Hearts were pounding in tense expectancy when three National Guard helicopters swooped over the ridgeline and converged on Mount Carmel. There was an exchange of gunfire, during which at least some of the community’s casualties were incurred. Shortly afterwards, two trucks pulling canvas-covered livestock trailers rushed up the driveway and stopped in front of the building, positioning themselves between the reporters who had gathered in the front lawn and Mount Carmel.
Hoping to avoid violence, David Koresh, unarmed, opened the front door, and began shouting, “Go away! There are women and children here! Let’s talk!” According to some accounts, this gesture of appeasement was answered by a bullet, fired by Agent Steve Willis, who had been assigned to “take out’” Koresh. Willis, seated on the passenger side of an ATF vehicle,2 fired at the Davidian prophet with a suppressed (silenced) machine gun in such a way that the gathered press would not see his act of aggression (Vinzant 1994: 49). At the same time, ATF agents in dark blue uniforms jumped out of the cattle trailers, tossing concussion grenades and screaming “Come out!” A lead agent shouted “It’s showtime!” as he jumped from the trailer (Wessinger 2000: 61). Willis initially missed Koresh, who slammed the door and dived for cover as a fusillade of bullets crashed through the door. Koresh was hit twice, in the wrist and in the abdomen. The Davidians who had armed themselves when they became aware of the impending raid began shooting back, taking particular aim at Willis, who was the first agent to die.
The firefight then began in earnest. Hundreds of bullets filled the air, crashing through the buildings and vehicles, and throwing up geysers of dirt as they furiously buried themselves in the soft Texas earth. It happened quickly, like the crashing of a tidal wave over a sleepy costal village. Peter Gent, who had been scraping rust off the community water tower—the ATF subsequently dubbed it a “watchtower”—died as he turned his head to see what the commotion was all about. Jaydean Wendell, an ex-policewoman and mother of four, died when a bullet struck her in the top of the head. Winston Blake, who was sitting on the edge of his bed eating a late breakfast of French toast, was gunned down by unseen assailants firing wildly into the thin wooden walls of Carmel. The children, screaming in fear, hid themselves under the beds and any available cover as the undirected fusillade of bullets whizzed through the air.
The Davidians quickly called 911 for help. The details of this conversation reveal a community startled by the violence of the assault. At one point Koresh, speaking to the Waco police, shouted in anguish, “You killed some of my children!” “There is a bunch of us dead and a bunch of you guys dead now—that’s your fault!” At other points in the conversation, Koresh made assertions like, “We told you we wanted to talk!” “Now we are willing and we’ve been willing all this time to sit down with anybody!” These assertions align well with the attitude of cooperation the Davidians had displayed in the past, and sharply call into question the necessity for a dramatic, military-style assault.
Two ATF casualties occurred when a team of agents went towards upper rooms believed to contain an armory and Koresh’s bedroom. Video footage from this dramatic episode—showing an agent on the roof dodging bullets fired through an adjacent wall—appeared on the television news the same day. This clip was shown over and over again in subsequent weeks on television newscasts. Three agents were wounded and two killed in this tragically botched phase of the operation. Had the raid truly been a surprise, they could have effectively prevented the Davidians from arming themselves. Without a back-up plan, however, the agents charged blindly forward with this phase of the attack. Agents Todd McKeehan and Conway LeBleu were shot and killed. Other agents on the roof were wounded and escaped (Reavis 1998: 151–5).
The ATF did not see fit to end the assault until they were out of ammunition. Only at that point did they call for a ceasefire, which the community readily granted. The Davidians further allowed the ATF to remove wounded agents, even assisting them with this task. These acts of reasonableness and kindness, coming from a community that had been violently and undeservedly assaulted, were quickly forgotten. Both the agency and the media, motivated by different but convergent agendas, proceeded immediately to demonize the Davidians as evil fanatics.
