Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 28, 1993 TAG: 9311280010
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Chicago Tribune
DATELINE: BOSTON LENGTH: Medium
Could it have been the FBI agents who were the hostages, trapped in a circle around a lonely compound, tense, afraid of making a mistake, living on coffee and anxiety, driven by a relentless media and uncertain leadership in Washington?
Stone's 46-page report, the last in a series by an advisory panel summoned by the Justice Department, joins a pile of government studies 10 inches thick.
It is certainly the quirkiest of the advisory reports, the only one the FBI has chosen to counter with a news release.
Among the outsiders invited by Philip Heymann, deputy attorney general, to suggest ways to improve the handling of such a crisis was Stone, who had studied such diverse issues as blind and autistic children and suicide. Stone was Heymann's successor in teaching a course on violence at Harvard Law School.
When he first went to Washington, Stone remembers, he and other panelists met with about 10 FBI officials.
"We asked them to tell us what they thought they'd done wrong," he said. "They went around the table one by one, and it turned out they didn't think anything they'd done was wrong.
"My experience talking to these people showed me they were thoroughly decent, with tremendous concern for what happened," the professor said.
Stone's report holds that the FBI was driven by its nature as an elite law-enforcement agency, that its so-called action imperative pushed the agency to try to control Davidian leader David Koresh and bring the situation to an end.
by CNB