04/19/11 – Anthony Gregory – The Scott Horton Show

Hello?
Yeah, there's 75 men around our building and they're shooting at us at Mount Carmel.
Mount Carmel?
Yeah, tell them there are children and women in here to call it off!
I heard that, sir.
Who is it?
It's Wayne!
Wayne?
Tell me what's happening, Wayne.
There are women and children in danger!
Wayne?
Wayne?
Alright, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Those are sounds from the initial ATF raid on the Branch Davidians' property on February 28, 1993, taken from the movie Waco, A New Revelation, or perhaps The Rules of Engagement.
Anyway, and also that was Wayne Martin, one of the Branch Davidians, calling 911 upon the arrival of the ATF battle force.
I'd like to introduce to y'all Anthony Gregory from luerockwell.com, the Independent Institute, the Future Freedom Foundation, and on and on like that.
He has a piece at LRC today, From Waco to Libya, 18 Years of Humanitarian Mass Murder.
Anthony, I appreciate you joining us here on the show today.
I thought it would be appropriate if I had you on to talk a little bit about the Waco massacre, especially for young people or people who just weren't really interested at the time or whatever, don't really know.
Maybe we can give them a little bit of revisionist history, i.e. the truth, as compared to what they said at the time.
Maybe we can start with, what do you know about the initial raid by the ATF on the Davidians on February 28?
Well, Scott, thanks for having me.
Of course, this is a very important event in American history.
And I think it had a huge impact on both of us in kind of how we view the state, not that we would look at the American government with rosy-colored lenses without Waco, but Waco sure hid some truths about the federal government.
The original raid, as you know, was conducted as a publicity stunt.
The ATF was suffering bad publicity because of some sexual harassment allegations and some allegations of racism.
And so they came up with this raid, which they informally among themselves called Operation Showtime, where after quite some time, I believe well over a year, of the law enforcement, including federal law enforcement, having befriended David Koresh and becoming very intimate with the Branch Davidian church, they staged this raid where they attacked what they called in the press a compound, which was just their home and church.
They had models of this thing.
They'd been planning the raid since the end of the Bush, first Bush administration, but it was right then very early in the Clinton administration that they actually conducted this raid.
And, of course, on the search warrant, as you've pointed out, as we've talked about, originally it was all because of a supposed meth lab, which was not there because it was a meth lab that the Davidians had reported, the leftover meth lab from previous owners, that everyone knew wasn't there.
It was just a B.S. excuse to get the military involved and to, of course, we know that when the drug war is involved, especially back then before the war on terror, this was the best way to use military equipment and support in domestic law enforcement.
So Posse Comitatus was basically set aside.
They planned this militaristic siege.
They attacked the home.
I'm careful when I talk about Waco because I don't like to ever overstate my case, but I think that it's pretty clear of who the aggressors were here, the ATF, as seen in the Waco Rules of Engagement film, when the ATF ran out of bullets, the Davidians let them leave their property in peace.
They did not shoot at them.
They did not shoot them at the back, despite having suffered losses on their own side.
This was aggression, and it should have ended right there.
The ceasefire should have become a truth, in my opinion, between the government and this peaceful separatist, I think, and unusual religious community.
But, of course, in America, and I think in all the world, you should be allowed to be unusual without being shot at or murdered by the government.
Well, then, as David Koresh said, the FBI came and took over for the ATF.
He said it was like some kid in the neighborhood whoops you, and then his older brother comes to investigate.
Yeah, and when the FBI came in, it was full-out warfare.
They cut off the Davidians from phone calls.
They didn't talk to lawyers or his family or the press.
They shone these lights, these bright lights, onto the home all night to keep them awake.
They played, they blasted loud music at the home, sounds of animals being slaughtered, I believe Christmas carols, Nancy Sinatra's song, which I think is a good song, you know, these boots were made for walking.
It's a cruel thing to do to someone, to play that song over and over.
And it was kind of a psychological warfare.
Not kind of, it was.
The U.S. has done this type of stuff to foreigners, but this was one of the notable times when the U.S. basically waged war on Americans.
Well, and that hostage rescue team basically is just, it's at least trained the same way as they train the Navy SEALs and the Marine Force Recon and all that.
They're special forces only working for the FBI.
And as you say, they militarized the entire thing.
Immediately they had tanks.
I think you forgot to mention driving back and forth over the graves of the dead in the front yard, but still that's, I think, a major part of the psychological warfare going on.
But they completely militarized the thing.
