For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio 95.9 in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton.
This is Antiwar Radio.
Alright, so now let's get to Waco.
This is a story that I don't talk about on the radio so much anymore, but it's still just as important to me as it ever was, and, well, I hope this interview can help make it as important to you as it is to me.
Our guest is David T. Hardy.
He's the author of the book, This Is Not an Assault, Penetrating the Web of Official Lies Regarding the Waco Incident, co-written with Rex Kimball.
Welcome to the show, David.
How are you doing?
Oh, pretty good, pretty good.
Well, I sure appreciate you joining us on the show today.
Sorry for the long introduction there, but I had to get a couple things off my chest.
But now my plan, mostly, is to just cut the mic and let you tell the story of the Branch Davidians and what happened to them back in 1993.
So, go ahead.
Say it however you like.
I'll try to interject with follow-up questions and important points if I need to.
Sure.
The Branch Davidians were an offshoot of the, I believe, Seventh-Day Adventists.
And one of the things I found looking into them was that they didn't meet the standard definitions of a cult.
In fact, they tended to the opposite end.
It was more like they had so little structure in their religion and the way of dogma that you might even question whether they were an organized religion, quote-unquote.
Essentially, they were a group of people who were interested in studying the Seven Seals, and that was about the only requirement.
They set up a place where they lived together, which became, as usual, called a compound, once the government attacked it.
For some reason, any building assaulted by government forces becomes a compound.
Well, sorry, I already got to stop and interrupt you.
You sound like you're taking on the challenge, the characterization, of David Koresh as Charles Manson or some kind of charismatic cult leader who had all these people enthralled.
We've seen end-of-the-world cults before, and you're telling me this was not that.
No.
Their view, end-of-the-world view, was rather complicated.
They did maintain that we were in the stages of the Seven Seals, and they debate over which particular seal it was.
But the thing you have to understand is that when they're talking the last days, they had a rather expansive definition of the last days, as in the last millennia, by which I mean one of the stages in the Seven Seals they figured would take 10,000 years.
So you might say they believed we were in the end times.
However, actually getting through to the other end of the end times might be 10,000 or 12,000 years from now.
So it wasn't something they were looking at happening in the near future.
Yeah, it sounds like they actually had a broader view of the end times than most American fundamentalist Christians, from what I see in the polls.
Yeah, I mean, most do not speak of the end of the world as one stage taking 10,000 years.
Yeah, usually the end times means within a few decades, give or take, or something, right?
Yeah.
All right, I'm sorry.
Please go ahead.
I mean, just to get to one stage in the Seals, I believe, my memory may be off, but I believe they believed they would have to go to the Holy Land and recruit 144,000 people to be with them there, whereupon they would be attacked there.
So I mean, getting from one seal to another requires you to recruit 144,000 people, move them across the globe.
You know this is not a religion of beliefs.
This is going to take place next weekend.
Well, anyway, they were living in the place outside of Waco and doing their own thing and essentially not bothering anyone.
Then ATF, Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, which enforces the federal gun laws, took an interest in them.
And it was sort of strange because what started the interest was there was a FedEx or UPS delivery box, which allegedly fell open.
In practice, it may have been checked out, you know, consciously, and had dummy grenades in it.
Those are what you can buy at any gun show for, oh, $5 or $10.
You know, they're practice grenades.
They don't have an explosive charge, and they're not easy to convert to take one.
They're used for training.
One way or another, ATF got interested in them.
And what I think happened here was that I used to work in the federal government, and we knew that our law enforcement agency, every year would have one big publicity grabbing rate.
It would come down right at about the time of their house appropriation cycle starting.
They wanted to be in the headlines and be able to go in when they asked for their millions of dollars with typical, the difficult work our agents do is operation this or that.
This was going to be operation this or that for that year for ATF.
I'm told internally they joked about it and called it ZBO, the big one.
This was going to get the publicity.
Well, I'll try to put this in the form of a question.
David, my understanding is that because the Clinton administration was just taking power, the Reagan-Bush years were at an end.
The ATF had been under fire for acting in a very right-wing manner, I guess, in the most generalist sense or whatever.
They were kind of seen as a bunch of rednecks.
They had been discriminating against women and blacks inside the ATF and had been sued over that, things like that.
So they really needed to impress the Democrats.
Yeah, and a factor in that is that Al Gore, you remember back, Al Gore reinventing the government.
Right.
His project will wipe out small, inefficient agencies.
Oh, yeah, he was even talking about turning ATF over to the Justice Department from Treasury, right.
Yeah.
So if you're ATF management and you're looking at it at that point in time, you really want this administration to be happy with you.
I forget the exact numbers now, but I once worked out how much of a budget did ATF law enforcement consume per person arrested or per gun taken off the street.
I think it was like $20,000 for every firearm they seized.
This is not efficiency.
So they've got that worry.
This is going to be their big raid.
And one of the things I found out, I did like three or four years of Freedom of Information Act litigation to get at this stuff.