Though the ATF repeatedly asserted they had been practicing the assault for months, at least some of the agents involved were not briefed until the preceding day, and were never told they would be facing high-power, assault-type weapons. Incredibly, the ATF did not even bring a doctor to treat wounded agents, a standard practice of more professional agencies like the FBI. These inept, ‘Keystone Cop’ antics of the ATF are difficult to understand unless we suppose that agency officials simply assumed the Davidians would give up at the first sign of a superior force, a fatal assumption that would have been immediately rejected by anyone knowing anything about survivalist religious groups. The stupidity of the attack was exceeded only by the stupidity of the explanation ATF spokespersons offered for the attack’s failure: “We had an excellent plan and we practiced it for months. Everything would have been fine, except we were outgunned” (Richardson 1994: 181).
If the ATF was serving a search warrant to a heavily armed “cult” believed to have automatic weapons and perhaps even hand grenades, why were they surprised by the Davidians’ powerful gunfire? Especially after they lost the element of surprise, why did ATF agents charge in with guns blazing? If Mount Carmel was such a dangerous place, why didn’t they just lay siege to it from the very beginning rather than sacrificing the lives of their agents? The reason given to the public was that, in the words of one ATF official, “Either they were going to come out and attack the citizens of Waco or do a Jonestown, which was why an operation was staged that placed our agents between a rock and a hard place. Our information was that was how bad it was” (cited in Lewis 2000: 100).
The perception that Mount Carmel was another Jonestown waiting to happen is interesting from a number of different points of view. John R. Hall (2002; 1995; Hall et al. 2000) has argued that the ATF sincerely believed they were dealing with a suicide cult, which helps explain a number of aspects of the attack that are otherwise difficult to interpret. This initial attribution of being suicidal was later reinforced by the FBI who, following the deadly second attack, claimed the Branch Davidians had committed mass suicide, an explanation conveniently absolving them of any blame for the resulting deaths (Palmer 1994; Lewis 1994b; Bradford 1994).
The present chapter will focus on the “suicide cult” perception and how it helped shape the Davidian tragedy of 1993. Also, current theorists have stressed the important role hostile external forces play in the precipitation of much new religion-related violence. This line of thinking—which seems to have originated from careful reflection on the Jonestown murder-suicides—received considerable impetus from the Branch Davidians, who were for the most part victims rather than perpetrators of violence.3 It will thus be useful to explore in some detail the “exogenous” factors (Robbins 2002: 58) that set the Mount Carmel tragedy in motion.
The first assault by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms was the end result of the differing but convergent agendas of the ATF and hostile former Davidians. Both of these groups drew heavily on the evocative power of the cult stereotype to legitimate (Lewis 2003: 198–213) their respective agendas. As analyzed by John R. Hall, “After Jonestown, ‘mass suicide’ became a term of general cultural currency, a touchstone for describing the stark danger posed by cults” (2002: 151–2). Davidian apostates raised the specter of Mount Carmel becoming a potential Jonestown more than a year before the raid (Breault and King 1993: 11–12). When the ATF became involved, they uncritically adopted the perspective of these disaffected ex-members.
Had it not been for these outside forces, it is highly unlikely the community would ever have been engulfed in violence. The Branch Davidians were infrequently a problem to their immediate neighbors, or to the residents of Waco. The only incident of note was the 1987 shoot-out with George Roden, the son of Lois Roden, from whom Koresh had inherited leadership of the Branch Davidians.4 In the wake of this incident, the local sheriff, Jack Harwell, had telephoned Koresh and informed him that charges were pending from the shoot-out and that he would have to be placed under arrest and give up his weapons. Koresh promised the sheriff full cooperation. Two law officers were then dispatched to Mount Carmel where they arrested him and seven associates, and confiscated their weapons. (ATF officials could have learned some lessons in etiquette, not to mention proper law enforcement procedure, from the McLennan County Sheriff’s department.) The Davidians were eventually acquitted on charges of attempted murder.
