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Hence the large number of NRA members that implicitly or explicitly agreed with Wayne LaPierre's statements that the ATF were a bunch of 'jack booted thugs' in Waco, or Feral's link above where Rush refers to the ATF / FBI actions in Waco as an 'invasion'.
This seems to me to be a category error. You are implying that since conservatives attacked liberals for how they were handling the Waco situation, it meant they were secretly Waco sympathizers. Or wanted them to win?
That's no more valid than the republicans saying that liberals who took issue with the way conservatives were mishandling Afghanistan were secretly Taliban sympathizers or something.
Does saying that the patriot act violates the 1st amendment mean you want the terrorists to win and therefore the fight America vs the Taliban is a conservative vs liberal fight? Absolutely not. Changing countries, would it make sense to say "The Battle of Fallujah was THE symbolic fight between liberals and conservatives in the 2000's". No. Not even though by then many influential progressives had come around to be largely against the Iraq war.
Sure the right attacked the Clinton administration over ruby ridge, waco, etc. The right used absolutely everything as a political club to hit Clinton with.
It's possible we mean very different things when we say A represented B or such and such was a symbol. What do you mean when you say "X was THE symbolic battle between Y and Z"?I hope you don't just mean "Well, some of the themes that were present in X were also areas of disagreement between Y and Z". When I say that a fight between A and B was a symbolic fight between Y and Z, I mean that Y wanted A to win and Z wanted B to win.
If both Y and Z want B to win and A to lose, that's not really a symbolic fight now, is it?
It's quite true, as I pointed out, that gun control was a real actual conflict between conservatives and liberals in the 90's. The assault weapons ban was a huge (possibly the primary) reason republicans won the house in 94, for the first time in forever. However, thinking something should not be against the law does not mean you are for people who do violate the law.
Let's just assume you are correct and Waco was THE symbolic fight of conservatism vs liberalism as I suspect we're talking past each other using different definitions.
This matters how? This excuses / mitigates the incompetence displayed in what way? The Branch Davidian children deserved what they got because conservatives are hypocritical assholes and therefore the ATF/FBI were not incompetent?
edit: to go with what Ronya is saying I won't go against anyone who says they believe they were negligent, but criminal negligence? I find that to be preposterous, all indications were that they had a plan, they underestimated what they were up against, and some innocent people died. Even in hindsight almost 2 decades later we can't come to a consensus on how this could have been resolved with zero deaths
All right, if you agree they were incompetent/negligent, but don't think it rises to the level of being criminal and only appears that way with the benefit of hindsight, that's fine. That's a reasonable and plausible position.
I'm arguing against the various arguments that they weren't incompetent, or that it is impossible to determine incompetency, or that their incompetence in launching the initial raid to serve the warrant, or their incompetence in the siege or launching the second raid to get the kids out, can somehow be excused by the political situation being unfavorable.
And it wouldn't have to be zero deaths. Just less than, say, almost 90, including around 20 children.
If they had gone in (as they initially planned) and surprised the cultists and overpowered them, even if they had to kill Koresh and a couple other hardliners, I think that would have been judged as a acceptable outcome.
The problem was they carried out their plan that relied upon the element of surprise even after they knew they no longer had surprise! They had an informant in the compound who told them the cultists knew they were coming. This led to the unnecessary deaths of ATF agents and directly led to the apocalyptic end of days scenario that Koresh wanted all along. That is the part that, to my mind, comes closest to criminal incompetence.
The conservatives tried to politicize absolutely everything in the Clinton years, including sex.
I do not see how this has a bearing on the ATF / FBI handling of Waco.
Are we saying their incompetence didn't count because the right tried to make political hay out of it?
Well that's a shitty question because first I'd have to accept the premise of incompetence being responsible for the tragedy
The ATF's plan actually wasn't too bad, they just lost the element of surprise and had no idea what to do after that, and the FBI handled things... adequately as well. They absolutely could have done better, tried other tactics, but I won't accept that because they didn't just up and leave to calm the situation down that they were incompetent
I mean I guess its incompetence if you ask me to disarm a nuclear bomb and I fuck it up and we all die, but I don't have any experience disarming nuclear bombs
So you're saying the ATF doesn't have the experience necessary to do the job they tried to do at Waco?
I'm saying nobody had the experience necessary to do the job they tried to do at Waco.
The ATF and FBI believed initially that the people within would eventually relent when they realized it was hopeless. Because that's how those situations almost always went down
edit: to go with what Ronya is saying I won't go against anyone who says they believe they were negligent, but criminal negligence? I find that to be preposterous, all indications were that they had a plan, they underestimated what they were up against, and some innocent people died. Even in hindsight almost 2 decades later we can't come to a consensus on how this could have been resolved with zero deaths
now imagine you're in the heat of the moment and getting a constant barrage of intel, some of which is contradictory, and have immense political pressure from every side to accomplish contradictory mission objectives
Everyone knows that if your plane gets hijacked, you just keep calm and enjoy your free vacation in Cuba.
Precedent setting event is precedent setting, shocker.
It is true that the testimony is highly contentious, but happily I don't see this as intruding upon my view that letting things get this far was a mistake to begin with.
Well, as a thought experiment, suppose the Davidians had only been stockpiling legal firearms; unmodified AR-15s, high caliber rifles, etc. These guns are just as dangerous as any spray and pray submachine gun or fully automatic M-16, but (as i understand it), it's legal to own as many of these weapons as you like. Could you not have had exactly the same situation develop given that everyone in the country has the legally protected right to go out and create a little militia group, assuming they stay within the boundaries of state & federal law?
And if you agree that we could arrive at exactly the same place with legally acquired / stockpiled weapons, how do you reconcile that with the idea that the state is failed once it surrenders the monopoly of violence? Isn't the surrender of said monopoly at least partly supposed to be what the 2nd amendment enshrines?
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
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The confirmation of Reno was vigorously contested by the NRA, because it was known that Reno favoured more gun control. The Clinton administration initially indicated that they did not wish to use force, at least going by international news archives - until the siege ended badly, there was relatively little international attention. Unfortunately, these don't include editorials and columns in American publications. It would be useful to get a sense whether the FBI would have felt obliged to end the siege, which seems suggested in some sources.
When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire or alternately shoot them.
It is true that the testimony is highly contentious, but happily I don't see this as intruding upon my view that letting things get this far was a mistake to begin with.
Well, as a thought experiment, suppose the Davidians had only been stockpiling legal firearms; unmodified AR-15s, high caliber rifles, etc. These guns are just as dangerous as any spray and pray submachine gun or fully automatic M-16, but (as i understand it), it's legal to own as many of these weapons as you like. Could you not have had exactly the same situation develop given that everyone in the country has the legally protected right to go out and create a little militia group, assuming they stay within the boundaries of state & federal law?
And if you agree that we could arrive at exactly the same place with legally acquired / stockpiled weapons, how do you reconcile that with the idea that the state is failed once it surrenders the monopoly of violence? Isn't the surrender of said monopoly at least partly supposed to be what the 2nd amendment enshrines?
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
I would argue that if you send a surveillance team to watch a group of people for an arbitrarily long period of time, it is inevitable that you will find someone committing a crime. Given that argument, and given that the state would probably want to keep surveillance on a group that they found stockpiling weapons of any sort (for good reason), I think it's more than just an issue of a legal loophole: Isn't the armament protection law (and the almost bipolar nature of protecting it) more or less guaranteed to set-up exactly the sort of stand-off seen at Waco?
I mean, you've ('you' being 'the state') told that group of people, "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," and that group of people say, "Okay!" and set-up a militia commune where they erect a personal armory. Concerned about this, you decide it's best to keep an eye on them. Oh look, some of the kids have been vandalizing nearby vehicles, some people have been torrenting games & movies, some people have been buying / selling drugs, etc. Well now you've got to enforce the law... but it's a militia commune with guns, guns, guns and dubious respect for you. In my mind, enforcing the law in that scenario now necessarily demands an approach akin to Waco, and when you walk down that road I can't imagine too many scenarios where it ends without at least a few dead people here or there.
When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire.
According to one of the post-incident analyses (the Alan Stone report), a mass suicide was foreseeable (and foreseen, by FBI behavioral analysts) but the ATF and FBI chose to ignore that possibility.
This may just be hindsight being 20/20. I recognize that. I just see that there's a bit of a schizophrenic response here. Either it was inevitable that law enforcement action would end in violence and tragedy; or nobody could have predicted a mass suicide.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive possibilities (there are many ways this could have ended terribly, not all of which involve mass suicide), but there's a bit of a tension there.
Personally, I think it's fairly clear that the ATF and FBI failed to adequately recognize the eschatological zealotry of the cultists and decided just to roll forward come hell or high water. Some people don't seem to care about that, but I can't really dismiss it that easily.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
There's no way to reconcile the fact that we can't let you buy a rocket launcher at wal-mart with the second amendment
so its not really in anyone's interests to pursue that
*I am pretty sure that the courts have said it's okay to restrict automatic weapons though
The National Firearms Act of 1934 was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1938. That specific case centered on sawed-off shotguns.
It's important to remember that it's entirely legal to own machine guns in the United States, just extremely expensive and a pain in the ass and also the ATF occasionally drops by to make sure you haven't done anything stupid like sold it without telling them.