There was a traditional excuse as to why they had to bring in, I think it was 80-odd agents, borrow two National Guard helicopters and do a whole bunch of other stuff, was that Koresh could not be arrested outside the building because he was a paranoid recluse and never left the building.
Well, I got one of the ATF reports and it relates to what's called the undercover house.
They actually set up a house nominally across the street, but given the size of the lot, more like 100 yards away.
Oh yeah, I've been photographed from there.
Yeah.
And they had several agents in it who were supposedly undercover and watching for Koresh's movements.
Now, the Davidians very swiftly figured out that these guys were undercover and thought it rather amusing.
Well, I think it was eight days before the big bloody raid, the guys in the undercover house engaged, according to their report, in a rather unusual activity.
They went shooting with David Koresh.
No, I'm not kidding.
It's in the report.
Well, in fact, if I remember it right, they had shot over on his property and they had even invited him to come shoot at their range at one point.
Is that right?
I don't know about them inviting him to theirs.
Yeah, maybe I just had that one backwards.
Yeah, the report says they had some AR-15s and they went over to Koresh's place, knocked on the door, and Koresh himself answered.
And they asked permission to go out behind his place and shoot where there was some open land.
And Koresh said, sure, and volunteered that he had a bunch of .223 ammunition.
So they all went out with the agents carrying the guns and Koresh carrying the ammunition.
And they did some shooting.
And after a while, one of the agents, it really wasn't fair that they're shooting up Koresh's ammo and not letting him use theirs.
So the agent loans Koresh his .38 Super Pistol, which Koresh shoots, gives back to him with a compliment and something effective.
I've got to get one of those someday myself.
Incredible.
We can't arrest this guy.
We're just shooting with him.
This is so important for people to understand the context here.
This is how dangerous the undercover ATF agents thought he was.
Here, shoot my gun and they hand it to him.
They told us that these people were preparing to wage war on the town of Waco.
They were going to invade and take it over or something with all their guns.
They were building an army for a final war of Armageddon.
In other words, that's not true.
They were just peaceful people.
Another thing they never really said outright, David, but they kind of implied, or at least they left this lie by omission stand, was that somehow these were all a bunch of white, right-wing rednecks, when in fact they were from all over the world of every different color and description.
Oh, I think a majority were actually non-Caucasian.
You had a whole lot of people that they picked up from, I believe the West Indies had joined their group.
And a lot of, I know, was it the Australians who were mostly black?
Yeah, well, the West Indians were mostly, and I think some of the Australians were also.
And, of course, they had some Americans as well.
Their attorney was an African American with a Harvard Law degree.
All right, now, I guess we need to go ahead and get to the morning of February 28, 1993.
And, well, for example, what really happened at the beginning there?
Who fired the first shots?
Do you know?
Can you prove it?
We'll never be able to prove it.
I think the first shots were at the rear of the facility.
Everybody agrees they were at the rear of the facility, not at the front.
And I think the best evidence suggests they were shots fired from the helicopters.
They may have been shots to attract attention.
I can't guarantee they were shooting at anybody.
But the angle of the fire matches the approach of the helicopters.
And I also got videotape made from the helicopters in which you could hear the gunshots.
And then you heard, after a gap of about five seconds, you heard several thunks, which the helicopter crews identified as bullets hitting them, hitting the helicopter.
But you didn't hear gunshots associated with those thunks, which suggests to me that on the audio tape you cannot hear gunfire from the building, which means those shots you are hearing is something much closer, as in somebody in the helicopter.
That's not 100% proof, but that's the best I can do with the data we have.
Now, from what I remember of the different testimony about what happened at the front door, when we played the clip there, people could hear the dogs being shot to death, which were little Malamuse, of course, were not pit bulls or Dobermans or anything that could possibly be a real threat to armed and armored federal agents.
And they were in their pen anyway.
But from what I remember of at least the way it was told by a few different people, I think, perhaps even including some of the government agents, was that Koresh opened the door and said, Hey, wait, guys, there's women and children in here, let's work something out.
And then a bullet flew under his arm, basically, and shot his father-in-law in the chest, an unarmed man standing behind him.
And at that point, Koresh fell back, closed the door, and all the jackbooted thugs in the front yard opened up.
If I remember correctly, they seem to agree, like you said, Koresh came out of the building, he was waving his hands, he plainly is not springing an ambush on anybody.
He's walked right into the middle of a field of fire, and he's saying just that.
There are women and children in here, let's calm down.
He's trying to defuse the situation.
Then they heard some shots, and I believe the shots seemed to come from the rear of the building.
And at that point, Koresh sprints back inside, realizing that that gunfight is about to break out and he's going to get blown away.
But he's definitely out there, he's trying to defuse the situation, not increase it.
And he gets back inside.
Now, I'm trying to remember, I think he took a hit in the initial seconds.
That was a graze.
Then he got back inside, and once inside, he took a much more serious hit.
The autopsy showed it went through his, entered through the front of his pelvic area, and the pelvic girdle, where the bone comes up and curves to the outside on the side of your body, it blew like an inch diameter hole through that and then exited.
So he was pretty badly hit there.
To back up, the main door was a double door, a main front door, a double door made out of metal.
