Sunday, Sep 7, 2008
Many have suggested that Koresh was a Jim Jones-like madman. But he wasn't. He had no plans for mass suicide; indeed, in sharp contrast to Jones, Koresh allowed members of the community to leave at any time, and many of them did, even during the siege. But many of us stayed, too, not because we had to, but because we wanted to. The FBI and ATF had been confrontational from the start, they had lied to us and they continued lying up through the siege.
The FBI and ATF had many pretexts for their attack on Mount Carmel. The initial ATF raid, in which four ATF agents and six Davidians were killed, was based on allegations that we were running a drug lab. But later even ATF employees would admit the charges were "a complete fabrication." One member had allowed speed dealers to operate from the building in the mid-1980s, but everyone knew Koresh hated drugs, and he'd asked the Waco sheriff to remove the methamphetamine lab when he took over as leader in 1987.
Charges that we were assembling an arsenal of weapons to be used against the government were equally off-base. We ran a business, buying and selling weapons at gun shows, to bring in revenue for the community. Only a few of us at Mount Carmel were directly involved with this -- I personally had an aversion to guns -- but it was a relatively profitable line of work. Everything was bought and sold on a legal basis. In fact, weeks before the raid, Koresh offered the ATF the opportunity to come out to Mount Carmel and inspect the building and every single weapon we had. They refused.
Maybe the most disturbing allegation, to those inside the building, was that we were engaging in child abuse there. The children of Mount Carmel were treasured, and they were a vital part of our small society. A disgruntled former resident, Marc Breault, was the original source of complaints about the treatment of children, and his wild allegations -- that we were planning to sacrifice one of our children on Yom Kippur one year -- were unfounded. Yes, occasionally kids were paddled for misbehaving, but the strict rule was they could never be paddled in anger. The parents usually did the paddling themselves. A few former residents also complained that David paddled their children, harshly, but I never saw that, and the Texas Child Protective Services workers who investigated the complaints concluded they were unfounded.
The biggest lie, though, is the FBI's claim that we set the building fire ourselves, to commit suicide. At the very least, the FBI has already provided proof that it created the conditions for a disaster. On the April morning when the FBI finally made its move, we had been under siege for 51 days. The FBI had cut off our power weeks earlier, so we had been resigned to heating the building with kerosene lamps. It was kerosene and gas from these lamps and the storage canisters, spilled over the floors as a result of collapsing walls and FBI munitions fire, that is often mistakenly taken as evidence that we doused Mount Carmel with an intent of burning it.
Furthermore, the noxious CS gas that the FBI shot into Mount Carmel (almost 400 rounds were fired at us) was mixed with methylene chloride, which is flammable when mixed with air and can become explosive in confined spaces. CS gas is so nasty that the United States, along with 130 other countries, has signed the Chemical Weapons Convention banning its use in warfare. But apparently there is no prohibition against its use against American citizens.
The amount of gas the FBI shot into Mount Carmel was twice the density considered life threatening to an adult and even more dangerous for little children. Ironically, one of the questions that was asked of the FBI during the congressional hearings was "Why didn't you use an anesthetic gas that would have put the people inside to sleep?" The FBI said it felt anesthetic gas would be harmful to the women and children.
With powerful Texas winds whistling through the holes ripped in the building's sides and roof, Mount Carmel was primed to ignite. And while hours before the blaze FBI bugs inside Mount Carmel picked up, in the words of the New York Times, "ambiguous conversations" that seemed to be about setting the place on fire, I never heard any serious discussion of suicide or starting fires. I certainly never saw anyone try to do so. If we had really wanted to kill ourselves, we would not have waited 51 cold, hungry, scary days to do it. Truth is, we were desperate to live, to figure out a way to end the standoff. But the FBI, riled up, was not going to let that happen.
In fact, Koresh had negotiated a settlement to the crisis: He would leave peacefully, to be arrested and taken into custody by the Texas Rangers, as soon as he finished writing what he called his "Seven Seals" manuscript. David worked as fast as he could on this scriptural commentary, especially given the fact that he had been shot in the initial ATF raid and was struggling not only to write but simply to stay alive. The FBI thought the Seven Seals issue was just a ploy, and dismissed it. But it was legitimate, and in the ashes of Mount Carmel they found that Koresh had completed the first two commentaries and was hard at work on the third when the tanks rolled in.
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