As part of the community’s gun-show business, the Davidians had purchased empty grenade casings. These were cut in half, mounted on frames, and sold as novelty items. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms initially turned its attention to the community in May 1992 after a UPS driver making deliveries to Mount Carmel saw some of the grenade casings and reported it to authorities (Kopel and Blackman 1997: 49). Possessing empty grenades is not illegal, but the UPS driver was either unaware of this or assumed he had seen live grenades. The ATF assigned Davy Aguilera to investigate, and he subsequently met with Waco Assistant US Attorney Bill Johnston and Gene Barber of the sheriff’s office. Both Johnston and Barber had met with Geoffrey Hossack, a private investigator working for Davidian apostates, two years earlier. They were thus familiar with such accusations, and passed them along to Aguilera. It was at this juncture that the ATF began to become entwined in the “webs of discourse that had been spun by Koresh’s opponents” (Hall 2002: 159).
The ATF, however, was not a disinterested player in the Waco drama. Before the Mount Carmel assault, the ATF had been investigated for discriminating against minorities in its hiring and promotion practices. The agency had also been accused of turning a blind eye to sexual harassment within its ranks. As discussed at length in the first chapter of Kopel and Blackman’s No More Wacos (1997), the prospect of overcoming this tarnished image seems to have been a major impetus behind conducting a high-profile raid of the Branch Davidian community. It is also apparent in retrospect that ATF began searching for such a high-profile operation soon after it became clear that Bill Clinton would become the next president of the United States. Clinton had been broadcasting a strong anti-gun message, and certain ATF officials perceived an opportunity to expand the scope, power, and above all, the funding of their agency within the new president’s anti-gun agenda. The Waco attack, if this suggestion is correct, was designed to attract positive attention to the ATF in a highly publicized raid. The raid seems to have been planned with an eye to the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Treasury, Postal Service, and General Government slated to meet in early March (Kopel and Blackman 1997: 47–8).
By October 1992, Aguilera was told to start drawing up an affidavit for search and arrest warrants. However, on November 2, ATF headquarters reported back to Aguilera that the evidence he had provided was insufficient justification for a search warrant. The agency then decided to establish direct contact with Davidian apostates and unhappy relatives of current members. In order not to compromise the secrecy of their investigation, they “limited themselves to interviewing committed opponents of Koresh” (Hall 2002: 160). This self-limitation seems to have guaranteed that the ATF would come to perceive the Branch Davidians as a potential Jonestown. Recounting interviews with Breault and other hostile apostates, a US Treasury Department report noted that “Several former cult members … noted the distinct possibility that Koresh might respond to a siege by leading his followers in a mass suicide” (US Department of the Treasury 1993: 46). This perspective was adopted and repeated to Treasury officials—officials who wanted to call off the raid—by Stephen Higgens, then-director of the ATF. Higgens explained that a forceful entry was necessary “because BATF feared that Koresh and his followers might destroy evidence or commit mass suicide if given the opportunity” (ibid.: 53, B126). The most aggressive approach was chosen, and, despite statements to the contrary, the ATF never intended to try peaceably to serve a search warrant (Tabor and Gallagher 1995: 2).
The extent to which ATF discourse about mass suicide at Mount Carmel reflected genuine concern versus the extent to which such discourse was simply rhetoric meant to legitimate a “dynamic entry” is difficult to determine. On the one hand, staging a dramatic raid immediately prior to the Senate Subcommittee hearing in combination with the agency’s shameless courting of media attention indicate self-serving factors were the primary factors at work in the Waco tragedy. On the other hand, Hall’s argument that the specter of mass suicide can explain a number of oddities about the assault, including why the ATF never contemplated siege as a fallback option, is also convincing (2002: 165). Probably the fear that Mount Carmel might become another Jonestown was a genuine but secondary influence.
Other, less direct, factors at work in the Waco stand-off were the media and the anti-cult movement. The notion that most “cults” are mass suicides waiting to happen is a standard component of anti-cult discourse, one that undoubtedly influenced the expectations of the ATF and later the FBI. The negative stereotype of alternative religions was also significantly responsible for shaping the attitudes of FBI negotiators, who seem never to have taken Koresh’s religious views seriously: “The power of the term ‘cult’ … render[ed] all other attempts at understanding unnecessary” (Ammerman 1995: 295, n.2). This view of the Branch Davidians dominated the interpretation of events in media coverage of the stand-off.
