04/19/13 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
This is The Scott Horton Show.
Appreciate you tuning in today.
Our next guest is the great Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute at independent.org.
He also writes for the Future Freedom Foundation at fff.org, for luerockwell.com, for antiwar.com, for your local newspaper, and all over the place.
This one is at luerockwell.com today.
Top story, David Koresh's revenge, Waco and 20 years of state terror.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
I'm doing pretty good.
How are you doing, Scott?
I'm doing real good.
I appreciate you joining us today and for being so good on Waco, which after 20 years is just as important to me as it was back then.
You do such a great job of just, you know, hitting some highlights of, you know, maybe what people need to understand about Waco if they don't already know the story.
You think you could give us a little bit of that to start off here?
Well, as you know, this all began when the ATF was suffering in its publicity, in its public image, due to a couple of scandals.
And so, starting in the George H.W. Bush administration, the ATF began planning this raid of the Davidians, who were this eccentric offshoot of the Seventh-Day Adventists, though some Adventists don't regard them as such, living just outside Waco.
And they were an odd group, but the community there didn't tend to see them as any sort of threat.
And the ATF, over the period of the better part of a year, was doing these training exercises to do this raid, even as these agents were befriending Koresh, trying to find some evidence of significant weapons violations and so forth.
And then on February 28th, they went ahead with this raid.
They came in these livestock trailers, and they drove up to the Davidian home, and they raided it.
And I bend over backwards in most of my work to try to be fair with the facts.
So, in total fairness, we're not absolutely certain who fired first, but we know that the ATF raided the home, which is an act of aggression, I would say.
And I think they fired first.
That's where it was.
Well, some indications that they fired first come from the ATF agents' testimony themselves, and they quit actually even doing their debriefings that day, because so many of them were saying, yeah, we shot first.
They shot the dogs as soon as they got there.
And then when David Koresh opened the door unarmed, they shot him, and they shot and killed his father-in-law right there on the spot.
And then there was the shootout, and the FBI took over because the raid just didn't—it failed.
The Davidians, I like to point out, did cease fire when the ATF ran out of ammo.
They didn't decide to just gun them down.
They let them retreat.
And then for 51 days, the FBI had this horrible military siege on this home, and the press, they called it a compound.
It was just their estate is another neutral way of putting it.
And the FBI blared awful sounds and shine awful lights, and they cut off the Davidians from the outside world, from the press, destroyed the water supply, and they just—they threw flashbang grenades at Davidians that were leaving the building, even as they called it, all a hostage situation.
And eventually, the FBI got tired of this, and Janet Reno ordered the attack on April 19th, when, 20 years ago today, at 6 a.m. about, when the FBI took its Abrams tank, and it took its CS gas that pumped into the building for six hours, which likely killed some children right away, because these children were small, and any gas mask wouldn't fit them.
And they punctured the building with—it just folded, you know, broke a big hole in it.
This is not an assault, they yelled.
And the building went up in flames, and as you know, there's a lot of argument as to what was the proximate cause of the fire.
And I have my own views of that.
I think it was all of this government activity that caused the bulk of the fire.
It's possible that some of the Davidians inside contributed.
I mean, it's kind of a—I don't think I can know with certainty.
It is true that the Davidians had something of an apocalyptic vision in their eschatology.
But I think we can say with something close to certainty that if the FBI had not done many of the things it had done, those 70-plus people wouldn't have been killed.
All right, now, I want to make a real quick point about the origin of the fire there.
Mike McNulty that did Waco, the Rules of Engagement, etc., etc., he said on the show that he had one explanation for how the fire could have started inside, could have been set by a Branch Davidian, but accidentally.
And that was that—and it's difficult.
I think, Anthony, it's the southeast corner of the building there where the flames first come from.
A tank had just been right there.
And McNulty believes that—and I think he even knows the name of who the guy was that was in that corner room at the moment— that he was firing at the tank with his rifle right after it had sprayed in a lot of the flammable poison gas, and that that probably sparked it.