And after the initial fight, the Davidians told the FBI when they came in that the door would prove that the government started the firefight because one half of it had bullets.
All the bullet holes were coming in through the metal.
And there were witnesses, their attorneys, who said, yeah, there's no question, all the gunshots on that side of the door were coming in.
And the thing about it is, after the fire, that half of the metal door vanished.
The other half of it survives.
I've seen it.
But that half just flew up in the air, just gone.
Well, listen, this is my fault, but I've got to back up to even before the raid started that morning.
I forget the gentleman's name, but could you verify for me whether it's the case, as I think I remember it, that a guy, one of the Davidians, left that morning with hundreds and hundreds of guns, a full-size truck with a camper shell full in the bed, and also towing a U-Haul trailer full of guns to go down to Austin, to the Best Bank skate spot right there at Sheridan and 290 in Austin, Texas, where they used to have the gun show every weekend.
Yeah.
This guy left with 90 percent of the Davidians' guns that morning, not to go hide them, to go sell them at a gun show in front of God and everybody.
Yep.
Yep.
He was there, the resident gunsmith and everything, and yeah, he dealt with gun shows.
They ended up putting him in prison, by the way.
Yeah.
I forgot the guy's name, Frank or something?
Yeah, I forget it, too.
There was another guy who was outside the building when the firefight broke out, and now I forget his name, but he tried to sneak back in, and he encountered some agents, and long and short of it is he wound up quite dead, and for some reason they never ran the little test for gunpowder residue.
What killed him was the head shot in the end, back of the head, and for some reason they never really ran the gunshot residue tests on his cap.
Well, but in the Waco, A New Revelation, the sequel to Waco, The Rules of Engagement, they show that cap, and they show it close up that it looks like an execution shot, not a rifle shot from far away.
Yep.
Because those powder burn tests that weren't done, you can see the powder burns around the entrance wound there in the cap.
Yep.
And they left his body rotting there for five days, too, if I remember right.
I can't remember the guy's name.
I know it was left out there for some time.
Well, and also there's footage in that first movie, The Rules of Engagement, that shows a guy armed with a trowel on top of the water tower, and the helicopter flies by and kills him, like he's North Vietnamese, flying Ann Richards helicopters.
Yep.
By the way, the helicopters were an interesting side issue.
After everything was over, the National Guard discovered that ATF and even FBI had been using, well, there was a provision in the law that says you can borrow military equipment and operators for law enforcement, but you have to reimburse the military unless it's part of the war on drugs.
Then you can just, you know, it's yours to keep.
Well, both ATF and FBI spent all the military equipment they got during that raid, which was incredible, by the way, millions of dollars worth, and they portrayed it as if it was all under the war on drugs so they wouldn't have to reimburse.
Right, and they lied and twisted the story about how, when Koresh had had a conflict with a different branch of the Davidians there, pardon my pun, it was an accident, I swear, when he kicked the other group out, he called the local sheriff's department and said, there's a speed lab in here.
Send your deputies and your hazmat team to come and dismantle it.
They twisted that story to say, oh, well, we think that there's a speed lab there at David Koresh's house, and that's why we have our loophole.
Thank you, Ronald Reagan, and we can use Huey helicopters against Texans.
Yeah.
Not only was it a different branch that Koresh had kicked out, it was in a house that no longer existed.
The Davidians had some smaller houses that they disassembled to make the big house, and that was one of them.
At the time of the ATF raid, all that remained of it was the concrete foundation.
So all of that has vanished, but they still use it as an excuse to get military equipment.
And when I say military equipment, I got rosters of what was sent in.
It was incredible.
I mean, we're talking everything from sandbags to portable air-conditioning equipment.
I think the ultimate was they got some battlefield robots and, as an experiment, used two of those, and they made no bones about it.
They were sending it up to the Davidian house to see if they could coax the Davidians into shooting at it.
It was sort of funny because, in the end, they had to withdraw them because they were controlled by an optical cable, which cost like $15,000.
The problem was the FBI was getting clumsy, and so they'd send out these little battlefield robots, and the FBI would accidentally run a tank over their optical cables.
There's $15,000 bucks down the drain.
Yeah, well, they got it for free to them, so it's okay.
All right.
So that first day, February 28th, six Davidians killed and four ATF agents, right?
Then what happened?
One weird part that happened right after that was the badly wounded David Koresh is on the 911 line to the sheriff's department, and he thinks he's dying.
And given the seriousness of the wound, it could very well have killed him.
He certainly would think it would.
So he's lying there bleeding, and he's talking to him, and you'd think he'd be at least a little upset.
I mean, your house has been shot up.
You've got two bullet holes in you.
He's just there saying, you know what, why did you do this to me?
I've always liked law enforcement because you all put your lives on the line every day.
Why were you doing this?
We bought everything legal on them.
I think the phrase was yellow sheets, meaning the 4473s.
You were always free to come out here and look at everything that I had.
And then he gives away the guy, the undercover agent they actually sent into the building.
I forget his last name now.
But Koresh gives away that they knew he was undercover because he says.
