Artfully dodging blame on Waco

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 4, 1995 | by Paul Greenberg

There are few things so enlightening as listening to our president explain moral philosophy to the masses. Bill Clinton's line on the Waco massacre seems to have changed from the days when he was saying the inferno was all the Branch Davidians' fault. He may even be ready to acknowledge that mistakes were made. But in recent weeks he has been emphasizing allegations of sexual misconduct made against the Branch Davidians' leader, David Koresh, who, unlike Clinton, no longer can defend himself against such accusations. At least not in this world.

There simply is "no moral equivalence," said the president, between what the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the FBI did at the Davidians' compound and Koresh's sexual exploitation of young girls. The president is right. If the accusations against the Branch Davidians' high priest are correct, what he did to his young charges is called statutory rape. What the government's assault on the Davidians' compound succeeded in doing, whether out of compassion or vainglory or a combination of both, was to kill them.

Yep, to judge by the results, there was no moral equivalence here at all. Not that the death of the adults who were slain in this long, drawn-out ordeal, whether they were committed Davidians or dedicated lawmen, should be shrugged off lightly, either. But of course there's no equalizing the actions of a self-styled prophet who at least could plead a deranged zealotry and officers of the government of the United States who are supposed to know what they are doing -- and to remain calm and rational even when lives are in danger. Of course, they should be held to a much higher standard than some shadetree theologian in his bunker out there under the "X" in Texas.

A social worker named Joyce Sparks, testifying at the congressional hearing into this bloody mess, said she had tried to warn those masterminds at the ATF that the Branch Davidians would react violently if their leader were confronted directly. She had studied the theology of the group when investigating accusations of child abuse at the compound, but the ATF didn't seem interested. "You couldn't get them to listen to information you thought was vital," she told the committee. "They just thought they were above it."

Her conclusion on the final assault: "Once the raid started, the fire was inevitable. Once that happened, children were going to die."

Why, even Roger Altman could see this disaster coming. Yes, Roger Altman, the former deputy secretary of the Treasury who made such a hash of Whitewater. He had written a memo four days before the raid-cum-inferno warning: "The risks of tragedy are there." His advice was to stay patient. He figured that "if the FBI waits indefinitely, Koresh eventually will concede." Well, maybe Koresh would have, maybe he wouldn't have, but it's hard to see how the outcome could have been any worse or the casualties any greater if Altman's counsel had been followed.

Unfortunately, Altman's memo never reached the FBI; it never got beyond then-secretary of the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen. By that time, the ATF -- which comes under the Treasury Department -- had been relieved of this mission after its ill-timed raid on the compound in February. The FBI had taken over and the FBI came under Attorney General Janet Reno's supervision, not Bentsen's.

Or, as Bentsen put it, with a bureaucrat's fine sense of the limits of his responsibility: "Let me say I took care of my responsibilities and my jurisdiction, and this was the jurisdiction at this point of the attorney general." In short, Bentsen could have been one of Kitty Genovese's neighbors in that celebrated case: He didn't think it was his business to get involved.

In this administration, Altman may brief White House aides on a criminal referral when the president's name is involved, but his advice on a matter of life and death -- plenty of death, as it turned out -- doesn't even get out of the department. One would scarcely suspect that the secretary of the Treasury and the attorney general were in the same Cabinet, or even on the same continent.

Not that the FBI would necessarily have heeded Altman's advice even if it had received his memo, but it would have been thoughtful and, yes, responsible of Bentsen to have given it the opportunity. Reno already had managed to put off any showdown at the compound for 51 days; a word from Altman might have bolstered her resistance to the FBI's importunings to stage its own raid after the ATF's had failed.

Bentsen himself wasn't told about the original raid on the compound by the ATF, an agency nominally under his supervision, until after that venture had proved a bloody fiasco. The ATF's failed raid had involved 70 armed agents and had been planned for months, but why bother to inform the boss? Communication clearly has not been the Treasury Department's strong point in recent years--it's either doing too much of it (with the White House) or not enough (with the FBI).

There is a kind of incompetence so gross, and so awful in its results, that it far outshadows any sin it is intended to avenge. In this case, the results included the violent, horrible deaths of scores of people, including young girls whose alleged treatment by Koresh moved the president to such righteous indignation last week. Of the more than 80 people killed in the second and final raid, at least 22 were children. After one of the French Revolution's perfectly legal and perfectly awful bloodlettings, a member of the nobility was heard to say: "It is worse than a crime, it is blunder." Is there anyone who still cannot see that the conduct of both these deadly raids on that strange little settlement outside Waco was a monstrous blunder? And that the effects were far worse than any violation of the gun laws of which the Branch Davidians were accused?