It is true that the testimony is highly contentious, but happily I don't see this as intruding upon my view that letting things get this far was a mistake to begin with.
Well, as a thought experiment, suppose the Davidians had only been stockpiling legal firearms; unmodified AR-15s, high caliber rifles, etc. These guns are just as dangerous as any spray and pray submachine gun or fully automatic M-16, but (as i understand it), it's legal to own as many of these weapons as you like. Could you not have had exactly the same situation develop given that everyone in the country has the legally protected right to go out and create a little militia group, assuming they stay within the boundaries of state & federal law?
And if you agree that we could arrive at exactly the same place with legally acquired / stockpiled weapons, how do you reconcile that with the idea that the state is failed once it surrenders the monopoly of violence? Isn't the surrender of said monopoly at least partly supposed to be what the 2nd amendment enshrines?
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
I would argue that if you send a surveillance team to watch a group of people for an arbitrarily long period of time, it is inevitable that you will find someone committing a crime. Given that argument, and given that the state would probably want to keep surveillance on a group that they found stockpiling weapons of any sort (for good reason), I think it's more than just an issue of a legal loophole: Isn't the armament protection law (and the almost bipolar nature of protecting it) more or less guaranteed to set-up exactly the sort of stand-off seen at Waco?
I mean, you've ('you' being 'the state') told that group of people, "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," and that group of people say, "Okay!" and set-up a militia commune where they erect a personal armory. Concerned about this, you decide it's best to keep an eye on them. Oh look, some of the kids have been vandalizing nearby vehicles, some people have been torrenting games & movies, some people have been buying / selling drugs, etc. Well now you've got to enforce the law... but it's a militia commune with guns, guns, guns and dubious respect for you. In my mind, enforcing the law in that scenario now necessarily demands an approach akin to Waco, and when you walk down that road I can't imagine too many scenarios where it ends without at least a few dead people here or there.
A few dead people here or there are one hundred percent absolutely acceptable to maintain the state monopoly on force. I cannot state this strongly enough. It is emphatically the duty of the government to kill every last man woman and child in that commune, if and only if necessary, to maintain sovereignty. Call in airstrikes, if you have to (you won't.) That's not a statement I make lightly, and such a situation would be monumentally tragic and also probably spark an incredibly short-lived second round of the Civil War, but the alternative is Somalia.
When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire.
According to one of the post-incident analyses (the Alan Stone report), a mass suicide was foreseeable (and foreseen, by FBI behavioral analysts) but the ATF and FBI chose to ignore that possibility.
This may just be hindsight being 20/20. I recognize that. I just see that there's a bit of a schizophrenic response here. Either it was inevitable that law enforcement action would end in violence and tragedy; or nobody could have predicted a mass suicide.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive possibilities (there are many ways this could have ended terribly, not all of which involve mass suicide), but there's a bit of a tension there.
Personally, I think it's fairly clear that the ATF and FBI failed to adequately recognize the eschatological zealotry of the cultists and decided just to roll forward come hell or high water. Some people don't seem to care about that, but I can't really dismiss it that easily.
The Jonestown scenario seems to have floated around in discussion quite a bit prior to the final raid, so I think the ATF and FBI recognized the zeal but predicted the wrong reactions from it.
It is true that the testimony is highly contentious, but happily I don't see this as intruding upon my view that letting things get this far was a mistake to begin with.
Well, as a thought experiment, suppose the Davidians had only been stockpiling legal firearms; unmodified AR-15s, high caliber rifles, etc. These guns are just as dangerous as any spray and pray submachine gun or fully automatic M-16, but (as i understand it), it's legal to own as many of these weapons as you like. Could you not have had exactly the same situation develop given that everyone in the country has the legally protected right to go out and create a little militia group, assuming they stay within the boundaries of state & federal law?
And if you agree that we could arrive at exactly the same place with legally acquired / stockpiled weapons, how do you reconcile that with the idea that the state is failed once it surrenders the monopoly of violence? Isn't the surrender of said monopoly at least partly supposed to be what the 2nd amendment enshrines?
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
I would argue that if you send a surveillance team to watch a group of people for an arbitrarily long period of time, it is inevitable that you will find someone committing a crime. Given that argument, and given that the state would probably want to keep surveillance on a group that they found stockpiling weapons of any sort (for good reason), I think it's more than just an issue of a legal loophole: Isn't the armament protection law (and the almost bipolar nature of protecting it) more or less guaranteed to set-up exactly the sort of stand-off seen at Waco?
I mean, you've ('you' being 'the state') told that group of people, "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," and that group of people say, "Okay!" and set-up a militia commune where they erect a personal armory. Concerned about this, you decide it's best to keep an eye on them. Oh look, some of the kids have been vandalizing nearby vehicles, some people have been torrenting games & movies, some people have been buying / selling drugs, etc. Well now you've got to enforce the law... but it's a militia commune with guns, guns, guns and dubious respect for you. In my mind, enforcing the law in that scenario now necessarily demands an approach akin to Waco, and when you walk down that road I can't imagine too many scenarios where it ends without at least a few dead people here or there.
I'm fairly comfortable agreeing with most of this. I think it's the case that the laws as they stand are, given a large population and enough time, going to lead to situations in which a bunch of crazy people wind up in violent stand-offs that end badly. I don't think Waco-levels of badness are inevitable (ie, I think we could've acted differently and prevented at least some of the deaths), but yeah, sometimes shit is going to go down. I find this inevitability to be the least bad option of many bad options, though.
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When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire.
According to one of the post-incident analyses (the Alan Stone report), a mass suicide was foreseeable (and foreseen, by FBI behavioral analysts) but the ATF and FBI chose to ignore that possibility.
This may just be hindsight being 20/20. I recognize that. I just see that there's a bit of a schizophrenic response here. Either it was inevitable that law enforcement action would end in violence and tragedy; or nobody could have predicted a mass suicide.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive possibilities (there are many ways this could have ended terribly, not all of which involve mass suicide), but there's a bit of a tension there.
Personally, I think it's fairly clear that the ATF and FBI failed to adequately recognize the eschatological zealotry of the cultists and decided just to roll forward come hell or high water. Some people don't seem to care about that, but I can't really dismiss it that easily.
The Jonestown scenario seems to have floated around in discussion quite a bit prior to the final raid, so I think the ATF and FBI recognized the zeal but predicted the wrong reactions from it.
If there really was thought to be a risk of mass suicide (ala Jonestown) I'm pretty sure that would make the Feds want to go in sooner rather than later in hopes of saving as many as possible.
Since that indeed seems to have been the case, I question whether prolonging the siege would have had better results.
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I agree that if the situation had happened today it might have ended differently. Though I kind of see similar events as unpreventable, given time. When one of the sides are so many people, who are armed and also severe lunatics, and there are children present.
When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire.
Yes, after the disastrous final assault, it immediately became a tool the right used to club Clinton. It wasn't quite as polarizing as you suggest - tons of Democrats agreed that the ATF had fucked it up big time. I think most people thought it was totally incompetent, with conservatives arguing it was perhaps out of malice.
This does not mean that as the siege was happening, it was seen as some sort of battle between conservatives and liberals, and that this somehow meant the FBI had to launch their misguided final attack (or the ATF had to launch their misguided first attack once their surprise was blown).
To the extent that political pressure from conservatives sympathetic to the Branch Davidians would have played a role, it would have been a 'go softer' approach to starve them out or negotiate or whatever as opposed to a massive firefight that left everyone dead.
I also agree some libertarians were actively rooting for the branch davidians to win. (You would see stories of some crazy vowing he was going to cross the country and 'reinforce' the Branch Davidians) However libertarians have basically zero influence in the republican party generally, let alone the smaller fringe group of them. I simply don't agree that the Waco Siege was seen as the symbolic battle between left and right by any meaningful portion of the population. Being politically polarizing is quite a different thing.
I will refer back to my previous example about the surge in Iraq. That was polarizing politically. But it doesn't mean that any fight between American GI's and AQ militants was seen as a symbolic fight between Liberalism and Conservatism. (let alone THE such fight) Even anti-war Americans still wanted their boys and girls in uniform to win and come home safely. (Minus possibly an extreme fringe). Someone said earlier "Oh well when we say it was a symbolic fight between conservatives and liberalism, we don't mean anyone actually wanted the branch davidians to win" which to me is a sign we are using the term very differently. So it's probably more fruitful to argue : ok, well, if it was a symbolic fight, so what? I don't think even granting the premise makes a difference.
And yes, as far as the fire goes, all the evidence points to a small inner circle of the Branch Davidians deliberately setting it off at various points in the compound.
When the whole thing happened, it became politically polarized immediately because, fuck Clinton and everything he touches...or something (See also: fuck Bush and everything he touches; fuck Obama and everything he touches).
Afterwards, it became a libertarian vs state issue among the lunatic fringe of the Libertarians, who were very much in favor of the Branch Davidians winning (and some of whom got murderously upset over their losing).
Also, claiming the death of the children was due to FBI incompetence suggests it was foreseeable that parents (even the rapey, molesty sort) would willingly set their own children on fire.
