(Been thinking about this myself... --RJT)

3.  REMEMBERING APRIL NINETEENTH
    by Peter Vinton, Jr. 
    Special to TLE      http://www.webleyweb.com/tle/>     Issue 220

It is with great sadness and not a little fear that I write this essay.
Certainly the words "April Nineteenth" don't set off emotions at
the same level as "July Fourth," "December Seventh," or
"September Eleventh." I am distressed that Americans nowadays
must acknowledge April 19th as twin anniversary dates of tragedy, rather
than the proud moment in our nation's history that the date should inspire.

By the inspiring moment, I of course refer to April 19, 1775: the day when
a band of Massachusetts colonials, fed up with the actions of an intrusive,
uncaring government in which they had no representative voice, did the
unthinkable and mustered to defend themselves.

Instead of commemorating this singular act of boldness, today we
acknowledge April 19, 1993, and April 19, 1995 for quite different reasons.
Most Americans know full well what happened on those dates: in 1993 our own
Federal government incinerated a group of approximately 82 religious
dissidents, some of which were children under the age of five. In 1995,
that same Federal government was sucker-punched in Oklahoma City by a group
of fed-up American citizens, in an act which resulted in 168 deaths -- some
of whom were children under the age of five, in a day-care center.

Let me be clear right at the outset: I recoil in horror at both events.
Both were totally unnecessary, both are an affront to civilized behavior,
and both have been so thoroughly clouded by misdirection, double-dealing,
missing evidence and outright lying as to forever defy an honest reckoning.

April 19, 1993

In February 1993, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (then an
enforcement wing of the Treasury Department) set in motion its plan to
execute search warrants at the Waco, Texas compound of a breakaway group of
Seventh-Day Adventists. This particular schism, known as Branch Davidians,
was led by a charismatic young man who went by the name David Koresh (ne้
Vernon Howell). Koresh was, by all accounts, a powerful and persuasive
speaker, with an innate musical talent and a fiery passion. The ATF had
been following up on Koresh's activities, believing him and some of his
senior followers to be involved in arms trafficking. Koresh was known to
Texas Rangers as a small-time concern -- nobody worth expending case time
on.

The ATF was under an uncomfortable bureaucratic microscope at the time; a
series of sexual harassment charges from the rank-and-file had made their
way onto the six o'clock news. The agency was also grappling with a racist
image problem which seemed to uncover new allegations with every passing
week. For reasons never made quite clear, the ATF decided to stage a
full-scale raid on the Branch Davidian compound, inviting television
cameras along for the ride. On the morning of February 28, a convoy
comprising roughly 80 Federal agents, state and local police
(conspicuously, no Texas Rangers) arrived at the Mt. Carmel compound under
cover of three oversized farming equipment trucks. The SAC (Special Agent
in Charge) of ATF's Dallas Field Division was even present for the raid,
watching event unfold from a military helicopter on loan from Joint Task
Force Six (JTF-6), a military drug interdiction unit. (The military support
for this operation was predicated on an entirely falsified report of a
'methamphetamine lab' inside the compound.)

Exactly what went wrong that morning is certainly unclear, but some jumpy
soul was a little too quick on the trigger and a massive shootout between
the Feds and the Branch Davidians erupted. Four ATF agents were killed in
the first few minutes, even as Koresh got on the phone and begged the local
police to stop shooting. Based on Koresh's lengthy telephone conversations
with indifferent negotiators over the next few weeks, it appeared that six
Davidians had also been killed --at one point Koresh himself alluded to a
gunshot wound in his leg. The smoke cleared, and the FBI's Hostage Rescue
Team (HRT) -- that wonderful defender of liberty and democracy that brought
us civilian slaughter at Ruby Ridge, Idaho -- moved in to take over the
operation.