And they did tests, I think he said, like this, where can you spark this gas with a muzzle flash?
And yes, you can.
It goes up in a blue flame like alcohol kind of a thing.
And so it could have been—the first fire could have been set then by a Davidian, yet accidentally, as he was attempting to defend himself from a tank.
But then that still leaves open, even if we assume that that—and he wasn't saying he was certain about that.
But even if we assume that, that still leaves two more fires, one way in the back gymnasium and one over more near the kitchen area, where apparently we have separate fires that started independently.
And of course McNulty is the guy who found pyrotechnic, not incendiary, meant to start fire, but pyrotechnic could start fire rounds, the flashbang grenades, at all three origins of the fire.
Yeah, right.
And then, of course, the FBI lied about having used those incendiary— That's right.
They labeled them silencers on the paperwork.
It wasn't until, I think, 1999 that the truth came out from official voices.
But I think that's the way I look at it, too, and I trust that analysis.
But I must say, first of all, I haven't looked at all of the evidence in the detail to have quite the confidence that McNulty has, just because I have no reason to distrust that analysis.
But I'm just—the way I see this, Scott, is I'm a libertarian, and if I raid your home for whatever reason, especially if it's because I think you have guns or something, and I start shooting, and then I terrorize you, and then I start gassing your kids, and then I break down your building with a tank, and I do all of these things, and then there's a fire, I think I should share a lot of the responsibility for that.
So the only reason that I'm a little bit—I think I soft-pedal all of my accusations to the government.
I think I'm as soft as I can be, and even assuming that a lot of what the government says is true about certain facts here, it's still murder, what they did.
So certainly we see now that the state is—I mean, what the state did, I know you probably had some way you wanted to talk about this and then move on, but I'll just jump ahead to Chris Dorner, because it seemed there that the plan was to— that this is now standard operating procedure almost with certain enemies of the law enforcement, that they just surround you, and then they shoot NCS gas, and then they precipitate a fire, and then they don't let you leave.
Let me shoot.
That just seems—so given that—and look, today, I know I'm jumping all over the place, I apologize, but today the policy seems to be that the suspect in Boston, who—assuming he's guilty, of course, he's guilty of a very awful, awful crime— that the policy is—it's not just, let's try to get him, and if we have to kill him, then that'll be that.
It doesn't—I mean, maybe they'll get him alive, but it doesn't look like that's the way they're approaching it.
They seem to just—these days, they just approach the situation like, well, we just declare martial law, whatever the perimeter is.
In the case of Waco, they pushed the press back, and they basically created a military siege for that perimeter, and now they extend it at much of the Boston area.
So I think one thing we can tell is it's kind of like the whole approach to criminal justice and law enforcement has melded so much with military tactics that sometimes the question of who started this specific fire, it's important, but one reason I don't always focus on that, other than the fact that it's hard to weigh all the evidence objectively, or at least I don't have—I'm sure if I spent the time on it, I'd have stronger opinions, but when the government goes and just starts bombing people in another country, sometimes you also don't know what's the proximate cause of every aspect of violence.
Maybe some of the people in the Davidian home killed other people, and it was most likely mercy killings, because those people are going to die anyway.
But the point is when you create this whole situation, the institution doing that should bear responsibility, ultimate responsibility.
Yeah, I mean, look at Iraq.
They did the exact same thing with Iraq as they did with Waco.
They made Saddam David Koresh.
He's crazy, so you can't negotiate with him.
He's got illegal weapons, which he's ready to use on all of us any minute now, trust me, and he's bad to his own people.
And so with this narrative, they recycled the exact narrative against Saddam Hussein.
They went in there, they got a million people killed.
It wasn't the U.S. Army shot one million people, but they turned that entire society upside down, and the excess death rate would show a million people more dead than would have been for the 2003 through 2011 time frame there, 2009 time frame.
Right, right.