Yes, after the disastrous final assault, it immediately became a tool the right used to club Clinton. It wasn't quite as polarizing as you suggest - tons of Democrats agreed that the ATF had fucked it up big time. I think most people thought it was totally incompetent, with conservatives arguing it was perhaps out of malice.
This does not mean that as the siege was happening, it was seen as some sort of battle between conservatives and liberals, and that this somehow meant the FBI had to launch their misguided final attack (or the ATF had to launch their misguided first attack once their surprise was blown).
To the extent that political pressure from conservatives sympathetic to the Branch Davidians would have played a role, it would have been a 'go softer' approach to starve them out or negotiate or whatever as opposed to a massive firefight that left everyone dead.
I also agree some libertarians were actively rooting for the branch davidians to win. (You would see stories of some crazy vowing he was going to cross the country and 'reinforce' the Branch Davidians) However libertarians have basically zero influence in the republican party generally, let alone the smaller fringe group of them. I simply don't agree that the Waco Siege was seen as the symbolic battle between left and right by any meaningful portion of the population. Being politically polarizing is quite a different thing.
I will refer back to my previous example about the surge in Iraq. That was polarizing politically. But it doesn't mean that any fight between American GI's and AQ militants was seen as a symbolic fight between Liberalism and Conservatism. (let alone THE such fight) Even anti-war Americans still wanted their boys and girls in uniform to win and come home safely. (Minus possibly an extreme fringe). Someone said earlier "Oh well when we say it was a symbolic fight between conservatives and liberalism, we don't mean anyone actually wanted the branch davidians to win" which to me is a sign we are using the term very differently. So it's probably more fruitful to argue : ok, well, if it was a symbolic fight, so what? I don't think even granting the premise makes a difference.
And yes, as far as the fire goes, all the evidence points to a small inner circle of the Branch Davidians deliberately setting it off at various points in the compound.
Immediately after the initial assault by the ATF, the right presented Waco as an attempt by Reno / Clinton to grab guns by whatever means were necessary. The NRA used it as a rallying cry ('jack-booted thugs') against gun control, and presented it as an example of what would happen to every gun owner if the 'gun grabbing Democrats' got their way. Waco (and to a lesser extent Ruby Ridge), and the support it drummed up among mainstream Republican gun owners was a significant factor in why the Brady Bill (passed later that year) and Federal Assault Weapons Ban (passed the following year) were the pretty much the last two significant Federal bills regarding gun control. Second Amendment rights have always been a major plank by the Conservative wing, and Waco was absolutely presented as that symbolic battle.
Immediately after the initial assault, when the FBI took over the siege, the Christian Coalition and other similar major players in the mainstream Republican Party presented it to their congregations as a battle between religious (as claimed by Conservatives) and the Liberal atheism / anti-religion attitude. This rhetoric lessened somewhat as it became clear that the Branch Davidians were not so much a harmless group of Christians, but rather a child raping doomsday cult, but Waco was absolutely presented as an attack on religious freedom from the initial ATF raid onward.
This rhetoric also included the libertarian / militia / other anti-government nutjobs who actively supported the Branch Davidians as you pointed out. They were probably the only group that actively wanted the Branch Davidians to 'win'.
However, a large number of mainstream Republicans and Republican / Conservative figureheads in the 90's chastised Reno, Clinton, and the ATF for having the audacity to do their jobs in the first place. The initial raid / investigation was treated as a massive infringement on what they saw as god-given rights. Waco was the symbolic battle in the sense that the 'god hating, freedom hating, politically correct liberals' are going to come stomping into my home and take my gun - 'from my cold dead hands'. Mainstream Republicans said that if Clinton / Reno could do this in Waco, they could do it to any good American who loves their freedom (paraphrased).
That's how it's a symbolic battle. They wanted the Branch Davidians to 'win' in a sense that they wanted the Branch Davidians to be free to collect their guns and do whatever crazyness their religion dictated free of scrutiny from the government.
All right, for the sake of argument, I'll accept your definition of 'symbolic battle'.
Wouldn't the fact that their actions would be viewed through that prism tend to mean the ATF and FBI needed to act with MORE circumspection and caution, rather than less? It's not like this idea comes to us only through hindsight. Many within the FBI, and President Clinton, wanted wanted to extend the blockade and try to reach a negotiated solution rather than storming the breaches. Additionally, experts were warning the FBI of exactly the kind of apocalyptic end the cultists wound up seeking.
You can't plausibly argue that because the actions at Waco were going to be viewed as a symbolic battle between gun rights activists and gun grabbers, the staggering incompetence on display mattered *less*.
If anything, the incompetence at Waco made the gun control push far less likely to succeed. It was quite easy to paint the ATF as incompetent jack booted thugs. They were incompetent, and they were overzealous and cocky.
If you know your siege is going to be used as the poster child for government gun control vs freedom and liberty loving Americans...maybe your final assault ostensibly made to 'save the kids' shouldn't end up with all the kids dead? Maybe you should bend over backwards to defuse the 'jack booted thugs out for your guns' argument?
The original argument, as best I can remember, was a defense of the incompetence and unnecessary loss of life caused by the final FBI raid that they simply HAD to launch the raid because it was the symbolic fight between liberals and conservatives! That argument made little sense to me because it wasn't, and even if so, it cuts against the idea of launching the raid. Unless the idea was the government was going to shock and awe those gun rights sons of bitches all across the nation and stun them into acquiescence by rolling over Waco with tanks.
That uh, didn't work out so well, as the 1994 elections showed.
No. At least, that was not my argument - I cannot speak for the other posters who have noted its political significance. Rather, it was that letting the siege drag on indefinitely was not an option, because the ATF and FBI did not have unlimited political capital in Washington DC to sustain the siege. The gun-control détente that settled after the mid-90s had not yet occurred, and there was still an open desire to abolish the ATF and fold its responsibilities into the FBI. Ruby Ridge had occurred just two years earlier. This came to a head as Reno was confirmed as AG.
It was not a symbol of a fight between liberals and conservatives; rather, the ongoing media attention was granting momentum to activists who would have preferred for the ATF to not have existed.
You are again intently arguing that because children died, that means the FBI must have intended for children to die.
You are again intently arguing that because children died, that means the FBI must have intended for children to die.
Not at all. Although you appear to be arguing that anything that happened happened only because it was meant to happen.
When I say 'The FBI caused children to die through their incompetence' do you really read it as 'the FBI wanted children to die'?
I also don't buy the 'the bloody raid was necessary because of lack of political capital for the ATF'. The FBI had already taken over the siege. Even if the ATF had been disbanded entirely and folded into the FBI, that wouldn't have mattered. Additionally, at that point, we had evidence of the abuse of children (which we didn't have before the ATF raid). That was the reason given for the FBI raid - they feared the children were being abused inside (this turns out to not have been the case, but was the reason given at the time).
So I think letting the siege drag on was an option, just as Bill Clinton and many in the FBI advocated. At this point the political capital of the ATF didn't really factor into it.
All right, for the sake of argument, I'll accept your definition of 'symbolic battle'.
Wouldn't the fact that their actions would be viewed through that prism tend to mean the ATF and FBI needed to act with MORE circumspection and caution, rather than less? It's not like this idea comes to us only through hindsight. Many within the FBI, and President Clinton, wanted wanted to extend the blockade and try to reach a negotiated solution rather than storming the breaches. Additionally, experts were warning the FBI of exactly the kind of apocalyptic end the cultists wound up seeking.
You can't plausibly argue that because the actions at Waco were going to be viewed as a symbolic battle between gun rights activists and gun grabbers, the staggering incompetence on display mattered *less*.
If anything, the incompetence at Waco made the gun control push far less likely to succeed. It was quite easy to paint the ATF as incompetent jack booted thugs. They were incompetent, and they were overzealous and cocky.
If you know your siege is going to be used as the poster child for government gun control vs freedom and liberty loving Americans...maybe your final assault ostensibly made to 'save the kids' shouldn't end up with all the kids dead? Maybe you should bend over backwards to defuse the 'jack booted thugs out for your guns' argument?
The original argument, as best I can remember, was a defense of the incompetence and unnecessary loss of life caused by the final FBI raid that they simply HAD to launch the raid because it was the symbolic fight between liberals and conservatives! That argument made little sense to me because it wasn't, and even if so, it cuts against the idea of launching the raid. Unless the idea was the government was going to shock and awe those gun rights sons of bitches all across the nation and stun them into acquiescence by rolling over Waco with tanks.
That uh, didn't work out so well, as the 1994 elections showed.
I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make. Yes, the ATF raid didn't go as planned because they had lost the element of surprise. There was a bad decision made to move forward that day, but it's also very easy to Monday Morning Quarterback decisions when you have the benefit of two decades of hindsight. The operation was a well planned warrant execution, and the contingency plans for resistance somewhat reasonably didn't anticipate the unprecedented level of heavily armed resistance the Davidians demonstrated.
Now, it seems you are conflating the intial ATF raid and the final day of the siege. There was no 'shock and awe' raid by the FBI that resulted in the fires being set and everyone dying. The FBI had been negotiating with Koresh, who repeatedly demonstrated bad faith and refusing to follow through after the FBI made concessions. It was generally believed the prolonging the siege would not result in a surrender or release of any additional hostages. This is something that's still a widely accepted belief.