And as was finally reported in Waco, A New Revelation, and then of course over and over again by the great Lee Hancock at the Dallas Morning News, for example, came out, I think, a little bit in the hearings and a little bit at the trial, where they were acquitted, by the way, of murder and conspiracy to commit murder, when it comes to the who fired first question there.
You know, I've written about Waco every year since 2003, and I try to include a little bit different taste of detail in each article, because otherwise it becomes the same article over and over.
But it is very important, as you note, that they drove over the grave.
Oh yeah, and my point was about how they militarized it.
They made it the compound, they had them surrounded, and really they gave them the Saddam Hussein treatment, or they gave Saddam the Koresh treatment later, which was, you know, this guy is a crazy dictator who cannot be reasoned with, and he's got illegal weapons, and he's bad to his own people, and we got him surrounded, and here comes the pre-emptive war kind of thing.
Same difference.
Yeah, and although the Davidians didn't know this, I think it's telling that I'm pretty sure Lon Horyuchi was on site, wasn't he?
Yeah, he was in the so-called undercover house across the street, where they found three empty shells after the final assault on April the 19th on the floor there.
And supposedly he was driving one of the tanks on that day too.
What happens to me, Scott, is I've read this stuff and learned this stuff, and some of it is so horrible that I keep saying, you know, once in a while I'll call you and say, they actually practiced this raid, right?
I'm not making this up, because it's just unspeakable.
And Lon Horyuchi, of course, is the guy who murdered Vicki Weaver at Ruby Ridge while she was holding her and Randy Weaver's baby.
All right, hold it right there.
We've got to take this break.
Everybody, it's Anthony Gregory from the Independent Institute.
Scott Anewin at LewRockwell.com.
From Waco to Libya, 18 years of humanitarian mass murder.
Today, LewRockwell.com.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
Here's Gene Cullen, CIA officer.
Approximately a year after the Waco incident, I was deployed overseas in Europe, and I had the chance to meet some of the Delta operators that I had met on previous assignments.
They had told me on several different occasions during my meetings with them in Europe that not only were they forwardly deployed at Waco, Texas, but they were actually involved in a gunfight with the Branch Davidians.
And here's Stephen Barry, former Special Forces officer.
I did talk to some Combat Applications Group guys, and they did confirm that, yes, portions of the B-Squad were there, portions of the B-Squad were there pulling triggers.
Right, pulling triggers.
That means killing people.
Anthony Gregory is on the line from the Independent Institute, and LewRockwell.com, where he has a piece today.
From Waco to Libya, 18 years of humanitarian mass murder.
And that really is right to the heart of this thing, huh?
Bill Clinton and Janet Reno, they sent in the death squad to murder these people with fire and machine gun bullets in the name of saving the little children.
Yeah.
I mean, the thing that gets me about all this is that time and again, the government kills innocent people.
I think it's totally fair to call it murder.
But it seems there are two basic excuses for this.
Defending the rest of us and saving the other.
And I have to say, both of these excuses offend me.
But I think nothing offends me more than the humanitarian excuse.
And, of course, this was a big part of the Bush wars, too.
I mean, it wasn't because of self-defense that the U.S. stayed in Iraq year after year.
Though they did say, we fight them there so we don't have to fight them here.
I think it was because Americans thought naively that their government was doing some good for the Iraqis, on balance, and the Afghans.
And in the case of Libya, we see this again, where the government has started to kill people based on humanitarian justifications that seem more and more tenuous as the news comes in.
And with Waco, it's particularly disgusting.
Because the government murdered, you know, about two dozen children.
Texans!
Yeah, that's right.
In the name of protecting children.
And the thing is, people believe it, don't they?
People still believe it when people talk about Waco now.
They remember that more than anything else.
That David Koresh was tormenting children, and therefore, you know, we need to be soft on the government, or even be thankful of the government.
Maybe it's okay to say the government didn't do everything perfectly, but you're not supposed to say that the FBI murdered those people because child abuse.
That's all it takes, is this mindless excuse as if the federal government cares about, you know, innocent people.
And that every time it murders innocent people, it's to protect innocent people.
It's so, it's not even Orwellian.
It's not that sophisticated.
It's just disgusting.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, you know, right after the re-election in 1996, Bill Clinton said to reporters on Air Force One that the Oklahoma City bombing saved my presidency.
It's all the people rallied around the country against the forces of hate and whatever.
And they sure loved that Oklahoma bombing there, and the Democratic Party in power at the time.
