All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast fee.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthorton show.
Hey, guys, check it out.
On the line, I got the great Jim Bovard, and I didn't know this at the time, I only found out much later, and I'm all caught up now, but he was great on the Waco masker all along, holding it down for the libertarian movement at that time.
And he's written so much about what really happened there, and especially the cover up.
And we've got one that we've reprinted at the Libertarian Institute right now.
It's called How the Government Covered Up the Waco Masker.
It's about Senator Danforth's investigation in 1999.
And really happy to have you back on the show, Jim.
How are you, my friend?
Doing good, Scott.
Thanks for having me on.
Thanks for sending me a copy of your new book.
It looks great.
I'm glad to see so many rave reviews on Twitter for your book.
Yeah, man.
And thanks for blurbing it.
I really appreciate that.
It makes me look all credible and stuff.
And yeah, so far, reactions are pretty positive.
So that's great.
That's great.
Yeah, folks are starting to say, well, so how soon is the next Scott Horton book coming out?
Yeah, boy, I'm not even considering one right now.
So life in hell.
Writing books sucks, man.
It's terrible.
And honestly, this latest book, this is everything I've got to say, man, pretty much.
So that ought to satisfy, that ought to hold them for a while.
Speaking of books, you wrote more than half of the books that have ever been published, I'm pretty sure.
It's a lot of books that you've written.
And of course, Public Policy Hooligan is the memoir, which is hilarious and great, and I hope everyone will look at it.
And Deficit Democracy, the absolute masterpiece.
But then before that, too, you wrote so many books, and I'm curious, was it Lost Rights or Feeling Your Pain or Freedom in Chains, or which one of these had your best treatment on the Waco disaster, Jim?
Probably Feeling Your Pain, because I had a whole chapter in there on Waco, I think.
And I've had some stuff, practically breaking news in Lost Rights, because Lost Rights went to the press in late 1993, came out in early 94.
And so I was, you know, I was using all my elbows with my publisher at St. Martin's Press to update it, to add one more paragraph, and we can, oh, there's some more great new killer details on Waco, can we add this in?
And you know, I think they thought I was a pain in the ass.
You know what, man, I think you're a hero.
And not just because you're good on this, because a lot of people are good on this now.
But at the time, the narrative was, boy, do these people deserve it, and good.
And by the way, they did it to themselves anyway.
And just total immunity and impunity and kind of celebratory kind of a take on it.
And you sure did a good job of reminding me of that in this article, that this was a badge of honor for them.
This is how we knew that Janet Reno was a great attorney general.
Yeah.
Well, it was fascinating that the Washington Press Corps made her a hero within days of the FBI final assault that ended with 80 dead civilians.
But this is how the Washington Press Corps reacted.
I mean, do you see how they were kowtowing to Biden on the press conference on Thursday?
It's like, yeah, well, this is not the first time.
Yeah.
All right.
So there's so much to go over here, but I like your angle in this article.
So let's just stick with that.
Tell me, who's John Danforth?
John Danforth was a senator from Missouri, and he was an ordained Episcopalian minister.
And he's someone who was a moderate Republican.
So he was beloved by the Washington Post and the Washington establishment.
He was someone who had voted in 1994 in favor of the assault weapons ban, which is always like one of the acid tests for if anybody was in Congress back then, OK, did the person vote for that so-called assault weapons ban?
Especially Republican.
Yep.
Yep.
So he was one of the supporters.
But he's, he was, folks mocked him as, was it St. John?
Was that the phrase?
I think that was a phrase.
It's, you know, it's been a while since I wrote the article.
But he's someone who was chosen by Janet Rideau to do a reinvestigation of Waco after the news came out, thanks to Mike McNulty, that the FBI had used pyrotechnic explosives during their assault on April 19th before the building caught on fire.
And that was a bombshell because the FBI had always said, we, you know, we got nothing to do with the fire.
