A New Documentary from Archival Interview Footage of the Surviving Branch Davidians.

“IN THEIR OWN WORDS”

From the Creator of

“DAY 51 – THE TRUE STORY OF WACO”

• April 21, 2010 Antiwar Radio: David T. Hardy

• July 14, 2008 Antiwar Radio: L. Neil Smith

• March 20, 2008 Antiwar Radio: Matthew Cole

• October 24, 2007 Antiwar Radio: Jacob Hornberger

• April 19, 2007 Antiwar Radio: Mike McNulty

Playlist location at youtube.com

DAY 51 dot net is the ONLY Official, Authorized, Definitive, Final Cut Source for “Day 51: The True Story of Waco.”

DAY 51 was one of the earliest documentaries covering the terrible events perpetrated against the men, women and children of the Branch Davidian community.

This site hopes to serve as an expanding Memorial Site and Informational Resource.

We will soon be offering the Best Quality, Definitive, Authorized, Final Cut of the film available anywhere for distribution, produced by the true creators of the film, producer Richard Mosley and associate producer Jim Bentley.

Part One

Part Two

Part Three

Part Four

Part Five

Part Six

Part Seven

Part Eight

THE DAVIDIAN MASSACRE
Disturbing Questions about Waco which Must Be Answered
© 1995 Carol Moore

Index of Links to Full Text of Each Chapter

Order the Book

Preface

List of Davidian Victims

1.      Why the BATF and the FBI Massacred the Branch Davidians

2.       The BATF’s Flawed Investigation

3.       The BATF’s Ruthless Raid Plan

4.       The BATF Initiated Violent Raid

5.       The BATF Actions Led to Ten Deaths

6.       The BATF and Treasury Department Coverups

7.       FBI Imposed Militaristic Siege

8.       FBI Sabotaged Negotiations

9.       FBI Tricked Attorney General Into Approving Gas and Tank Assault

10.     FBI’s April 19th Gas and Tank Attack

11.     FBI Tank Attacks Led to Fire and Death

12.     The FBI-Justice Department-White House Coverup

13.     Congressional Hearings Continued the Coverup

The Davidian Massacre was published as a mass market paperback by Gun Owners Foundation and Legacy Communications in October, 1995.  Copyright 1995 Carol Moore ISBN 1-880692-22-8 Not for redistribution on the internet or other media without explicit permission.

To see many of the photographs and graphics in the book, plus various others, click here.
This electronic version does not contain some stylistic changes made by the editor; other grammatical and punctuation changes have been made.  Corrections, additions, comments and updates will be made in the near future and clearly identified by italics and other notations. Some links to other pages also will be included.
For book ordering information click here.
For five years of updates on Waco, as well as information about Committee for Waco Justice activities, click here.

The Davidian Massacre – Book Index.

David T. Hardy, author of This Is Not an Assault: Penetrating the Web of Official Lies Regarding the Waco Incident, discusses the regular practice of federal law enforcement agencies conducting headline-grabbing raids just before Congressional appropriations, the scandal-plagued ATF’s attempt to get back in the Clinton government’s good graces by cracking down on right-wing groups, how ATF “undercover” agents – just nine days before the assault began – were granted access to the Branch Davidian compound and test-fired weapons with David Koresh, the FBI’s attempts to humiliate and provoke a violent response from the Davidians, how FOIA requests have reclaimed some of the reams of missing evidence, how Janet Reno was apparently lied to and manipulated into approving an escalation of force, the lethal effects of highly concentrated CS gas and the infrared footage that shows gunfire was indeed coming from FBI positions surrounding the compound.

 Via ScottHortonShow.com

Listen to Scott Horton Interview David T. Hardy:

•  Antiwar Radio: David T. Hardy - 4/20/10 

The Following is via Archive.org as the site appears to have vanished…

Waco Feb 28-April 19, 1993

Five Year Freedom of Information lawsuit yields new evidence–

Videotapes, audiotapes, planning documents. But first, a few late-breaking

(hey, this page has been here for years) highlights:

(1) For a preview of my new book, “This Is Not An Assault,” click here.

