04/17/15 – James Bovard – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show, and so today's April the 17th, I guess close as we're going to get, so time for our annual Waco show.
I got James Bovard on the line.
He's a great libertarian journalist and the author of a hell of a lot of great books.
Shakedown, the latest is Public Policy Hooligan, the memoir.
You should get that, man.
It's really good.
But before that also, there's Freedom in Chains, The Bush Betrayal, Attention Deficit Democracy, which is my very favorite one, The Fair Trade Fraud, The Farm Fiasco, Terrorism and Tyranny, Lost Rights, and I think there's more than that that I didn't get to, but a pile of really great books.
Back in the 1990s and all the way since then too, he's been writing about the travesty, what happened at the so-called compound of the Branch Davidians outside of Waco, Texas back in 1993.
Welcome back to the show, Jim.
How are you doing?
Hey, doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for keeping the fires of Waco burning.
It's something you've done a great job of.
It's great how you've been doing this almost every year, going on almost 20 years now, so you've helped keep this issue alive.
Geez, it really has been.
Not quite that long, but yeah, getting into the teens here.
Yeah, you know, well, it happened 100 miles from my door, and it was such an obvious lie to me at the time, and then it's the whole getting away with it thing.
As I learned about Nixon when I was a kid, it's always the cover-up that really gets him in trouble.
Well, in this one, I guess the cover-up got him in trouble with me more than even the travesty.
It's the constantly being lied to right to my face that really pisses me off, and also the mass murder.
Well, yeah, and this is something which I think helped make a lot of people more radical.
It did that for you, it did that for Angela Keaton, and there are so many other people who are listening to your show right now who are probably driven, whose eyes were opened up to the nature of Leviathan because of what the feds did at Waco and all the lies they told afterward.
Yeah, absolutely.
That's true.
A huge part of my political development, you know, I was 15 at the time.
I like to bear witness, as long as I mention it, to I was sacking groceries at the local grocery store there, and all the white upper-middle class housewives of northwest Austin, Texas were unanimous in the instant death penalty for these people.
Just go in there and end it, they would say.
He said he was Jesus, nail him to a tree, and this kind of thing where it was completely out of control.
It was, when the government did finally go in there and end it, as they said, they truly were carrying out the will of the democracy, at least, you know, in the nice part of Austin, Texas, anyway.
Nicest.
Well, and yeah, it was interesting to see how the government shaped that consensus by this one pile of lies after another from the day when the ATF first assaulted it, the whole notion the ATF had been ambushed, the notion that the Branch Davidians had fired first, the notion that the feds were simply trying to serve a search warrant based on ginned up evidence and false charges, by the way, when the ATF had planned all along to do a military-style assault on a peaceful home on a Sunday morning.
All right, so rewind a little bit, and in fact, I got an apology to make here.
I gave a presentation about the wars to some Young Americans for Liberty students at Baylor University, and they asked me about Waco, and maybe I sounded glib or something when I said that they were, that the Branch Davidians were a break-off group of the Seventh-Day Adventists, and I guess that was taken to mean that I was saying Seventh-Day Adventists are crazy cult people or whatever, when to me, that was sort of the mark of how normal they were.
There's nothing wrong with being a Seventh-Day Adventist, and they were a break-off group.
Yeah, it's true.
Maybe I should have clarified.
They broke off back in the 1930s, this particular group.
They went way back and all of that, but that was like, I probably said that in an effort just to show how normal they were for people from Central Texas, that they were basically a sect of Protestant Christians, not a Charles Manson cult like they were portrayed as being, but instead, I came off like I was insulting Adventists, which I never meant to do.
It's unfortunate that some people interpret your comments that way, knowing you and having seen you speak, I would assume that you were fair and even-handed and just explaining it and not doing backflips to make sure that no one got offended, which it's unfortunate people did, but the fact is, these are folks who were living in that part of Texas.
They were peaceful.