.
.
Robert Rodriguez.
Yeah, because he says, that's what I told Robert, you know, your guy Robert, when you send him out here, that they could look at anything I had.
Well, and in fact, here, I want to play this short clip real quick.
This is Henry Mann, or Mann, or something like that.
McMahon, pardon me.
This is Koresh's gun dealer talking about the ATF coming to him and saying, we want everything you have on Koresh.
And he goes, oh, Koresh, huh, here, let me call him up for you.
And then everyone, just imagine the pantomime of the guy doing his hands back and forth, like, no, no, that's kind of implied.
We can almost hear him doing the miming here.
It's a very short clip.
Why was a warrant sought in the first place since David Koresh, on learning that he was being investigated by ATF, invited the agency on July 30, 1992, through his gun dealer, Henry McMahon, to come to his residence and inspect his firearms?
And I go, I got David Koresh on the phone.
And David Aguilera, he goes, he jumps up and goes, don't go, don't go.
I got him on the phone.
And he goes.
Yeah, that's shaking his head and doing both hands side to side, palm down.
Like, no, no, no.
That's, just to make sure, because I'm not sure how well spoken I am today.
I haven't quite got all the coffee in me I need, Dave.
To be perfectly clear here, the ATF went to David Koresh's gun dealer, and David Koresh's gun dealer got him on the phone and said, hey, I got the ATF here.
And David Koresh said, oh, great, put him on the phone.
I'd like to invite him on out to check everything out.
And the ATF guy said, no, no, no, no, because they had a plan instead.
They would rather kill a bunch of people.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, it wouldn't be the big one, good for publicity, if he went out to his place and checked out all his guns and they were all okay.
Or even if they weren't, just going out to his place and saying, hey, there's problems with this one.
The same thing would be you couldn't arrest him when you took him out shooting, because, you know, that wouldn't get national headlines.
And we took this guy out in the field and we showed him our badges and brought him in.
No, you need the SWAT team coming in, you need the helicopters, you need drama.
They were going to get it.
And that was their, it was all a stage production.
Stage production resulted in about 100 people getting killed, but a stage production.
Well, speaking of which, the FBI showed up that night.
Yep.
And they took over the whole crime scene.
Yeah.
Tell us a little bit about that.
It was the negotiators and the HRT.
What's the HRT?
Hostage Rescue Team, which is a fancy name for their equivalent of a super SWAT team.
They also have SWAT teams.
I mean, cannabis agents have been on a SWAT team these days.
They had FBI SWAT teams and then they had the Hostage Rescue Team, which is sort of the elite of the elite.
The thing is, its whole training and function and mindset is go in and kick some tail.
I mean, do it quickly.
They're trained to work in a, think of a battle as taking seconds rather than minutes, let alone days and weeks.
Well, and they're really trained by the Joint Special Operations Command.
It's sort of like a SEAL team or something like that.
Yep.
They're basically a SEAL team for inside the U.S.
And a lot of them are ex-SEALs.
Well, now, they're sitting out there in the siege that goes on week after week.
And naturally, they were getting in conflicts with the negotiators and doing little things like hanging women's underwear on the negotiators' cars to show what they thought of their virility, et cetera, et cetera.
And a lot of times during the negotiations, you would see what appeared to be conscious sabotage.
That is, the negotiators would work out some deal with the Davidians.
The Davidians would be reasonable and amenable and let's do it this way.
And that night, the action team would cut off all the electricity in the building, basically punishing them whenever they reached an agreement.
And then they got into things like playing loud music all night for sleep deprivation, sending tanks to storm around the building, that sort of thing.
Essentially, as much as they could to try to intimidate the Davidians as opposed to working out the situation.
Well, including even running over the graves of the dead.
Yep.
And also their cars.
They had their cars parked out front, so they just took the tanks and ran right over them.
Pretty impressive.
And that's, of course, right in their own front yard.
Everything they could to intimidate, provoke, that sort of thing.
And in the meantime, I found they finally had a meeting with Jeanette Reno.
And I think the FBI horn-swallowed her.
Because you could see they knew what hot buttons to push.
They knew that she had, as a prosecutor, made a big thing out of child abuse.
Yeah, prosecuting innocent people.
Yeah, yeah.
So when they go in, they tell her that David Koresh is abusing, that is, beating the children.
Well, later on they admit there wasn't a speck of evidence of this.
And when she got up during the congressional hearings and was asked, well, just which one of the people advising you said that David Koresh was abusing the children?
She fell back on one of these, you know, I can't really remember who said it, routines.
Yeah, sure she couldn't.
And then they told her that there was no chance of the Davidians coming out, which wasn't true.
David Koresh had, in fact, just worked out something.
Well, to back up, what happened was there was a couple of theologians went on the radio in the area and described, basically took David Koresh's view of the Seven Seals and interpreted it in a way that suggested that at this point Koresh must give himself up and that that would fill the requirements of the next step.
And they know that Koresh heard this radio broadcast because he sent out a note, I believe the next day, saying essentially that he was going to write up a document called The Little Book, I think it was.