And if the textbook image of what government's all about was anything close to the truth, then after something like Waco, there would have been a serious investigation, not what was given.
But people in government, if they were actually good people concerned with enforcing the law, they wouldn't assume right away that everyone did everything by the book.
They'd say, what the hell did you do?
They would go up and down the chain of command, and they'd question everything, and they would try to ferret out crime.
Well, the fact that Juan Horiuchi, the sniper who murdered Vicki Weaver in August 1992, Ruby Ridge, was at Waco just shows how you would think that after doing that, even if the government had concluded, well, maybe he did it under pressure, or maybe it was a mistake or whatever, you'd think they would at least put him on some sort of suspension for a year and not have him being a sniper at one of these raids again.
Right, yeah, I mean, and there's compelling evidence that he fired shots that day too, the day of the fire, from the undercover house across the street.
Yeah.
And he was a tank driver some of the time there.
I don't know about the final day.
Well, I know one thing I don't think I've mentioned in any of my articles.
I've written, as you know, about 12 articles on Waco.
I always hit some of the same points, but always give a little bit different, add something different about what happened to each article so they're not the same article.
But one thing that I don't think I've ever mentioned is that, you know, after the, was it the ATF that, or maybe it was the FBI that drove the Bradley fighting vehicle over the grave of the Davidian?
Yeah, it would have been the FBI hostage rescue team.
Yeah, it was the FBI by then.
I know they took over right away, but some ATF guys might have been, you know.
That's true.
There were ATF guys who were included on some level, perhaps unofficially throughout.
And in fact, I've at least heard tell before that maybe it was ATF guys with no badge on who were doing a lot of the killing on the final day with all the machine gunning taking place in the backyard, although that's unconfirmed.
Well, they're the ones who, they're the ones who lost people the first day.
Exactly.
And they're the ones, you could see the FBI saying, well, you ATF guys are not.
Yeah, who wants to volunteer?
You're our younger stupid brothers, but we'll let you do this.
You know, this will be your coming of age.
Now you're like the FBI.
But when they drove the tank over the, there was a question about this in the press, and one of the officials or spokesmen said something like, well, we're not trained soldiers driving these vehicles.
You know, we're just FBI agents.
So we drove over it by accident.
And what a great excuse.
You know, well, we have this military hardware, but if we, if we do something like that, it's just an accident because we don't, we don't know what we're doing.
I mean, we're just FBI agents.
Yeah.
You give us a tank, of course, we're going to drive over a grave.
Well, you know, Anthony, all this dissent out of you reminds me of what Senator Danforth said when he was brought out in 1999 to do the ridiculous cover up, pretend third investigation or whatever on this story.
He complained that he wasn't sure that the government could maintain its faith in the people anymore.
And that, you know, maybe we're going to have to rethink this whole who made who thing.
Because if the American people are willing to doubt the FBI on a case like Waco, then how can the government ever trust them to do the right thing ever again, to believe the right thing ever again?
Well, his, his whitewash was overkill because unfortunately, even if Americans thought that it was that the FBI set out to burn them all to death on purpose from day one, people would still favor the Bush Obama era police state.
I mean, that's, that's a sad thing.
I mean, we just had this huge new task force report on the torture state under Bush, right?
And I haven't really delved into it, but it looks from what I've read that, that the torture state under Bush was even worse than we thought.
It was more extensive, more brutal, more vicious, awful, totally indefensible torture.
But that doesn't seem to make people think, oh, well, then we should question the legitimacy of the policy at its core, right?
Right.
Yeah, just like the FBI's failure all week to figure out who the hell these guys were until late yesterday.
Nobody brought up that there should be resignations, much less, you know, the abolition of the FBI and its replacement with some altogether new thing.
If that's how bad they suck at crime fighting, that they got to get the Boston PD to do it all for them.
But no, they maintain their faith.
And you know what?