They had guns, but there's Texas.
Texas has guns.
It's not like New Jersey, for God's sake, and it was the feds who decided to make a target of them and to make an issue of them, and then the folks at the ATF Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had this endless, huge campaign based largely on false charges, and it was the false claims of a drug nexus, which allowed them to get the National Guard helicopters, which were flying over top of the Branch Davidian home during the raid, and according to some folks, they were shooting into the home during the time that the small army of ATF agents were assaulting it from the front.
Yeah, and now, so one of the things that I tried to drive home with those students was to go look at this documentary, at least one of the two or three here by Mike McNulty and others, Waco, the Rules of Engagement.
This really, I think, does the best job of laying the groundwork for a much more accurate narrative than the one that we were all fed on TV at the time.
And something which is really good about Waco, Rules of Engagement, which won an Emmy and was a finalist for the best documentary at the Academy Awards, it walks people through in a way, it humanizes the victims of the government, who the FBI and others made a big effort to tar after almost everybody died in the FBI final assault.
And it shows the absurdity of a lot of the policy assumptions that the feds were making.
It makes it clear that the feds were lying basically from the start, that a number of the federal officials knew they were lying, and yet most of the media just rolled over and was happy to be a government tool.
And it was very telling that April 19th was the day of the final FBI assault.
And in the days after that, the Washington Press Corps made Attorney General Janet Reno a hero, basically because she had been tough, she'd stood up, so on and so forth.
But basically, you have all these dead Americans, a lot of dead foreigners as well, after a reckless federal attack.
And what does the media do?
Thank God for Janet Reno.
Yeah, it's funny the way they can just flip that around.
Yeah.
Funny is one word for it.
Yeah.
Well, now, so, yeah, because it really was sort of like we're seeing right now with Hillary Clinton, where, hey, what are you, sexist?
Why are you attacking Janet Reno?
You just don't like her because she's a woman attorney general or just somehow change the subject.
It's amazing it works.
It's not funny, but it is amazing that it works.
Well, it's so craven and it was self-evidently craven.
And you're kind of wondering, OK, so she's a hero with 80 people dead, 80 people that did not have to die.
I mean, what the hell does a person have to do to be a non-hero?
Yeah.
Well, you know, you made a very important point when you mentioned in talking about the film, how it humanizes the people there, show some of the home video footage of them and this kind of thing.
Again, you know, I remember this time very well.
I was a kid at the time, but still that, you know, it was really like Saddam Hussein in Iraq, right?
There's only one Iraqi Saddam.
There's only one Davidian, David Koresh, and they never told us anything about anyone else there other than basically they were all hostages of this crazy cult leader.
But other than that, they were like, you know, the faceless people from the Pink Floyd videos or whatever, where they just they kind of were unhuman.
And so, man, they were no big loss, really.
If it'll shut that Koresh guy up and I can go back to my game shows, then no big loss, you know, because they hardly existed.
Yeah.
Something that was really amazing about that is that the the press corps was so anxious to put a halo over Janet Reno that she was given credit for being concerned.
Someone from the FBI or who knows where Janet Reno would never say, if memory serves, someone had told her that the children in there were being abused.
And that was why, you know, Janet Reno was part of her public persona.
She was so concerned about child abuse.
And so part of the reason, according to the narrative, is that she was willing to send in the tanks to stop the child abuse.
You know, gassing the kids with CS gas, which can kill them when they didn't have gas masks that fit them, didn't matter.
Janet Reno cares about children.
All right.
More Jim Bovard right after this, guys.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I should have had all my Waco soundbites queued up and everything.
I got some great ones.
Oh, well.
I'm on the line with the great Jim Bovard.
He wrote a ton of great articles about Waco all this time.
You can find many of them in his archives at Jim Bovard dot com.
Check out all his great books at Amazon, et cetera.
So, Jim, now the fire.
