#Janet Reno

[broadcastnewsarchive]

Attorney General Janet Reno speaks on the investigation into the Oklahoma City bombing, following statements by President Clinton.

Coverage by CNN

3:03 CDT/4:03 EDT (2003Z) 1995/04/19

[x]

[danascullysjournal]

If you know, you know.

[valkyries-things]

JANET RENO // LAWYER

“She was an American lawyer and public official who served as the first female and 78th United States attorney general. Reno, a member of the Democratic Party, held the position from 1993 to 2001, making her the second-longest serving attorney general, behind only William Wirt. She was elected to the Office of State Attorney five times and was the first woman to serve as a state attorney in Florida.”

[qupritsuvwix]

Is your church ATF-approved?

[sgreffenius]

Respect for institutions and rule of law

In a recent WSJ article, Peggy Noonan argues that when people lose faith in their institutions, the whole society suffers. It loses its cohesion. Faith in foundational institutions, such as rule of law, is essential for democracy to work, and for overall order and stability. Only cohesive societies can maintain these qualities.

A key implication of this argument - and Noonan is not subtle about this point - is that we should not undermine these institutions. People who do so undermine the whole society, and do no service to anyone. We can criticize our institutions, of course. That’s what it means to live in a democracy. We must not, however, lead people to lose faith in them, distrust them, or become alienated from them.

I am a good example of the latter type of critic. I have written dozens of articles, whose main point is to make people see that the FBI - and by extension the Department of Justice - are bad jokes. Their very existence undermines rule of law. The sooner we rid ourselves of these pustules on the state, the sooner we can restore rule of law, respect for legal institutions, and free ourselves of the fear that poisons our sense of community.

I need offer only one example here: Waco. We approach the thirtieth anniversary of that horrific travesty. The FBI and the Department of Justice are responsible for that mass murder. Yet no official, not Attorney General Janet Reno, not FBI Director William Sessions, not any of the FBI agents on the scene, took responsibility for the outcome. What was the outcome? A religious group that minded its own business was wiped out.

In my critiques, I have tried to stick with more recent transgressions, such as the FBI’s involvement in the 2016 election and its aftermath. Of course, you can go further back, to the 1950s, when the FBI illegally targeted Communists and homosexuals. No matter what decade you select, you can discover activities in the FBI inconsistent with the rule of law, or worse, activities that undermine our rights in ways we cannot repair.

Why then, should we maintain respect for institutions that do not deserve it? Noonan is not the only defender of so-called democratic institutions, who suggest that we cannot expect good government if critics constantly encourage people to run it down. I can only respond with a brief question: what if the criticisms are true? What if the FBI threatens democracy far more than its critics do?

[tenth-sentence]

By the twenty-third day, the frustrated FBI started considering tear gas as a non-lethal technique for getting everyone out, but they needed special clearance for that from Janet Reno, the attorney-general.

"Zealot: A Book About Cults" - Jo Thornely

[glogster]

gleeposting day 2

i do like the disco episode… well my eyes glazed over the finn and rachel stuff but the music AND THE JOKES?? way better than usual

kurt = samantha jones, as far as being characters who are SO put together + charming + resourceful that it almost feels too easy to give them fav status. but he’s WORKING FOR IT. um and I like his relationship with rachel :)

puck is probably the most like my boyfriend so I do take note of him…

[hitchell-mope]

MCU/Anything Goes au

Natasha. Reno Sweeney.

Bruce. Evelyn Oakleigh.

Steve. Billy Crocker.

Wanda. Hope Harcourt.

Tony. Moonface Martin.

Darcy. Erma.

Hank. Elisha J. Whitney.

Janet. Evangeline Harcourt.

[incorrectlooneytunesquotes]

They have ah say they have anvils, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction.

NSA General Leghorn

[sharpened--edges]

While I was writing this to you, Janet Napolitano, the former U.S. secretary of Homeland Security, assumed her new post as the twentieth president of the University of California system, the first woman to occupy the office. The revolving door between institutions of policing, bordering, surveillance, incarceration, illegalization, militarization, and schooling is not new. Indeed, in San Diego, where I am based, Alan Bersin was superintendent of public schools from 1998 to 2005, after three years of running U.S.–Mexican border law enforcement for Attorney General Janet Reno under President Clinton. After his stint governing schools, Bersin governed the border (again) in 2009, this time for the Obama administration, working as ‘border czar’ under Janet Napolitano, then Homeland Security secretary, now UC president. However, it would be a misguided comparison to describe the bodies of faculty and students as analogous to the bodies of detainees and deportees and migrants and suspectees. It is not analogous power but technologies of power that recirculate in these imperial triangles, for example, debt financing, neoliberal market policies, information systems, managing noncitizen populations, land development. If we consider triangular connections between war abroad and refugee management within, antiblackness and the maintenance of black fungibility and accumulation, and militarization and Indigenous erasure throughout empire, then we can understand why the governors of war and the governors of schools can have similar résumés, without pretending that the governed suffer through identical conditions.

la paperson, A Third University Is Possible (Duke University Press, 2017), pp. 37–38.