It was just a bunch of crazy people decided to burn themselves up.
And you had Congressman Jack Brooks, the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, saying that burning to death was too good for those people.
So and it's a credit of Texas voters that they threw him out after that.
But so Danforth was brought in to sanctify the whitewash of the federal establishment.
But there were so many other things that have come out that Danforth ignored.
Hang on, hang on just one sec there, man.
I just want to clarify one thing for people real quick.
And this is always the first big step for people who are new to this story is you watch the documentary Waco, The Rules of Engagement.
And then the sequel is called Waco, A New Revelation, as Jim was saying there, produced by documentary filmmaker Mike McNulty.
And also Dan Gifford was involved in one or the other of those or both, I forget.
And what happened was it was the sequel, A New Revelation, that revealed and sorry to correct your language here, but it's very important.
It wasn't just pyrotechnic rounds.
It was incendiary rounds that they found that they had pictures of that restarted the investigation.
But then it's an important detail that that was actually a red herring because all evidence available evidence shows that those actually were only shot into a puddle of water outside the house hours before the fire broke out and really didn't have anything to do with the fire.
But that doesn't matter because then this is where you're right.
It's the pyrotechnic rounds.
The CS rounds are different kinds of CS rounds.
And some of the CS rounds were pyrotechnic, meaning not meant to start fires, but use fire and explosive heat in order to disperse the CS.
And those they found at all three origins of the fire in the aftermath.
And McNulty found in the evidence lockers that they had all been mislabeled as silencers.
That was what they were, were pyrotechnic CS rounds.
So it's a little bit complicated, but I just wanted to point that out that it matters.
And McNulty got after me for saying incendiary when I meant pyrotechnic.
At least you understated it instead of overstating it, which is important, but I just wanted to get that out.
Hey, Scott, it's hard to imagine Mike McNulty getting after anybody.
He was so good.
No, Mike.
Mike is someone who passed away a few years ago.
He did great work.
He and Dan Gifford made a hell of a movie.
It was nominated for an Academy Award documentary.
It should have won.
It didn't.
But the Waco rule of engagement is a wonderful place to start to understand the, you know, some of the evil that went down there.
But it's just, you know, it's sort of like peeling an onion, trying to find all the different government lies on this, you know, joint federal, joint ATF and FBI attack on the Davidians.
I mean, there was a guy, Dave Hardy, who did a great book on that.
This is not an assault.
I think I got the title right.
But he's a former federal lawyer and knows how to do investigations of federal agencies.
And, you know, five, six years after everything had gone down, Hardy turns up this internal ATF memo that talks about how some of the undercover agents went target shooting with David Koresh five or six, seven days before the ATF launched their assault, launched the violent assault where they just rode up and started shooting.
You know, it's the ultimate no knock warning where you, you know, where you're warning, you know, shooting instead of knocking.
But so David Koresh went out and he knew they were undercover agents.
He still went shooting with them and talked with them.
So the feds could have, you know, scooped him up very easily if, you know, if they had a ballot warrant, if they wanted to do a real search.
But the feds, the ATF covered that up.
And if that fact had come out on the day of the ATF raid, the violent raid, four ATF agents were killed.
Quite a few Davidians were also killed in that February 28th raid.
It would have changed the narrative completely and it would have been a hell of a lot harder for the FBI to come in and treat all those people like, you know, terrorists.
Because that was, that was how the federal prosecutors characterized the Branch Davidians at the trial the following year, that there were a bunch of terrorists.
And it's, that's kind of chilling because you got some people in DC now, some people very high up in the government are saying, for instance, that all the protesters who entered the Capitol on January 6th, well, those are a bunch of terrorists too.
What did they do?
Well, they frightened Congress.
Okay.
So they must be terrorists.
There were some people that were violent and assaulted police.
That's in a different category.
Most of the people who went in were peaceful.
Most people who went in were nonviolent.
But I'm getting astray.
So.