And for good reason, I think, because I know from personal experience that numerous times, it must be, Anthony, dozens of times, when I brought up Waco to somebody, usually some poor victim in my cab, they would immediately come back with, Yeah, well, what about the Oklahoma City bombing?
Well, what about the Oklahoma City bombing?
As though the government had done Waco as revenge for Oklahoma City.
As though David Koresh had done it.
And he and the people around him, that's what they get for doing the Oklahoma bombing or something.
It became the excuse for burning all those children in Waco to death after the fact.
And it worked.
I'm telling you, that worked on the average doofus out there.
Yeah, you know, it's bad enough that people use this collectivist argument that it was okay to nuke Hiroshima because of the rape of Nanking.
I'm sure you've heard that many times, too.
Sure.
But at least, as collectivist and evil as that argument is, at least Nanking happened first.
You know?
It's like, with the Waco stuff, Well, it's like Libya, right?
We just invaded Libya to prevent a massacre.
That was going to happen, I swear.
Exactly.
And Oklahoma does, as you say, in many people's minds, vindicate the actions at Waco.
And it vindicates the entire growth of the police state and the kind of 1990s version of the Brown scare that we had under Clinton, where we had to worry about people, patriots or whatever, we had to worry about gun owners out in the middle of nowhere, or in this case, not in the middle of nowhere, but we had to worry about that, too.
And, of course, we got this with the Huttari militia in Michigan a little over a year ago.
Remember these guys?
Yeah.
Who were planning.
The government accused them of planning to overthrow the government with weapons of mass destruction.
And Rachel Maddow and all the liberals just jumped on board and said, Oh, my God, this is so horrible.
And I remember hearing about Oklahoma City then.
It seems like if the government is targeting someone who can be culturally associated with the dissident right, then that's okay because of Timothy McVeigh, because Timothy McVeigh is David Koresh, is that group in Michigan, is anybody else.
It's just like, of course, the right does this, too.
They did it with the communists and antiwar radicals.
They do it with Muslims.
But, yeah, it's horrific that somehow Oklahoma City has bearing, as though time doesn't move forward, as though Clinton's attack on the Davidians was a preemptive strike so two years later Oklahoma wouldn't be worse.
I don't even know how to put my brain inside the minds of these people who seem to think this, but that's what they seem to think to me.
Hey, man, the surge worked.
It's all just sloganeering.
It doesn't have to actually have any consistent logic to it at all.
But I want to cut to the proof here, because this isn't a matter of debate or conspiracy theory or anything else about what happened to the Davidians on the 19th.
I think it's pretty clear that the ATF fired first from the time that they got there and destroyed all the evidence and all the rest of it.
But the proof, of course, there's been a lot of books about it, but videos are much more accessible to people.
And I highly recommend that you get the longest director's cut version or the longest not director's cut version or whatever it is that you can find of WACO, the rules of engagement, WACO, a new revelation, and especially the FLIR project.
In the FLIR project, above all, is just the absolute fact that there are federal agents we know from other sources, military and probably as well as including FBI hostage rescue team types were in the backyard firing machine guns, killing anybody who was trying to escape the burning house.
It's their own footage that proves it.
And it's not a matter of debate.
And anyone who argues about it is simply wrong or lying.
There was an argument about the machine guns a few years ago on a semi-prominent, somewhat libertarian-ish blog with someone who claimed to be a libertarian.
I won't go into it, but his whole argument was the Danforth Report.
Yeah, of course.
And that's what the FLIR project absolutely dismantles.
The FLIR project proves that Danforth is simply guilty of obstruction of justice.
There's just no doubt about it.
They recreated the firefight at Fort Hood.
But first they made sure to spray water all over the ground so there'd be no dust in the air.
They used extended barrel rifles and flash-suppressant ammunition and claimed the weather was the same when it wasn't.
And then they said, look, see, it's not the same at all.
Yeah, well, great.
Thanks for obstructing justice.
But anyway, here's Dr. Edward Allard who helped invent the FLIR.
I stopped counting after about 62 individual shots.
What we have is we have men firing automatic weapons.
And they're firing into the burning building.
And like some sort of a cowboy movie, they're retreating down the building and firing as they're retreating.
I cannot remember something more sickening that I had to do to witness.
They open up with automatic gunfire.
We've measured the actual time of the individual flashes.
And they occur at a fraction of a second, in some cases a 30th of a second.
There is absolutely nothing in nature that can cause thermal flashes to occur in 30th of a second.