    'Somebody in there should buy some fire insurance.' (ATF agent
Jim Cavanaugh on Day 19 of the siege)

For the next 51 days, the FBI made a wonderful show of trying every tactic
its in-house 'cult advisors' could come up with -- including cutting off
electricity, blasting Nancy Sinatra music at all hours, and shining
searchlights in the windows. Koresh was, by all accounts, hard at work on a
manuscript that outlined his interpretation of the Seven Seals as described
in the Book of Revelations, but on the bright sunny morning of April 19,
HRT commander Jeffrey Jamar had decided he wasn't going to listen to any
more 'Bible babble' and raised the stakes. National Guard tanks (again,
courtesy of JTF-6) were used to punch holes in the side of the compound
(reportedly in the kitchen area, crushing several people to death) and
flammable CS gas was pumped into the structure. The resulting inferno was
probably inevitable. What the press never was allowed to broadcast (their
crews having been pushed back to 2 miles from the site) was the spectacle
of FBI agents in full combat gear opening fire on the compound even as it
was being engulfed in flames -- this horror is corroborated by footage
taken by the FBI's own surveillance helicopters and was later highlighted
in the gripping documentary film Waco: Rules of Engagement. Members of the
group who were coming out to surrender were purportedly fired on and so
rushed back inside to their deaths. The Waco, Texas fire department was
likewise kept away with threats. (Five survivors, not counting those who
had voluntarily walked out of the compound during the 51-day siege, would
later be tried on manslaughter charges.) By noon nothing remained of the
compound but a pile of smoking ash and the charred skeleton of a school
bus. The final tally: 82 Davidians dead, including Koresh, his wives and
family, his lieutenants, and at least 25 children, some of whom were
younger than five. The ATF raised its flag over the smoking ruins in time
for the evening news. To this day law enforcement is united in its
insistence that the Davidians started the fire themselves in a ludicrous
act of mass suicide (a la Jonestown).

Much posturing from Washington followed, including an offer of resignation
by newly-installed Attorney General Janet Reno ('I'm accountable, the buck
stops with me'), which President Clinton refused to accept. An
investigation followed, during which ATF director Stephen Higgins 'decided'
to retire (replaced by former Secret Service director John Magaw, who would
later become Tom Ridge's number-two man at the Department of Homeland
Security). The SAC and two ASACs (Assistant Special Agents in Charges) of
the ATF Dallas Field Division, as well as the RAC (Resident Agent in
Charge) of the Waco, Texas Resident Office turned in their resignations.
Four days later the FBI announced that its own internal forensic department
had completed its examination of the site, and promptly bulldozed the
entire property, effectively erasing any and all remaining evidentiary
questions that might have later come to light.

To say that a few lies have come out of this fiasco would be something of
an understatement. But the core of it cannot be argued: on April 19, 1993,
the U.S. government acted as judge, jury, and executioner to a group of
private citizens rather than allow itself to be seen as anything less than
completely and totally in charge. Congress would only open its formal
investigation of the situation a full two years later -- but by then, a
different horror would have gripped the nation.

April 19, 1995

Romanticized documentaries portray Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh as a
loner with "anger issues;" as someone who would, following his
dishonorable discharge, make a "pilgrimage" out to the Davidian
site on April 19, 1994 and make a vow of revenge. Whether this actually
happened is certainly open to interpretation. Whatever his true level of
involvement, McVeigh was implicated in "the worst attack on U.S.
soil" one year later, tried, found guilty, and executed.

Just as the workday was beginning on the beautiful cloudless morning of
April 19, 1995, a massive blast shook the Alfred P. Murrah federal office
building in Oklahoma City, demolishing more than one-third of the structure
and killing some 168 people, many of them low-level Federal office workers
and contractors. The Murrah building housed, among others, the local field
offices of the ATF and the DEA, as well as the Secret Service. (The FBI's
Resident Office was in a different building). The building also included VA
offices, a Navy credit union, a U.S. Army recruitment office, a Social
Security office, and most chilling of all, an in-house day-care center on
the second floor. Every agency in the building had raised its respective
flag over the smoking ruins in time for the evening news.