He was going to write up and then he would surrender and give thanks to these two theologians.
So he'd heard the presentation and was won over.
And he started writing.
So, I mean, finally you've got, we have a reasonable prospect of this all being done in the near future.
But they weren't going to let Jeanette Reno know that because then she wouldn't OK the raid.
So they hid that from her.
And they misinformed her.
And then they essentially got permission to go ahead with the big tank raid.
And one of the things they sold her on was, we'll just use some tear gas to sort of annoy them into coming out, but if they fire at us, we'll have the power to inject enormous quantities of tear gas.
And you can figure whether somebody who was dumb enough to fire at a tank or not, somebody is going to report, in particular a fellow named Horiyoshi, is going to report they were firing at the tanks at the right moment.
And then it's all weapons free.
And Lon Horiyoshi, that's the guy that shot Vicky Weaver in the head, and he was stationed at the undercover house across the street, where later a bunch of shell casings were found on the ground and his ammo count was low.
And he's the one who called out the words compromise over the radio, which was a signal that someone has fired at the tanks, therefore you can dump in all the tear gas or CS gas you want.
Well now, during the siege, I'm sorry because I've been sitting here, while I'm listening to you with one ear, I'm looking for the sound bite with the other eye, and I can't seem to find it, but there is a sound bite from, I believe it's Waco, A New Revelation, the second movie, where the negotiator is explaining to Stephen Schneider, David Koresh's sidekick there, that no one is allowed outside of the house for any reason.
All this stuff about, oh, well they could have come out any time.
The instructions were, if you come out, you will be dealt with.
And in practice, what that meant was, for example, the one guy who, I'm sorry, I forget everybody's name nowadays.
They were real human beings that were murdered there.
But this guy was a cigarette smoker, and he would have to go outside to smoke.
And every time he would, they'd throw a flashbang grenade at him and force him back into the house.
So he had to quit smoking.
And so the rule was, you are under siege, you are forbidden from leaving.
And of course, here they're trying to say that Koresh is Charles Manson, he has this robot-like control over all these people, which if that was true, then obviously the rules ought to be, if any of the Davidians tried to get out of the building, grab them or help them to escape the clutches of this terrible madman.
Don't treat them all like they all don't want to come out or whatever, if they are in fact coming out.
Yeah, sure.
They knew they were lying about this.
Yep.
All right, so anyway, so the raid, the CS gas.
Now, CS is banned by international convention.
It's not just tear gas.
And when you burn it, it becomes hydrogen cyanide, the stuff that they use in the gas chamber.
Yep.
Now, that's not hyperbole.
Scott Horton just hates the government a lot, never stops saying terrible things about them using banned chemical weapons against Texans.
But you're verifying that the crazy hyperbole out of my mouth is actually the fact.
Yeah, CS gas, it's actually a fine powder.
And part of its incredible irritating power, and I mean it just irritates the heck out of everything including the eyes, nose and throat, is that it contains quantities of cyanide.
Nitrile groups is the technical term.
And if you ignite it, all of those are released.
So it isn't just part of them being released, they all are released, and you get hydrogen cyanide.
But the other interesting thing is what they sprayed into the building was that dissolved in methylene chloride as a solvent.
And each tank load was I believe they had four to six five-gallon tanks of this.
So we're spraying in a pretty good amount of this liquid which immediately evaporates, which releases the little particles.
And that stuff, methylene chloride, if inhaled converts to metabolizes into carbon monoxide.
It's generally not a good idea to have people run up their blood levels of carbon monoxide if there's a risk of a fire, because that's the big killer, not the flames, it's carbon monoxide.
And you're spraying the house full of this stuff.
Well, and it's the hydrogen cyanide that...
Well, how does hydrogen cyanide kill?
I think it's a cellular-level asphyxiant, something like that.
I'm not really up on it that much, but it's obviously pretty potent stuff.
Well, the way they describe it in Waco, the Rules of Engagement, is that the reason they strap people to the chair in the gas chamber is for, I guess, to minimize the cruelty a little bit, but it's mostly for the audience, so that they don't have to see the muscle spasms so fierce that they shatter bones.
Knees and elbows bend backwards, spines break.
That's what CS does to little women and children buried in a house by a bunch of tanks.
And the children were all in what came to be called the bunker, since every compound has a bunker.
And what it was was a cinderblock room.
No, excuse me, not cinderblock.
It was a cast concrete room, a big one, like 20 by 20, in the center of the building.
And this was basically the most secure room in the building.
So that's where the women and children were, covered with wet blankets to try to protect against the CS gas to some extent.
And there was only one door out of this concrete room, and that's pretty straightforward.
And one of the tanks drove into the front of the building, smashed through to the area of the door into the concrete bunker, and delivered I think it was four five-gallon loads of this methylene chloride CS gas mixture.
So we're talking about firing it basically right into the entryway.
And there's a good chance that anybody inside was comatose by the time the fire actually broke out.
All right, now listen to this.
Here's a clip of FBI spokesman Bob Ricks bragging about it.
We knew that that protection was in there.