There was incredible pressure to end the siege, and every day the siege continued was presented in and of itself as evidence of Clinton / Reno / the FBI's incompetence by Conservatives. There was also a legitimate belief at the time that the children and other hostages were being physically and sexually abused as the siege continued, providing a strong non-political impedius for ending the siege. While there were suggestions that the Davidians would commit mass suicide, once the siege began and negotiations to release hostages fell through, there really was no option to resolve the siege peacefully. Koresh was not going to surrender peacefully to the government or release the women and children that he held.
Now, you seem to be having trouble separating the symbolism that is attached to Waco and was attached at the time from what was going on at Waco on the ground. Waco was the symbolic battle between liberals and conservatives. That doesn't mean that - for the ATF - the raid was a battle between political views...on that day, it was simply the ATF executing a search warrant to search for suspected stockpiles of illegal weapons. There is more than one level to a complex event like this, and the symbolism that's attached to it by various groups.
I refuse to be baited into yet another page of idiotically patient explanations that unintended events do not entail incompetence. These do not appear to be having any effect, and you have already conceded the main point of non-foreseeability. So let us tackle this other point, which seems fairly straightforwardly wrong:
I also don't buy the 'the bloody raid was necessary because of lack of political capital for the ATF'. The FBI had already taken over the siege. Even if the ATF had been disbanded entirely and folded into the FBI, that wouldn't have mattered. Additionally, at that point, we had evidence of the abuse of children (which we didn't have before the ATF raid). That was the reason given for the FBI raid - they feared the children were being abused inside (this turns out to not have been the case, but was the reason given at the time).
So I think letting the siege drag on was an option, just as Bill Clinton and many in the FBI advocated. At this point the political capital of the ATF didn't really factor into it.
But Ruby Ridge was also executed by the FBI - the same Hostage Rescue Team unit of the FBI, in fact. And yet Ruby Ridge was exactly the crystallizing event for the far right.
Now you say that letting the siege drag on was the obvious way forward. But this only works if you are slowly but surely reducing the will of the besieged to refuse a surrender, and your argument on page 2 was that sleep deprivation was obviously incompetent because then the crazy people might then do something crazy. So if wearing them down is 'incompetent', what are you proposing here?
Blaming the ATF or the FBI for the murder of those children is like blaming the clothing for the rape of a woman. The fucking people to blame are the ones who killed the kids.
All right, for the sake of argument, I'll accept your definition of 'symbolic battle'.
Wouldn't the fact that their actions would be viewed through that prism tend to mean the ATF and FBI needed to act with MORE circumspection and caution, rather than less?
Nope. Not at all.
It's an issue of strategy versus tactics. It's possible that political considerations should come into play in deciding what general approach you should take in addressing the issue. Should we leave them be? Should we ask them politely to let us in? Should we resort to force? Those are the kinds of questions for which you might think about the larger implications of what you're doing. (Note: I think the general idea of displaying force was a good one, on balance, even after political considerations are made, because the alternative was letting crazy people break the law and build an army with impunity, given that these dudes weren't going to just peacefully give up their aresenal.)
But once you decide, "Okay, we need to use force," you absolutely do not consider political implications in deciding how to storm the compound. You do whatever you deem necessary to resolve the issue with a minimal loss of life. If a bunch of assholes on talk radio are going to blather about what you did, fuck it, let them blather, because the alternative is to use what you've already deemed sub-optimal tactics. You can tell they are deemed sub-optimal tactics, because if they weren't, they'd already be using them.
In hindsight, it's the case that the tactics they used weren't the best idea. But that's because their tactics resulted in a lot of death, and not because they didn't consider the precious feelings of conservative argle-barglers.
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+11
MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
I wonder if today's LE technology would have made things better or worse? That is, if it was 1993 thinking/tactics with 2013's tech.
Specifically tech like drones, scouting robots, and even (presumably) improved non-lethal rounds and breaching methods. Guess it's somewhat hard to separate the tech from the techniques - which have been changed based on situations like Waco - but would any of that stuff have resulted in a less deadly outcome?
No such thing as non-lethal rounds, just less than lethal rounds. I don't think a robot is ever going to help a hostage situation because the robot is still an intruder that is going to provoke a hostile response.
MichaelLCIn what furnace was thy brain?ChicagoRegistered Userregular
Well, yes, but that's the common term for beanbags, rubber pellets, TASERs, etc. Those probably wouldn't have helped much since it sounds like the the ATF was under live fire pretty much from the get-go, so that's where I wonder if drones or robots would have helped. If they're shooting at a robot then they're not shooting at a person, and the machines can be used as surveillance, delivery of supplies, or of 'flash-bangs'.
Did the police and feds have a pretty good idea of the layout of the compound before the siege? Just a 'what-if' exercise if a couple of passes with a video drone would have made them reconsider their approach or not.
don't think a robot is ever going to help a hostage situation because the robot is still an intruder that is going to provoke a hostile response.
No way man. You send that robot in and they'll just be all like "Oh look, a robot. Isn't he cute!" or "It's just as scared of us as we are of it. Just don't look at it and it'll go away hunny. That's a good boy."
It is true that the testimony is highly contentious, but happily I don't see this as intruding upon my view that letting things get this far was a mistake to begin with.
Well, as a thought experiment, suppose the Davidians had only been stockpiling legal firearms; unmodified AR-15s, high caliber rifles, etc. These guns are just as dangerous as any spray and pray submachine gun or fully automatic M-16, but (as i understand it), it's legal to own as many of these weapons as you like. Could you not have had exactly the same situation develop given that everyone in the country has the legally protected right to go out and create a little militia group, assuming they stay within the boundaries of state & federal law?
And if you agree that we could arrive at exactly the same place with legally acquired / stockpiled weapons, how do you reconcile that with the idea that the state is failed once it surrenders the monopoly of violence? Isn't the surrender of said monopoly at least partly supposed to be what the 2nd amendment enshrines?
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
I would argue that if you send a surveillance team to watch a group of people for an arbitrarily long period of time, it is inevitable that you will find someone committing a crime. Given that argument, and given that the state would probably want to keep surveillance on a group that they found stockpiling weapons of any sort (for good reason), I think it's more than just an issue of a legal loophole: Isn't the armament protection law (and the almost bipolar nature of protecting it) more or less guaranteed to set-up exactly the sort of stand-off seen at Waco?
I mean, you've ('you' being 'the state') told that group of people, "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," and that group of people say, "Okay!" and set-up a militia commune where they erect a personal armory. Concerned about this, you decide it's best to keep an eye on them. Oh look, some of the kids have been vandalizing nearby vehicles, some people have been torrenting games & movies, some people have been buying / selling drugs, etc. Well now you've got to enforce the law... but it's a militia commune with guns, guns, guns and dubious respect for you. In my mind, enforcing the law in that scenario now necessarily demands an approach akin to Waco, and when you walk down that road I can't imagine too many scenarios where it ends without at least a few dead people here or there.
I'm fairly comfortable agreeing with most of this. I think it's the case that the laws as they stand are, given a large population and enough time, going to lead to situations in which a bunch of crazy people wind up in violent stand-offs that end badly. I don't think Waco-levels of badness are inevitable (ie, I think we could've acted differently and prevented at least some of the deaths), but yeah, sometimes shit is going to go down. I find this inevitability to be the least bad option of many bad options, though.
This ties back into a point @ronya brought up earlier about state monopoly on force. As soon as someone believes they can reasonably challenge that monopoly, it becomes impractical to attempt to enforce any laws on them without expecting it to devolve into violence. The state's power ultimately rests on the monopoly of force, though there are many many other abstractions layered over that to form what we know as "society." The reason you have to pay your taxes is because if you don't, armed men will eventually take you to jail. They will always be better armed than you, at some level. Your decision to try and outgun them, and the ensuing bloodbath, is not their responsibility.
When The Ender's hypothetical state says "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," there becomes a point where there are enough armed people in a group that they think they can become the law. Restrictions on weapons when our bill of rights explicitly protects gun ownership is simply the state being self-preserving.
Put control of that many weapons into someone's hands and add a dose of religious fanaticism, and you've got a potent mixture that will not end well no matter how you approach it. Someone is going to get shot, period.
I wonder if today's LE technology would have made things better or worse? That is, if it was 1993 thinking/tactics with 2013's tech.
Specifically tech like drones, scouting robots, and even (presumably) improved non-lethal rounds and breaching methods. Guess it's somewhat hard to separate the tech from the techniques - which have been changed based on situations like Waco - but would any of that stuff have resulted in a less deadly outcome?
For the initial raid.
Night vision maybe. They could have gone in at 3 am. I assume flashbangs were around in 93, not sure.
Once it degenerated into a siege, probably not. Your options are raid, and they'll be watching and waiting, our keep waiting them out, but there's no guarantee that the last days of rations won't have some cyanide in the kool aid, so that's not some for sure win.
20 years later, I'm not sure we have developed and deployed anything new that would have made Waco any less bloody. Sure small drones might have given law enforcement a better understanding of the layout of the outside compound without any risk to personnel. Still wouldn't have done shit to alert them that the fuckers were going to set those kids on fire.