Oh, well, first, before the fire here and and there's a lot of kind of bigger issues to grapple with here, too.
But I think the the first knee jerk answer that a defender of the cops would say is that, well, why didn't they just come out then?
Took 51 days this siege between the initial ATF assault, if you want to call it that, and the time when Bill Clinton finally sent the Delta Force to finish them off 51 days later.
Why didn't they just come out?
Well, there were some people who did come out and they were slapped into handcuffs and leg chains and orange type prison suits.
I don't know if they were orange, but and then they were marching in front of the TV cameras as if they were very dangerous felons.
And that wasn't exactly the best way to persuade the other folks to come out.
And there was the feds managed to dominate the media.
Part of what they did is keep the media so far away from the side of the Davidians home and and also block contact between the folks inside and outside in order so the feds could control the narrative and thereby demonize the folks.
And and it was unfortunate that so many people were so gullible that the fact that the government was, you know, spinning this story so heavily, it didn't matter.
They they still swallowed the government line.
And from that perspective, there's a there's a parallel, as you mentioned earlier, what the feds did with Saddam Hussein and how they were able to demonize the Iraqi people so that they didn't really matter, that that shock and awe was fine because, OK, we're bombing Baghdad, but we're not really killing civilians because they're bad guys or they support the bad guys or and it was it was the same paradox, which we've seen in U.S. foreign policy going back to the Kaiser, you know, because what the government does at one point is say, well, those people are living under a terrible dictator.
And at the same time, the U.S. government blames them for for not changing the policy or not having a better leader after they say that they're helpless.
And that was how the government portrayed the people saying that David Koresh had total control.
And yet everybody in there, it was like joining several liability that that anybody living in that house was liable for anything David Koresh did.
So the government had a right to treat everyone in like that should treat David Koresh.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's the perfect parallel.
And it goes further to where, you know, he's crazy, just like Saddam.
He's a madman.
He's so damn insane.
And so there's no point in even trying to negotiate with him.
Like, look at us.
We're throwing up our hands because, by golly, we swear we've tried so hard to negotiate.
But the man is just irrational.
And then, of course, you have the illegal weapons.
You have the international and the local level gun control going on in the name of full autos or mustard gas or whatever the lie is.
Yeah.
And these it was interesting.
There were, I guess, was it forty nine fifty rifles that were, you know, charred, charred leftovers of them after the fire.
And prior to the 1995 congressional hearings, the Clinton administration blocked any independent examination of those rifles to determine if they were actually automatic or if they had been illegally converted.
If my memory is correct and that is possible, I'm wrong.
But there was there was a lot of distortions with the evidence.
And it was amazing that the Fed's case was so shaky.
And yet they found a federal judge who was an utter disgrace to his robe, to his bat suit, who basically rubber stamped whatever the prosecutors wanted to do.
And even though the jury in Texas, the Texas jury basically threw out most of the harshest charges against the Branch Davidians.
But the federal judge twisted things and then sentenced them to long prison, sentenced most of the survivors to a long prison time, even in spite of the jury's verdict.
Right.
Yeah.
And, you know, even if they were right that, oh, look, this rifle's been converted.
When was it converted?
During the siege or before it?
And that's a good point.
That's a good point.
And even if they had, then they're and this was what they put on the made up warrant was that they should have paid a tax on it.
And then the way I remember reading it, although it's been a while, was that they had paid their taxes for the one full auto they did have or whatever it was.
Well, and not only that, but there is a gun culture in Texas, which is very different than many parts of the U.S., certainly very different than where the mainstream media comes from.
And folks are very.
First of all, folks are casual about gun ownership, and they're also a lot more responsible than they are in some places in the big cities.
So it didn't really matter what the Branch Davidians had because they were not out there assaulting anybody.
Right.
And not only that, but something which did not come out until long afterwards, thanks to David Hardy, was the feds.
The undercover ATF agents had gone shooting with David Koresh like a week, 10 days before the the ATF assault.