We believe we finally were able to make entry into that compound and were able to insert gas inside that protective area.
We put massive gas in there.
Their gas masks by that time had to be failing.
We thought that their instincts, their motherly instincts would take place and that they would want their children out of that environment.
It appears they don't care that much about their children, which is unfortunate.
And what do you say to that?
Let's see.
So what he's saying is we view it as a legitimate tactic to torture children in order to cause their parents to come out.
Right.
Isn't that a wonderful view?
Well, according to John Yoo, there's no treaty that prevents the president from doing so.
It's only a question of why the president thinks he needs to do that, and then, of course, the president is the only one with the power to review his own decision.
And here's the real point.
In fact, we could have talked about just this for a whole hour, David Hardy.
Janet Reno, that son of a bitch, does not control the Army's combat applications group.
She's merely the attorney general.
Bill Clinton, the commander in chief of the Army and the Navy of the United States, he ordered the U.S. Army to help the FBI murder those innocent people.
Yep.
And the other one who played a role in it was reportedly Mrs. Clinton, although that paperwork is rather hard to come by, but there is some word that Vince Foster would have played a role in it.
In the negotiation, I guess, so he was the White House counsel, right?
He would have been the go-to guy, the in-between man, to deal with the Department of Justice and the Army and the presidential powers and whatever.
They say that perhaps it's part of the reason that he killed himself, because he couldn't deal with all the dead kids that were on his hands.
Well, now I forget what words were in the suicide note, but there was something that the logical understanding is Waco.
And I forget now what the words were, but there was something in there where when you read it, what you think of is Waco.
And then there was some attempt to go, no, it meant something entirely different.
Not to my eyes.
All right.
Now, so let's talk about the fire that day, April 19, 1993.
The last time that I spoke with Michael McNulty, who was the researcher who did the yeoman's work in the movies Waco, Waco New Revelation and the FLIR project, which is the final proof, and we'll get to that.
But the last time I spoke to him, he said that he now believes that the first fire started, which would have been in the southwest corner of the house.
He thought that it happened by accident, that the tank shot the CS, methylene chloride mixture, into that room, and that someone in that room shot at the tank, and that the muzzle flash must have ignited the fine mist in the room, and that that would be how the first fire started, he believes.
However, if I think I'm quoting him right here, paraphrasing him correctly, I think he was still quite open to the idea that the other fires were in fact started either deliberately or accidentally by federal agents firing, not incendiary, but pyrotechnic CS rounds into the house.
Can you elaborate on all this, please?
Well, that was something I picked up before I actually got involved in Waco.
I was listening to some of the early congressional hearings, and one of the Davidians was testifying that when they heard the tear gas rounds being shot in, the tear gas rounds made hissing sounds, and he told one of them to throw them out through the window, and the guy said, I can't, they're too hot.
Well, what jumped out at me was, those are not the rounds that were supposed to be being fired in.
We were told they fired in what are called ferret rounds, which are, they look like a little mortar shell made out of plastic, and they're in 40 millimeter size for launching from grenade launchers.
And basically, they'll fly through the air stabilized by the fins, and when they hit a window, for example, they splatter.
It's like a water balloon, except it's filled with CS powder dissolved in methylene chloride.
Those can't start a fire.
There's nothing in them that's flammable.
There's nothing that's burning.
The older version were the pyrotechnic rounds, and these have a fuse, and the fuse ignites basically a black powder mixture with CS gas that shoots out the back.
They can start fires, because obviously they burn, and that would match the description of the guy, that they're making hissing sounds, and that they are too hot to pick up.
And the Davidian who was describing that didn't think anything of it.
He didn't realize what he had just said.
And at the end, I believe Mike's efforts showed that they did fire in pyrotechnic rounds, even though they denied it.
Well, and the Texas Rangers said that they found these shells at all three origins of the fire, and it was McNulty who said he was finally allowed access after the feds and the Texas Rangers kept sending him back and forth and back and forth.
He was finally allowed access to the Waco evidence at DPS headquarters there at Lamar and Koenig Lane in Austin, and he went digging through the piles of stuff there, and every time he found one of these pyrotechnic rounds, it was labeled a silencer on the evidence forms.
But these silencers were found right where the fires broke out.
And one of the reasons they invented the ferret round, which wouldn't start a fire, was what happened during the, what was it, the Patty Hearst, the Symbionese Liberation Army.
I think it was late 1960s.
They holed up in a building in California, and the police fired in pyrotechnic rounds to try to force them out, and the result was the building burned to the ground.
So it was well known that if you fire pyrotechnic rounds into a building, you're running a big risk of burning it to the ground.
All right.
Now let's talk about the forward-looking infrared.
What's forward-looking infrared?
It's basically an infrared heat sensor.
They call it forward-looking because the earliest forms were put into fighter aircraft and were so big that all you could do was have them in a fixed position forward-looking.
Today they're small enough to where they even have handheld rigs, but you still call them forward-looking.
Basically, they see the world in terms of heat radiation.
So you can, they're useful at night, for example.
You can see a person walking around, he looks like he's glowing, that sort of thing.