Supposedly, we're working on some sort of microwave thing that causes so much discomfort that people don't want to be in the area it's hitting, but that seems more geared to crowd control. I'm not sure it would have much merit for breaking sieges; especially, if actually walls cut down on the effectiveness. Even then, those guys probably would have either started setting fires to the hostages, taking cyanide (also give it to the kids) and/or chose death by cop.
I'm with Jeffe, use of force was justified (it only seems bad in hindsight cause of the deaths and most sane people usually aren't cool with bloodshed). Things would have probably gotten messy, they were are dealing with armed crazies. When someone is still willing to take shots at people, while starring down fucking tanks, probably aren't dealing with someone that is interested in peaceful resolutions. It's still kind of fucking appalling that elements of the right can safely invoke Waco in their bullshit, without getting shot down by a majority of the population. Putting all the bullshit involving guns aside, they were doing plenty of reprehensible shit to minors that should be career ending for any talk show host, reporter, politicians or PR person that tries to make the Branch Dravidian in Waco out as some sort of victims.
Well, yes, but that's the common term for beanbags, rubber pellets, TASERs, etc. Those probably wouldn't have helped much since it sounds like the the ATF was under live fire pretty much from the get-go, so that's where I wonder if drones or robots would have helped. If they're shooting at a robot then they're not shooting at a person, and the machines can be used as surveillance, delivery of supplies, or of 'flash-bangs'.
Did the police and feds have a pretty good idea of the layout of the compound before the siege? Just a 'what-if' exercise if a couple of passes with a video drone would have made them reconsider their approach or not.
They used tear gas during the raid. And less than lethal is the term used for all "non lethal" weapons. A flash bang can kill as can tear gas or mace.
I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make.
A very simple one. That the ATF and FBI behaved incompetently and incorrectly, and they were informed of this possibility at the time.
The rebuttal seems to be in one of two variations
1) They weren't incompetent, they were forced to do bad things because of political considerations. ElJeffe already explained how if you are letting political considerations impact your ability to carry out your job properly, that's already incompetence.
2) They were incompetent, but the blame for that rests on pro-gun conservatives
I don't find either of these persuasive. There have also been sub arguments that seem to argue it's unfair/impossible to claim the law enforcement acted incompetently at all, because we are speaking only with the benefit of hindsight. I don't find that persuasive either.
I don't give any credence whatsoever to the view that political considerations somehow can mitigate bad decision making on the ATF or FBI while carrying out their job. If you think they weren't incompetent because they made the wise, reasonable decisions with the knowledge they had, go ahead and make that argument.
However given that they were warned their surprise raid that depended on the element of surprise was blown, and went ahead and did it anyway, and given that they were warned they were facing a potentially suicidal doomsday cult, and didn't factor this into their plans, I think it's hard to make that claim. You can still try of course, but what the conservatives were doing in the background is completely irrelevant. Most people, including law enforcement, do not think the waco situation was handled well at all.
The following six "lessons learned" were offered by the three commanders and other sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak about the raid.
Overly confident planning involving an unknown threat. The Branch Davidians presented a new kind of threat to law enforcement—a heavily armed doomsday sect. Raid planners didn't adequately address Koresh's apocalyptic beliefs and willingness to defend the compound to the death. The ATF also had a nearly flawless track record using entry control teams without a full-fledged tactical unit. "We had never failed before," Maslin said. Buford added, "We were going to go in there, kick a little booty, and be home by noon. It didn't work that way." No sniper teams. At the time, the ATF didn't have SRT snipers who could have ended the carnage sooner. Following Waco, the ATF supplemented these tactical units, establishing permanent tactical commanders and adding specialized roles to SRT such as snipers, K-9 units, and tactical medics. The agency eliminated its 24 field division SRTs in favor of five regional tactical units. Lack of quality intelligence before the raid. ATF commanders decided to proceed with the raid, even though the Branch Davidians were expecting them. The agency had lost the element of surprise, after a postal carrier tipped off sect leaders. The ATF had hired an ambulance company to provide medical support, and an employee leaked it to a television reporter who asked the carrier, who was Koresh's brother-in-law, for directions to the compound. Rodriguez learned his cover was blown and relayed this information to commanders. When agents emerged from horse trailers at the compound, Branch Davidians opened fire from more than 40 firing positions, including from atop a water tower. Limited medical resources. Only two of the ATF agents involved in the raid were trained in tactical medicine. They provided life-saving care; however, the agency later created a tactical medic unit that undergoes extensive training, including training at the Casualty Care Research Center/Bethesda Naval Hospital and John Hopkins Medical College/Hospital. Agents were outgunned. ATF agents were mostly armed with shotguns, revolvers, and 9mm pistols. Several had semi-auto MP5s and AR-15s. ATF SRT operators now carry M-4s and .40-caliber semi-auto pistols. Petrilli said the Branch Davidians fired first and ATF agents returned fire "in defense of yourself or a fellow person." No contingency plan. Buford said he didn't develop a plan for a strategic withdrawal if the raid went sideways, and ATF agents only began to pull back when they began running out of ammo. "You can't make a snap decision when you're under fire," Buford said. "We were like lost sheep leaving the compound." A strong contingency plan is now required on every ATF raid.
Points 1,3, and 6 are indicative of incompetence. Points 2,4,5 are indicative of lack of funding/obsolete doctrine/holes in training and would not be indicative of incompetence.
I refuse to be baited into yet another page of idiotically patient explanations that unintended events do not entail incompetence.
I'm beginning to think you don't understand what incompetence means. Do you believe we can assess a past action as competent or incompetent? What metrics do you use to decide between the two? I don't want to wast time discussing incompetence with you if you don't even really think it exists.
Blaming the ATF or the FBI for the murder of those children is like blaming the clothing for the rape of a woman.
You are conflating responsibility with moral blame or culpability. Saying "Your actions helped contribute to this outcome" is not the same thing as saying "You bear primary moral responsibility for this crime". I don't think the FBI or ATF are guilty of murder. They were trying to save the children. I am saying they were incompetent. Not that they were evil. I feel like a lot of people are arguing with a lot of baggage from back then and not really addressing arguments being made in this thread.
For example when the US invades a country and messes it up and sets off violent sectarian conflict...we have some responsibility for the people who wind up dying in that conflict because we created the violent situation, but the moral culpability lies with the people who killed them. Some people even think we have some responsibility for the people who died in Rwanda, because we might have been able to do something to save them, but didn't.
You are acting like a huge fucking goose vorpal. There is NO moral culpability on the ATF or the FBI here. You know why? Because the Davidians made the choice to not come out. Then they chose to kill those children. The ATF and the FBI contribution was by attempting to enforce the law. You want to argue if they could have done it better? Fine. But don't fucking dare try to pin those deaths on the people trying to do their jobs and then go home to their families.
You are acting like a huge fucking goose vorpal. There is NO moral culpability on the ATF or the FBI here. You know why? Because the Davidians made the choice to not come out. Then they chose to kill those children. The ATF and the FBI contribution was by attempting to enforce the law. You want to argue if they could have done it better? Fine. But don't fucking dare try to pin those deaths on the people trying to do their jobs and then go home to their families.
Goose.
Calm down, you silly, excitable little goose. Take a deep breathe and actually read before responding. I've said over and over that it the FBI bears no moral culpability and is thus not guilty of murder. The moral culpability rests upon the Branch Davidians who deliberately set the fires.
I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make.
A very simple one. That the ATF and FBI behaved incompetently and incorrectly, and they were informed of this possibility at the time.
The rebuttal seems to be in one of two variations
1) They weren't incompetent, they were forced to do bad things because of political considerations. ElJeffe already explained how if you are letting political considerations impact your ability to carry out your job properly, that's already incompetence.
2) They were incompetent, but the blame for that rests on pro-gun conservatives
I don't find either of these persuasive. There have also been sub arguments that seem to argue it's unfair/impossible to claim the law enforcement acted incompetently at all, because we are speaking only with the benefit of hindsight. I don't find that persuasive either.
I don't give any credence whatsoever to the view that political considerations somehow can mitigate bad decision making on the ATF or FBI while carrying out their job. If you think they weren't incompetent because they made the wise, reasonable decisions with the knowledge they had, go ahead and make that argument.
However given that they were warned their surprise raid that depended on the element of surprise was blown, and went ahead and did it anyway, and given that they were warned they were facing a potentially suicidal doomsday cult, and didn't factor this into their plans, I think it's hard to make that claim. You can still try of course, but what the conservatives were doing in the background is completely irrelevant. Most people, including law enforcement, do not think the waco situation was handled well at all.
The following six "lessons learned" were offered by the three commanders and other sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak about the raid.
