Brasscheck TV recently circulated the film "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" (1997) by director William Gazecki. Perhaps the timing of presenting again now this brilliant Oscar-nominated and award-winning film is to disabuse us of illusions we may be entertaining that any of the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, or the multitude of other crimes committed by the current administration might be investigated or prosecuted by the next administration, even if it be Democratic. No administration in my lifetime, which goes back to Eisenhower, has been without its grave crimes, but not one has been held responsible for the most serious ones, the war crimes and other crimes against humanity. As the French proverb goes, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same).
"Waco: The Rules of Engagement" is an excellent documentary, even if it leaves one at the end with a sore bitterness that Clinton wasn't impeached for his real crimes and that now, 15 years later, the cover-up of the Waco murders continues to succeed. Actually, that's one of the reasons it's so good. We should be bitter, and we should remind each other over and over again about those crimes committed in 1993 against David Koresh and the Branch Davidians, remind each other repeatedly about what happened―more to the point, what didn't happen―afterwards in Washington, because surely we can't allow cover-ups to succeed in the courts of public opinion, even if the politicians and their appointees and all the bureaucrats manage to elude even poetic justice.
Toggling between the events of February 28 through April 19, 1993 and the congressional Joint Hearings of the Oversight Subcommittee on Crime (JHOSC) of July to August of 1995, Gazecki tells the story of the U.S. government's murder―it's impossible to weigh the evidence presented without seeing it as anything but mass murder and a subsequent cover-up―of 82 Branch Davidians, presenting numerous viewpoints, including taped interviews of
victims just before they died in that final holocaust, and footage from the hearings. The hearings came about after two years of unrelenting criticism by the public, albeit a minority of the public, who saw the tragedy as a case of savage brutality by personnel of several government agencies, as well as the military, against U.S. citizens. But U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos of California, a Democrat, put on a show for the greater public, those of us who knew nothing more than what the media reported to us, which was for the most part propaganda, such as Time's cover story demonizing David Koresh (see "Oh, My God, They're Killing Themselves—FBI agent Bob Ricks," May 3, 1993).
Apparently, it was the mission of Congressman Lantos, and those of like mind, to reinforce the false impressions about the Branch Davidians that had been touted by the government and the media during that 51-day siege in central Texas during 1993's final winter weeks. Lantos was no stranger to the power of propaganda. He had been a victim of it fifty years earlier in Europe; however, after surviving the Holocaust he was able to use propaganda techniques to his own advantage during his subsequent political life in the United States.
"This is the approach of what I call ‘the lunatic fringe,'" he said in his trademark Hungarian accent, "[who] still clings to the notion that there was a gigantic governmental conspiracy that brought about this nightmare. It’s difficult to see how any rational human being subscribes to such a notion, but obviously many do." Similar words had been spoken half a century earlier, even by Jews, when refuting reports that unthinkable things were occurring in nearby villages, and we've heard them these past seven years to discount the evidence and theories challenging the official conspiracy theory of what happened on September 11, 2001. Plus ça change. . .
"What I am telling you," the film captures Lantos' saying, "is that the most plausible single explanation for this nightmare, namely the apocalyptic vision of a criminally insane, charismatic cult leader who was hell-bent on bringing
about this infernal nightmare in flames and the extermination of the children and the women and the other innocents is not an explanation that should be cast aside." What Lantos meant was not the most plausible explanation, but the merely the simplest. However, when departments and agencies such as the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigations, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Department of the Treasure, plus the military, hatch and carry out cooperative plans, the results are bound to be anything but simple. Therefore, the simplest of explanation, which Rep. Lantos thought should not be cast aside and which the JHOSC ultimately adopted, and was not, to say the least, plausible by any stretch of the imagination.
"And I find it very offending to me, and offensive to the memory of the Davidians and everyone else involvedin this tragedy, to wrap it up in a nice clean, 'Well, it was just a mass suicide, end of story,' because it was far from that."
Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the JHOSC not only decided to not cast aside what Lantos claimed was the most plausible explanation, David Koresh was a criminally insane, charismatic cult leader who was, as Time put it, likely a "devil who had deceived" his followers and deservedly "was thrown into the lake of fire and sulfur." No, it embraced it as the only explanation. After all, what Congress is best at is making deals: "You help us cover up the crimes of our party's administration, and when the time rolls around again for you, we'll do the same for yours." That 1995 Oversight Subcommittee on Crime was not without dissenters. Rep. Adam Schiff appears in the film during the hearings as one of the more skeptical members of the Subcommittee.