No, well, you're not.
I mean, that's the important point here is not just, you know, the horror show inflicted against these people, but our government's willingness to do such a thing and to justify such a thing to the ends of the earth with lies about mass suicide.
And with, you know, as you said, Jack Brooks statement that they deserved even worse.
And this kind of thing, when, you know, when I was 15 or 16, so that means a lot of the people listening to the show were way too young to remember this as it happened.
But what they did was they took this little plot of land out in northeast, you know, northeast of the city of Waco, which is the place where you stop for fast food on the way to Dallas, you know, between Austin and Dallas.
And they turned it into a foreign enemy nation.
And they turned just the same way they do with Saddam Hussein or Putin, Putin, Putin, Putin.
Iraq doesn't exist.
The Iraqi people don't exist.
The Russian people don't exist.
It's just the demon leader of the enemy state.
And that's what they did to David Koresh.
And in doing so, they erased the identity of all those individual human beings in there.
Civilians, women and children, Texans, 100 miles from my front door.
And they said, these people are the enemy to be destroyed.
And boy, did the American people buy it, too.
They loved it.
They loved it at the time.
Well, it's interesting, you know, it was hard to get good information early on.
I think there were a lot of Americans who were watching this and kind of thinking, what the hell is going on here?
I think that the polls, I think there was more skepticism than what the polls showed.
And it's interesting, back in 1994, Janet Reno was doing some tour out in the, I think it was Oklahoma.
Was it Bob Ricks?
Was he the spokesman for the FBI during Waco?
Yeah.
And Rick said to her, look, you know, people are concerned.
People are upset about Waco.
And she says, no, they aren't.
It doesn't matter.
You know, let's just brush it under the rug.
I mean, the cover-up's going great.
So if it was to the point where even the FBI spokesman was saying, hey, you know, people are getting, you know, people are restless on this.
But it's sad to see how much the cover-up succeeded.
And it's a frustrating thing I have as a, you know, someone who works as an investigative journalist.
I mean, federal cover-ups are a dime a dozen.
Most of them succeed.
People say, well, you know, the truth will out.
I'm thinking like, not inside the beltway.
I mean, every now and then it does, but the, you know, the odds are very much against it.
Every now and then.
And you've got to hammer so hard.
But most of the journalists these days, you know, they're more interested in being part of the political establishment than being hell raisers.
Yeah.
Well, that's certainly true.
And it was then, too.
But, you know, there were at least some good people who were paying attention.
And I guess the Wall Street Journal or whoever, they were willing to publish you at the time and that kind of thing.
Yeah.
In 1995.
Oh, OK.
Yeah.
That was when I wrote about Waco for them.
Yeah.
OK, you guys, check it out.
The new book is finally done.
Enough already.
It's time to end the war on terrorism.
It's available in paperback and Kindle.
Also, the audio book is coming, although that might take a little while.
For all those who participated in the big fundraiser of 2019, I have the list and you will be getting all your stuff as soon as my boxes of wholesale copies arrive.
Thank you so much to everybody for your support of the show and of the Libertarian Institute.
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All right, now listen, I want to play this clip real quick just to establish a perspective here.
This is from the sequel by McNulty, A New Revelation.
It's Stephen Berry, who's a former special operations commander.
And I was curious about, you know, what you wrote about this at the time.
It doesn't, I don't think, make an appearance in your current article.
But as you said, there's so much to keep track of here.
But this is Stephen Berry.
But I did talk to some Combat Applications Group guys.
And they did confirm that, yes, portions of B Squadron were there pulling triggers.
All right, Combat Applications Group, CAG, that's Delta Force, Team B. And he was told, and there's another clip of a guy named Gene Cullen, who was CIA, who also said that he was told personally by members of Delta Force that they were there in a firefight with Branch Davidians in the back of the house there.
It wasn't just the FBI hostage rescue team that murdered them.
But it was the Army Delta Force, top tier special operations forces.