Overly confident planning involving an unknown threat. The Branch Davidians presented a new kind of threat to law enforcement—a heavily armed doomsday sect. Raid planners didn't adequately address Koresh's apocalyptic beliefs and willingness to defend the compound to the death. The ATF also had a nearly flawless track record using entry control teams without a full-fledged tactical unit. "We had never failed before," Maslin said. Buford added, "We were going to go in there, kick a little booty, and be home by noon. It didn't work that way." No sniper teams. At the time, the ATF didn't have SRT snipers who could have ended the carnage sooner. Following Waco, the ATF supplemented these tactical units, establishing permanent tactical commanders and adding specialized roles to SRT such as snipers, K-9 units, and tactical medics. The agency eliminated its 24 field division SRTs in favor of five regional tactical units. Lack of quality intelligence before the raid. ATF commanders decided to proceed with the raid, even though the Branch Davidians were expecting them. The agency had lost the element of surprise, after a postal carrier tipped off sect leaders. The ATF had hired an ambulance company to provide medical support, and an employee leaked it to a television reporter who asked the carrier, who was Koresh's brother-in-law, for directions to the compound. Rodriguez learned his cover was blown and relayed this information to commanders. When agents emerged from horse trailers at the compound, Branch Davidians opened fire from more than 40 firing positions, including from atop a water tower. Limited medical resources. Only two of the ATF agents involved in the raid were trained in tactical medicine. They provided life-saving care; however, the agency later created a tactical medic unit that undergoes extensive training, including training at the Casualty Care Research Center/Bethesda Naval Hospital and John Hopkins Medical College/Hospital. Agents were outgunned. ATF agents were mostly armed with shotguns, revolvers, and 9mm pistols. Several had semi-auto MP5s and AR-15s. ATF SRT operators now carry M-4s and .40-caliber semi-auto pistols. Petrilli said the Branch Davidians fired first and ATF agents returned fire "in defense of yourself or a fellow person." No contingency plan. Buford said he didn't develop a plan for a strategic withdrawal if the raid went sideways, and ATF agents only began to pull back when they began running out of ammo. "You can't make a snap decision when you're under fire," Buford said. "We were like lost sheep leaving the compound." A strong contingency plan is now required on every ATF raid.
Points 1,3, and 6 are indicative of incompetence. Points 2,4,5 are indicative of lack of funding/obsolete doctrine/holes in training and would not be indicative of incompetence.
I refuse to be baited into yet another page of idiotically patient explanations that unintended events do not entail incompetence.
I'm beginning to think you don't understand what incompetence means. Do you believe we can assess a past action as competent or incompetent? What metrics do you use to decide between the two? I don't want to wast time discussing incompetence with you if you don't even really think it exists.
Blaming the ATF or the FBI for the murder of those children is like blaming the clothing for the rape of a woman.
You are conflating responsibility with moral blame or culpability. Saying "Your actions helped contribute to this outcome" is not the same thing as saying "You bear primary moral responsibility for this crime". I don't think the FBI or ATF are guilty of murder. They were trying to save the children. I am saying they were incompetent. Not that they were evil. I feel like a lot of people are arguing with a lot of baggage from back then and not really addressing arguments being made in this thread.
For example when the US invades a country and messes it up and sets off violent sectarian conflict...we have some responsibility for the people who wind up dying in that conflict because we created the violent situation, but the moral culpability lies with the people who killed them. Some people even think we have some responsibility for the people who died in Rwanda, because we might have been able to do something to save them, but didn't.
You are acting like a huge fucking goose vorpal. There is NO moral culpability on the ATF or the FBI here. You know why? Because the Davidians made the choice to not come out. Then they chose to kill those children. The ATF and the FBI contribution was by attempting to enforce the law. You want to argue if they could have done it better? Fine. But don't fucking dare try to pin those deaths on the people trying to do their jobs and then go home to their families.
Goose.
Calm down, you silly, excitable little goose. Take a deep breathe and actually read before responding. I've said over and over that it the FBI bears no moral culpability and is thus not guilty of murder. The moral culpability rests upon the Branch Davidians who deliberately set the fires.
Now, are the FBI/ATF morally culpable for those deaths? No. That is the branch davidians who set the fires/fired the shots.
What exactly are you trying to say in the bold then? Because it sure looks like you're trying to imply moral culpability. If the FBI/ATF aren't responsible, and they aren't morally culpable, what is the premise of your argument?
Edit:
To make this explicit. The ATF and FBI hold no legal, ethical or moral culpability or responsibility for the deaths of those children. Any argument to the contrary is goosery of the highest level. The fuckers who killed those kids rather than adhering to the law are the only culpable or responsible parties.
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Evidence? The battle in Waco was ATF vs Branch Davidians. Which side was the liberals and which the conservatives? How much is 'reasonable'? 20%? 30%?
This seems to me to be a category error. You are implying that since conservatives attacked liberals for how they were handling the Waco situation, it meant they were secretly Waco sympathizers. Or wanted them to win?
That's no more valid than the republicans saying that liberals who took issue with the way conservatives were mishandling Afghanistan were secretly Taliban sympathizers or something.
Does saying that the patriot act violates the 1st amendment mean you want the terrorists to win and therefore the fight America vs the Taliban is a conservative vs liberal fight? Absolutely not. Changing countries, would it make sense to say "The Battle of Fallujah was THE symbolic fight between liberals and conservatives in the 2000's". No. Not even though by then many influential progressives had come around to be largely against the Iraq war.
Sure the right attacked the Clinton administration over ruby ridge, waco, etc. The right used absolutely everything as a political club to hit Clinton with.
It's possible we mean very different things when we say A represented B or such and such was a symbol. What do you mean when you say "X was THE symbolic battle between Y and Z"?I hope you don't just mean "Well, some of the themes that were present in X were also areas of disagreement between Y and Z". When I say that a fight between A and B was a symbolic fight between Y and Z, I mean that Y wanted A to win and Z wanted B to win.
If both Y and Z want B to win and A to lose, that's not really a symbolic fight now, is it?
It's quite true, as I pointed out, that gun control was a real actual conflict between conservatives and liberals in the 90's. The assault weapons ban was a huge (possibly the primary) reason republicans won the house in 94, for the first time in forever. However, thinking something should not be against the law does not mean you are for people who do violate the law.
Let's just assume you are correct and Waco was THE symbolic fight of conservatism vs liberalism as I suspect we're talking past each other using different definitions.
This matters how? This excuses / mitigates the incompetence displayed in what way? The Branch Davidian children deserved what they got because conservatives are hypocritical assholes and therefore the ATF/FBI were not incompetent?
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All right, if you agree they were incompetent/negligent, but don't think it rises to the level of being criminal and only appears that way with the benefit of hindsight, that's fine. That's a reasonable and plausible position.
I'm arguing against the various arguments that they weren't incompetent, or that it is impossible to determine incompetency, or that their incompetence in launching the initial raid to serve the warrant, or their incompetence in the siege or launching the second raid to get the kids out, can somehow be excused by the political situation being unfavorable.
And it wouldn't have to be zero deaths. Just less than, say, almost 90, including around 20 children.
If they had gone in (as they initially planned) and surprised the cultists and overpowered them, even if they had to kill Koresh and a couple other hardliners, I think that would have been judged as a acceptable outcome.
The problem was they carried out their plan that relied upon the element of surprise even after they knew they no longer had surprise! They had an informant in the compound who told them the cultists knew they were coming. This led to the unnecessary deaths of ATF agents and directly led to the apocalyptic end of days scenario that Koresh wanted all along. That is the part that, to my mind, comes closest to criminal incompetence.
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Everyone knows that if your plane gets hijacked, you just keep calm and enjoy your free vacation in Cuba.
Precedent setting event is precedent setting, shocker.
In the particular thought experiment that the Davidians were only stockpiling legal weapons, I would say what you'd have is a clearly dangerous and troublesome situation that is, unfortunately, perfectly legal. It is a side-effect of not living in a dictatorship that what is good or wise or sane or just doesn't always line up perfectly with what is legal. These legal loopholes are necessary in order to not stomp all over people's rights, but that doesn't mean they aren't loopholes. When a crazy person is amassing huge amounts of firepower, there is a pretty good chance that he might be planning to do something very bad with it.
It is fortunate when someone doing something legal but clearly worrisome winds up committing a crime as well, because then it's possible to properly investigate the situation and see how bad it might truly be. In the case of Waco, it didn't much matter that we suspected they were stockpiling illegal weapons, because we also suspected they were holding hostage and/or abusing children, and we would've been able to investigate the scene on those grounds. It just wouldn't have been the ATF who was doing the investigation, were that the case.
Basically, I don't think the fact that we could've gotten there with perfectly legal weapons proves, in itself, a failure of anything. It just illustrates that it's nigh-impossible to create a one-to-one correspondence between "things that are really worrisome" and "things that are illegal".
The confirmation of Reno was vigorously contested by the NRA, because it was known that Reno favoured more gun control. The Clinton administration initially indicated that they did not wish to use force, at least going by international news archives - until the siege ended badly, there was relatively little international attention. Unfortunately, these don't include editorials and columns in American publications. It would be useful to get a sense whether the FBI would have felt obliged to end the siege, which seems suggested in some sources.
The siege was not cheap to maintain, as I indicated earlier. Some of the statements by Limbaugh and Senator Specter suggest opportunism only after the siege ended, but it's hard to tell.
I would argue that if you send a surveillance team to watch a group of people for an arbitrarily long period of time, it is inevitable that you will find someone committing a crime. Given that argument, and given that the state would probably want to keep surveillance on a group that they found stockpiling weapons of any sort (for good reason), I think it's more than just an issue of a legal loophole: Isn't the armament protection law (and the almost bipolar nature of protecting it) more or less guaranteed to set-up exactly the sort of stand-off seen at Waco?
