to him,

look what they're doing to Saddam Hussein here, man. They say he's crazy, so we can't negotiate with him. He's got illegal weapons. And he's He's bad to his own people. So he had no choice but to go in there invade and save the day. And it's all a lie, and it's nothing but Waco writ large, don't you see? It's the same story. It's the same pile of lies that they used on the Branch Divideans. And Colin Powell's a four-star general is our secretary of state.

He's not tough enough to send over there to read the Riot Act to little old Saddam Hussein. Are you kidding me? How about send his old friend Donald Rumsfeld over there? He's a gruffled defense department leader. I bet he could put Saddam Hussein right in line. Nope, nope, no, no. Negotiations are going nowhere. We got inspectors on the ground.

Negotiations are making no progress. He's beating the babies. We've got to stop him. We're going. And so if Iraq War II is just Waco writ large, then that means that Waco is just Iraq War II writ small. They took a piece of property, you know, not even this big. 100 miles from my front door.

And they made it a foreign nation. And they made David Koresh into a foreign dictator. And then they sent the Delta Force in there to help the hostage rescue team to kill them all. And a giant conflagration. And it's just the same damn thing again. And we keep doing it over and over again. And people wonder sometimes,

Well, I always mentioned David Koresh, and I'll always mention Waco, when the subject is Iraq, the subject is Iran, the subject is Russia, the subject is China. And the answer is because the same thing, man, they keep jerking your chain, and you keep falling for it, not you, but the broader public out there. This guy's so bad, so we've got to send our heroes to stop them. But who's really the bad guys? And after what happened in Waco, 1993, how could anyone believe in this government and its legitimacy again.

How could anyone believe that our government is the good guys set out to set right what went wrong? It's just not true. They're child killers. And they don't mind either. They're happy to. And the right wing was just as bad as the liberals on it.

A lot of right wingers now like to pretend they were good on Waco, but I remember different. The Branch Divideans had thumbed their nose at law enforcement. They deserve to die, them and their children and their grandmothers too. You're damned right. That was the consensus on the Republican right in 1993, on talk radio, on the Free Republic Message Board, and whatever you got. And so there should be a lesson there, that after this, we should be, pardon me, inoculated.

permanently, against the poison, against the idea that we should trust and have faith in this government or their agents to do the right thing, on anything ever. The very least, knowing that they consider us the enemy, we can consider them ours, and we can at least stop being the demand for what they supply. And that's it. Thank you. Thank you.