Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again.
You've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right you guys, introducing Dan Gifford.
He is an investigative reporter, formerly did TV news reporting and is a documentary filmmaker and he was the producer of the great documentary Waco, The Rules of Engagement that came out in 1997 if I remember correctly.
Welcome to the show Dan, how are you sir?
Thank you.
A little frog in the throat from the weather out here in California of late.
Yeah, plenty of smoke to breathe out there, huh?
There's a new documentary and a new mini-series about the Waco massacre coming out, correct?
That's what I'm told.
I must tell you I rarely, I used to work for a network television like KTRK channel 13 in Houston, but I just, we now have so many channels and so much of the stuff I see on, it competes.
I just rarely watch network television anymore and that's why I didn't even know these things were coming up, like the one that's on ABC that I wrote about.
So when I heard about it and watched it, that's what got the reaction.
Because it's, people were right, it's very salacious, it's very a lot of inflammatory stuff that is just made for television and it's not true.
That's the problem that so much of what you see that has been done is just not off, is off the fact.
Yeah.
All right now, so for people who aren't familiar, this movie Waco, The Rules of Engagement is really what, you know, I guess kicked the door in so to speak on, kicked it open on getting this story out and getting regular Americans who had been lied to up until that time and believed the mass suicide lies and all the rest of the lies about the Branch Davidian group there in Waco and really began to change things.
So maybe, can you talk to us a little bit about how you guys got into this story in the first place, you and Mike McNulty and whoever else?
Well, what happened was I was at CNN in New York and left CNN and basically switched over to acting in New York and some of the people who have long memories might remember me on Saturday Night Live as a featured extra and a few things like that.
Then I moved out here with my wife to West Coast and we were looking for a project for a production company that we just started and I ran into Mike McNulty and he had this wild story about, you know, what happened at Waco.
This would be like 1995 or, no, I guess, no, this was earlier.
This is like 1994, I suppose, and I thought it was all crazy and we just thought it would make a nice one hour or half hour TV little segment about conspiracy theories and I thought the entire official story was true.
I really hadn't paid that much attention to the thing when it went on, but it was, if those remember, it was on every day, all day for, what, 51 some days and then we got into it and found out that the official story is not true.
I mean, 99% of it and really what matters and this is, people have taken their eye off the ball here.
This is the nexus of what is going on in the country that I hate to use the term is turning us into a police state, but it is.
This is where you have the federal government, not that this hasn't been done before and police don't do it anymore, lying to get a warrant and they're putting all sorts of salacious stuff in flames, going out and shooting and kicking in doors, as you say, and the bottom line here is that if you want to know where your civil liberties are threatened and this is it.
It's even to the point of when the prosecution, the government prosecuted the Davidians, they did something that prosecutors are doing all over almost every day, which is they're withholding exculpatory evidence showing that the people they're prosecuting did not commit the crimes that they committed and that happened here.
You have Bill Johnston, who was the assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted the Davidians, then afterwards, Mike McNulty kept on with his stuff and managed to get into the evidence locker and found that a lot of the things that were withheld from the defense attorneys and that Johnston didn't know, so when Johnston complains about it, the government turns around and prosecutes him for obstruction of justice and then prosecute, tries to get him disbarred, so you have the government prosecuting a prosecutor that prosecuted the Davidians because of what the government did withholding evidence and this is not an isolated story at all by any means.
Well, you know, I'm so glad that you frame it that way because, you know, I mean, this is what I thought at the time and I think it's really played out, right?
That the American people's ratification of the Clinton government's actions at Waco, that was really, you know, it was the litmus test, not that it was necessarily meant to be, but if the American people will tolerate what they did to the Branch Davidians, then how do you think we feel about kicking in black stores in the middle of the night over a joint in their ashtray or whatever?
Because let's face it, when there's 50,000 SWAT raids a year and it's not in my neighborhood, almost all of that is happening in poor black people's neighborhoods, which is why they're so pissed off, but it's the militarization and the military, you know, the special forces training of these SWAT teams and all their equipment and as you say, all the precedents, the way that they operate in terms of withholding evidence and all these other things.
The American people loved it back then, you know, you mentioned it went on for 51 days and we all watched it for 51 days.
Well, that's why they had to kill them because the housewives of Texas, I don't know about the rest of America, but the housewives of Texas wanted them dead, dead, dead because they wanted to get back to watching One Life to live and they couldn't stand it anymore.
Is that still on the air?
Oh no.
I mean, I was sacking groceries at the time and every upper middle class white lady from Northwest Austin would get up with just, this was the talk of the neighborhood.
It's all anybody had to talk about.
Well, he said he was Jesus and I say they just go in there and kill him.
Like, yeah, maybe we should nail him to a tree, huh?
Is that what you think we should do?
Yeah.
See, that's the attitude.
I think it's really true.
The forewoman of the jury on the Davidian said it, she took an opposite view.
She said, the people who should have been charged with crimes are the federal agents.
And the Davidians are lucky that survived that they, this whole event happened in Texas because in Texas, it's one of the few States, maybe the only remaining one where you can use deadly force against law enforcement officers.
And that's an interesting phrase.
We'll get to it in a second, but, and this is the circumstance where, what do you do when the police show up at your door and they just start shooting?
It's very plain.
They intend to kill you.
Do you have an obligation to be a good citizen and let them kill you?
Or do you have a right to defend your life?
Now, if you saw the film and the Davidians called 911, the sheriff said they didn't know what was going on.
They were part of this.
This was a big public relations event that the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms had planned.
And what they wanted was, was they were going to have a lot of people in handcuffs and a lot of guns and a lot of TV cameras, which they had to alerted to be out there.
And it was going to be a big spur to get more gun control because that's what the Clinton administration had talked about, which was coming in.
And when you were the Bureau, it means more power, more money, more personnel, all that.
And the truth is almost every agency I have seen at federal, state, local level, before their budget comes up, will do some kind of a public relations scam like this to justify more money, more power, more personnel, see how important we are.