I mean, you've ('you' being 'the state') told that group of people, "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," and that group of people say, "Okay!" and set-up a militia commune where they erect a personal armory. Concerned about this, you decide it's best to keep an eye on them. Oh look, some of the kids have been vandalizing nearby vehicles, some people have been torrenting games & movies, some people have been buying / selling drugs, etc. Well now you've got to enforce the law... but it's a militia commune with guns, guns, guns and dubious respect for you. In my mind, enforcing the law in that scenario now necessarily demands an approach akin to Waco, and when you walk down that road I can't imagine too many scenarios where it ends without at least a few dead people here or there.
According to one of the post-incident analyses (the Alan Stone report), a mass suicide was foreseeable (and foreseen, by FBI behavioral analysts) but the ATF and FBI chose to ignore that possibility.
This may just be hindsight being 20/20. I recognize that. I just see that there's a bit of a schizophrenic response here. Either it was inevitable that law enforcement action would end in violence and tragedy; or nobody could have predicted a mass suicide.
These aren't necessarily mutually exclusive possibilities (there are many ways this could have ended terribly, not all of which involve mass suicide), but there's a bit of a tension there.
Personally, I think it's fairly clear that the ATF and FBI failed to adequately recognize the eschatological zealotry of the cultists and decided just to roll forward come hell or high water. Some people don't seem to care about that, but I can't really dismiss it that easily.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
The National Firearms Act of 1934 was upheld by the Supreme Court in 1938. That specific case centered on sawed-off shotguns.
It's important to remember that it's entirely legal to own machine guns in the United States, just extremely expensive and a pain in the ass and also the ATF occasionally drops by to make sure you haven't done anything stupid like sold it without telling them.
A few dead people here or there are one hundred percent absolutely acceptable to maintain the state monopoly on force. I cannot state this strongly enough. It is emphatically the duty of the government to kill every last man woman and child in that commune, if and only if necessary, to maintain sovereignty. Call in airstrikes, if you have to (you won't.) That's not a statement I make lightly, and such a situation would be monumentally tragic and also probably spark an incredibly short-lived second round of the Civil War, but the alternative is Somalia.
The Jonestown scenario seems to have floated around in discussion quite a bit prior to the final raid, so I think the ATF and FBI recognized the zeal but predicted the wrong reactions from it.
I'm fairly comfortable agreeing with most of this. I think it's the case that the laws as they stand are, given a large population and enough time, going to lead to situations in which a bunch of crazy people wind up in violent stand-offs that end badly. I don't think Waco-levels of badness are inevitable (ie, I think we could've acted differently and prevented at least some of the deaths), but yeah, sometimes shit is going to go down. I find this inevitability to be the least bad option of many bad options, though.
If there really was thought to be a risk of mass suicide (ala Jonestown) I'm pretty sure that would make the Feds want to go in sooner rather than later in hopes of saving as many as possible.
Since that indeed seems to have been the case, I question whether prolonging the siege would have had better results.
Yes, after the disastrous final assault, it immediately became a tool the right used to club Clinton. It wasn't quite as polarizing as you suggest - tons of Democrats agreed that the ATF had fucked it up big time. I think most people thought it was totally incompetent, with conservatives arguing it was perhaps out of malice.
This does not mean that as the siege was happening, it was seen as some sort of battle between conservatives and liberals, and that this somehow meant the FBI had to launch their misguided final attack (or the ATF had to launch their misguided first attack once their surprise was blown).
To the extent that political pressure from conservatives sympathetic to the Branch Davidians would have played a role, it would have been a 'go softer' approach to starve them out or negotiate or whatever as opposed to a massive firefight that left everyone dead.
I also agree some libertarians were actively rooting for the branch davidians to win. (You would see stories of some crazy vowing he was going to cross the country and 'reinforce' the Branch Davidians) However libertarians have basically zero influence in the republican party generally, let alone the smaller fringe group of them. I simply don't agree that the Waco Siege was seen as the symbolic battle between left and right by any meaningful portion of the population. Being politically polarizing is quite a different thing.
I will refer back to my previous example about the surge in Iraq. That was polarizing politically. But it doesn't mean that any fight between American GI's and AQ militants was seen as a symbolic fight between Liberalism and Conservatism. (let alone THE such fight) Even anti-war Americans still wanted their boys and girls in uniform to win and come home safely. (Minus possibly an extreme fringe). Someone said earlier "Oh well when we say it was a symbolic fight between conservatives and liberalism, we don't mean anyone actually wanted the branch davidians to win" which to me is a sign we are using the term very differently. So it's probably more fruitful to argue : ok, well, if it was a symbolic fight, so what? I don't think even granting the premise makes a difference.
And yes, as far as the fire goes, all the evidence points to a small inner circle of the Branch Davidians deliberately setting it off at various points in the compound.
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Immediately after the initial assault by the ATF, the right presented Waco as an attempt by Reno / Clinton to grab guns by whatever means were necessary. The NRA used it as a rallying cry ('jack-booted thugs') against gun control, and presented it as an example of what would happen to every gun owner if the 'gun grabbing Democrats' got their way. Waco (and to a lesser extent Ruby Ridge), and the support it drummed up among mainstream Republican gun owners was a significant factor in why the Brady Bill (passed later that year) and Federal Assault Weapons Ban (passed the following year) were the pretty much the last two significant Federal bills regarding gun control. Second Amendment rights have always been a major plank by the Conservative wing, and Waco was absolutely presented as that symbolic battle.
Immediately after the initial assault, when the FBI took over the siege, the Christian Coalition and other similar major players in the mainstream Republican Party presented it to their congregations as a battle between religious (as claimed by Conservatives) and the Liberal atheism / anti-religion attitude. This rhetoric lessened somewhat as it became clear that the Branch Davidians were not so much a harmless group of Christians, but rather a child raping doomsday cult, but Waco was absolutely presented as an attack on religious freedom from the initial ATF raid onward.
This rhetoric also included the libertarian / militia / other anti-government nutjobs who actively supported the Branch Davidians as you pointed out. They were probably the only group that actively wanted the Branch Davidians to 'win'.
However, a large number of mainstream Republicans and Republican / Conservative figureheads in the 90's chastised Reno, Clinton, and the ATF for having the audacity to do their jobs in the first place. The initial raid / investigation was treated as a massive infringement on what they saw as god-given rights. Waco was the symbolic battle in the sense that the 'god hating, freedom hating, politically correct liberals' are going to come stomping into my home and take my gun - 'from my cold dead hands'. Mainstream Republicans said that if Clinton / Reno could do this in Waco, they could do it to any good American who loves their freedom (paraphrased).
That's how it's a symbolic battle. They wanted the Branch Davidians to 'win' in a sense that they wanted the Branch Davidians to be free to collect their guns and do whatever crazyness their religion dictated free of scrutiny from the government.
Wouldn't the fact that their actions would be viewed through that prism tend to mean the ATF and FBI needed to act with MORE circumspection and caution, rather than less? It's not like this idea comes to us only through hindsight. Many within the FBI, and President Clinton, wanted wanted to extend the blockade and try to reach a negotiated solution rather than storming the breaches. Additionally, experts were warning the FBI of exactly the kind of apocalyptic end the cultists wound up seeking.
You can't plausibly argue that because the actions at Waco were going to be viewed as a symbolic battle between gun rights activists and gun grabbers, the staggering incompetence on display mattered *less*.
If anything, the incompetence at Waco made the gun control push far less likely to succeed. It was quite easy to paint the ATF as incompetent jack booted thugs. They were incompetent, and they were overzealous and cocky.
If you know your siege is going to be used as the poster child for government gun control vs freedom and liberty loving Americans...maybe your final assault ostensibly made to 'save the kids' shouldn't end up with all the kids dead? Maybe you should bend over backwards to defuse the 'jack booted thugs out for your guns' argument?
The original argument, as best I can remember, was a defense of the incompetence and unnecessary loss of life caused by the final FBI raid that they simply HAD to launch the raid because it was the symbolic fight between liberals and conservatives! That argument made little sense to me because it wasn't, and even if so, it cuts against the idea of launching the raid. Unless the idea was the government was going to shock and awe those gun rights sons of bitches all across the nation and stun them into acquiescence by rolling over Waco with tanks.
That uh, didn't work out so well, as the 1994 elections showed.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
It was not a symbol of a fight between liberals and conservatives; rather, the ongoing media attention was granting momentum to activists who would have preferred for the ATF to not have existed.
You are again intently arguing that because children died, that means the FBI must have intended for children to die.
Not at all. Although you appear to be arguing that anything that happened happened only because it was meant to happen.
When I say 'The FBI caused children to die through their incompetence' do you really read it as 'the FBI wanted children to die'?
I also don't buy the 'the bloody raid was necessary because of lack of political capital for the ATF'. The FBI had already taken over the siege. Even if the ATF had been disbanded entirely and folded into the FBI, that wouldn't have mattered. Additionally, at that point, we had evidence of the abuse of children (which we didn't have before the ATF raid). That was the reason given for the FBI raid - they feared the children were being abused inside (this turns out to not have been the case, but was the reason given at the time).
So I think letting the siege drag on was an option, just as Bill Clinton and many in the FBI advocated. At this point the political capital of the ATF didn't really factor into it.