But the bipartisanship of the conclusions was made clear. Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, a Republican, was unequivocal: "Let me be clear. This investigation has not uncovered any evidence of political corruption or influences. We have not found any of that. There was no conspiracy to kill Branch Davidians." Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat, should have been given an award for the most emphatic liar of the congressional investigation: "The record of the Waco incident documents mistakes. But what the record from Waco does not evidence, however, is any improper motive or intent on the part of law enforcement. David Koresh and the Davidians set fire to themselves and committed suicide. The government did not do that." Psychologists have said that some amount of lying is healthy. However, the lies told by members of the Department of Justice, including Janet Reno, and by those of the FBI and Department of Treasury, etc. were of the same sort told by a sociopath, whether it be beating his wife or murdering her and dismembering her body. "I could never do that," he is often heard saying, which is to say not that he didn't do it but that he neither wants you to believe he has committed the crime of which he is accused, nor does he even want to believe he is capable of it. The public does not want to contemplate that we are a nation whose government would conspire to kill its citizens, even its women and children, in the way that it obviously did. It's too monstrous and therefore unthinkable.
Therefore, however much the statements by Hatch and Biden fly in the face of the evidence presented in the film, evidence which is but a fraction of what was presented to the committee in testimonies, graphics, and documents, many U.S. citizens, albeit a shrinking minority, are still comforted by those lies which are known as the pathological state of denial. "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" is an antidote to that denial of which the lies told during those congressional hearings played a key part. It's also an antidote to the government lies told regarding the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 2001 attacks of 2001. The victor of all these acts of state terrorism is of course the government and its various agencies, but the history recorded in this film is told by the victims and those who spoke on their behalf. Some of the last words were given to former FBI forensic photographer Farris Rookstool, who was part of the evidence response team, and is no doubt as haunted today by the memories of what he witnessed as he was during those interviews.
Criticizing the conclusion of the congressional Oversight Subcommittee on Crime, which the media accepted as the truth (just as it has accepted the reports of the 9/11 Commission and NIST), he said, "That assertion to me, that the media and that the government has made a blanket declaration that the Branch Davidians committed quote 'mass suicide,' to equate it to a Jonestown, Guyana suicide, is the most irresponsible statement that can be attributed to anything having to do with the Waco incident…And I find it very offending to me, and offensive to the memo
ry of the Davidians and everyone else involved in this tragedy, to wrap it up in a nice clean, 'Well, it was just a mass suicide, end of story'; because it was far from that." Rookstool had photographed the mutilated, charred remains of the Branch Davidian victims, including 25 children.
It's hard to get around the mountain of evidence supporting the argument that our government, through the cooperation of various departments and bureaus, and the military, deliberately killed David Koresh and the 82 Branch Davidians who remained in the Mount Carmel Center, and that they killed them with bullets, with lethal gases, by running over them with tanks, and by burning alive any survivors who could not escape, and that afterwards they destroyed much of the crime scene evidence, seized and "lost" other collected evidence, and committed perjury during the congress hearings. The BATF, FBI, and DoJ agents, and all the others responsible for these crimes, had to lie. They had to lie to each other and to their families, and us, but most of all to themselves. The rules of engagement were that they were only to fire their weapons if they were fired upon, and had to do so to protect their own lives―not the lives of their wives and children, mind you, as the Davidians were forced to do, but themselves. The Davidians never fired until their lives and those of the women and children were in danger, and only after they begged for them to stop shooting at them, as evidence by desperate 9-11 calls made to try to get them to stop and to ask again for negotiations.
Rep. Lantos and Sens. Hatch and Biden, as well as most of the other committee members, such as Senator Chuck Schumer, insisted that there were only "mistakes" made, but no crimes committed, by the federal government during the Waco holocaust, which they euphemistically referred to as an "incident," are just as guilty of the murders of the Davidians as anyone who is who is an accessory to a crime after the fact. But their constituents have judged them time and time again as guiltless. Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer are still U.S. senators, and, as everybody knows, so is Joe Biden, who could be our next Vice President. Being complicit in crimes against humanity has apparently not troubled Biden. Murder, they say, is easy after a while, especially when it's committed wholesale and remotely from the grand halls of the Capitol, where senators' and representatives' own opinions are far more important than those of victims of government crimes or their advocates, even when the victims number in the millions. In October 2002, Sen. Biden voted in favor of the Resolution to Authorize Military Force Against Iraq, which means that he authorized the supreme war crime: waging an aggressive war against a sovereign nation.