It was called Operation Showtime.
That's right.
It was.
It was.
And that's exactly what went on.
And honestly, you know, and I'm sorry because I always interrupt every Waco interview.
I end up talking about this, but I think this is the most important thing because I try not to be a collectivist and say things like we and this and that when I'm really speaking about other people, not myself and not necessarily you and whatever.
But it was the consensus among the people.
And, you know, because TV said so and the cops say so.
And so the American people went along with that.
But I mean, I saw them with my own eyes.
The upper middle class housewives of Northwest Austin, who otherwise would never hurt a fly, were saying they ought to go in there and end it, end it because it was interrupting their TV shows.
And it didn't matter that it was a house full of women and children.
It didn't matter.
What mattered was they were sick and tired of it, and it was perfectly fine for the government to murder all those people.
That was the consensus before the tank raid.
That was really the mandate for the tank raid really did come from the people, or at least, I mean, it came originally from TV and the cops, but the people bought it hook, line and sinker the same way they did against Saddam Hussein, same way they do against Iran today.
You know, whatever you say, government.
Yeah.
And the FBI has built this public image over the years.
We can think people old enough will think of that from Zimbalist Junior or Jimmy Stewart or something to sort the straight arrow, never would lie.
But that's just not the fact when you're talking about an agency that has this kind of power.
And a lot of it was exerted on me.
I mean, the people you might have seen referenced in what I wrote there about, I received a subpoena from the Danforth Committee to talk.
And what they really want to know is who my sources were, and I never divulged that.
And I told them, OK, I'll talk to you, but I want you to stop the harassment that's going on.
When I go to the coffee shop, people show up and sit down at the table, and they've read my emails.
They've listened to my phone calls.
They make threats.
They've said, you know, Dan, we know where you drive.
You might get stopped on the road by somebody that looks like a policeman that might not actually be a policeman.
And this dog, interestingly enough, goes back to when I was a reporter in Houston, and I was doing bank fraud stories that you might remember the 1980s, we had a lot of looting going on.
And the looters could go over to Arkansas under the Clinton administration, this is long before they were on the national scene, and give part of their loot to the Bubba group.
And they were protected from, you know, administratively from a lot of investigations.
And we had people, my camera crew and our KTRK stopped on the road in Texas by Texas sheriff's people who knew who we were, and they were just sending us a message, we know who you are, just watch yourself.
It was this kind of intimidation.
And that might sound crazy to people, but I don't doubt it in this case.
You know, for real.
And I had, oh, you know, honey traps, there were two honey traps that were out here that for those who don't know, that's when a good looking woman shows up and tries to seduce you into a relationship and then uses for blackmail.
But that's lots and lots of things.
And I have had Freedom of Information requests in probably longer than Susan Atkinson, the CBS reporter has, asking for my file from the FBI.
All I got back was a snarky note that, well, we don't keep, you know, we don't keep records on everybody.
Baloney, of course they do.
And it's, well, in this case, they were, maybe not everybody, but they certainly have them on me, but they're not going to get them.
And the whole thing is stonewalled.
And the evidence has been destroyed.
You know, this is really not a conspiracy.
This is, again, this is not unusual.
This happens all over the country every day.
You just had the one, what was the guy, Clyde Bundy, the guy out in Oregon, or was it who was in the land?
Yeah, out in Nevada.
Yeah.
And, you know, this is a big story.
I'm going to see if I can get Jim Bovard on about this, but the judge dismissed all the charges, quote, with prejudice because of the amount of covering up and withholding of evidence from the defense and lying about things like ringing this ranch with snipers and being out to get this guy.
And all their documents proved it.
Yeah.
By the way, say hello to Jim Bovard and talk to him, good buddy.
Yeah, I will.
Yeah, he's great.
But I have a story posted on, on the past, the post here that I use, it's a conviction, the decade's most important film, that Hillary Swank did this story.
It's a real story of a guy who was convicted of a murder he didn't commit in Massachusetts, and nobody would take the case.
And so his own sister had to go to law school and become a lawyer to defend him.
And it turns out the police intimidated witnesses into into this, giving evidence against him for something that he didn't do.
And this, that's just the short story of it.
But again, this is not unusual.
We have, you know, the story, let me let me break in here real quick, too.
There's the story of the kid Browder.
There's a documentary about it.
Now, the kid who was accused of stealing a backpack in New York, and they kept him in Rikers for years with and then finally ended up just dropping the charges, and he killed himself later on.
And it turned out that the kid that had ratted on him was a kid that the police basically just used as a slave, who just they just blackmailed and extorted him into pointing the finger at all kinds of innocent people in that neighborhood for years, and they got away with it.
Now, once the police are under a lot of pressure, and I can understand what happens if you're a cop, and you're on a case, and the case has a murder case, it has getting publicity, you're under pressure to arrest somebody.
And if you're a prosecutor, you're under pressure to prosecute to get a conviction.
And so it's winning at all costs.
And that is one of the problems here.
I'll just point to one of the great examples that most people have never heard about, where the district attorney did the right thing.
Homer Cummings was the US attorney under FDR in the 1930s.
But prior to that, he was the district attorney in a small town in Connecticut.
Anyway, they had a murder there that everybody was upset about.
I mean, to the point, an arrest was made, and it looked very obvious that this guy had to be the murderer.
And Homer Cummings went out and investigated the people that were making the claims and the witnesses and all that.
It was impossible.
This guy could not have done it.
So in court, he disproved his own murder case.
And he got a lot of flack for it.
But he said, Hey, my job as district attorney is to do justice.
It ain't just to get a conviction.
And that's the that's the standard we need to return to.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that's the thing, right?
We all watch Perry Mason or Matlock or whatever, when we're kids and or even I guess, law and order nowadays, right?
Where if they're wrong, they're always the first to admit it.