More generally, the journalistic penchant for sensationalism has been a decisive factor in promoting the cult stereotype to the larger society.5 The mass media are not, of course, motivated primarily by the quest for truth, although some reporters have more integrity than others. Instead, the mainstream media is driven by market forces and by the necessity of competing with other newspapers, other television news programs, and so forth. This is not to say that reporters necessarily lie or fabricate their stories. Rather, in the case of New Religious Movements (NRMs), news people tend to accentuate those facets of these groups that seem to be strange, exploitative, dangerous, totalitarian, sensational, and the like, because such portrayals titillate consumers of news. This kind of reporting contributes to the perpetuation of the cult stereotype. In the words of British sociologist James Beckford:
Journalists need no other reason for writing about any particular NRM except that it is counted as a cult. This categorization is sufficient to justify a story, especially if the story illustrates many of the other components which conventionally make up the “cult” category. This puts pressure on journalists to find more and more evidence which conforms with the categorical image of cults and therefore confirms the idea that a NRM is newsworthy to the extent that it does match the category. It is no part of conventional journalistic practice to look for stories about NRMs which do not conform to the category of cult. (Beckford 1994: 146)
Another important factor is the marked tendency of the mass media to report on a phenomenon only when it results in conflicts and problems. To again cite from Beckford:
NRMs are only newsworthy when a problem occurs. Scandals, atrocities, spectacular failures, “tug-of-love” stories, defections, exposés, outrageous conduct—these are the main criteria of NRMs’ newsworthiness … And, of course, the unspectacular, non-sensational NRMs are permanently invisible in journalists’ accounts. (Ibid.: 144–5).
The different media vary somewhat in their tendency to produce imbalanced reports. Television tabloids such as 20/20 and Dateline that have to compete with prime-time programming tend to be the most imbalanced. Rather than attempting to produce programs that examine the complex ramifications of issues, news shows usually present melodramas in which people in white hats are shown locked in conflict with other people in black hats. On the opposite extreme are the major newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, that tend to do the best job of presenting balanced articles on controversial subjects. Such “balance,” however, usually only means finding the space for opposing views. The journalist appears to be objective when their story is two-sided rather than one-sided. The news magazines such as Time and Newsweek tend to fall somewhere in between, although on the “cult” issue they have generally been as bad if not worse than the worst of the television tabloids.
The Mount Carmel stand-off also instructively demonstrates the point that the anti-cult movement is simultaneously powerful and impotent. There were only a couple of direct connections between law enforcement authorities and the anti-cult movement. The testimony of deprogrammed former Davidians was used to support the contention that Koresh had to be served a search warrant (reports of deprogrammees about their former religious group are notoriously suspect). Also, Rick Ross, a deprogrammer, was consulted by the ATF prior to the attack. Before the blood had even dried in the Mount Carmel killing fields, Ross was busy promoting himself to the media on the basis of his advisory role to the ATF. Ross’s only credentials, however, were that he was a deprogrammer who had deprogrammed several Branch Davidians. In common with almost all deprogrammers, he had no professional training in counseling. And as someone who made his living kidnapping cult members for money, Ross clearly had a vested interest in portraying non-traditional religions in the worst possible light. It is easy to see how ATF’s distorted impressions of the Branch Davidians might have been influenced by information received from this individual.
However, beyond the consultation with Ross, which was probably minimal, the anti-cult movement exercised relatively little real direct power in Waco. Where it was most influential was in helping construct and reinforce negative stereotypes about non-traditional religions in the mass media. The three-decade-long interaction between the anti-cult movement and the media has been partially responsible for the widespread view that all non-traditional religions are dangerous organizations—this despite the fact that comparatively few such groups constitute a genuine threat, either to themselves or to society. The general atmosphere of distrust toward minority religions contributed significantly to public support for the ATF assault on Mount Carmel, and probably even explains why the ATF picked a group like the Davidians for their dramatic public raid.
What all this means for the Waco situation was that the Branch Davidians lost their chance for a fair hearing as soon as the label “cult” was applied and accepted by the general public. After that, it was only a matter of time before the media completely demonized Koresh and his followers. And after this demonization had been successfully carried out, the entire community—men, women, and children—could be consigned to the flames with little more than a peep of protest from the American public, a public that overwhelmingly approved (more than 80 percent) of the FBI’s tragic final assault on Mount Carmel.