Yeah, that was that's a big point in McNulty's second movie.
Has there been any more evidence that's come out since that movie to buttress that?
That's a great question.
I don't know about that.
Those are two solid witnesses.
I know that.
Geez, I'd have to go back now and look, make us make a separate project out of that.
I know that there's obviously plenty of proof, even you know, Lee Hancock and the Dallas Morning News and so forth about their presence there.
But as far as they're actually being, you know, riding around with the FBI and engaging in the firefight, as far as I know, we have those two witnesses to their confession, but that's it.
Yeah, it's my impression, a lot of the Pentagon material on this has never been declassified.
So that might answer some of the questions, but I don't think that they want to answer those questions.
I, you know, I wish we had more information on that charge, because it's, it's a hell of a charge.
So it's, yeah, so well, and if it's true, it goes to show Bill Clinton's direct involvement, which he admitted to in a deposition that he gave the okay to Janet Reno.
And he only admitted that in 1998, five years later, he had always let her take the rap for the whole thing.
But if Delta Force was out there, presumably, that was on the President's order, or their own.
But Janet Reno has no authority to order the Delta Force into action against anyone.
And so...
Right, right.
And it's, it's telling as far as the the whitewash, the John Danforth did that there was no concern at all about the false claims by the ATF of a drug lab at the Branch Davidians' homes, which is how they justify bringing in a National Guard helicopter that may have started shooting at the Branch Davidians' house even before the agents arrived.
So I mean, you know, that's just a complete scam by the, by the ATF people running the operation.
But oh, never mind, you know, I mean, there was, you know, part of what exasperated me about the Danforth report was, was the attitude, it's complete contempt for the American people.
And, you know, the, the thing that he comes out with there at the end, he says, it's, you know, in today's world, it's perhaps understandable that government officials are reluctant to make full disclosure of information for fear that the result of candor will be personal or professional ruin.
Any misstep yields howls of indignation and still more investigations.
Right.
Well, dude, maybe they shouldn't have sent the tanks in, you know?
Right.
How are we supposed, how do you expect us to admit the truth about what we do when then you're going to say that we should be held accountable for those things?
You can't expect us to admit our guilt about stuff?
Yeah.
Great quote.
Yeah, there was, yeah, there was a, and Danforth says the lesson of Waco was that the burden is on all of us to be more skeptical of those who make sensational accusations of evil acts by government.
It's like, and he said he hoped his report would start the process of restoring the faith of the people in their government and the faith of the government in the people.
And it's like, dude, what are you smoking?
Yeah.
I mean, restoring the faith of the government, the people, what the people would be more docile.
They'd swallow whatever BS the FBI shovels.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's the preamble to the constitution.
We the politicians and militarists in order to form a more perfect union, allow you the citizenry to exist in order that you can pay us to pretend to be your security force.
It's all right there.
You and Patrick Henry.
Yeah, exactly.
Right.
And listen, talk about a wild accusations of malfeasance.
How about it's an absolute fact, it's an indisputable fact that they kill people from those Huey attack helicopters that they got from the Texas guard by lying and pretending that David Koresh was cooking meth.
And Winston Blake was eating breakfast in his bedroom when a helicopter flew by and shot kill him.
And then it's on video in the rules of engagement where the young man, I forget his name now, who was doing his chores, scraping rust out of the water tower and then went and climbed up to see what was going on in the helicopter flies by and shoots him dead.
And then they left his corpse up there and they wouldn't let the Davidians even go up there and get his corpse down for five days or whatever it was.
So yeah, no wonder he didn't want to get into them barring a Huey attack helicopter leftover surplus from the war in Vietnam that was used to murder innocent unarmed Texan civilians in their home.
Yeah, well, it would have made a very interesting part in Danforth's report.
You know, there were so many levels of, you know, shenanigans here and Danforth was hoping to become George W. Bush's vice presidential nominee.