You know, as soon as Matlock gets the confession on the stand, the prosecutor says, Well, goddang, judge, I guess I have to admit, I've made a mistake here.
Please dismiss the charges.
Right.
But that's not real life at all.
That's just TV.
But that's the way we always assume that it goes.
Anyway, so let's talk about the Branch Davidians.
Because we can sit here and complain about the cops in general forever.
But and the courts and the rest of it.
But one way, sure.
You just use the phrase law and order.
Now that phrase didn't exist prior to about the police prior to about 19 sometime in the 60s, not late 60s.
And that's one of the problems with the language that has been altered so that we that has a harder edge put in say, peace officer, or policemen, or some words that we used to use that one originated on the series, Adam 12.
Yeah, I mean, enforcement actually has the violent verb right in it, right?
Precisely.
And that's one of the things we are all manipulated by the language that has been concocted that we use every day.
Just like with the Davidians.
They lived in a compound.
No, they didn't.
That's a that is a specifically crafted psychological warfare word to militarize the situation.
What's the difference between a gun collection?
In Texas, a lot of people have gun collections?
Or do they have an arsenal?
Or are they stockpiling weapons?
You know, it's how you want to phrase this.
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If you read the book and um, yeah, you know, invite me to give a speech to your group.
Thank you for bringing up the guns because here's where I want to get to when we start, you know, get to the story here really.
Um, and correct me if I'm wrong here, but I'm pretty sure I'm not.
Paul Fata or Fata or however you pronounce it, left the branch Davidians property that morning driving a dually pickup truck with a camper shell and towing a U-Haul trailer, both full of rifles, 90 plus percent of the branch Davidians arsenal.
And he drove it out of there and it wasn't because he was evading the incoming ATF raid.
It was because he was going to the gun show in Austin at the old best building there on Sheridan and 290.
And he was going to sell them because he was the guy that ran the Davidians gun business.
And that was 90 something percent of their guns.
And then when he found out about the raid later that day, he called them and said, well, I'm the guy with all the guns.
Are you looking for me?
I'll turn myself in.
I don't want any trouble, mister.
And yeah, that was the branch Davidians arsenal.
And they portrayed it as though these people were about to, I guess, march on downtown Waco and take it over.
Well, that's what a lot of people thought.
That's the thing, two things here that's never mentioned.
One is they had a legal business, but all the talk about gun control caused the increase in price in certain firearms.
So they bought them from a dealer and held them until the price went up and then sold them back to other dealers or whatever.
Perfectly legal.
We couldn't find anything illegal about firearms.
And I say that contrary to what ATF reps have said, you're talking about an agency where agents have bragged in my presence, they can take any semi-automatic firearm and take it into their lab and goof around with it and cause it to fire two shots with one pull of the trigger.
And that qualifies as a machine gun.
And then they can arrest the possessor.
And they've done that.
And they bragged about this.
I've heard this over the years.
And so have other cops out here, but that is something that is just never mentioned.
But we have never found anything that's credible, let's just say, that they would add illegal firearms.
And by God, it's Texas.
How many people have, I mean, machine guns are legal in Texas if you get the right stuff from the sheriff.
So that's one that inflames when people hear that.
And it's, again, an untruth.
Yeah.
Well, you know, sorry, again, another little sort of personal story here for a second.
Kind of the reason why I'm like this overall and stuck this way, anti-government extremist that I am, is because of Waco.
But it's also the origin of my obsession with talk radio, too.
Because the first time I ever heard AM talk radio, when I was 16, driving my sister's hand-me-down Old Plymouth, I decided, oh, I wonder what's on the AM band in Austin, Texas.
I actually had no idea.
I've lived here my whole life.
And I started flipping through the AM band and there was surviving Branch Davidians telling their side of the story and taking calls.
And the callers knew all kinds of stuff about it.
And the Branch Davidians were like, yeah, that's right.
Exactly.
And my mind was just absolutely blown because here was it's like Rumsfeld says about the unknown unknown.
It had never occurred to me that you could that anyone could ever hear the Branch Davidians side of the story that they even had one to tell.
You know, rather Jennings and Brokaw sure as hell weren't going to hand it to me on a silver platter.
And and here callers can call in and can ask questions and make good points.
And it's this whole other level of discussion of the truth about this most important thing that had been so covered up and lied about.
And it's just it's a miracle.
I love it.
The technology of this medium and what it's good for interviews like this.
You know, I know that there are people listening to this who are way too young to know anything about Waco at all, who are now going to watch the rules of engagement and then hopefully McNulty sequels a new revelation in the FLIR project as well.
If nobody comes away with any one thing from this interview, it is with don't talk to police and particularly federal police without your lawyer present.
And you see this playing out right now where, let's say, an FBI agent or two could talk to you, have talked to you a year ago, and then they come back now and maybe you don't recollect what exactly you said.
Now they can charge you with lying to an FBI agent.
And now you're really in the soup.
You're going to hire a lawyer.
You're going to go to federal court.
It's going to break.
It's going to break the bank.
And they know that and they can use that as leverage to for whatever.
That is one of the things that people have got to understand is you don't talk to police without a lawyer.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so get to the heart of this thing about David Koresh.
He talked about how it was a PR stunt.
But, you know, this guy, I don't buy at all that this was like a Charles Manson cult.
I think you guys dispel that in the or Jim Jones style call.
I think you dispel that pretty well in the documentaries.
And yet he did have a bit of a cult of personality there.
And geez, he had a mullet and a Trans Am.
And people just hate that.
So, I mean, just tell me exactly how horrible was this guy?
How criminal was this little commune religious group that he was running out there?
And just how bad the day did they deserve to be raided and then later shot and burned?
Well, first of all, what is the difference between a cult and a religious sect?
Before Charles Manson, cult just meant a small religion.
Jesus and his followers were a cult.
And when Manson happened, we really didn't know what do you call that?
And that's when cult became vilified.
