Posted on 04/19/2018 10:00:35 AM PDT by BBell
WACO — The fire rose above the Texas prairie like a portent, an inferno consuming David Koresh and more than 70 of his followers in the Branch Davidian compound.
Koresh's personal apocalypse was televised live worldwide just after noon on April 19, 1993. Questions about what went wrong began to mount before the ashes were cool. How could a 33-year-old ninth-grade dropout convince so many people that he was the Lamb and God had willed this terrible end - nurses and teachers, a postman and a Harvard-educated lawyer, Australians and Brits, New Zealanders and an Argentinian-born Israeli Jew? Above all, why didn't FBI commanders realize they were fulfilling Koresh's doomsday prophecies?
"It was a mess, and we played right into it -- into a prophetic, apocalyptic ministry that David Koresh had been preaching for 7 ½ years," said retired FBI agent and negotiator Byron Sage. "There were no good options. It was damned if you do, you're damned if you don't."
After the fire came the fault-finding; something had to account for so much death. Four agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and five sect members had died in a firefight that broke out as ATF raided the Davidians' compound. It burned fifty-one days later, as the FBI sprayed in tear gas to try to force the sect to surrender.
The federal government blamed Koresh. Justice and Treasury Department reviews, a federal wrongful death trial and a $17 million special counsel's investigation concluded that Koresh led followers in torching their building and immolating themselves.
But federal inquiries also conceded that official accounts of the tragedy were marred by omissions and lies.
First, ATF leaders misled the public about why their raid failed, denying they went in after learning Koresh knew they were coming.
(Excerpt) Read more at dallasnews.com ...
“Branch Davidian tragedy sparked government suspicion that still haunts us 25 years later”
Hell it goes back to the beginning and carries through endlessly...whiskey rebellion, scorched earth in the south/sack of Atlanta, Wounded Knee. etc. It’s the nature of a big corrupt all powerful central government solidified and baked in by the Civil War.
Doesn’t matter. You will never be able to fire any of your firearms again. Defend yourself or your family with one. You’ll be arrested and prosecuted. This is where we are headed thanks to the brainwashed public educated idiot youth who will one day hold public offices.
Tragedy? This was mass murder.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nahh. More like a mass suicide.
Remember who it was that started the fire on that day?
David Koresh was also a nutcase! I’ll never understand fully why people follow these nuts. It never ends well.
I was visiting my parents in Phoenix when I saw the fire. I screamed at the TV. My parents had to hear me rant about what Hillary just did.
I would like to say something here.
Hillary ordered that fire. Why? Because she is a Satanist and she needed some human sacrifices. April 19th of that year was a Satanic holiday that required human sacrifice by fire.
She got them. Women and children died as a sacrifice to Satan.
“Our government... teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.”
Louis D. Brandeis
Whatever you say.
How about the PO bombing in OK City?
” It was damned if you do, you’re damned if you don’t.”
So these bloodthirsty government hoods chose to err on the side of most death and carnage.
> Remember who it was that started the fire on that day?
The FBI with incendiary grenades.
“What a crock! David Koresh left the compound to go into town regularly and jogged”
That would have been the smart thing to do and would have eliminated all the forthcoming fun for the government sport shooters.
When was the “Full Auto Evidence” destroyed ?
Last I heard was that it was locked up at DPS HQ in Austin and off limits to Everybody.
IIRC- there were X-Rays of the burned/melted Firearms in question that showed NONE were Full Auto.
Can anyone else recall this ?
Nope.
The Branch Davidians with gasoline.
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-waco/
“Also the first shots fired were the atf killing the davidians lab retriever and her puppies.”
For that alone the hero perpetrators should be executed.Guess a requirement to get into law enforcement is to have a predilection for animal abuse.
2) Mentally ill people are taken in to custody every day without resulting in them, and scores of other people, being killed.
3) Mental illness, in and of itself, is not justification for law enforcement to initiate lethal force.
4) I'll never understand why people develop worshipful attachments to any individual (other than Jesus Christ). I think treating another human being as if he can do no wrong is a sin.
“The whole thing was an incompetent BATF publicity stunt “
Yep.
“If you ever get sideways with govt forces they will have no issues with watching you burn to death or bleeding out.”
The drawback to this kind of oppression is that it teaches people to prepare for overwhelming force with an asymmetric and unstoppable force of their own.
Law enforcement needs to step back from this militarized policing syndrome of theirs and try being civil whenever possible.
If they can’t manage this then the reality is that police will end up dying and we’ll eventually have a popular revolution to overturn and disarm the government. Sorry, but creating a domestic military out of the police should not be allowed as a loophole to Posse Commitatus.
Americans will not forever tolerate an occupying force in their midst even if it says ‘Police’ on the tanks instead of ‘Army’.
“How about the PO bombing in OK City?”
Hatred of the government but poor choice of target.
They wanted a dramatic takedown to justify all their pretty SWAT gear at the upcoming budget hearings. Then some agents got killed. Once that happened, the feds could not afford the possibility that a Texas jury would decide the Branch Davidians shot the feds in self-defense.
Well if PBS said it, it must be true. /s
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