Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 9, 1993 TAG: 9310090127
SECTION: NATL/INTL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
Independent arson investigators concluded that fires were set in three places inside the compound by cult members, not by armored vehicles sent in by the FBI, according to the report.
"The fire appears to be an act of mass suicide or an act of mass murder or a combination of the two," said Edward S.G. Dennis, a former senior Justice Department official, who evaluated the department report prepared by three career prosecutors and three FBI inspectors.
Dennis said the FBI exercised restraint and did not fire a single shot during the entire standoff. He blamed the end of the tragedy on cult leader David Koresh, saying that he had laid plans for the blaze in advance and "choreographed his own death and the deaths of his followers."
In grim detail, the report recounted events in Washington leading up to the decision to fire tear gas into the compound and reconstructed the last hours of the siege in Waco before it ended in an inferno on April 19 that left at least 75 cult members dead - 25 of them children.
Most of the children were among 31 people who died inside a collapsed concrete bunker near the center of the compound.
Almost all of the victims suffocated. But in a chilling list of the dead - many burned beyond recognition and identified only by a number - the report said the bunker contained the bodies of a 3-year-old boy who had been stabbed, a 6-year-old girl shot in the chest and an infant shot in the head.
The Justice Department report was the result of one of two investigations ordered by President Clinton in the aftermath of the Waco disaster. Last week, a Treasury Department report sharply criticized the actions of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms officials in planning and executing the abortive Feb. 28 raid that set the stage for the standoff.
Four ATF agents were killed and 20 were wounded in the shootout that followed the botched attempt to enter the compound by force and arrest Koresh on weapons charges. Seven weeks later, the fire set after the FBI fired tear gas into the compound quickly engulfed the wooden structure.
Dennis said the FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno considered all reasonable alternatives before deciding to try to force out cult members with a tear-gas assault.
"An indefinite siege was not a realistic option," said Dennis, who said the cult had provisions to hold out for a year.
If the standoff continued, authorities feared that cult members could engage the FBI in a gun battle or try a mass escape.
Reno told a news conference she did not consider the report a "whitewash," despite the contrast with the Treasury analysis, which led to the suspension of five officials.
Rep. Don Edwards, D-Calif., criticized the report for failing to come up with tough recommendations to ensure that a Waco-type disaster is not repeated. He said proposals to double the size of the FBI's hostage rescue team and other recommendations did not go far enough.
"It seems to me to give us no assurance from the recommendations or the observations that, if a similar crisis took place today, we wouldn't have the same tragic outcome," said Edwards, who heads a House Judiciary Committee subcommittee that oversees the FBI.
The only area of substantive criticism in the report dealt with a conflict between the FBI negotiators and tactical agents over strategy.
"On several occasions tactical pressure was exerted on the Davidians either without consulting the negotiators or over the negotiators' objections," Dennis wrote in his review. "The negotiators believed the timing of these tactical activities disrupted the progress of the negotiations unnecessarily."
For instance, loudspeakers initially used to provide information to the cult members were used over the objections of negotiators to broadcast Tibetan chants, annoying music and the sounds of dying rabbits.
Some of the nine outside experts asked by the Justice Department to review the report were critical of what they said was a failure to heed the negotiators' concerns and warnings by the FBI's own behavioral scientists to proceed with caution.
"There was an understandable desire among many agents in Waco to make Koresh and the Davidians pay for the harm they had caused," Nancy T. Ammerman, a cult expert and visiting scholar at Princeton University, said in a compilation of the outside reviews released by the Justice Department. "Arguments for patience or unconventional tactics fell on deaf ears."
There also was criticism from some of the outside experts of the FBI's failure to recognize the possibility of a mass suicide if it tried to take the compound.
But the report said evidence was contradictory about whether Koresh intended to orchestrate a mass suicide. He and his followers repeatedly assured negotiators that they did not intend to commit suicide.
Keywords:
FATALITY
by CNB