Regardless of the fact that the opinion poll said that 93 percent of the American people approved of the tank attack after seeing it break out in a fire and being told that these people all burn themselves to death deliberately, the most ridiculous lie in the world.
Even if they manipulated that poll and it was really only 83 percent, not 93 or something like that.
I'm here to tell you, I was sacking groceries 15 years old at the time and the housewives of Northwest Austin, Texas, wanted the Davidians dead and they wanted them dead yesterday.
And how dare you now six weeks of preempting my soap operas and my game shows burn them all to death was the consensus of the housewives of Northwest Austin, Texas, at the time.
So it wasn't just, you know, Yankees who hate rednecks and live far away and think of Texans as Pakistanis or something like that.
It was Texans that wanted the Davidians to die.
In fact, if I might, one thing I want to say is when I did my thesis on this at Berkeley 10 years ago, I went into the project with an assumption because you know me.
I was kind of an Alex P. King libertarian, so I thought the blue state types would be way worse on this than the red state types.
And they were on some extent, but I looked at the press and I read every press report from February 28th through April 19th or 20th in both the New York Times and the Dallas Morning News.
I read every single one of them.
And I went in thinking, I know the Dallas Morning News doesn't represent Texas, you know, but I went in thinking that the slightly more local Dallas Morning News would be considerably more critical of the federal usurper Clinton administration's conduct than the New York Times.
Well, no, it turned out the New York Times was far more critical.
It was far more likely to question its own president and his conduct and the ATF, the FBI, and to critique the raid, raise uncomfortable questions.
The Dallas Morning News was somewhat more deferential to the government side of things.
Yeah.
Oh, to their credit, I'll say their reporter, Lee Hancock, ended up doing a hell of a lot of great work on what really happened there later on.
But yeah, you know what?
I should I should I should pull back a little bit because that because I read a lot of his stuff.
It's a herb.
Yeah.
Or cheese.
Look at how terrible you should never have me on as an expert or anything.
She was great.
How are you supposed to know the name?
Lee could be either way.
Right.
Who knows women named Lee?
Come on.
OK, well, she was she I do remember it wasn't like uniformly bad, but to the you know, and all the papers, I don't want to exaggerate the difference.
All the papers were basically trying to figure out what's going on.
But if you're if you're going to say which one was more deferential to the state, it was the Dallas Morning News.
It wasn't the New York Times.
Well, and you're talking about live at the time in 93, not all the retrospective in 1999 and 97 and whatever.
Right.
Trial or even summer 93.
I mean, look, the key is you've got to.
And that's the other thing with the press, as you as you know, as well as anyone.
If you read the whole article, it's a lot different from if you just read the headlines, isn't it?
Right.
And so I read a lot of that.
By the way, I hate to turn this into a personal thing, but it's kind of personal because it was my I was writing all of this during the buildup to the Iraq war.
So that was a pretty.
Trying time, I mean, not nothing like people actually face this type of violence or anything like that.
If I'm going to be in the if I'm going to be sitting here whining about how hard it is to read about state violence, I'll say that when you're doing all your daytime reading about Waco and then you go home and read about all the lies about Iraq, it was kind of a very memorable semester.
Yeah, I see what you mean.
And, you know, again, the parallels there are just incredible.
Yeah.
And, you know, in both cases, I would also mention, too, that it was so obvious that they were lying.
You would have to be a tool deliberately grabbing your own ankles, wanting to be lied to, to believe the crap that they say.
I mean, when George Bush declared war on terror instead of Al Qaeda, wasn't that a clue that, oh, we've decided we're going to get away with blue bloody murder now, not we're going to get the people who actually did this to us?
I mean, come on.
And it's the same thing with the Branch Davidians.
What were they going to do?
Conquer and occupy Waco?
Really?
When, as you mentioned at the beginning and as everybody knows, they've been infiltrated by the ATF for weeks and weeks and weeks that they could have just asked David Koresh to come on down and put his hands in cuffs himself.
You know, he's shooting at the gun range with the ATF.