Were one to know nothing more about Rep. Tom Lantos than that he was a Holocaust survivor, it would be shocking to hear what he had to say during those 1995 hearings. However, this was the same congressman who was a leading champion of the First Gulf War, and the one who gave the official stamp of approval to the sensational propaganda that Iraqi soldiers were removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators. As an apologist for the real perpetrators of the crimes against the Davidians, Lantos, along with Schumer and others, repeated the venomous mantras that had demonized David Koresh during the siege two years earlier. It wasn't that Rep. Lantos didn't wish it to be cast aside that David Koresh was a "criminally insane, charismatic cult leader" who was stockpiling illegal guns to use against the U.S. government; he would have it no other way.
The psychiatrist who appears in "Waco: Rules of Engagement" said that when he went to Mount Carmel during the days of the standoff he thought that he would be studying the pathologies of the Branch Davidians, but he found them to be the sane ones, but learned that pathologies were rampant among the people lurking about outside waiting for the command that would bring the end. It was in the end the government agents, the press, and the public at the scene who had the insane apocalyptic vision. And it seemed that it was also Rep. Lantos and many of his colleagues on that committee who projected their own apocalyptic fears (and memories, in the case of Lantos) onto David Koresh. However, whatever psychological pathologies that may have afflicted Lantos, they were not the direct cause of his mortality. He would still be a US congressman today and long enough to vote us into several more wars, had he not contracted cancer of the esophagus (he wasn't a smoker). He died in February 2008.
While we would hope that the only survivor of the Holocaust to serve in Congress would have been a leading champion of human rights, this could hardly be further from the case. Yes, it's true that during a hearing before the House Committee on Foreign Relations last November, three months before his death, he raked over the coals the CEO of Yahoo, Jerry Yang, and its General Counsel, Michael Callahan, calling them "moral pygmies" for providing the Chinese government information with the identifying data on a Chinese dissident named Shi Tao that resulted in his receiving a ten-year prison sentence. But, Lantos was hardly a moral giant. Even during the same hearing he proved yet again what a master he was at exploiting the media to his advantage. Playing for the cameras, he had Tao's weeping mother sit directly behind Yang and Callahan, and at the end of his sermon he said, "Mr. Yang, Mr. Callahan, Shi Tao’s mother is sitting in the first row right behind you. I would urge you to beg the forgiveness of the mother whose son is languishing behind bars due to Yahoo’s actions." It was good theater, and seemed calculated more to cap his legacy as a congressman who protected human rights as to help Shi Tao or his mother. Lantos' previous years as a congressman, belies such a legacy, however. Besides being party to the denial of justice for the mass murder of the Branch Davidians and being a leading proponent of the First Gulf War against Iraq, Lantos was also gung-ho, at least at first, about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, voting in 2002, as most members of Congress did, to authorize military force, even though it was illegal. Obviously he never had as much sympathy for U.S. dissidents or real dying Texan and Iraqi mothers and babies as he did for fictional Kuwaiti babies. Plus ça change—others will take the place of Rep. Lantos, others who will express as much caring in their legislation toward some populations as callousness toward others—plus c’est la même chose.
This is all the more reason that U.S. citizens should watch "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," and William Gazecki should be encouraged to create a sequel—one which traces the aftermath of the murders of the Branch Davidians through the growth of the Patriot Movement and its demise at the hands of the FBI, ADL, SPC, CIA, and Mossad, and their fellow travelers, who have framed the Patriots over the years. By now we know, or should know, just how brutal our own government has been not just to civilians throughout the world, but against its own citizens. By now we know, or should know, just how capable it is of being even more savage. By now we should have realized that it doesn't matter if it's Republicans or Democrats who are in control of the White House or Congress.
Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's infamous Secretary of State who said that punishing Iraq through sanctions was worth the price of the 600,000 children who had starved to death (by the invasion it was over a million), was a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Barack Obama invited her into his camp after he became the presumptive Democratic candidate.
Will we also see a recycling of other advisers and cabinet members from past administrations in the new ones? Well, yes. There's Zbigniew Brzezinski, a wiz at Russia and the former Soviet Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia, is also on Obama's foreign relations advisory committee. Why not Janet Reno, a.k.a. "Waco Angel of Death"? Plus ça change... We already know the corporatist, anti-humanity oil-war themes of the Republican candidate, John McCain, and his censorious running mate, Alaska's governor Sarah Palin. Henry Kissinger, one of the worst war criminals alive today, is never far away. The most lethal foreign policy advisers seem to be as immortal as Beelzebub. Therefore, plus c’est la même chose, policies, domestic and foreign, are recycled and refined to become even more formidable enemies of the Constitution and international law.