(2) A brief word about the author. Ignore it if you want to assess the evidence. Take a look if you’re concerned about whether the author is an anarcho-fascist who sleeps in camoflage pajamas and believes that the meaning of the Constitution can only be determined with his secret decoder ring. (Decoder rings available for $10 plus S&H)

(3) A discussion of the continuing FLIR (forward looking infrared) controversy, over whether the FLIR videotapes indicate FBI agents may have shot on the day of the fire.

(3) A roster of the extensive military aid (never mind the Posse Comitatus Act) given at Waco — everything from barbed wire to battlefield robots. Not just the ATF raid, but the entire FBI siege were funded out of “War on Drugs” monies — until the military figured out the ruse, months later, pointed out that FBI had violated two statutes, and demanded reibursement.

(4) For the latest revelation from ATF–a taped conversation between the wounded Koresh and ATF agent Cavanaugh, at the end of the gunbattle, in which Koresh says he “really liked” the ATF agent who investigated him, and had “always loved law enforcement, ‘cuz y’all guys risk your lives every day.” click here.

(5) Another new page: click here for a discussion of how high the responsibility really went on April 19, 1993.

The 1993 incident outside Waco, Texas, was the bloodiest encounter in the history of Federal law enforcement. By its end in the fire of April 19, nearly a ninety civilians and four law enforcement agents were dead.

The incident originated in an attempt by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to serve search and arrest warrants on a building, known to its residents as Mount Carmel, located in a rural area a few miles outside of Waco, Texas. The operation required mustering appoximately a hundred agents (flown in from sites around the country), and who received military training at Ft. Hood. They travelled in a convoy of sixty vehicles and were supported by three National Guard helicopters and one fixed-wing aircraft, with armored vehicles in reserve.

The official explanation is that the raid was intended to gather evidence in support of suspicion that the residents of Mount Carmel (members of the Branch Davidians, an offshoot of Seventh-Day Adventism), possessed machineguns without the required licenses and tax, and that nothing but overwhelming military force would enable he arrest of their leader, David Koresh, and a search of the residence.

The official version is undercut by BATF’s concession that, when informed of the investigation, Koresh invited agents to come over, look at the firearms, and take any that they might feel were questionable. It is also undercut by a rather embarassing event. Thanks to the Freedom of Information Act, we now know how ATF undercover agents investigating the case spent February 19, 1993–nine days before the raid.

They went shooting with David Koresh. He provided the ammunition, and they handed him their guns. No, I am not jesting. And yes, he knew they were agents. Click here for their report.

Even a well-heeled agency does not divert a hundred agents with air support to investigate a single and rather small case–particularly not if a simple audit could resolve the matter.

A different, and less acceptable, motivation appears most likely. At the Federal level, law enforcement operations center upon the annual appropriation process. Anyone who has worked with such an agency (as I did, for nine years) knows that they try to schedule a “showcase” operation, one which will garner national coverage, just before their House Appropriations cycle begins. An agency director loves to begin the hearings with “Typical of the dangerous work undertaken by our agents is ….” Such a showcase move is usually given a suitably dramatic and military-sounding name.

The codename for the Waco raid was “Operation Trojan Horse.” The code for its initiation was “Showtime.” The target date was less than two weeks before BATF’s House Appropriations hearings were scheduled. The team assigned included a Public Information Officer, who made sure to alert newspapers to stand by for a story that weekend. There would indeed be a story–four agents and six civilians would die to make it.

Waco FOIA suit and book “This Is Not Assault”.

Dick Morris: Bill Clinton Personally Orchestrated the 1993 Waco, Texas Tragedy.

by Anthony Gregory
by Anthony Gregory

Every year for the last five years [1, 2, 3, 4, 5], I have written an article commemorating the Waco siege: the 51-day standoff from February 28 to April 19, 1993, between government agents – ATF, FBI and US military – and the Branch Davidians: a conflict ending in a conflagration that consumed the lives of 76 civilians, including 21 children.