Now what does that have to do with this story?
Well, on the day of the final fire, FBI had an aircraft up with a forward-looking infrared sensor, and it was able to look down, and it started pre-dawn.
That was their explanation for why they had an infrared sensor up.
The early hours, you don't see much because there's a bunch of low-lying clouds, and infrared doesn't penetrate clouds at all well.
Then you eventually get to where you can, for several hours, you're watching the actual, the building, you're watching the tanks crashing in, that sort of thing.
And then the most shocking thing on it, or interesting thing on it, comes when there are flashes appear, which appear to resemble muzzle flashes from gunfire near FBI positions outside the building.
They appear to resemble muzzle flashes to you, me, and who else?
Well, the several FLIR experts who were brought in, I'm trying to think now, there was Dr. Ferdinand Siegel.
Wayne Allard was one.
Yeah, yeah.
And then there was the guy who was the congressional investigator and FLIR expert, or video expert, who wound up dead.
Yeah.
Started with a G, Italian name.
Gigliotti.
Gigliotti, right.
Yeah.
And I actually had a chance to talk with him before he died.
He'd been hired by the Government Reform Committee, I think it is, of the House, to investigate the FLIR tapes.
And Carlos Gigliotti was an incredibly meticulous guy.
He had a very advanced optical shop, and that was his whole field of expertise he learned in the military.
And he was reconstructing parts of a battle that went on at the rear of the building.
And I mean, the details, such as, here is the tank, and it's maybe ten yards out from the wrecked portion of the building.
He could pick up somebody moving in the wreckage, and then ahead of the tank there's this big multiple series of flashes.
He said he couldn't figure out what that was, but it was possible the guy in there, in the wreckage, had thrown something at the tank.
Anyway, then he could make out the hatch on the tank opening.
And I believe two people got out.
And then you saw gun flashes from their position pointing toward where you last saw the guy in the wreckage.
And then he traced the movement of those two guys.
There was essentially a gunfight at the back of the building, which no one ever admitted to.
And no one ever wanted to talk about, essentially.
Well, if I remember right, I think he said shortly before he died, and I don't guess anybody ever showed exactly how it was that he died.
But I believe he said that he had more than 200 individual instances of federal gunfire from the men getting out of the tanks, at some points even going into the house, I think, in the back of the gymnasium.
Yeah.
200 instances of gunfire there.
I forget them to count, but it was pretty impressive.
He was pinning it down to, at one point you see gunfire coming from an image that can be associated with a human being, and one of the tanks keeps on demolishing the gym, and it knocks over one of the walls on top of the guy.
And he pointed out this guy would probably have been squished, except there was already some rubble in the area that would have held it up off him.
So he was reconstructing the battle in that sort of detail.
And then one morning they found him dead in his office, and they found a card from the Congressional Committee in his pocket.
So the police called up the Congressional Committee, and all of a sudden the Congressional Committee is, we hardly know this guy.
Yeah, we hired him to do a little analysis, but he never really came up with anything.
And we fired him, or we're sort of firing him anyway, but we didn't have much to do with him.
All of which was BS, because I talked to Carlos during that time, and he told me he'd given reports, verbal reports, and he faxed me a copy of his written report that he gave him.
Yeah, well, jeez, there's so many different follow-ups and ways to go here, and limited time.
Well, let's talk about the American people, you know.
After all, it was you and me.
Okay, it wasn't you and me, but it was pretty much everybody else.
And this is the part that I think, or this is a part that I think is really important to bring up, you know, now that it's years and years later, you know, to ask people to kind of remember back.
At least according to the USA Today poll, 93% of the American people approved of the tank attack against the Davidians.
And at least before the attack happened, you know, I don't know exactly about the reaction afterwards necessarily, but I certainly know before the attack took place, I was bagging groceries at the grocery store in Austin, Texas.
And the women of the grocery store, and the women, that means the employees and especially the customers, the upper middle class kind of Ford Explorer driving know-it-all white ladies, they all insisted that David Koresh and anyone near him be murdered immediately.
And they could not, their impatience was so tangible, it was just incredible.
And I remember the women at the Albertsons saying that, oh, they just need to end this, they just need to end this, I'm sick and tired of this, they just need to end this.
And, you know, I mostly didn't care, I was a kid, you know, and I was just sort of being a smart-ass and playing devil's advocate and saying, well, you know, what's the big deal?
I mean, you know, what's the hurry?
What's so bad about it anyway?
And this one particular lady whose groceries I was bagging said, well, he said he was Jesus.
And I said, ah, well, then the first thing we need to do is nail him to a tree then, right?
And she said, yes.
And this was the consensus among all the women in the grocery store whose groceries I was bagging was kill them all.
And that's in Austin, Texas, a hundred miles from where they were almost all killed.
So, you know, we can blame Bill Clinton and the hostage rescue team and the combat applications group, but it was the people of Texas and the people of the United States of America who insisted that the citizens of the foreign country that was Mount Carmel be exterminated.
Well, you've got to remember at the time, what did anybody know in the first weeks and first months?
