Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 30, 1993 TAG: 9304300419
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-14 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
It is also making certain members of Congress - Michigan Democrat John Conyers Jr. most prominently - look like fools.
It is now known, on the basis of the findings of independent investigators, that the FBI was correct when it said the fires were deliberately set inside the compound.
Arson from within, not governmental force from without, caused the conflagration.
It is also now known, on the basis of the findings of medical examiners, that at least five Koresh followers died not from the fire but from gunshot wounds.
A likely explanation is that they were shot as they tried to flee. Even if the wounds were self-inflicted under Koresh's influence, or were the result of arson-induced munitions explosions, it comes almost to the same thing: murder.
Koresh was a dangerous man. He was a suicidal killer responsible for the deaths of dozens of people, including children. Yet this basic fact seems forgotten in much of the silly chatter, absurd rhetoric and cynical posturing that has arisen in the wake of the compound's destruction.
It seems forgotten, too, in the apparent seriousness with which some people have seemed willing to consider Koresh's fruitcake scribbling.
In any event, Conyers' hectoring of Attorney General Janet Reno at House Judiciary Committee hearings on Wednesday was inexcusable. Calling the government's actions "a profound disgrace to law enforcement" was ridiculous. Suggesting that he, unlike Reno, would not "rationalize the deaths of two dozen children" was atrocious.
It is Conyers who should be thinking about resigning.
Two California Republicans, Elton Gallegly and Carlos Moorhead, also seemed intent on criticizing (a) the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which conducted the Feb. 28 illegal-arms raid that touched it off, for trying to do their jobs; (b) Reno, for backing up the law-enforcement authorities for trying to do their jobs; and (c) President Clinton, for allowing law-enforcement authorities to try to do their jobs.
There may be partisan advantage in ignoring the evidence. That's doubtful, however, and doesn't explain Democrat Conyers' idiotic tirade. So maybe it's just ego.
This does not mean the affair should go unexamined, including by Congress. When federal agents lose their lives in an attempt to exercise a duly authorized search warrant, and when dozens of people lose their lives while the government tries to capture those who killed the agents, of course you should ask whether and how it could have been handled better.
But honest examination and Monday-morning quarterbacking - from people who, even after the fact, can't say what they would have done differently - are not the same thing.
Moreover, given what was knowable then and is known now about occurrences inside the compound, it's possible that most of it couldn't have been handled much better. Koresh's thirst for apocalypse may have made his and his followers' deaths inevitable.
Let us at least keep in mind that the authorities were dealing with a bizarrely unpredictable man. They had good reason to fear for the safety of the children inside, reason that was confirmed by Koresh's willingness to destroy the children by fire rather than release them.
From the left, Saul Landau and Marcus Raskin of the Institute for Policy Studies have written that Waco has done "severe damage to the reputation of the Clinton administration." From the right has come criticism of Clinton's leadership skills - for getting too little involved in the details or, alternatively, for being too much so.
All of which carries the blame game entirely too far. Waco wasn't important enough. As Chicago Tribune columnist Jon Margolis has observed, it was a "Big Story" - with fire, weirdness and sadness at the children's deaths - but it was hardly an "Important Event."
Waco's actual impact on the lives of most people is trivial. The debate, to the extent there's a legitimate one, is over tactics, not basic values or principles.
Koresh was too addled to be taken seriously as a religious force, his followership too tiny to be taken seriously as a social force. To pretend otherwise is to elevate Koresh to a status neither proper nor true.
by CNB