"Waco: The Rules of Engagement" does offer the public one of the greatest hopes for change: when government lies to its citizens, there are always artists and writers among them who are as compelled to seek out and tell the truth as the government is to perpetuate lies. But the hope is not in those expressions alone, but in heeding the warning which lie within them. Gazecki wisely allows the Davidians to ask from their ashen graves the questions we are now asking ourselves and each other ever more frequently. Are we a people who believe in the principles set forth in the Constitution and the rights spelled out in the Bill of Rights? If we take that question alone to heart, we can't help but see that David Koresh was indeed a prophet, as were all those Davidians who were sacrified even while they proved with their burning bodies that that holocaust on April 19, 1993 would be the point of no return on the path of a government on its way to becoming worse than any of the foreign regimes we were brought up being warned about. Unless, they tell us through their medium William Gazecki, unless we demand that our elected officials, the military, and everyone who takes the oath to defend and uphold the Constitution against enemies domestic and foreign.
During the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearings on the Constitutional Limits of Executive Power, California Congressman Adam Schiff, stated his intention to establish a new "Church Committee" to once again investigate abuses of deep state operations, reaching back to past administrations to even those before 1977. The list of the abuses of power by the executive branch of government grows increasingly by the day, so that it will take generations to get through it all. The mass murder of the Davidians should nonetheless be give high priority. By demanding that the government take responsibility for its crimes against humanity, including those against the Davidians, which was a crime against us all, we will also be taking responsibility for our nation's destiny, for ours is one that cannot afford to remain the same despite the changes.
trailer
"Waco: The Rules of Engagement" official website and DVD sales
Waco: The Rules of Engagement (134 min.) Also view (below) "Waco: A New Revelation" (1999). Released four years after "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," this documentary reveals even more disturbing evidence destroyed, lost, or otherwise covered up by the federal government. It also provides information that the military was involved in the operation of April 19, 1993 in capacities greater than merely consulting or supplying equipment and that the participation of Delta Force there could only have occurred by order of President Clinton. As a result of this film, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed the former senator John Danforth to conduct an "independent" investigation. Unsurprisingly, despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary, his report (see below) merely echoed what was stated before: the Branch Davidians committed suicide. Waco: A New Revelation (1999)
Jason van Vleet, director; Michael McNulty, researcher
part I (54 min.)
Waco: A New Revelation
part II (58 min.)
Holocaust—in Waco, Texas
Appearing in the same May 3, 1993 issue of Time magazine as an extensive cover story on the tragedy of David Koresh and the Branch Davidians was a column by Charles Krauhthammer called "Holocaust." No, ostensibly it had nothing to do with that final conflagration of the Mt. Carmel Center ("the logical conclusion," as Bob Ricks, the FBI spokesman called it), in which 76 souls died or their bodies burned, in addition to the six killed during the previous weeks of the siege by federal agents. Krauthammer was not speaking of that holocaust. He was criticizing what he claimed were inaccurate comparisons being made between the Jewish Holocaust and what he preferred to call the "ethnic conflict" in Bosnia. He complained about the inappropriate use of "borrowed terms" such as "death camps and genocide," whose applications to anything short of the scale and methods of Nazi 
Germany's genocide of European Jews "betrays a poverty of language." At that time a controversy was raging between advocates for Bosnians and apologists of Serbian aggressions against them as to whether or not what was occurring was indeed genocide.
The lives of several million Bosnians depended on winning on the politics-of-language front, where Col. Krauthammer commanded his columns. Means of "ethnic cleansing," which is but a sanitized term for genocide—savage atrocities and most brutal cruelties—were being perpetrated against Bosnians, albeit not yet on a scale of the Holocaust, nor executed with the bureaucratic exactitude 
of the Holocaust—the perpetrators were, after all, Serbians, not Germans. Despite Krauthammer's objections, in 2007 the World Court ruled: that Serbians were guilty of genocide, not for participating in Krauthammer's preferred "ethnic conflict," in the case of the 1995 massacre at Srebrenica, considered to be the worst massacre in Europe since World War II; and that Serbia had violated the United Nations Convention on Genocide by doing nothing to avert the atrocities committed, genocidal killings. The International Criminal Tribunal subsequently indicted former president Slobodan Milosevic, and four other Serbian leaders, for crimes against humanity, including, yes, genocide, and war crimes. Just recently, in July 2008, Radovan Karadzic was apprehended. Perhaps he will use Krauthammer's objections to theexaggerated uses of the 
term "genocide" in his defense.