On April 19, 1993, the day of the final tragedy, the FBI’s workday began somewhat prior to the gas attack. As reported by a nurse interviewed on two different radio programs—one in Laporte and the other in Waco—the FBI dropped by the local hospital at 5AM Monday morning to find out how the facility was equipped to handle burn victims (Kelly 1995: 366). This incident indicates the FBI fully expected Mount Carmel to catch fire, and stands in sharp contrast to the agency’s apparent lack of preparedness for the final fiery holocaust. The nurse’s radio interview is, however, only the most glaring item of information in a rather lengthy laundry list of suspicious events and situations—bits of information that, while insignificant in isolation, together indicate that the Mount Carmel fire was intentionally set by the FBI rather than on the order of a suicidal cult leader.
Consider, for example, that, tactically, the best times for tear gas attacks are days on which the wind is still, allowing the gas to hang in the air around its target rather than being blown away. Instead of waiting for such conditions, the Feds chose to move on a day when the wind was blowing at a brisk 30 miles per hour. On top of that, they called the Davidians at 5:50AM and informed them ahead of time that the FBI was about to mount a gas attack (Linedecker 1993: 230–31). People inside the community responded by opening up the windows and doors, so as to allow the wind simply to blow the gas through the building and out the other end. This would have created a wind-tunnel effect, an effect amplified by the large, gaping holes the tanks created as they ripped into the building and inserted gas. Clearly, these were poor conditions for a tear gas attack, but ideal for setting fire to a wooden-frame structure.
The potential for Mount Carmel to go up in flames should have been readily apparent. Electricity had been cut off on March 12, compelling the community to use gasoline-powered generators, propane, and kerosene lamps. The building itself was a crudely built firetrap, constructed from plywood, both used and new lumber, and tacked together with tar paper. Bales of hay had been pushed against windows to help stop bullets.
On April 26, a team of arson investigators led by Paul Gray, assistant chief investigator for the Houston Fire Department who insisted his group of experts was independent of any federal law enforcement agency, issued their report. Gray and his team concluded the blaze must have been initiated by people inside the building in two or more different locations at about the same time. (Defending the scenario of several simultaneous starting-points was an important point in eliminating the possibility that one of the tanks tipped over a lamp that set the building on fire, which was the surviving Davidians’ version of the story.) However, other authoritative sources assert that flames broke out at different points within 50 to 120 seconds of each other, which is not exactly “simultaneous” when we take into consideration a 30 mile per hour wind in a firetrap that burnt to the ground in less than 45 minutes.
Suspicions began to be raised on April 28, when CBS News correspondent Sarah Hughes broadcast the information that the “independent” arson team had close ties with the FBI. It was also discovered that the wife of arson team leader Paul Gray was an employee of the ATF. Gray responded indignantly to these revelations with the assertion that to “even suggest that any information we may be getting from the FBI is somehow tainted is absolutely ridiculous.” However, on Nightline that same evening, lawyer Jack Zimmermann posed the question, “Why in the world did they bring in, as chief of this investigating team looking into the fire, a fellow who had been on an ATF joint task force for eight to ten years, out of the Houston office of the ATF, the office that planned and executed the raid?”7
In a situation already reeking with the stench of dissimulation and cover-up, choosing an individual with close personal ties to the very agencies he was hired to exonerate could only have the opposite effect of increasing rather than decreasing widely held suspicions. As if to further confirm critics’ suspicions, the burned-out remains of Mount Carmel—along with any remaining evidence—were bulldozed on May 12. This action, which assured that no truly independent arson investigator would ever be able to sift through the charred remains and construct an alternative scenario, was justified on the pretext of safety and health concerns—filling holes, burying trash, and so on (Kopel and Blackman 1997: 227).8
The government’s interpretation assumes that, like Jonestown, the Davidians had actually planned a mass suicide. Given this assumption, it is plausible they set fire to Mount Carmel rather than surrender to government forces. Otherwise, the contention that Koresh’s followers torched their own community is implausible. Prior to the initial ATF attack, the only sources for the view that Mount Carmel was another Jonestown were hostile ex-members, and self-appointed “cult experts” like Rick Ross (ibid.: 142–3), neither of whom were reliable sources of information. There is far more evidence to support the alternative contention, namely that the Davidians were not suicidal, and that Koresh and his followers were planning on living into the future.