That I’ve written about this so consistently raises some questions: Am I obsessed? Why do I, and a number of other commentators, feel the need to keep bringing up this sad episode in modern American history?

Waco still matters. Not just because it has become the paradigmatic symbol for federal police power gone out of control. Not just because it starkly demonstrates the American government’s militarism unleashed against its own people. Not just because it showcases the propensity of politicians and law enforcers to deceitfully cover and obscure their wrongful actions. No, Waco’s still important mostly because it shows exactly what happens when people resist the unjust incursions of their own government, including under democracy.

Consider, in contrast, what has happened quite recently in Texas. This time, state and local officials seized 416 children from the Fundamentalist Latter-day Saints (FLDS) Church. The supposed justification was the abuse of minors, but there is in any event no reason to assume these children would be less abused in the custody of the Texas government, whose foster system has been rife with child rape, poisonings and murder.

This mass seizure of children featured officials “wearing body armor and carrying automatic weapons, backed by an armored personnel carrier.” The militarization of domestic police has infected every level of American government, down to the local. The Texas police were ready to conduct a warlike raid of the Fundamentalist Mormon home, and the particular justification for it has shifted from a specific report of abuse (still unconfirmed, and possibly a prank) to a more general one, just as the rationale behind Waco shifted (from a methamphetamine lab, to illegal guns, to child abuse).

Thank goodness the family under siege this time around did not forcibly resist, because it could have ended violently, with many of those kids not just kidnapped, but killed. Is this not a lesson to learn from Waco – that outright resisting the police state will likely get you killed, and most Americans will still side against you? Indeed, it has been downright troubling how many Americans have unquestioningly swallowed the government’s line on this FLDS affair, just as they swallowed the government line on Waco.

The police state in this country is very real, and for any who do not understand the truly violent nature of law enforcement, it is worth considering the costs of non-compliance. The truly unique thing about Waco was not just that so many innocent people lost their lives. The unique thing was that people resisted.* And that’s why they lost their lives.

In America it has become increasingly easy to get oneself killed by the government. Simply “resisting arrest” – including arrest for a fabricated offense – can get one tased and beaten. Sometimes, even the most unsuspecting members of society, like Derek J. Hale, are murdered by the state. If your home is under full-blown siege by government jackboots, delaying compliance can mean death. It did in Philadelphia, at Ruby Ridge, and at Waco, Texas.

We should remember Waco as the quintessence of modern government police power – not gone out of control, but simply the way it acts when it meets enough resistance. Government power flows from the barrel of a gun, a gun with which taxpayers and subjects are threatened constantly. When the gun is literally aimed at a particularly unlucky denizen, his choices are quite limited.

This relates to the radical principle of resisting tyranny on which America was founded. The Second Amendment was not meant to protect the right to go hunting, despite what liberals might say. Nor was it principally meant as a defense against common criminals, as the right usually stresses. The idea is that people have a right to use force to defend themselves against and even overthrow tyrannical government – an idea that some NRA members sometimes utter out one side of the mouth, while the other side is busy defending the drug war, the empire, the Republicans, the Bush administration, the local police and the federal goons empowered by the war on terror.

Yet violently resisting government agents, even when one is in the right – or, as Cory Maye was, simply mistaken as to who was breaking into his house – does not tend to protect one’s liberty, in most cases. It is worse than futile. It leads to increases in state power, in fact. So long as public opinion sides with the police brutalizers, kidnappers and murderers, violent resistance is generally at best counterproductive. Once public opinion turns against the state, however, violent revolution isn’t even always necessary, as was seen in the glorious end of Communism in Russia.

So long as public opinion regarding such incidents as Waco remains as pro-state as it is, we have a long ways to go toward recapturing the spirit of the American Revolution in this country. The very way that Waco has been remembered indicates the uphill battle. For the last fifteen years, Americans have been in denial of the type of government they live under.

