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Great balls of fire
The press got a little burned at Waco as well.

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By Sean Elder

"A paranoid-schizophrenic is a guy who just found out what's going on." -- William S. Burroughs

Sept. 9, 1999 | Though the government's siege and destruction of the Branch Davidian headquarters in Waco, Texas, in 1993 has returned to the news with an incendiary burst in the last few weeks, it never really went away. On a host of right-wing Web sites, in fringe literature and on talk radio, "Waco," like "Ruby Ridge," has become a kind of code for all the far right's worst fears about government interference in individual freedom and the state's determination to resort to violence when denied absolute obeisance. One phenomenon feeds the other, of course. The press ignored the inconsistencies in the FBI's account and accepted the government's pat answers to seemingly logical questions. (Why assault the "compound" and endanger the children within if David Koresh and his followers were the unstable, apocalyptic cult they'd been portrayed as?) It has accordingly been demonized by the right as being irresponsible and worse.

As Steven Brill can tell you, there's no better way to get the press to ignore you than by challenging its credibility. It's fair to say most people covering Waco had never been anywhere near that town before and won't be heading back soon. More to the point, the people bearing the conspiracy theories since -- the nut jobs who see black helicopters behind every UNICEF card -- are not considered reliable witnesses.

Mark Pitcavage is a historian who charts the doings of the militia movement and heard the Waco theories long before the FBI began "discovering" evidence the existence of which it had previously denied. Like a lot of people, he didn't trust the messenger. "They deserve a little bit of credit," he told the New York Times of the conspiracy theorists who kept this story alive, "but you wish that someone else had discovered this stuff instead. These guys have ulterior motives." ("Mr. Drudge, a Ms. Goldberg on line one.")

Also Today The truth about Waco A survivor says the government still isn't admitting its role in the deaths of 74 Branch Davidians.

"For quite some time, all of the accusations about Waco were from very unreliable people or people who mixed valid allegations with very invalid allegations," Pitcavage told me. "It's natural to distrust things like that." What is ironic is that many of the same journalists who mistrust the Waco alarmists when they question the government grew up distrusting the government themselves, following (and sometimes covering) stories as diverse and earth-shattering as My Lai, Watergate and Contragate. Pitcavage, who has worked closely with the FBI since Waco and Randy Weaver's siege at Ruby Ridge in Idaho (during which government sharpshooters fatally shot Weaver's wife and son), does not see a double standard there. "The FBI has gained a lot more credibility since, say, 1970," he believes. "Cointelpro is a thing of the past."

This is just the sort of attitude that drives those who see problems in the Waco siege wild. "I have heard this over and over again," says Dan Gifford, one of the producers of the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement." Mimicking the knee-jerk response, he continued: "'You know that evil FBI had that Cointel program; they investigated Martin Luther King and wrote a letter threatening his life and Daniel Ellsberg yada yada -- all these people whose politics I like. But they would never do that to someone whose politics I don't like, and whose culture I don't like.'" Gifford is downright moderate by the far right's standards; he was a producer at CNN for 10 years before lighting out for Hollywood, and his film wears the mantle of respectability, having opened at Sundance and been nominated for an Academy Award. (The video, recently released, is available at most video stores and on Gifford's Web site. In keeping with the hall-of-mirrors reality of conspiracy theorists of all stripes, there are now two versions of "Rules of Engagement" out there. More on that later.) Still, he feels that Koresh and company were disposable by the standards of the liberal elite -- the people who control the press and the government. "Here in Hollywood it's the last type of person you can make fun of without impunity: the angry white guy."

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