From as authoritative of a source as William Sessions, then-director of the FBI, we learn that the agency had concluded before the April 19 assault that Koresh was not suicidal:
… every single analysis made of his writing, of what he had said, of what he had said to his lawyers, of what the behavioral science people said, what the psychologists thought, the psycholinguist thought, what the psychiatrists believed, was that this man was not suicidal, that he would not take his life. (US House of Representatives 1993: 124)
On April 29, Dr Murray Miron, a psycholinguistics professor consulted by the FBI, informed newsman Tom Brokaw that, with respect to the letters authored by Koresh that he had been asked to analyze: “All of his communications were future oriented. He claimed to be working on a manuscript. He was talking about the publication rights to that manuscript through his lawyer. He was intent upon furthering his cause.”9 Koresh even went so far as to retain literary attorney Ken Burrows to handle his story. He also requested another attorney to prepare a will that would protect Davidian property rights, as well as establish a trust for his children to safeguard any future income from books or movies.
Beyond Koresh himself, there are many indications that the other Davidians were not suicidal. For example, despite claims by the FBI that the community had not tried to save its children during the final fire, a May 14 report issued by the Associated Press revealed that “most of the children were found huddled in the concrete bunker, enveloped in the protective embraces of their mothers” (cited in Lee 1995), in what had clearly been an attempt to protect the children from the flames. These and many other particulars that could be cited indicate the Davidians were not suicidal.
Yet other kinds of questions are raised by the FBI’s choice of tear gas. The gas used in the attack—a white, crystalline powder called CS (O-chlorobenzylidene malonitrile)—causes nausea, disorientation, dizziness, shortness of breath, tightness in the chest, burning of the skin, intense tearing, coughing, and vomiting. If dispersed in a flammable medium—as it was at Waco—it is also quite flammable. It is so inhumane that in January 1993, shortly before the ATF attack on Mount Carmel, the United States and 130 other nations signed the Chemical Weapons Convention agreement banning CS gas. This treaty did not, however, cover internal uses, such as quelling domestic disturbances.
On April 23, 1993, Benjamin C. Garrett, director of the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, was quoted in the Washington Times as saying that CS gas would have had the greatest impact on the children at Mount Carmel. “The reaction would have intensified for the children,” Garrett said, because “the smaller you are, the sooner you would feel response” (cited in Lee 1993). According to the FBI, the anticipated scenario was that mothers, in an effort to protect their children, would leave the building with their offspring after the gas had thoroughly saturated it. White House spokesman George Stephanopoulos, speaking at a news conference, was unwilling (or unable) to account for why such a deadly form of tear gas—one that temporarily blinds and disables people—was selected over other possibilities.
Given the deadly choice of tear gas, the question of how the fires started on the plains of east Texas that fateful day becomes all the more intriguing. All of the survivors, despite FBI claims to the contrary, denied that Davidians had started the fire. Instead, they asserted the tanks had knocked over lanterns, which probably set the blaze. The Davidians were, however, being more generous to the FBI than the evidence indicates. As we have already noted, it seems the FBI took steps to guarantee flames would spread quickly, and could not be stopped once started. A dry, windy day was chosen for the assault, a day that, as pointed out earlier, would have been terrible for a tear gas attack, but perfect for incinerating a building.
Despite the obvious risk of a fire, fire trucks were nowhere near the scene when the assault began. When smoke began to appear, the FBI waited at least ten minutes before calling 911 to request firefighters from Waco. Clearly, stopping the fire was not a high priority on the agency’s list. When fire trucks finally arrived, they were held at the checkpoint under FBI order for another 16 minutes—more than enough time to guarantee Mount Carmel would be reduced to a pile of embers before a drop of water touched the flames.