[luanneclatterbuck]

My eldest child is in a musical theater class, and today we took a train to Chicago with them to see Mrs. Doubtfire the musical, and it was surprisingly delightful and emotional and entertaining. I don’t like musicals but seeing this live was pretty great. The best part was a dance number with Eleanor Roosevelt, Julia Child, Margaret Thatcher, and Janet Reno.

[memecucker]

gm'd a call of cthulhu game involving a late 90s militia church and the way things came into place and fell together, the players ended up convincing Janet Reno to authorize and assault because they showed her a video with Nyarlathotep speaking to the cultists and which also curses people that watch it so now Nyarlathotep is following around Janet Reno in that universe

[theinsatiables]

Present Imperfect

Aftersun opens with a home movie, a daughter filming her father. Sophie (Frankie Corio) has just turned eleven. Calum (Paul Mescal), who will turn thirty-one by the end of the film, is dancing. “These are my moves,” he smiles, and you can almost hear her eyes roll. “When you were eleven,” she asks, zooming in on his face, “what did you think you’d be doing now?” He looks down and the frame freezes. So this is to be an elegy.

It is the story of a parent who will die—who has died. This is a spoiler only insofar as knowing that the mother will die could ruin the experience of watching Tokyo Story, which is to say only insofar as the death of a parent is a surprise. It is, of course. But you knew it was coming. And then it did, and now you know. This temporality, from future to present perfect, eliding the unspeakable present imperfect and future perfect—“is dying,” “will have died”—gives force to Aftersun’s otherwise delicate narrative. It is a reminiscence haunted by dread, which might be a good definition of grief.

Calum and Sophie are on vacation in Turkey. We can guess, given the presence of a consumer camera that shoots on digital video and, later, the most natural-looking performance of the Macarena you’ve seen since Janet Reno was attorney general, that it’s about 1997 or 1998. It is eventually made clear that adult Sophie (Celia Rowlson-Hall), a millennial with a baby of her own, is watching these old tapes—fleeting documents of what she and her dad were like, Calum’s sly humor, Sophie’s antic energy—and remembering or imagining what happened outside the frame. Aftersun could be understood as the art project that she makes as she sits with her memories and recordings and tries to piece together a portrait of her father. Calum, meanwhile, turns out to have been reminiscing while still on vacation, watching the tapes each night like dailies, holding fast to the experience while it’s fresh in his mind.

Clips from the home movies punctuate the film, the pale, watery light of digital video testifying to their cinematic factuality. In between, on celluloid, the languorous days of vacation: father and daughter laze by the pool, play billiards, go to a mud bath and a sauna, visit a rug merchant, tease each other, swim, apply sunscreen during the day and toner at night. Looking back on her younger self, a child on the cusp of adolescence with an adored father whose fallibility she is beginning to grasp, adult Sophie sees a perceptive, sensitive girl approaching a loss she is still struggling to understand.

Adult Sophie, or perhaps the director, Charlotte Wells. Wells also happens to be a Scottish thirtysomething whose father died when she was young. In interviews she has said that Aftersun is not strictly factual but “emotionally autobiographical.” This idea should be familiar to anyone who has ever recounted a story whose details they’ve forgotten.

For a film with only the barest exposition, which dedicates its oblique framing and patient editing to the careful construction of feeling, Aftersun is dense with meaning and unspoken narrative. Calum and Sophie arrive in Turkey, take a tour bus to a tacky resort peopled by other British tourists, explore the local environs, and grow closer and further apart. He and Sophie’s mom, who has primary custody back in Scotland, are on friendly terms, but Calum, who moved to London, is a restless young man, given to a third beer with dinner, standing on the hotel balcony late at night smoking a cigarette, looking at the sky, and dancing.

The vacation is clearly a special occasion, not least because it must have cost dearly for Calum, whose current job is “this new thing going on with Keith.” On the first night in their room, they discover that there is only one small bed. Calum dutifully calls down for a cot, ceding the mattress to his daughter. The next morning they are awakened by the ringing sounds of construction: the hotel is being renovated in the off-season. Yet this flat disappointment—the deflating indignities of poverty, even while on vacation—intensifies the sense of freedom, the delight of time alone with a parent, the need to enjoy a rare luxury.