So that's part of the reason he rushed out a draft of the report in July 2000, just before Bush had announced his pick for VP.
And so, I mean, there were so many different levels where this should have set off all the bullshit alarms.
And the fact that George W. Bush was governor of Texas and never helped expose any of the crap that went on under Ann Richards, I mean, because, you know, the Texas Rangers, I think, could have answered or exposed some of this stuff.
Or what's your take on that, Scott, as a Texan?
No, absolutely right.
I mean, and that was at the time it was, see, this guy's just the son of a bush.
Think he cares about you?
He cares about you.
Where is he on Waco?
He's nowhere.
Yeah.
Yeah.
God.
Well, anybody who ever believed in him for a minute needed to be dissuaded, ought to have been dissuaded just by that.
They're like, well, he is just George Bush's son anyway.
The dumbest one of them, right?
Should have been Neal, but he was already guilty of bank swindling and stuff.
He was ruined.
And Jeb is supposedly the more capable one of the two left over, except he lost his first run for governor.
So it had to be W in 2000, but even at the time, people said, well, look, of course the guy's a complete idiot, but at least Colin Powell will be there to help tell him what to do.
So it'd be okay.
But nobody believed in the guy, I don't think, really.
Even then, not until after his greatest failure of any president to protect the American people with 3000 slaughtered on his watch, when he'd only been in office for a measly eight months as the head of our security force.
And only then did people really love him and see him as a great leader and give him a 90% approval rating and permission to attack any country he wanted and the rest of that.
Yeah, that was an unfortunate reaction to that catastrophe.
It's the biggest blunder, intelligence blunder since Pearl Harbor.
And so he put the president on a pedestal and clap when he promises to rid the world of evil.
And I was, you know, I was almost disillusioned by that.
Yeah, man.
Here I am on the other side of disillusioned.
So listen, let's talk more about Danforth's cover up here, because it's so important.
And I saw that you liked my tweet.
I don't know if you went and reviewed the thing yourself again.
I'm sure you've seen it.
The FLIR project, F-L-I-R, FLIR, forward looking infrared.
Did you see that again yesterday?
Scott, I saw your tweet.
I liked your tweet.
And I was saying, Scott expected me to do a lot of research before the damn show.
And I was thinking, FLIR, let's see, I watched that.
What did I write about that at the time?
I think I wrote a review for maybe American Spectator or someplace like that at the time.
Must have.
So this is part three.
This is McNulty again.
And what happened was, as I says earlier in the setup part of the show there, that when the sequel, A New Revelation, came out, they had to admit that, okay, those are military incendiary rounds there.
So we didn't quite admit everything.
So now we're going to have to have this new investigation.
And so they did a whole recreation in order to try to debunk the FLIR, which is absolutely conclusive, even to a layman or an expert too, that you can see men getting out of the back of the tanks and firing machine guns toward the house.
There's no question about what's going on there.
So they tried to debunk that by holding the simulation at Fort Hood.
But then in this movie, The FLIR Project, the part three of this series, they debunked the debunking severely and show that they really just completely rigged this thing.
They didn't dare recreate the same situation on the ground there at Fort Hood that could have even led to the possibility of similar images showing up on the test footage.
Yep, well, that's how government reenactments tend to go.
So but yet Danforth out there, there was so much deference, which was given to Danforth.
And it's partly because the entire Washington establishment, as soon as Waco happened, they absolutely rallied around the Clinton administration, Janet Reno, FBI, ATF.
It was, you know, very much them against the American people.
And the kind of people who had doubts about Waco, I mean, it was kind of like the same way that they talk about deplorables, Hillary Clinton did, I guess.
You know, it's a sign of being unwashed, oh, you probably didn't graduate from college, if you know what I mean.
Or, you know, it's the kind of person that is so ill-mannered that they ask the wrong questions.
I mean, this is something which has been, you know, a factor in my career, you know, for decades.
Think about that.