What does all of this indicate? Given the FBI’s visit to the local hospital early that morning to enquire about burn facilities, given the conditions that were less than ideal for a tear gas attack, given the inadequate preparations for the possibility of a fire, et cetera, et cetera, it is impossible to avoid the conclusion that the agency planned to torch Mount Carmel from the very beginning. In the years following the tragedy, a wide variety of observers pointedly raised doubts about the government’s claim that the Davidians had committed mass suicide (for example, Bradford 1994; Kopel and Blackman 1997; Lewis 1994b; Palmer 1994; Reavis 1998; Tabor and Gallagher 1995; Wright 1995). However, after over six years of denial, it finally came out that the FBI had misled everyone—government and public alike—about the use of “incendiary devices” on the final day of the assault (Wright 2002: 102; see also Handcock 1999). The FBI had even withheld parts of relevant documents from public scrutiny that had authorized the use of pyrotechnic military rounds (Kellman 1999). Whether intentionally or unintentionally, these rounds were almost certainly the proximate cause of the fire. Clearly, the FBI believed so, or the agency would not have gone to such lengths to hide the evidence.
Although the perpetrators of the Waco tragedy will likely never be brought to justice, these revelations definitively demolish the Branch Davidians’ undeserved reputation as a suicide cult. And if there is a lesson here, it is that we should hesitate before unreflectively accusing other non-traditional religious groups of being potential Jonestowns.
If we set aside popular books, all of the serious books written about the Waco confrontation have been critical of the official conclusion that the Branch Davidians committed mass suicide. The community of researchers who have studied this tragedy were thus surprised when a British theologian, Kenneth G.C. Newport, published his The Branch Davidians of Waco: The History and Beliefs of an Apocalyptic Sect (2006) in which he argued strongly in support of the official conclusion. Stuart A. Wright, who had edited the most important scholarly volume published up to that point, penned a book review and then later a journal article demolishing Newport’s argument regarding the mass suicide scenario.10 Minus the argument for mass suicide, The Branch Davidians of Waco is, as Wright also noted in his review, actually a fine account of the theology and history of the Branch Davidians.
In part for reasons of space, I will oversimplify Newport’s argument by saying that that the cogency of his analysis depends upon accepting his contention that the imputed group suicide was the logical outcome of Davidian theology plus accepting the official account pretty much at face value. Newport also completely ignores or misrepresents contrary evidence, such as some of the items of information mentioned earlier in this chapter. This was possible, it appears, because he had reached a theological conclusion beforehand, and then selectively focused on gathering supporting data at the expense of disconfirming information. From my reading, the key to understanding Newport’s approach to the mass suicide issue is contained in the last paragraph of his text (not counting appendices) where he asserted:
In a post-modern intellectual climate it has become rather unfashionable in academic circles to say that people’s religious beliefs or their interpretation of the Bible are wrong. But at Waco this was surely the case … one could argue that most religious people are wrong in what they think. That might well be so. Unfortunately, however, in the case of Waco being right or wrong turned out to be a matter of life or death. (Newport 2006: 343)
It is difficult to read this passage and not infer that Newport had been convinced from the very beginning of his project that it was flawed theology which had led to the deaths of the Branch Davidians. With that conviction as a starting-point, he subsequently went about collecting evidence which would prove that this was indeed the case.
I will conclude by noting that one need not be a “fashionable post-modernist” in order to object to Newport’s conclusion. Rather, to argue that an idea or that an ideology is false based on the negative results of adhering to such ideas is to commit the fallacy of argumentum ad consequentiam. Over the centuries, Christians as well as many other people with strong convictions have had to endure the “life or death” consequences of holding certain beliefs. If we applied Newport’s style of reasoning to such historical cases, we would have to conclude that they were just as “wrong” as the Branch Davidians, a conclusion I doubt most of us, including Newport, would be ready to accept.
Ammerman, Nancy T. (1995). “Waco, Federal Law Enforcement, and Scholars of Religion,” in Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, ed. Stuart A. Wright. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 282–96.
Beckford, James A. (1994). “The Media and New Religious Movements,” in From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco, ed. James R. Lewis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 143–8.
