Waco's message for our times?

Either Andy McNab was taking unconscionable liberties with the facts, a mere dozen years after Waco (and ten years after the connected Oklahoma Bombing), or the handling of events there was even more brutal than I remembered from the coverage at the time.

According to ‘Aggressor’ (publ. 2005), the FBI besiegers were not constantly broadcasting ‘loud music’ at the Christians in their residential complex, but an endless loop of ‘horrible, high-pitched noise like baby rabbits being slaughtered.’

In the story, when a five-year-old girl is on the line to a negotiator – critically, not on-site but miles away on an Air Force base, observes McNab’s hero – she asks, ‘Are you going to kill me?’ and the answer is a bland reassurance the adult is in no position to give.

As armoured vehicles crash through the walls, accompanied by the message ‘this is not an assault, do not fire any weapons’, they inject into the buildings – occupied by many women and children as well as the men – not ‘tear gas’ but some gas designed to put people into bone-breaking convulsions, lethal in confined spaces. There are no ambulances on hand; this operation is not intended to result in a mass of surrendering survivors. 

In the book, the FBI commander on the ground, Jim D. Bastendorf’ aka ‘Bastard’ is a swaggering, rhino-skinned bullyboy and his men are utter oafs, dropping their trousers at the modest Branch Davidian women and yelling victoriously as the ‘compound’ is trashed and a massive fire breaks out.

It all sickens the Brits, but when they protest they are brushed off as ‘faggots’. 

Police and Delta Force are there, too, together with a mass of rubberneckers and TV outfits come to watch the fun as the ‘cult’ is tackled in its ‘compound.’ There is a barrel organ, a fairgound, stalls selling fast food and T-shirts.

McNab’s character sees this episode as a PR job for the authorities and a bloody-handed revenge for an earlier, failed attack on the Davidians that resulted in four ATF officers dead and sixteen wounded:

    ‘The Davidians returned fire, as they were entitled to do under American law. They even called 911 to      tell the police they were being attacked, and begged for help.’

The Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 forbids the use of military force against US citizens; but McNab says, President Clinton had signed a waiver in the case of ‘drugs interdiction operations’ and despite being invited to see for themselves that there were no drugs on-site the authorities used this excuse to militarise. 

According to a Vox post, Clinton pooh-poohed claims of official culpability the day after the raid, saying, ‘I do not think the United States government is responsible for the fact that a bunch of religious fanatics decided to kill themselves.’ One could wish that instead of screening louche rubbish about his affair with Monica Lewinsky the BBC would look at more serious aspects of his Presidency – including the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act (which he signed off in 1999) that arguably initiated the process of destroying our financial system.

And now we have the Biden Administration pushing at Russia’s borders in the usual ham-fisted way, risking an absolutely dreadful sequence of events. Given enough distance, reality transforms into fantasy and myth; perhaps the chess-players of Washington imagine that the Ukraine is so far away that not one blade of American grass will bend in a Northern-hemisphere-wide nuclear firestorm.

I hope McNab wasn’t faking the facts; though on reflection I wish he was. Either way, the crucial element is mindset, and it seems it’s not only anarchists and Trump’s good ol’ boys who are moronic and thuggish. Perhaps the American Establishment depends on a poor education system and cheerleading dross from the mass media to help them get away with their crass and dangerous behaviour at home and abroad.