Krauthammer's complaint about terms "borrowed" from the Holocaust, seem to also indirectly warn against using the word holocaust to describe the con-flagration near Waco two weeks earlier in which the survivors of the siege of the Mt. Carmel Center perished. Altogether, 82 Branch Davidians, including 25 children, died between February 28 and April 19. Whether one agrees with the official explanaton-it was a mass suicide-or that it was a mass murder, at the hands of the federal government, doesn't alter the fact that 82 souls were unnecessarily sacrificed. To call those deaths a holocaust in no way reflects a poverty of language or meaning. The etymology of the word holocaust is Greek, from the word holokaustos; OED's first definition is "a sacrifice wholly consumed by fire." There is no more appropriate term which can be used to describe what happened at the conclusion of the federal government's siege of the Branch Davidians. It was a tragedy in the Greek sense: the events pivoted daily and ultimately onthe moral (as well as immoral and amoral) decisions of men and women.
To those who have objectively reviewed the extant evidence and the congressional testimonies, the Branch Davidians were, for reasons not yet entirely clear, sacrificed by members of the Clinton administration and subsequently covered up with the complicity of Congress. But those 82 souls who died at Mt. Carmel has moved many people throughout the world from various religious, social, and political affinities to believe those deaths should not be in vain and led many to see the U.S. government with new eyes, to wit: the Branch Davidians did not die due to their lack of will to live, but, rather, due to the government's will to tyrannize.
There is no shortage of details about April 19, 1993 that continue to shock us fifteen years after that holocaust. No less stunning than the savagery eradication of the Branch Davidians in their home is that on the evening of that same day President Clinton addressed foreign and national dignitaries during the dedication in Washington D.C. of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum:
"The Holocaust began when the most civilized country of its day unleashed unpredented acts of cruelty and hatred abetted by perversions of science, philosophy, and law—a culture which producecd Goethe, Schiller, and Beethoven, and then brought forth Hitler and then Himler, the merciless hordes who were themselves educated as others who were educated stood by and did nothing. Millions died for who they were, how they worshipped, what they believed, and who they loved."
The dedication of the Holocaust memorial and the final conflagration at Mt. Carmel were on Passover, also the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the final battle when the Nazi storm troopers moved in, burning the buildings and killing all the survivors. Mt. Carmel and the Branch Davidians were surely on the minds of more than a few of the attendees. Clinton had proved with his own actions that even the most highly educated people of what is supposedly the most civilized nations are capable of unspeakable cruelties.
The Colombian author Gabriel García Márquez, the author of the book Clinton once claimed was his favorite, One Hundred Years of Solitude, often wrote tales of a village which are a microcosm of the world. The siege of Mt. Carmel can and should also be viewed not only as a microcosm but as a sign of things to come.
The Danforth Report
Following is an excerpt from "The Final Report to the Deputy Attorney General Concerning the 1993 Confrontation at the Mt. Carmel Center, Waco, Texas," submitted November 8, 2000 by John C. Danforth, Special Counsel.
....The experts further concluded that the CS and methylene chloride inserted into the complex as part of the plan did not start or contribute to the spread of the fire. In addition to the allegtions that CS gas could have started the fire in the Davidian complex, some have claimed that tear gas is lethal and should not have been used by the FBI at Waco. Indeed, although concluding, "[I]t is highly unlikely that the CS riot control agent, in the quanities used by the FBI, reached lethal toxic levels," the United States House of Representatives Judiciary Committee and the Committee on Government Reform and Oversight issued a report on August 2, 1996, stating:
The presented evidence does indicate that CS insertion into the enclosed bunker, at a time when women and children were assembled inside that enclosed space, could have been a proximate cause of or directly resulted in some or all of the deaths attributed to asphysiation in the autopsy reports.Therefore, the Office of Special Counsel believed that it was necessary to investigate thoroughly whether the CS gas used at Waco could have killed any of the Davidians. As stated in the Introduction, the evidence clearly establishes that the Davidians killed themselves. There is no doubt that they set the complex on fire; they refused to come out of the complex after they started the fire; and they shot themselves. No forensic pathologist who has examined the evidence has found any indication that the tear gas killed any Davidian. Notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence that the Davidians killed themselves, the Office of Special Counsel notes that one of the toxicologists it retained, Dr. Uwe Heinrich, has concluded that, if people exposed to high levels of CS are not able to leave a room, "there is a distinct possibility that this kind of CS exposure can significantly contribute to or even cause lethal effects. "Based upon the report of the Office of Special Counsel expert Dr. George Lucier, the Office of Special Counsel concludes that the amount of methylene chloride in the complex did not reach lethal levels and did not cause the deaths of any Davidians. Some of the Davidians, however, could have experienced mild irritation, dizziness, and decreased responsiveness to visual and auditory signals from the methylene chloride.