Bradford, R.W. (1994). “Who Started the Fires?: Mass Murder, American Style,” in From the Ashes: Making Sense of Waco, ed. James R. Lewis. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 111–14.
Breault, Mark and Martin King (1995). Inside the Cult: A Member’s Chilling, Exclusive Account of Madness and Depravity in David Koresh’s Compound. New York: Signet.
Bromley, David G., and Edward D. Silver (1995a). “The Davidian Tradition: From Patronal Clan to Prophetic Movement,” in Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, ed. Stuart A. Wright. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 43–72.
— (1995b). “The Branch Davidians: A Social Profile and Organizational History,” in America’s Alternative Religions, ed. Timothy Miller. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, pp. 149–58.
Hall, John R. (1995). “Public Narratives and the Apocalyptic Sect: From Jonestown to Mt. Carmel,” in Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, ed. Stuart A. Wright. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 205–35.
— (2002). “Mass Suicide and the Branch Davidians,” in Cults, Religion and Violence, eds. David G. Bromley and J. Gordon Melton. New York: Cambridge University Press, pp. 149–69.
—, with Philip D. Schuyler and Sylvaine Trinh (2000). Apocalypse Observed: Religious Movements and Violence in North America, Europe, and Japan. London and New York: Routledge.
Handcock, Lee (1999). “Waco: FBI to acknowledge use of pyrotechnic devices—New account on Branch Davidian fire expected,” Dallas Morning News, August 25.
Kellman, Laurie (1999). “FBI Aware Early of Waco Tear Gas,” Associated Press, September 11. Accessed November 15, 2013. At <http://www.cesnur.org/testi/waco10.htm> This article can also be found at <http://www.rickross.com/reference/waco/waco54/.html>.
Kelly, Dean M. (1995). “The Implosion of Mt. Carmel: Is It All Over Yet?” in Armageddon in Waco: Critical Perspectives on the Branch Davidian Conflict, ed. Stuart A. Wright. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 359–78.
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1 My general approach in this chapter builds upon John R. Hall’s analysis. See, for example, Hall (2002) and Hall et al. (2000).
2 ATF is an abbreviation for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, a federal law enforcement organization within the US Department of Justice.
3 Even Robert Jay Lifton, whom no one can accuse of being a “cult apologist,” has characterized the Davidians as “an armed but not violent” religious sect (Lifton 1999: 329).
4 Some years prior, George Roden had tried to trump Koresh in the spiritual arena by challenging him to a “resurrection contest.” He dug up the casket of Anna Hughes, who had died twenty years earlier at Mount Carmel, and proposed that the two of them compete to raise her from the dead. Koresh lodged a complaint with the sheriff’s office, but was told nothing could be done without evidence. So on the evening of November 3, 1987, Koresh and some others went to Mount Carmel to take photographs of the woman’s remains that could be used as evidence to prosecute Roden. This led to a gun battle in which Roden received a minor wound. Koresh and his group were tried for attempted murder, but charges were eventually dismissed (Bromley and Silver 1995b: 153).
5 There are a number of illuminating analyses of how the media played into the Mount Carmel tragedy. See, for example, the treatments in Richardson (1995), Shupe and Hadden (1995), and Chapter 6 of Tabor and Gallagher (1995).
6 This statement was part of President Bill Clinton’s remarks made in the wake of the FBI assault.
7 Also refer to Zimmerman’s more extended remarks, as well as remarks by Dick DeGuerin, who was Koresh’s lawyer during the siege, cited in Kopel and Blackman (1997: 226–7).
8 As anyone who has studied the Branch Davidian fiasco in any detail knows, there were so many unusual aspects of the case that it is impossible to avoid the impression of a systematic cover-up. To take another particularly gruesome example, “there were thirty Davidian corpses stored in the Tarrant County medical examiner’s refrigeration unit that somehow was turned off. All the corpses deteriorated, making additional examination impossible” (Wessinger 2000: 67).
9 Also refer to Miron’s remarks cited in Tabor and Gallagher (1995: 169).
10 Wright’s “Revisiting the Branch Davidian Suicide Debate” originally appeared as an article in November 2009, in the journal Nova Religio, 13(2): 4–24.