And then a week later, they come and kill his whole family.
I mean, give me a break, man.
And then, oh, they committed suicide.
Yeah, because that's what people usually do.
Right.
Is is.
Oh, in fact, that's what people have ever done.
Right.
Set all their own children on fire with flammable liquids.
Right.
Just like no times in history ever.
Yeah.
I mean, come on, man.
And then.
Oh, but you know, and this is the thing.
People don't even remember now that that was the lie.
Right.
So long as 20 years ago.
But, hey, they got away with saying it was a suicide.
They looked at the American people right there.
Oh, yeah, that.
Yeah, that was a suicide.
Well, yeah, I know.
We were so surprised that they set themselves on fire.
What kind of barbarians are these Davidians anyway?
And the American people swallowed that whole because they wanted to because they love it.
Yeah, they do.
Americans tend not to want to believe that what seems to be plainly in front of them.
Yeah.
But don't believe anything that's not right.
Anything.
Well, yeah.
I mean, the the truth is really painful.
You know, if you just focus on any one of these things, certainly something as big as like the Iraq war.
The truth of that war is just too painful.
People don't want to believe that the entire administration lied for eight solid years.
And that the Obama administration, I mean, and that Obama and all the Democrats who were voting to fund the war were doing so for bad reasons.
And that it was all it's just really it's just really awful.
I don't really understand it, actually, why it's it's that awful, because it's only awful if you're that invested in in thinking the government is good.
But I thought Americans were supposed to at least have a somewhat skeptical view of government.
That's your problem right there.
The government isn't good.
Once you once you, you know, to this day, I know we're jumping around a lot this day.
People, my friends, sometimes surprised by things Obama does.
Now, there are things that are so evil that if Obama did them, I'd be like, wow, I never thought he'd do that.
You know, but nothing that he's done comes close to being that evil.
All of the things he's done that are very evil.
You know, I even before he became president, if he said, would you think he might go to war with Libya?
Do you think he might, you know, keep shut down Guantanamo releases and and be in some ways worse than this than Bush?
And do you think he will formalize the doctrine of presidential murder of whoever he wants on the planet?
I would have probably said, yeah, that sounds about right.
I mean, yeah, no, I know for a fact you would have said that because I was talking to you then.
And that was exactly the kind of conversation we were having.
Oh, this Obama guy.
Well, you know, he's Hillary Clinton, tall and black and male.
But other than that, you know, and this goes for another one.
Just, you know, how credulous the American people are.
It was so obvious, wasn't it, Anthony, in 2007 and 2008 that on the Democratic primary stage, you had two decent, honest gentlemen, Mike Revell and Dennis Kucinich.
And then on the other side of the stage, you had the three Hillary's Obama, Hillary and John Edwards, who were the three evil establishment warmonger status quo corrupt Hillary Clintons.
And how could any honest, intelligent person not see that there are two decent human beings on the stage and three lizards?
You know, I mean, rhetorically, not like David Icke lizard.
Sorry.
Yeah.
And I remember the bit where it got caught on audio when Hillary went up to Obama after one of the debates and said, you know, we need to have a serious debate with just the three of us.
Yeah.
We've got to figure out how to exclude these guys.
And Obama's nodding.
And, you know, the whole time he's probably thinking, you're one of the serious three for now, but I'm going to beat you.
You know, if she'd won, he'd be her secretary of state.
All right.
We got to go, man.
I'm way over time, Anthony.
I always like talking with you.
Thanks for doing the show today.
Thank you.
All right.
But that's my friend Anthony Gregory.
He's the something or other mucky muck important guy over at independent dot org, independent dot org.
Check out their great blog, The Lighthouse there.
He's also at the Future Freedom Foundation, FFF dot org.
And his piece today at Lew Rockwell dot com is called David Koresh's Revenge, Waco and 20 years of state terror.
Hey, I'll Scott Horton here for the Council for the National Interest at Council for the National Interest dot org.
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