Now, this is one of the most telling things that goes to your housewives you were talking about earlier, is that when you listen to the negotiations between the FBI guys, the Davidians, a lot of this is theological stuff, the arguments.
The FBI guys are born-again Christians or some other sect or Mormons, and they're arguing their theology against the branch Davidians, which is Seventh-day Adventists.
I mean, they are a break-off back in the 1920s or somewhere back in there of the Seventh-day Adventist church.
So they're having theological arguments.
So you might have, just think about the Thirty Years' War, where you got Catholics and Lutherans all at each other's throats, and you cross yourself one way and somebody else crosses there, so I can kill you because you crossed the wrong way.
But the stuff about the religion and all the things about the sects and all that is totally irrelevant, because that is completely outside the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and yet they use that to inflame.
You also had, in Waco, a dynamic with the local newspaper running very inflammatory stories.
But at its heart, David Koresh's or specifically the Davidians' problem started the way so many others have started that I have done stories on.
That is, somebody got angry at Koresh, a former member, and made a phone call, and that phone call happened to fit in when he called the police agency with a political agenda that was going on.
In this case, it was, the Clintons are coming in, they want more gun control, and we're the guys who benefit by that, so we're going to do some big stunt.
The business that was emphasized in the ABC story about the UPS driver having a package of hand grenades open up, it wasn't a package of hand grenades.
I'll bet you go to an Army, Navy store, surplus store in Texas, you could certainly do it here in Santa Monica until a few years ago, and they've got a box of these hand grenade hulls sitting right by the door.
You can't, they're not suitable for explosives.
People made them for, use them to make little novelties, like the one that was in the store, on the story I did.
And I think the Davidians were making paperweights and reselling them, right?
Oh yeah, they were making all kinds of...
Yeah, paperweights, deadly paperweights.
Yeah, paperweights, this kind of thing.
You've seen this, there's a grenade that says, take a complaint department, say, you know, pull a pin, stuff like that.
They had all kinds of stuff, but they made money at the flea markets, and there's just nothing going on.
Now, I've talked to the, you know, people who saw the film saw Sheriff Harwell, who was the sheriff at the time, he's now deceased, but full face on camera, he's saying that we investigated all these stories, these salacious stories about David Koresh, and sex, and the Department of Public Services, or Child Protective Services in Texas did as well, and there's no case there to be made with anybody else.
Remember, girls in Texas can get married at 14 years old, and it used to be some states had even 12 years old.
Now, you may disagree.
Not that that's okay, just that that's the law around here.
Makes you wonder about our legislators here in Texas, that that's the law, but anyway.
But this is stuff that goes back to the 1800s and before, that's just slowly been on the books, but again, the whole issue about the, you know, sex and whatever else was going on is completely irrelevant in terms of any legitimate purpose the ATF had to be there.
They are the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and so they want a warrant, they want a big public relations scare, and they lie, this is the big one of the big lies, that the Davidians were dealing drugs, which they were not.
Total lie.
But if you're a law enforcement agency and you provide a drug connection, you get free military equipment and guns and whatnot and training that you don't have to reimburse the federal government for.
If it's not drug related, you don't get it.
Part of our war on drugs.
And so they did this, they got to go to Fort Hood and do military training, that's where they got the tanks and whatnot, and...
And Huey helicopters.
And Huey helicopters.
And so you have this stunning shock and awe thing going on, and because the Davidians were vilified to the max, so as you have said, many people in the public justify you to even kill them.
And that's the bottom line, and it can happen to...
All you have to have is the political winds change a little bit, and if you're a Southern Baptist, if you're a Presbyterian, if you're a...
Whatever you are, you can be vilified and...
Well, we all ought to be familiar with this from Orwell.
It's just the two minutes hate, where your actual enemy, power, points at someone who doesn't have any and says, everybody hate that guy.
And people fall for it every time, like a bunch of animals.
Yeah, that's true.
And that's exactly what happened here.
It's just, you've got the raid, it's the power, it's the lies, it's the warrants that...
And the affidavits that were false, the whole business about lying, that the government, people, ATF wasn't shooting from the helicopters.
Of course they were.
I've had people...
I'm a big...
I'm, you know, made of Texan of sorts, and Southern.
I can know how to talk to the guys, and I've had them admit it.
You know, all you do is go up to the bar where these guys are drinking, and, boy, you guys would have smoked that son of a bitch down there in Hector, didn't you?
Oh, yeah, let me tell you about that.
So, you know, I've got my...
I have two Texas Rangers in my family line, and I know how it works.
Texas Rangers, by the way, I should say they're...
I'm talking 1800s Texas Rangers, but these are the ones that were at Waco, were the... probably the most honest guys there, and they got big-footed by the FBI, by the government, and they weren't happy about it.
The government destroyed evidence.
That big white double door at the front of the building the Davidians lived in has disappeared.
Big metal door, and there was testimony that the bullet holes were punched in from the outside, which the government's people denied.
Thing after thing after thing has destroyed... has been... has disappeared, but we... the Texas Rangers tried to say this stuff, and they couldn't do it.
Now, the thing that was really interesting that McNulty found in the evidence box, there was a lot of the munitions that were used that did...that were capable of starting a fire were mislabeled as silencers and gun parts and things of this sort, and there again, you're playing on people's ignorance if you show that stuff in court, which I don't think they...
I'm not sure they did, but I can read you the notes, but this is a... another thing that's very easy to hornswoggle people that you can hold up a piece of metal, and somebody who knows what it is recognizes it's not a gun part, but you can tell somebody else it is, and it's... it's one thing after another.
Well, and when you talk about mislabeled as silencers, you're referring to the pyrotechnic rounds that were found at all three origins of the fires.
No, no, and this is what...
I think this is not made clear.
We make it clear in the film we did is that the careful way the FBI prepared the building to burn, and then it filled it with CS, which is like a talcum powder.
It's not a... it's not tear gas.
My...