The nation's first reaction was to suspect Islamic terrorism -- and indeed,
the first few arrests made that day were almost exclusively of Middle
Eastern men, some of whom found themselves locked up without ever being
formally charged -- a harbinger of things to come. But by the following
evening, with investigative bits and pieces starting to materialize,
America woke up to an unpleasant reality -that the perpetrators of this
crime might just be all-American white faces; the faces of extreme citizen
discontent and a deep, loathing distrust of all things government.

To this date only two individuals have ever been charged in the Oklahoma
City bombing; McVeigh and his supposed "mentor," Terry Nichols.
McVeigh and Nichols were almost immediately vilified as far-right
extremists; gun-loving conspiracy theorists that subscribed to a dangerous
movement known as the (drum roll) Citizens' Militia -- a loosely-organized
citizen's network of tax protestors, gun-rights advocates, and -- just for
good measure -- white supremacists, anti-Semites, and neo-Nazis. President
Clinton, searching for a
palatable scapegoat, decided to focus his ire on right-wing talk show hosts
and commentators for contributing to an atmosphere of hate and intolerance.
New Constitution-crushing legislation was rushed into being that sharply
curtailed civil rights and afforded the government broad new powers to
seek, detain, and declare "terrorists" at home. Even Oprah
Winfrey, that mouthpiece for soccer moms everywhere, opined that it was
"perfectly okay" to give up constitutional rights and liberties
in exchange for protection from terrorism.

As before, the FBI took up the investigation and locked down the disaster
site under the pretense that it was a "crime scene." The tireless
efforts of rescue workers, firefighters, and volunteers to recover bodies
would almost certainly have gone quicker and more smoothly had not Federal
agents been double-checking and triple-searching every individual that
moved through the site. Also as before, once the FBI's in-house forensic
examination was done, the rest of the building was swiftly leveled in a
controlled implosion, effectively erasing any and all remaining evidentiary
questions that might have later come to light.

McVeigh's short trial, moved to Denver so as to avoid conflict of interest,
was certainly a foregone conclusion. Predictably, he was found guilty on
168 counts of capital murder, with 9 of those murders being augmented since
they involved the death of Federal law enforcement agents. (Isn't it
comforting to know that an 1811-series ATF agent is somehow considered to
be "more dead" than a mere civilian postal worker?) In spite of
blatant prosecutorial bungling and a rash of mysteriously-disappearing FBI
evidence, McVeigh was executed in May of 2001, in a marvelous act of
"sweeping it under the rug." Nichols got a life sentence on a
vague "conspiracy" charge. To this day the government maintains
that the entire act was perpetrated solely by these two men, in spite of
widespread accounts of others' involvement, including the infamous
"John Doe #2" who has never been found. Retired Air Force General
Benton K. Partin, an expert in demolitions, concluded that McVeigh's
fertilizer truck bomb could not possibly have created as much structural
damage as claimed. Partin raised the suggestion that additional explosive
charges may have been placed in the building earlier by additional
co-conspirators, but his testimony was dismissed out of hand by the Federal
prosecutor and ultimately ruled inadmissible --apparently it raised too
many
questions in opposition to the "lone gunman" story.

As before, the accounts very widely, from the uncomfortably plausible to
the outlandish, but a central fact does not alter: the Federal government,
in the face of an affront to its infallibility, lashed out and executed a
man who almost certainly knew much more than the public has been led to
believe, thus covering up and silencing information the public has a right
to know.

April 19, 1775

In both of these instances, the U.S. government moved quickly -- even
clumsily -- to quash even the faintest hint of suggestion that it was
acting less than perfectly. Nothing was more important in the aftermath of
these two April 19ths than that the government would appear blameless, or,
at the very least, would have some ready-made fall guys lined up and in
position. In his monumental book People of the Lie, Dr. M. Scott Peck
characterizes this kind of behavior as indicative of what can be described
as a psychological definition of evil:

"Evil is ... the use of power to destroy the spiritual growth of
others for the purpose of defending and preserving the integrity of our own
sick selves."