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I'm not even sure what point you are trying to make. Yes, the ATF raid didn't go as planned because they had lost the element of surprise. There was a bad decision made to move forward that day, but it's also very easy to Monday Morning Quarterback decisions when you have the benefit of two decades of hindsight. The operation was a well planned warrant execution, and the contingency plans for resistance somewhat reasonably didn't anticipate the unprecedented level of heavily armed resistance the Davidians demonstrated.
Now, it seems you are conflating the intial ATF raid and the final day of the siege. There was no 'shock and awe' raid by the FBI that resulted in the fires being set and everyone dying. The FBI had been negotiating with Koresh, who repeatedly demonstrated bad faith and refusing to follow through after the FBI made concessions. It was generally believed the prolonging the siege would not result in a surrender or release of any additional hostages. This is something that's still a widely accepted belief.
There was incredible pressure to end the siege, and every day the siege continued was presented in and of itself as evidence of Clinton / Reno / the FBI's incompetence by Conservatives. There was also a legitimate belief at the time that the children and other hostages were being physically and sexually abused as the siege continued, providing a strong non-political impedius for ending the siege. While there were suggestions that the Davidians would commit mass suicide, once the siege began and negotiations to release hostages fell through, there really was no option to resolve the siege peacefully. Koresh was not going to surrender peacefully to the government or release the women and children that he held.
Now, you seem to be having trouble separating the symbolism that is attached to Waco and was attached at the time from what was going on at Waco on the ground. Waco was the symbolic battle between liberals and conservatives. That doesn't mean that - for the ATF - the raid was a battle between political views...on that day, it was simply the ATF executing a search warrant to search for suspected stockpiles of illegal weapons. There is more than one level to a complex event like this, and the symbolism that's attached to it by various groups.
But Ruby Ridge was also executed by the FBI - the same Hostage Rescue Team unit of the FBI, in fact. And yet Ruby Ridge was exactly the crystallizing event for the far right.
Now you say that letting the siege drag on was the obvious way forward. But this only works if you are slowly but surely reducing the will of the besieged to refuse a surrender, and your argument on page 2 was that sleep deprivation was obviously incompetent because then the crazy people might then do something crazy. So if wearing them down is 'incompetent', what are you proposing here?
Jesus Tapdancing Christ people.
Nope. Not at all.
It's an issue of strategy versus tactics. It's possible that political considerations should come into play in deciding what general approach you should take in addressing the issue. Should we leave them be? Should we ask them politely to let us in? Should we resort to force? Those are the kinds of questions for which you might think about the larger implications of what you're doing. (Note: I think the general idea of displaying force was a good one, on balance, even after political considerations are made, because the alternative was letting crazy people break the law and build an army with impunity, given that these dudes weren't going to just peacefully give up their aresenal.)
But once you decide, "Okay, we need to use force," you absolutely do not consider political implications in deciding how to storm the compound. You do whatever you deem necessary to resolve the issue with a minimal loss of life. If a bunch of assholes on talk radio are going to blather about what you did, fuck it, let them blather, because the alternative is to use what you've already deemed sub-optimal tactics. You can tell they are deemed sub-optimal tactics, because if they weren't, they'd already be using them.
In hindsight, it's the case that the tactics they used weren't the best idea. But that's because their tactics resulted in a lot of death, and not because they didn't consider the precious feelings of conservative argle-barglers.
Specifically tech like drones, scouting robots, and even (presumably) improved non-lethal rounds and breaching methods. Guess it's somewhat hard to separate the tech from the techniques - which have been changed based on situations like Waco - but would any of that stuff have resulted in a less deadly outcome?
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Did the police and feds have a pretty good idea of the layout of the compound before the siege? Just a 'what-if' exercise if a couple of passes with a video drone would have made them reconsider their approach or not.
No way man. You send that robot in and they'll just be all like "Oh look, a robot. Isn't he cute!" or "It's just as scared of us as we are of it. Just don't look at it and it'll go away hunny. That's a good boy."
This ties back into a point @ronya brought up earlier about state monopoly on force. As soon as someone believes they can reasonably challenge that monopoly, it becomes impractical to attempt to enforce any laws on them without expecting it to devolve into violence. The state's power ultimately rests on the monopoly of force, though there are many many other abstractions layered over that to form what we know as "society." The reason you have to pay your taxes is because if you don't, armed men will eventually take you to jail. They will always be better armed than you, at some level. Your decision to try and outgun them, and the ensuing bloodbath, is not their responsibility.
When The Ender's hypothetical state says "You can have these guns. As many as you like, for whatever reason you want. Just don't break the law," there becomes a point where there are enough armed people in a group that they think they can become the law. Restrictions on weapons when our bill of rights explicitly protects gun ownership is simply the state being self-preserving.
Put control of that many weapons into someone's hands and add a dose of religious fanaticism, and you've got a potent mixture that will not end well no matter how you approach it. Someone is going to get shot, period.
Night vision maybe. They could have gone in at 3 am. I assume flashbangs were around in 93, not sure.
Once it degenerated into a siege, probably not. Your options are raid, and they'll be watching and waiting, our keep waiting them out, but there's no guarantee that the last days of rations won't have some cyanide in the kool aid, so that's not some for sure win.
Supposedly, we're working on some sort of microwave thing that causes so much discomfort that people don't want to be in the area it's hitting, but that seems more geared to crowd control. I'm not sure it would have much merit for breaking sieges; especially, if actually walls cut down on the effectiveness. Even then, those guys probably would have either started setting fires to the hostages, taking cyanide (also give it to the kids) and/or chose death by cop.
I'm with Jeffe, use of force was justified (it only seems bad in hindsight cause of the deaths and most sane people usually aren't cool with bloodshed). Things would have probably gotten messy, they were are dealing with armed crazies. When someone is still willing to take shots at people, while starring down fucking tanks, probably aren't dealing with someone that is interested in peaceful resolutions. It's still kind of fucking appalling that elements of the right can safely invoke Waco in their bullshit, without getting shot down by a majority of the population. Putting all the bullshit involving guns aside, they were doing plenty of reprehensible shit to minors that should be career ending for any talk show host, reporter, politicians or PR person that tries to make the Branch Dravidian in Waco out as some sort of victims.
They used tear gas during the raid. And less than lethal is the term used for all "non lethal" weapons. A flash bang can kill as can tear gas or mace.
A very simple one. That the ATF and FBI behaved incompetently and incorrectly, and they were informed of this possibility at the time.
The rebuttal seems to be in one of two variations
1) They weren't incompetent, they were forced to do bad things because of political considerations. ElJeffe already explained how if you are letting political considerations impact your ability to carry out your job properly, that's already incompetence.
2) They were incompetent, but the blame for that rests on pro-gun conservatives
I don't find either of these persuasive. There have also been sub arguments that seem to argue it's unfair/impossible to claim the law enforcement acted incompetently at all, because we are speaking only with the benefit of hindsight. I don't find that persuasive either.
I don't give any credence whatsoever to the view that political considerations somehow can mitigate bad decision making on the ATF or FBI while carrying out their job. If you think they weren't incompetent because they made the wise, reasonable decisions with the knowledge they had, go ahead and make that argument.
However given that they were warned their surprise raid that depended on the element of surprise was blown, and went ahead and did it anyway, and given that they were warned they were facing a potentially suicidal doomsday cult, and didn't factor this into their plans, I think it's hard to make that claim. You can still try of course, but what the conservatives were doing in the background is completely irrelevant. Most people, including law enforcement, do not think the waco situation was handled well at all.
Points 1,3, and 6 are indicative of incompetence. Points 2,4,5 are indicative of lack of funding/obsolete doctrine/holes in training and would not be indicative of incompetence.
I'm beginning to think you don't understand what incompetence means. Do you believe we can assess a past action as competent or incompetent? What metrics do you use to decide between the two? I don't want to wast time discussing incompetence with you if you don't even really think it exists.
You are conflating responsibility with moral blame or culpability. Saying "Your actions helped contribute to this outcome" is not the same thing as saying "You bear primary moral responsibility for this crime". I don't think the FBI or ATF are guilty of murder. They were trying to save the children. I am saying they were incompetent. Not that they were evil. I feel like a lot of people are arguing with a lot of baggage from back then and not really addressing arguments being made in this thread.
For example when the US invades a country and messes it up and sets off violent sectarian conflict...we have some responsibility for the people who wind up dying in that conflict because we created the violent situation, but the moral culpability lies with the people who killed them. Some people even think we have some responsibility for the people who died in Rwanda, because we might have been able to do something to save them, but didn't.
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Goose.
Calm down, you silly, excitable little goose. Take a deep breathe and actually read before responding. I've said over and over that it the FBI bears no moral culpability and is thus not guilty of murder. The moral culpability rests upon the Branch Davidians who deliberately set the fires.
PSN: Vorpallion Twitch: Vorpallion
What exactly are you trying to say in the bold then? Because it sure looks like you're trying to imply moral culpability. If the FBI/ATF aren't responsible, and they aren't morally culpable, what is the premise of your argument?
Edit:
To make this explicit. The ATF and FBI hold no legal, ethical or moral culpability or responsibility for the deaths of those children. Any argument to the contrary is goosery of the highest level. The fuckers who killed those kids rather than adhering to the law are the only culpable or responsible parties.