I've been exposed to it myself at Fort Edgewood Arsenal at... as part of Aberdeen Proving Grounds back in the 60s, but it's... it's a fine powder, and you get the same effect once it's suspended in the air of a grain dust fire or explosion.
It's... it just goes through, but here's the biggie, is that when it burns, it produces hydrogen cyanide, and the... all the conditions were right that day, and the testimony was... he was... well, the commander was asked, uh, why did you decide to do the raid that day?
He said, because of the weather, and then we show you what happened with the weather.
You had a 30 mile an hour wind blowing at one corner.
That's the... the building is injected with CS.
That's the last corner that's pulled out, so the wind is now going on, and that's the first point where we saw on the infrared video that the government had from a circling plane where there were...there was a flame starting.
Now, there were other points where pretty close to that they did, but that's... and then the fire just... a fireball, that's what people describe, just goes right through the building.
People who tried to get out the back of the building were being fired on by either the FBI or the U.S. Army or the British SAS.
That's the Special Air Services, their commando group, who were there as well.
So we had the prospect, the possibility, that British soldiers killed American soldiers... people on American soil.
And, oh, and I just...
I forgot to mention one thing here that...
Yeah, I knew those guys were there, Dan, but I had no idea that there was, uh, reasonable suspicion that they had actually participated in the firefight in the backyard.
Oh, well, you know, remember all the cameras that what happened at Waco were on the front side.
Sure, yeah.
You couldn't see what was going on the back side, but I... oh, I forgot to I mean, because there's... wait, wait, wait, but, I mean, we have testimony from a CIA and a former Delta Force officer that they had... that Delta Force had admitted to them, members of Team B had admitted to them that they were back there shooting.
Was there anything... was there any other indication that SAS participated other than just... we know they were there because there were Israelis there and I think even Russian Special Forces guys came to visit for a while too, right?
Uh, I haven't heard about that, but I have to go back.
Nobody has admitted that...
During the siege, anyway.
...they fired.
Here's where you get into word games again.
The FBI said that nobody on the government side fired a single shot.
Okay, does that mean they fired a whole bunch of shots?
Does that mean just the FBI guys?
It sounds like Bill Clinton wrote that line for him himself, right?
Yeah, but here's... here's one I...
I meant to mention this at the top.
One of the reasons for this raid that I...
I'd heard and I was able to confirm afterwards was that half the Davidians were black.
The public perception was there were a bunch of white red men.
Half were black and you had people in the ATF who have this, uh, had this annual thing called the Girl Boys Roundup where they go in the woods, drink whiskey, hand out hunting licenses, and I had angry agents, a couple of them, say David Koresh was miscegenated.
That had to be stopped.
We had to do something about that.
You think we're out of the, uh, out of that era?
Uh-uh.
All right, hang on just one second.
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Well, you know, I'm looking at the news today about Donald Trump, you know, talking bad about darker-skinned nations, so to speak, and what have you, that's got everybody so upset.
I was just thinking, I wonder if Bill Clinton had actually used the N-word himself as he was murdering the Branch Davidians.
Would the liberals have cared then?
And I guess the joke is, like you're saying, as far as they're concerned, the Branch Davidians were a bunch of neo-Nazis or something.
They don't know the first thing about it.
They don't know that half of them were black at all.
And they certainly wouldn't have said, no, the cops are the ones who were the KKK, and the Davidians are the ones who are the racially progressive types.
Yeah, well, you saw that photo on the story I did of the ATF agents with the Confederate flags.
About to tweet it right now, actually, as we're talking.
But that is, I've been trying to get an original of that photo for 20, over 20 years, and nobody will admit that it even exists, but there it is.
It's an interesting story how I got that, but that's the...
All right, so now two specific questions here.
Well, wait, one, I forgot the second one.
The first one is, how certain are you that the ATF fired first when they showed up that morning on February the 28th, 93?
Completely.
All the evidence we were able to develop is that talking to people and the sound and all that is that they came up and started shooting.
In fact, the first things they shot were the dogs.
They had, the Davidians had a pen out front with some dogs, puppies, and whatnot, and shot, and then they blasted through the door.
David Koresh came out, and you heard this, and said, stop, there's women, children in here, let's talk about this, and he got shot.
So game's on.
And then we have the helicopters circling and firing, striking the place from the air.
Again, that was lied about that it didn't happen, but it did.
And it's just one thing after another, but it is...
So you go back to that question, what do you do when the cops show up at your door and start shooting?
Do you be a good citizen, let them kill you?
Maybe out here in Santa Monica, that's the answer.
Not in Texas, I suspect.
Well, and as you said, the law in Texas is that every human has the right to defend themselves.
I mean, these people are supposedly our security force.
They don't have the right to murder us.
We do have the right to defend our lives with violent force.
If they use unreasonable, deadly force in the first place and initiate it, that's the law.
That's not some right-wing anti-government take.
Or maybe it is, but it's because it was written into the Constitution after the Civil War here.
Yeah, and Dick DeGaran and the other committee attorneys made that very plain.
I know Dick DeGaran from my days in Houston.
If you ever need a defense lawyer, he's the guy you want.
And the other one was very good too, but he made that point under oath at Congress.
About that.
And it's a very important principle.
I don't know how many other states would have that law anymore.
A lot of that kind of thing has been taken off the books, but that's the case.
It certainly was.
I remember hearing that about, like I said, I had two Texas Rangers up in Kerrville.
That's where my family used to be before they moved west to New Mexico territory.
But if somebody shot a sheriff or a deputy sheriff, the question was, okay, if it was shown that the sheriff started the problem or had no legitimate cause to be pulling it on somebody, that person's going to be found not guilty by the law.
Yeah, well, theoretically, anyway, yeah.
I guess that the lynch mob doesn't get him before then, but these things are very, very important to remember.
All right.
Now, so I want to ask you a little bit about the siege here real quick too, because one of the important things, and this may have been in the sequel, A New Revelation, but it may have been in the first one too.