In other words, people who are evil will scapegoat and attack others,
resorting to lies if necessary, rather than face their own failures.

Is the U.S. government evil? Two April 19ths do not, of course, make a
statistical universe, but the lesson cannot, and should not, be overlooked.

I shall conclude by recounting the events of one more April 19th -- this
one going a bit further back in time:

Dawn broke over the village green in Lexington, Massachusetts with a thick
mist and the promise of an unusually warm spring day. The colony of
Massachusetts Bay was positively seething with anti-Royal sentiment for
some time now, having borne the brunt of the new tax acts and having had
the port city of Boston forcibly closed by British troops. Some 900
redcoats marched onto the green, having been dispatched from Boston the
night before. Their goal was to arrest dissident fugitives (like Samuel
Adams and John Hancock) and to seize militia armaments. But they were not
alone; thanks to a timely
warning from local riders, a detachment of (drum roll) Citizens' Militia
had mustered and was waiting for them.

Of course we all know the words of militia captain John Parker to his men:
"Stand your ground; don't fire unless fired upon; but if they mean to
have a war, let it begin here!" A British officer ordered the militia
to disperse -before anyone could react, some jumpy soul was a little too
quick on the trigger and the British infantry opened fire, killing eight
militiamen. The citizens returned fire and so the War for American
Independence was joined.

In Conclusion

Three normalcy-shattering events, all on a spring day in mid-April. I don't
pretend to draw some kind of cosmic link between the three, other than to
note the fact that they share the same calendar date. I believe April 19th
is a date that should never be forgotten in the American consciousness --
it is a date that reminds us of the zealous excess to which our own
government may sometimes go to maintain its status quo. It is also a date
that reminds us that We The People have within us the ultimate power over
our own destinies, free from government coercion or interference, and that
we cannot be afraid to
assert that.

A similar reflection was once made by socialist leader Eugene V. Debs, when
he likened 1893's American Railway Union strike against the George Pullman
Company to the events of April 19, 1775. An estimated 100,000 workers had
joined the strike, blocking Chicago to railroad traffic almost completely.
A court order to end the strike was issued, but Debs and the American
Railway Union leaders ignored it. This strike became known in the press as
"Debs Rebellion," and it ended only when President Grover
Cleveland resorted to -- you guessed it -- federal troops:

"... each day is augmenting the number and making them more staunch
and resolute, they will sweep the country on the only vital issue before
the nation. A new power will be in control: the people. For the first time
in all history, man at last will be free!"

I should mention that Debs would go on to found the Industrial Workers of
the World (IWW) and would eventually run for President on the socialist
ticket -- garnering an unprecedented six percent of the vote in 1912.
Certainly this was enough achievement to make him a thorn in the side of
any U.S. government official. Some years later, for his temerity to openly
question America's "moral superiority" in participating in World
War I, Debs was arrested and convicted under the Wartime Espionage Law,
which strictly forbade any speech that might discourage enlistment. He was
his own attorney and though his
appeal to the jury is regarded as one of the most powerful speeches ever
made in a court of law, he was found guilty and sentenced to serve 10 years
in prison, as well as disenfranchisement for life. Oliver Wendell Holmes
spoke for a unanimous Supreme Court in upholding Debs' verdict. On a spring
day in 1919, Debs was formally stripped of his citizenship and began his
prison sentence, his "troublemaking" silenced and no longer an
irritant to the unimpeachable wisdom of the U.S. government.

The exact date? Guess.
- - -

References:
http://www.serendipity.li/waco.html>
http://home.maine.rr.com/waco/ww.html>
http://www.wizardsofaz.com/waco/picturethis.html>
http://www.eugenevdebs.com>
- - -

The author  is a rural-dwelling free-market
libertarian computer geek who's atoning for the sin of having worked for
Uncle Sam. Though he is certainly no friend of socialism, he thinks Eugene
V. Debs' remarkable personal courage and convictions are something to be
admired regardless of one's political stance.

---