This opinion is contrary to the expert advice given to Attorney General Reno before she approved the FBI's plan to insert tear gas into the complex. She has consistently stated that her primary concern was whether the tear gas could permanently harm the occupants of the complex, particularly the children. She has stated that had she been told the tear gas could be lethal, she would never have approved the tear gas plan. The expert who advised Attorney General Reno and the FBI on the potential effects of CS gas in April of 1993 told them that the tear gas could not cause death or permanent injury. Based on the then-available literature regarding the effects of CS gas on humans, the expert's advise to Attorney General Reno may have been well founded at that time. Indeed, no human death resulting from CS has ever been reported in the scientific literature.The tear gas inserted by the FBI on April 19, 1993, was a liquid aerosol of CS powder dissolved in methylene chloride.
Determining the lethality of CS for humans is only based on an extrapolation from the animal studies. Based upon these animal studies, the Office of Special Counsel's toxicologist concluded that extended exposure to high volumes of CS could potentially be lethal.The following analysis explains why the Office of Special Counsel has concluded that CS, although potentially lethal, was not responsible for the deaths of any Davidians. At some time in the late morning of April 19, 1993, many of the Davidians, including all the children, moved to the concrete bunker in the back of the complex. The bunker was a 20' by 21' room with concrete walls and no windows, located next to the cafeteria. Its only opening was a doorway approximately 4 feet wide. At 11:49 a.m., one of the CEV's penetrated the front of the complex, moving in the general direction of the bunker, and inserted one canister of tear gas into the complex. The CEV was approximately 17 feet away from the bunker when it inserted this tear gas. At 11:50 a.m., the CEV, then approximately 28 feet from the front of the bunker, inserted a second canister of tear gas.Whether potentially lethal levels of CS were reached in the Davidian complex is not known for sure. Some of that tear gas, although no one knows exactly how much, probably entered the bunker.
Dr. Heinrich has stated that the lethal effects of CS depend upon the exposed person being prevented from leaving the area of exposure. The evidence indicates that, through the gassing operation, many Davidians moved away from exposed rooms, moved and walked freely, and protected themselves with gas masks and wet towels around their faces. There was a doorway to exit the bunker, and people could have left the room. According to the Office of Special Counsel toxicologist, because of the significant discomfort caused by CS, he would fully expect that, unless individuals were forced to stay in the room, any potentially lethal amount of CS would have forced the occupants out of the room long before they could inhale the amount needed to kill them. Additionally, although there are no human studies, the studies done on laboratory animals indicate that humans would not die immediately following short-term inhalation exposure to high concentrations of CS. Therefore, even if potentially lethal levels of CS had entered the bunker, and Davidians were holding some of the members in the bunker against their will, there was insufficient time for the CS to kill anyone. The tear gas insertions near the bunker were at 11:49 a.m. and 11:50 a.m. The Davidians started one or more fires in the cafeteria at approximately 12:05 p.m., quickly filling that space with smoke. By 12:14 p.m., the roof of the cafeteria had burned through and the forensic pathologist believes that by this time, everyone in the bunker was dead from either the gunshot wounds or smoke inhalation.
* * * *
The Office of Special Counsel also reviewed the decision of the FBI delay allowing firefighting equipment to arrive at the scene. The Office of Special Counsel has concluded that the Davidians were shooting at outsiders, which would have endangered the lives of any firefighters who approached. In fact, a Title III intercept from April 17, 1993, records Davidians indicating that they intended to prevent firefighters from approaching the complex: "You're defintely right...I think all the time he knows it...nobody comes in here..."; "Catch fire and they couldn't bring the fire trucks and they couldn't even get near us"; "Exactly." Because firefighters could not immediately approach the complex and fight the fire, it was impossible to control or suppress it. Furthermore, the evidence indicates that many of the Davidians did not want to leave the burning building.
Died February 28, 1993
black, British
white, British
white, American