And that was that the outgoing director of the FBI, Sessions, wanted to go and say, look, I'm the director of the FBI.
I'm in charge of negotiations here.
Let's work this thing out.
And Bill Clinton grounded his plane and wouldn't let him go.
And he still had another week or two in office or something like that.
But Bill Clinton refused to let the guy go to negotiate.
Is that not right?
Problem here is we really can't confirm what was going on in the White House.
Janet Reno is the person who gets the blame in most cases, but she had only been in office a few weeks and she only knew what was being told to her.
And what I have heard is that, and Roger Stone says this in a book that's out, that it was Hillary Clinton who was the hard case on this about negotiating and getting it over and going ahead and getting it off the headlines.
I don't know, unless some of those people talk, we're not going to know.
And this of course is, ruler-wise, is linked in with the death of Bill Clinton.
But overall, factually speaking though, he was trying to go negotiate and somebody stopped him.
Yeah, I probably took probably, I'd have to review those, but I think it's probably true.
That's what I remember from one of those movies.
I forget which one, but yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, but somebody, we just don't know, you know, provably who said what to whom inside the White House at the time.
It was just, remember to deviate from the official story.
And with some stories now, he apparently is to be a conspiracy theorist.
Well, never mind that crap.
But wait, so now it makes sense, right, that Hillary Clinton would have been going absolutely crazy because this is the first hundred days of the Bill Clinton.
I mean, this happened a month into his administration, it broke out.
So, you know, of course she's going nuts.
But so what I'm, I guess, confused about a little bit is, well, not really confused, but I'd like to know more about how, why during that 51 days when the HR, with the HRT driving around in tanks, threatening the people, and with the FBI negotiations going absolutely nowhere, why would it be that even to Hillary Clinton, and I know she likes killing people, but why would it be even to her the idea would, you know, end it with some kind of violent raid rather than, you know what, switch out the negotiating team.
Let the Texas Rangers negotiate.
Let the local sheriff negotiate.
Somebody, we want an end to this thing, but instead of go in there and end it, how about send in the local sheriff to be the talk, the guy to talk now.
See if we can do something and not, not for, you know, generous reasons, but just wouldn't that be the smart thing to do when, when, you know, weeks and weeks, we're talking six weeks go by, right?
Weeks and weeks and weeks go by of this militarist siege thing, and I'm still, and I understand all the propaganda against them and everything at the time, but it just seems like it doesn't make much sense, even from the Democrats' point of view, or even from the FBI's point of view, necessarily, to send in tanks and do some violent raid and end it that way, when they could have just fired Bob and Joe and brought in Dick and Tom and put them on the phone instead and see if we can do a little bit of a different thing here, you know, switch it up a little bit.
Yeah, well, the Sheriff Harwell did go out there.
They tried, but they were big-footed by the FBI.
There's a whole segment here where Sheriff Harwell went out to negotiate, and the FBI came up with some scam plan where they were going to be inside an armored personnel carrier and run out and grab Gresh quickly and run in.
You've got to, again, put yourself in the mindset of, you know, you haven't broken any legitimate laws, and you're being attacked, and you're being asked to send your kids out to guys on tanks who are looting you and turning around and fondling their genitalia and telling you that your kids will be safe.
You're going to send your kids out there?
And this is part of the... you heard this in the tapes.
Again, this is one thing after another.
There's a big disconnect between the guys in the tanks, as Dick Revis points out, which is...
Dick Revis is terrific, by the way.
Yeah, he is, too.
Ashes of Waco is his book.
Exactly.
He's, I think, the second guy I interviewed on this show back in 2003.
Yeah, Revis has a talent for making a declarative sentence that sums it all up, that everybody can understand.
Very, very good, which is why they put him in the film, because it gets very confusing with so many things going on at the time that are just... have nothing to do there with what is really happening, and that's...they're just irrelevant, and that's what he's able to cut through there.
But you've got the people in the Davidians listening to these theological arguments about who found Jesus where, and you know, it just... it makes my head hurt, but that's what was going on, and I don't think that if you're in the White House, and you're Hillary Clinton, or you're some other official, you want this thing off the TV screen, because you look weak.
The questions are being raised, and why can't you end this thing?
Now, the thing that supposedly Janet Reno said that she was told that caused her to act was that babies were being beaten.
Now, I can't think of another thing that would be more inflammatory than that.
And what an obvious load of crap, too.
Oh yeah, when David Koresh gets frustrated, he just punches babies, and the other hundred-something people in there let him, too.
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah, but see, we have this myth, this image in our culture of the Bengali that controls people, and that's the cast that, you know, the Elmer Gantry, though, you know, pick your character, and that goes on.
Now, and that's something that also fits in with this, that most people aren't aware of, is that the military for years and years, certainly out in San Francisco, has been doing... very curious about why people follow a leader.
What is leadership?
And there've been all kinds of experiments done, and I know this one was studied by people at the War College, because I've been there, and it was talking about this.
And what made people follow him?
What made people... why didn't they just throw up their hands and walk out?
Well, there's a lot of... there's a lot of reasons why, and it's not a soundbite.
It's a long conversation to understand that these people felt that they were being attacked by the forces of, what was it, evil or Armageddon or the second coming or something of that sort, which I think is... certainly doesn't fit in with anything I believe, but to them, that was real.
That's their theology.
And the guys in the FBI who are the negotiators didn't buy that because that conflicted with their ideology.
So then they're arguing about how many angels can sit on the head of a pen or other such things.
Which is amazing, right, that the FBI agents would be, you know, so myopic.
I mean, the negotiators, too, that they get into, like, whether this is correct or not, rather than just trying to see it through their enemies' eyes, and because let's be frank about it, right, and say, like, okay, well, wait, if you guys think that the book of Daniel says that I'm going to bring chariots of fire and death against you, I guess I probably might be sort of provoking you a bit by ringing your house with a bunch of tanks and guys with guns.