And it would have been easy to arrest him then at that point.
But they chose not to do that.
Instead, it was Showtime, which was the name of the ATF operation.
And they had what was a three or four different TV news crews that were supposed to be there.
So feds could have very easily made an arrest and they lied and covered that up.
And if that information had come out on the day of the botched ATF assault, it would have been far more difficult for the Clinton administration, FBI, ATF to demonize Koresh and the Davidians and thereby to justify the final assault that left 80 people dead.
Yeah, yeah.
That's one of the most telling statements in that video about the guns is that, you know, this stockpile, as you call it, is just an inventory.
They had a gun business.
And in fact, there's a guy named Paul Fata who actually left.
Boy, did they have a lot of guns.
You talk about it was no big deal kind of a thing to them.
He had a dually truck with a camper shell towing a U-Haul trailer, both full of rifles.
And he left that morning, not in a secret getaway in a James, you know, James Bond conspiracy type thing, but he just drove down to Austin for the gun show where he was selling those rifles down right the corner to 90 and I-35 in Austin, Texas, with everybody else.
And when he found out what was happening, in other words, he left with 90 something percent of the firearms that the Branch Davidians had to go and do perfectly harmless, legitimate, legal gun business, just like tens of thousands of other Texans do gun business.
Nothing black market or illegal.
It's certainly nothing threatening to the people of Waco like they were building a Branch Davidian army to march on City Hall or whatever we were supposed to fear from them.
The guy left with all the guns for a completely innocuous reason.
And when he found out about the raid, he called the FBI and said, well, I'm Paul Fata, the gun dealer.
Are you looking for me?
He was actually the one who was running the business for Koresh.
So, yeah.
And but but it didn't matter because the the feds had their narrative and almost all the media bought it.
And it was that was how the feds were able to do the final assault, because if they had been honest and open from the get go, public support would have been much lower.
And it it took over two years before the public really turned against the government narrative on this.
And even then, the the hearings in July 2005, 19, July 1995, were pretty much a bust because most of the congressmen didn't have the balls to vigorously question federal agents and FBI officials.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's it's known now that there were flashbang grenades were found at all three origins of the fire, that the CES was extremely flammable and whether deliberately or not, the feds, the tank attack and the gas certainly helped lead.
And probably those flashbangs helped lead to that fire.
But then there's also the FLIR footage of the guys getting out of the backs of the tanks, which I guess were to believe are a mix between the hostage rescue team and the army's Delta Force.
And it was really Lee Hancock at the Dallas Morning News, I guess, who broke the the most stories about the Delta Force there.
But there's clips in the second movie, Waco, a new revelation of a CIA officer, I think a currently serving CIA officer and a former special forces officer, both saying that they had talked directly to the Delta Force guys and they admitted their role in helping kill the Branch Davidians in what they call the firefight in the back of the house.
Yeah.
And it was it was frustrating how the feds were able to sweep those allegations under the rug because the story broke in a fireball again in 1999, thanks largely to Mike McNulty and David Hardy.
And Janet Reno said, well, you know, I'm very upset.
I was lied to by the FBI.
So and the thing that Reno did was find a stooge, a former senator, John Danforth, who was so busy kissing her boots the whole time he was doing his independent investigation.
And, of course, the the final report came out whitewashing the FBI and the entire government and basically blaming the American people for not having believed that the government was not doing wonderful things there at Waco.
And and there was language in that Danforth report which captured the arrogance of Washington towards the American people, saying that it was unfortunate.
I don't have the exact quote in front of me.
I should.
But it was basically condescending to people like, well, the people that these these as if there was a mental problem, a psychological problem that was widespread among the American people for thinking the government had done bad things at Waco, when even Danforth's report showed quite a few lies and cover ups on top of all the ones that have been exposed from 1993 onwards.
Right.
Yeah, I think I remember the quote where it's something close to, you know, the government's faith in the people has been shaken.