Since 1993, liberals have wanted to believe the Waco atrocity was the fault of the Branch Davidians, and not the fault of the government. Perhaps some official made a minor error, but none of the main blame should fall on government, not on the Clinton administration and not on the very idea of state power. No, the liberals of 1993 thought of government as an institution inseparable from the good society, an institution charged with doing all these great things – collecting taxes to pay for necessary “services,” combating inequality, preserving the planet, ensuring economic fairness and defending human rights the world over. The left did not want to see the dark side of the regime they loved. And so, once the Branch Davidians – a true minority (incidentally, about half of them were people of color, as the left never noticed) – were viciously invaded and attacked, dozens of their members slaughtered by the government, most liberals refused to think the worst of their beloved warm-and-fuzzy Clintonian state.

The government of the 1990s was supposed to be the “good government” that liberals never cease to remind us we can have, once again, as soon as the White House is ridden of the Bush family. But George W. Bush didn’t conduct the massacre at Waco. And even if Bill Clinton’s wife blessedly loses the election, Barack Obama gives no guarantee that he will respect the fundamental rights of Americans any better than his predecessors. Certainly, McCain will not temper the police state any more than Bush has after Clinton. More Wacos are always possible in the current political climate.

And so in a sense, the liberals were right that blame didn’t belong squarely with Clinton, just as today’s conservatives are narrowly correct when they defend Bush against selective condemnation. But the modern right too seems not to understand the implications of Waco, or else it would be impossible for it to have taken the positions it has over the police state, including local police, these last fifteen (and actually fifty or more) years. Like yesterday’s liberals, today’s conservatives are just as naïve toward, or at least accepting of, the ugly underbelly of the government they’re proud to live under.

The right tried to drive Clinton out of office – some for such crimes as Waco, but most for the crime of lying to the government. Today’s better liberals, many of them, have long wanted to do the same to Bush. Nearly all Americans hope November will usher in a state both a little more effective and a little more palatable in the ways they’d prefer.

But this focus on the culprit in power misses the main point. While they do have moral responsibility for their actions, it is not just the men in charge of leviathan who must be driven out of office if we wish to prevent future Wacos, and reverse the precedent that parents must sometimes choose between seeing their children taken by the state or seeing their family killed.

It is rather the statist mindset – the ideology of state worship, on both left and right – that has brought us a standing army of militarized police forces in every corner on this country. Those forces were tyrannical before Waco, and they have been so ever since. Waco is not necessary to indict the police state. But it really should be sufficient to do so. That it has not been for so many people reveals the problem.

* I am indebted to Scott Horton for this crucial point.

April 19, 2008

Anthony Gregory [send him mail] is a writer and musician who lives in Berkeley, California. He is a research analyst at the Independent Institute. See his webpage for more articles and personal information.

Why Waco Still Matters by Anthony Gregory.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement, shaking the foundation of democracy, the shocking revelations behind the tragic series of events outside Waco, Texas that killed four federal agents and 76 men, women and children of the Branch Davidian religious sect has finally been exposed.

Winner of an Academy-Award® nomination in light of its incredible discoveries, Waco: The Rules of Engagement brings forth devastating evidence of federal law enforcement gone tragically wrong. It dares to suggest the ATF provoked war with a group whose apocalyptic religious beliefs and rumored manufacturing of illegal weapons made them easy targets for an inevitable abuse of its members’ civil and human rights.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement will change forever the way the world thinks and talks about the tragedy at Waco and, most importantly, it will renew our commitment to the basic precepts of tolerance and freedom upon which American society is built.

WACO: The Rules of Engagement.

Monday marks the 15th anniversary of one of the darker days in American history.The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City shook the nation on April 19, 1995.

Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the crime and was later sentenced to death.

Events are planned throughout the day to remember the victims.

Also on this day in 1993, the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco came to a fiery end.

The 50-day standoff started after members of the religious sect killed four federal agents in a shootout.

When the FBI tried to move in, the compound was lit on fire. Eighty people died, including children.

Monday marks anniversary of Oklahoma bombing, standoff at Waco compound – News 8 Austin.