And maybe if this is your script, maybe I shouldn't be playing exactly the role you have written for me.
But instead, they might as well have been deliberately trying to provoke, and I'm not saying I think they were, but just in a de facto sense, they were playing exactly the role that the Branch Davidians saw the evil, satanic new Roman Empire playing in the end of days and all this stuff.
Yeah, by their ideology.
And there's another factor here, too, which was these agents, the FBI, the ACF guys, wanted revenge.
And I remember I went to Waco and I was talking to a woman who cleaned one of the motels out there where the agents were staying, and she said that these guys were getting so angry at each other that there were actually incidents of guns being pointed by APF agents at other agents, FBI, I presume.
And she said, well, what police do I call?
And they wanted blood.
They wanted to kill them.
And the way that this was done, I come back to that, the careful way this whole attack was on the day that it was done and the way that it was done, you can see this was done by intention to achieve the results that you got.
And the big message here that was being sent was, don't mess with us.
You come, you surrender.
Hey, you know what?
Maybe I'm wrong in presuming that it was just de facto.
Maybe they really did want to make sure to push the thing to a head so that they would have a chance to burn the house down because it was covered in bullet holes, incoming bullet holes in the roof, in the doors, in the everything.
Do you think that's possible?
That that was really that level of premeditated?
We've got to get rid of that house, boys.
That has been mentioned many times in the testimony that the building burned because the physical evidence supported the Davidian story, not the government story.
That's why that front door has disappeared.
That's why everything else has happened.
That's why they poured bleach all over the crime scene as soon as the fire went out.
Well, maybe not.
You've got bodies there.
It's a hot day.
It's decomposition.
There's reason for that.
But you've got to look at this.
It's definitely used the overused phrase cover up, but it's there.
And we've seen how this withholding of evidence to get conviction, the corruption of the judge.
Don't forget that the government got a big black eye on this one, and it was only because the jury found the Davidians not guilty of everything, really, except a minor charge that they thought they would be released because they'd been held in custody for pending trial for a year or whatever it was.
And the prosecutors went behind closed doors with the judge and worked him over, and he imposed these draconian sentences, which were totally unjustified.
And again, I think everybody ought to put themselves in the position of in a courtroom against Uncle Sam.
And this is something that most nice people, certainly those housewives you're talking about in Austin, could never imagine themselves being in.
But all you have to have is some agency that wants to make a name for itself.
In this case, people see or hear guns and religion and child abuse and all this.
Can we go back to the bleach thing for a second?
Because I always thought that was really suspicious, all those pictures of the bottles of Clorox bleach there at the crime scene right after the fire.
But you're saying that maybe they would have needed to pour bleach on corpses out there?
That can't be right.
Well, it might ruin the autopsy.
But I mean, you've got bleach on.
I'm just saying there is a reason for that.
I can't get inside the head of knowing why.
Was there another reason?
Yeah, it could be used for the reason you're saying.
No, I mean, it's true, though, that I guess I don't think I've ever seen pictures of them literally pouring it out all over the place or whatever.
But I have seen just a lot of bottles of bleach on the scene.
I thought that didn't seem right.
Is that what you do, bring bleach to a crime scene?
Well, you've got, you know, remember, these bodies were there.
It's there in the hot ashes.
It's what was 100 degrees or thereabouts.
Yeah, it's not like they cared about preserving the evidence anyway.
Well, you're not going to be able to preserve the evidence much anyway as far as the decomposition of the bodies under those conditions.
Well, and they unplugged the freezer truck and let all the corpses in there, you know, continue to decompose.
Remember that one?
Yeah.
Now, so wait a minute.
We're almost out of time here, Dan, and I really appreciate your time on the show.
But let's talk about the fire here and the raid in the last day there.
Well, I guess, you know, in a nutshell, you think it's right that they just deliberately filled the house with a flammable gas and then shot in these pyrotechnic rounds to destroy that evidence and kill these people?
Is that what happened?
Yeah, that's what it is.
That's what we found.
That's what the evidence points to.
It's you don't want to see it, but that's what it is.
Again, I go back to the we have the aerial surveillance video that's being analyzed by Dr. Allard.
And that's competent to do it.
He invented the technology.
And you can plainly see where the injections were made and where the fire, the first flames started.
It's registered on the infrared.
And then quickly it goes other places.
But the fireball just goes right through the building.
And that's what people inside said happened.
And that's where you see there was a 30 mile per hour wind blowing right at that corner.
We have an interview with the Houston fire chief on, you remember, and he's talking about how this is likening it to a pot belly.
So they rigged it up to do that.
But you put CS in there and that produces hydrogen cyanide when it burns.
They know that.
You didn't have to do that.
And hydrogen cyanide, this is what they used to kill people in the gas chambers.
Yes.
And that's the point is made by one of the people in the film that in the gas chamber, when that was used, they strapped people down, not because they wanted to prevent them getting away.
It's because cyanide causes such extreme and violent muscle contractions that they don't want the people who are viewing it, the witnesses to see that.
And that you've seen some of the pictures of the children and other people from the fire, they are bent over backwards.
And that's one of the characteristics we were told of cyanide poisoning.
And by the way, CS, as I should mention, is banned in international warfare that goes right to Vietnam.
Yeah, right.
But the FBI can use it on us.
And and now so I just want to mention Delta Force again, Combat Applications Group, Team B there.
And there's all the work done by Lee Hancock of the Dallas Morning News about their presence there as well.
Worth a mention.
It's pretty hard to find online.
I haven't been able to find it online.
That's interesting.
I tried to talk to Lee Hancock about that.
And she was just violently pro-FBI to me.
I know.
And yet she proved it anyway that they were there.
She didn't prove that they were shooting, but she certainly, you know, uncovered a lot of documents and proved a lot of your case anyway.
I mean, I think I agree with you about like, it was weird her attitude for what a great job she'd done on that story, honestly.
You know, I thought about I thought about going out and visiting her in China or trying to where she lives.