Can they be trusted to be the sovereign in this society anymore?
We're just going to take it all for ourselves.
Yeah, let me pull that up here.
I've got to do the right ahead because I found my special forces quote here while you find that one.
All right.
I'll talk to some of the other guys.
Here he goes.
And they do.
Yes.
Portions of the squadron were there pulling triggers.
Pulling triggers.
All right.
Sorry.
OK, this is the quote from Danforth's preface.
He said he hoped his findings will start the process of restoring the faith of the people and their government and the faith of the government in the people.
So Danforth was saying government officials have been wrongly victimized by public distrust.
And that, you know, that phrase of hoping it would help restore the government's faith in the people.
It's like, you know, if there was any doubt about whose side Danforth was on, that settled it.
Yeah.
Well, listen, I already kept you into the break, but it's the long top of the hour break.
So let me ask you one more thing to please comment, if you would, about what role you think Waco had and the American people and the media and all the consensus acquiescence to what happened there, at least at first, and whether you think that has really had an effect on the rest of policing in America.
Because, you know, it seems like people go, yeah, occasionally things like Waco happen.
And actually things like Waco happen a hundred times a day.
Right.
It's just usually the people don't dare fight back.
And certainly they don't win and have a 51 day standoff.
That was what was unique.
But as far as the ATF style, you know, Colin Powell doctrine, overwhelming force raid first thing in the morning or in the middle of the night, this kind of thing.
This is an hourly occurrence in the United States of America.
But it wasn't then, was it, Jim?
And do you think this helped change that?
Yeah, I would not say it was a daily or an hourly occurrence.
But but certainly since 1993, 1994, there have been there was a vast increase in the number of SWAT teams and there was a change in how they operate because the SWAT teams became much more violent and preemptive.
There was it was almost as if they were driven by some kind of assumption that every possible suspect was like David Koresh or some kind of like every house that they were going to was an armed compound.
So they had to do the overwhelming force.
And that is that's one of the biggest legacies of the change and change in the relationship between the federal government and government at all levels in the American people, because the politicians and the bureaucrats saw what the FBI got away with it a way to go and say, hey, you know, let's you know, let's use more force because because it works for us.
It's fun.
And they enjoy domineering.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I'm pretty sure I read that it was something like 50 SWAT raids a day on average.
Could be.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, I think some of the SWAT SWAT raids are not like they're all on hooped up on steroids and amphetamines.
But there's certainly that that kind of potential.
Yeah.
And it's it's it's a change in how the government relates to the people.
And it's a very ugly change.
Yeah.
It seems like I remember then thinking that at least de facto, it served as a test to see just how far they can go and what we'll put up with.
And then the answer was, oh, we can barbecue a hundred of them right in front of God and everybody.
And now back to the price is right and they'll be happy.
So well, nothing we can't do, apparently.
Well, I think that they overestimated their.
Well, part of what happened was that some of that some of the truth came out and that really hurt the government's credibility.
And I think that that made the FBI a little more cautious, for instance, in the two thousand nineteen ninety six showdown with the Freeman group up there in Montana.
The FBI actually showed restraint and that was why they were able to get a peaceful solution, didn't have to kill the people.
So I think that may be part of why they didn't do anything about the Nazis at Elohim City that blew up Oklahoma, like we're about to have to talk about with Roger Charles in just a second.
Thank you very much for your time on the show.
I really appreciate it, Jim.
Hey, thanks a lot, Scott.
Always great to talk to you.
All right.
That's the great Jim Bovard, everybody.
Find him at Jim Bovard dot com.
He's got a bunch of great articles from back then and more recent about Waco.
And he's written a whole mess of books, Lost Rights, Terrorism and Tyranny, Attention Deficit Democracy, Freedom in Chains.
And the latest is his memoir, Public Policy Hooligan.
It's really great.
We'll be right back in just a second.
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