We're talking about they attacked a house with tanks and poison gas, and then somehow it lit on fire and 80 men, women and children burned to death.
And the burden is on you.
You're such a kook for caring about that.
What does that say about everybody else, that that's just fine then?
Well, it does raise questions about the rule of law.
It's interesting, if you go back and look at some of the outtakes of the Congress had no real hearings on this for two years, in the summer of 1995, they did.
Chuck Schumer was in the House at that point.
And he was always, you know, if there was a TV camera around, Schumer was going to be there like, well, that's too crude, but Schumer will be there.
And he was always just kind of sneering.
And there was a guy from Mississippi, a congressman, not male, but just utter contempt for the Branch Davidians.
And for anybody who didn't accept everything the government said, no matter how many times the government changed the story, I mean, it's similar to the invasion of Iraq.
Okay.
Okay.
We've got story one.
We've got story two.
We've got story three.
They can't all be right.
If we're going to trust the government, you know, how's it possible?
You know, when the government is, how's it possible to know when the government is no longer lying?
Right.
And, you know, nobody's answered that question.
Right.
Yeah.
That's the whole thing.
And look at the crisis they're in now.
You know, you talk about the government's faith in the people must be restored here in his words, in Danforth's words here.
How's that going for you?
Right.
There's nothing but a lack of confidence in them from this end.
And then, so that means that they hate and fear us more than ever before.
Radical violent extremists means anyone who doesn't believe in the system presumably might break into open aggressive violence at any time, according to them.
Just like, you know, the, the giant massacre that took place in the attempted overthrow of the U.S. government there on January 6th, Jim.
Yeah.
Well, these, I was, I've written a handful of stories on that tied to January 6th.
And as far as a new definition of terrorism, it might simply be, it might be any person who's, who's criticized the government and owns two guns and more than 100 bullets.
So it's, it's, it's frustrating to see how easy the mainstream establishment can frame an issue.
I don't know if it's going to stick for them.
There are folks who are pushing back very effectively.
But the level of kowtowing and to see how the people who kowtow get elevated, it's like, you know, it almost makes me cynical.
I could see why.
All right, listen, I better let you go.
We'll keep this right at a tight half hour so people can get really interested in this and then dive in and find out the rest.
I'd like to mention too, by the way, Carol Moore wrote a great book called The Davidian Massacre.
Carol was great.
And people can read the entire thing online for free.
And if you just Google the Libertarian Institute and Waco, you'll find a couple of blog entries by me where I have links to her book and to all three of these most important documentaries.
And then at JimBovard.com, there is essentially an endless treasure trove of your archives on this subject, correct?
Yeah.
Thanks very much.
One thing I want to add, Carol Moore is great.
I really appreciate her book.
She was cutting edge, you know, at the, you know, from the very start.
Something a positive aspect of Waco is that it helped radicalize you and Angela Keaton.
So that's been a positive legacy for Liberty.
Yeah, well, we take our silver linings, but I could have done without it, to be perfectly frank.
But yeah, no, I see what you mean.
And listen, it's done the same for a lot of people.
It's helped make the point about what state power is in a way that you could never really explain better than just showing that, you know, what they owed a $200 tax allegedly.
Was that the crime here?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yep.
The tanks going in there and they're broadcasting.
This is not an assault, but it was, the plan was to collapse the entire building on these people's head.
That was the official plan, but it was nonviolent collapse.
And they did.
And, and, and the coroner said the women and children in the concrete room were crushed to death.
Most of them before they were poisoned or burned to death or even bombed to death by the Delta force there.
And that's all in a new revelation.
So mission accomplished there.
All right.
Anyway, I'm sorry.
We could do this all afternoon, man.
We didn't.
And that was in no particular order anyway, but it's such an important point and damn John Danforth and all of the rest of them for their lives about it too.
And thank you, Jim.
Hey, thanks so much, Scott.
Good luck.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