And it's like she doesn't want that out.
But it's she was just so negative about taking the FBI's story as literal and the government story side story that I just didn't think there was any point of it.
But I what we found was conflicting with many cases with what she was writing about.
Right now, I'm sorry.
So before we wrap up here, we really got to go.
But I mean, we got to talk about this is the worst thing about it, even worse than killing all the people, I think, or it is to me, is just the level of lies and cover up here and calling it a mass suicide, accusing these people of pouring gasoline on their own children and setting it on fire when that's not what happened at all.
And they made people believe that.
And people cheered for it.
I remember the USA Today poll.
And this may have been fudged, but I don't know.
USA Today poll had ninety three percent of the American people approved of the tank assault, even though it had led directly to the fire one way or the other.
And and they thought that it was fine.
Those people have been so demonized.
It was like that time Saddam Hussein attacked us in New York and Washington, D.C., they thought, whatever.
You know, that was that was the level of deceit there.
And and they still get away with it to this day.
And, you know, the reason that this is in the news again, well, I got I got a conspiracy theory.
I think there is a pretty good documentary coming out or a TV miniseries coming out.
I saw a preview for it and made it look pretty good.
And it seems to me like maybe the reason that ABC did their documentary about it is to sort of try to deflate from this miniseries.
And I was going to ask you if you knew if maybe this miniseries was based on McNulty's script, because I know he wrote one.
And last time I talked to him, he was trying to get it published and thought he was going to be produced in Hollywood.
And I wondered if maybe this was it.
And I wonder if maybe all this new propaganda about Waco, it's not April.
Why are they doing this?
They're doing this maybe to blunt the effect of this new miniseries, you think?
Well, that takes us to another one.
We he got nowhere with that because he's not a script writer and all that.
But we my wife and I had we're going to do a film in conjunction with Walper Productions and Warner Brothers.
And we were pretty had a pretty good start when I got a death threat to not proceed.
And we kept on going.
And then one morning, the coordinator between Walper and Warners didn't show up for a meeting and they found her body in her house stuffed in the closet with a bullet hole in the back of her head.
This is 1999.
I'm sorry.
Who was it that got murdered?
The production coordinator between Walper and you see at the bottom of our bio, that's one of those unsolved murders I'm still seeking information on.
Janet Burroughs.
You know what?
There was the video expert who also had a suspicious death.
What was his name?
Yes.
But, yeah, there was there were a couple of and that's who were again.
He was the guy.
If it's the guy I'm thinking you're talking about, he was he had spent weeks and weeks and weeks working for the Congressional Committee examining the video is the guy I'm thinking of.
Yeah.
Well, I don't want to get into people cranked up here about conspiracy stuff, but lead on the patch by the headline is Andrew Breitbart's death.
Some uncomfortable reality.
Andrew Breitbart lived down the street from me here.
I knew him well.
And there were all kinds of conspiracy theories or theories that say ideas put out that he might have been murdered as well.
He had a heart attack.
This guy that you're talking about, I believe, had a heart attack as well.
I don't think that those were necessarily murders.
But the question is, do we have methods of doing that to make somebody murdering somebody and make it appear to be a heart attack?
Is this is true?
It's certainly worth asking the question, if not, you know, jumping to a conclusion.
Go back to the nineteen seventy five hearings done by Frank Church in the Senate about CIA activities and look on the Andrew Breitbart death thing there, and you'll see him holding up the CIA assassination gun, which fires a cryogenic pellet that was undetectable at the time.
This is in the 70s and causes what appears to be a heart attack.
And then the pellet goes away.
And this was something that William Colby was forced to bring into the to show because people didn't believe this kind of stuff existed.
But yes, it does.
And I spoke with Colby a number of years ago and his son afterwards.
And there's all kinds of things that I was told about that relate to Colby's death that revolved around events at Waco.
Really?
Yeah, because the government did not want to release that aerial surveillance video.
And the copy that we had to work with was degraded.
There's something people don't, if you ever get into a legal battle with a large corporation or the government, one of the techniques they do to win is simply provide so much information that you can't possibly go through it.
Now, in this case, this video tape was a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy.
It was a very degraded copy.
So we're not looking at the same resolution that, say, was shown to Congress.
And you can see that in the film.
And you can see this in the CBS 60 Minutes portion that was later done, where they brought in a guy from the British Army whose job was to spot IRA snipers using infrared technology.
And he says right there, and it's like the story that I wrote, that these aren't reflections off the moon, Venus or whatever.
These are guys shooting down there into the building.
Oh, and there's just no question about it.
I mean, even in the degraded footage, you can see the men get out of the tank and fire their weapons.
It's as simple as that.
Just on that very last point, which is really the most important point out of all of this.
If you watch Waco, The Rules of Engagement, you'll see that footage.
If you watch the sequel, Waco, A New Revelation, there's higher quality version of the same footage, and it proves what you thought you saw the last time.
And then there's the FLIR project, which McNulty also put out, which my friend Will Porter has put up on YouTube.
Anybody can watch it.
And this is about the cover up when Senator Danforth led the whole, you know, pretend investigation in 1999, and they rigged a fake test at Fort Hood in order to ensure that it would acquit them.
And it's the whole thing's a joke, and McNulty tore it apart in the FLIR project.
So that's Waco, The Rules of Engagement, Waco, A New Revelation, and the FLIR project.
And this great article, it's really an important article.
I hope everyone will look at it.
It's at patch.com.
It's called, Will ABC Really Tell Us What Happened at Waco in 1993?
And of course, the answer is no.
That's Dan Gifford.
Thanks very much for your time, Dan.
You're welcome, Scott.
Really appreciate it.
All right, you guys, you know me, scotthorton.org for the show, antiwar.com, and thelibertarianinstitute.org for things I want you to read.
Buy my book, Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan.
That's at foolserrand.us and amazon.com.
And follow me on Twitter at Scott Horton Show.
Thanks.