And the answer was they were all being told, yeah, Koresh was a cult leader, a child molesting cult leader, they were all a bunch of zombies waiting to drink the Kool-Aid, and they shot up a bunch of U.S. law enforcement officers.
Okay, that was all you knew.
And so it's natural that at that point in time people were saying just wipe them all out.
It wasn't until years later that we started finding out that wasn't exactly the truth.
But yeah, I mean, I remember hearing of it myself.
I couldn't say I had feelings one way or the other.
It was just sort of, you know, interesting.
And then years later I wound up getting involved in it.
I think they'll still be studying this whole thing years from now.
I mean, sooner or later somebody's going to talk, but it may not be in our lifetimes.
Well, and the thing is, a few people have talked.
Of course, Stephen Berry, who's a former Special Forces guy, I think Army Ranger, I'm not exactly sure, he said that the Delta Force guys admitted to him that they were in a firefight with the Branch Davidians in the back of the house.
Gene Cullen, a CIA agent, said, yep, they told me the same thing in the back of the house, pulling triggers.
Or maybe I'm switching those two quotes around, but same difference.
And like I say, that matches the infrared evidence that Carlos found.
So as his house was burning down, federal cops and U.S. Army were standing in the back of that property, machine-gunning the people trying to escape the burning building.
Well, there was also one guy, Stephen Riddle, I think was his name, one of the Davidians, whose body was found under, let's say, some unusual conditions.
I was there when we went through his autopsy report.
He's found lying in an area which is completely burned out, but in fact his clothes are intact.
So you wonder, was this where he really died, or did he die somewhere else?
And if the fire died down, his body got relocated.
His body is missing, I believe it's the right arm, traumatically severed, not found.
There is an aerial photograph that I saw with Mike McNulty that appears to show a corpse wearing clothing similar to his, with its right arm caught in the sprocket of one of the tank treads, being pulled up toward the sprocket, which would explain how the corpse is missing a right arm.
And that's outside the building.
As I recollect, he died of a gunshot wound.
So he dies of a gunshot wound outside the building where a tank can run over him.
That doesn't fit the story we've been told.
There was something going on outside that involved flying bullets, yeah.
Well, something else that's really important, too, is that whether it was the Army or FBI or whether they dressed up some ATF agents from the first day that wanted some revenge and let them go in there, I wouldn't doubt that.
I've heard that rumor, at least.
Somebody went to the roof of that concrete room that had the poison gas to death, mostly by that point, women and children in it, and they put a bomb on top of that room.
And that's really beyond doubt, isn't it?
I wouldn't consider it beyond doubt, no.
The concrete room was subjected to some incredible heat stress, and it's got a circular hole in the ceiling.
But I'm told that concrete suggested to extreme heat stress can fail under those conditions.
Basically, it's gypsum powder, sand, and pebbles.
And if you heat it, if you put water in it, it becomes concrete.
If you try the water out, it becomes powder.
Yeah, but as you said, there's a perfectly circular hole in the top.
And in McNulty's movie, he shows Stephen Berry, the Special Forces guy, saying this is a tactic we use all the time.
And you can see how the rebar from the inside of the concrete is bent down, and you can see how the giant steel refrigerator that was in there has been destroyed from what looks like a blast coming from the top like that.
The stress cracks in all the walls and so forth.
And General Benton Parton says that you can see that explosion going off there.
That's a high explosive charge, not just something going, some kind of fuel burning or something like that.
So anyway, that doesn't sound too much like suicide to me, assuming that's right, which I think it is.
Yeah.
The interesting part with some of it is, well, the people who died in the bunker, that's where all the children were found.
One of the things we found on the FLIR tapes is they have a soundtrack.
The first version they coughed up had no soundtrack.
Eventually, they coughed up another version, which does.
And the soundtrack is basically recorded in the cockpit of the aircraft.
Really?
And so it's the pilots talking about what they're seeing through their infrared monitor there?
Yeah.
And what's in there?
Well, what's interesting is it also picks up the radio.
And as the fire is breaking out, the guy, now I'm trying to remember, the second in command who is at the scene in the M1 tank starts calling for fire engines.
The other FBI agent, who is like a mile or two away controlling the checkpoint, says okay.
The guy at the scene continues screaming for fire engines, and there's nothing happening.
And the other agents are reporting that we haven't seen any fire engines.
What happened is the agent about one or two miles away in charge of the whole thing ordered the fire engines held back.
And it goes on and on.
Well, I'm sorry.
Listen, I've got a million more questions.
We're just all out of time here.
I've got another very important interview coming up next.
But I do want to recommend that people go and get the book.
This is Not an Assault by Rex Kimball and our guest David T. Hardy.
Also, you can watch Waco, the Rules of Engagement.
I don't know, but hopefully you can watch Waco, A New Revelation and The FLIR Project, also online.
The FLIR Project is all you need right there.
That's the end of the argument.
Mike McNulty won it, and Senator Danforth is a liar.
And that's all I've got to say about that.
Thanks very much for your time on the show, David.
I really appreciate it a lot.
Sure.
You have a good one.