But outlining the film’s plot feels like a graver betrayal than spoiling the end. Works of grief are typically described as “raw,” as if the creator had simply ripped off a limb. Aftersun is fragile, as befits a film with the title of a poetry collection. Each scene delicately brushes its meaning like layers of paint: by the pool on the morning after their arrival, Calum rubs sunscreen into Sophie’s back, apologizing for the resort’s limitations while trying to pick up on the last conversation they had together, a conversation she glancingly remembers. Underneath their dialogue, the shrill ping of hammers. This is the awkward rhythm of reuniting with the noncustodial parent, who is nonetheless determined to care for you, scored by the impingement of money, obligation, and the adult world.

Orbiting the story of a parent’s mortality is that of a child’s maturity. Sophie, who will start at a secondary school in the fall, takes alternately tentative and bold steps toward adulthood, and therefore away from her father. “Why don’t you go over and introduce yourself?” Calum asks her, indicating two children who must be around eight and six years old. “Dad, no, they’re like kids,” Sophie scoffs. Instead, she invites two teenage boys to join them in a game of pool, confidently breaking the rack herself. Where Calum largely confines his attention to Sophie, she is drawn to these long-limbed adolescents, who swan about in yellow bracelets that mark them as the privileged few with access to the all-inclusive experience—“You can get as much as you want of anything,” says a girl with a pierced ear, inadvertently advertising the adolescent fantasy of adulthood. (Sophie is also, mysteriously, briefly captivated by a bright pink swizzle stick in the shape of a woman’s naked body.) And always in the film’s background, swarms of paragliders—a risky adult pastime she is not allowed to try—flit about like dragonflies.

Wells sees everything with equanimity: Sophie getting affectionately teased by the big kids, recalling the episode of The Simpsons where Lisa befriends a group of oceanside teens and feels cool for once; or swimming with ease in the ocean with her dad but finding herself in over her head when the older kids start making out with each other in the pool. The role calls for the sensitivity of the budding artist, the impishness of childhood, the yearning of adolescence, security and sudden insecurity, the unspoken intimacy of parent and child. Corio is marvelous.

Mescal no less so. His handsome, charming Calum can’t be mawkish, awash in self-pity, because he is struggling mightily to keep Sophie from seeing his demons. She evinces some anxiety on his behalf, noting with a tremble in one of her video diaries that he has gone on “some scuba diving thing” despite not having a diving license. “He’ll be fine. Yeah. He’ll be fine, I’m sure,” she reassures herself. We get a child’s glimpses of his recklessness: crossing the street in front of a bus or balancing precariously on the balcony railing. For the first half of the movie, he sports an arm cast—from an accident he doesn’t remember—in which he fumbles to light his cigarettes.

But he is a doting father, protective and thoughtful, negotiating Sophie’s desire for independence with his responsibility to keep her safe. He indulges her in an intimate, grown-up rapport; they start their trip sharing a private joke at an English tour guide’s expense, Sophie laughing richly at her father’s impersonation. Calum practices tai chi, occasionally to Sophie’s embarrassment, but he is good at it, just as he is good at dancing. In one scene his movements rhyme with those of a fan in the corner of the room, which twists and blows cool air in time with him.

“If you let it rest on an object for a wee while it gets the lighting right,” Calum observes early on as he tries out the camcorder, and Aftersun seems to abide by this premise. The eccentric compositions—people and props placed about the frame in seemingly random order—are held until a balance reveals itself. Gregory Oke’s cinematography is complemented by Blair McClendon’s elliptical editing so that individual scenes have the aura of memory, an experience broken down to its elements: Sophie, Calum, ocean. Hand, face, cotton ball. Boat, mountain, shore. Through a toilet stall keyhole, a glimpse of the arm of an older girl as she mimes jerking someone off while telling her friend about a recent escapade with a boy. Experimental techniques are used less in a spirit of inquiry for its own sake than for their effect. Wells plays with a mostly shallow depth of field to highlight presences on the rim of Sophie’s awareness, pulling focus from Sophie to the arm of Michael, the boy playing arcade games with her, as he brushes her own, Calum in the deep background ordering at the bar.

At the furthest edge of Sophie’s awareness is a nagging anxiety, formed right at the seam of her maturity and Calum’s mortality. On one of their last nights in Turkey, she volunteers the two of them to sing REM’s “Losing My Religion,” a shared enthusiasm, at a resort karaoke show. Calum, drunker, perhaps, than he intended, and dwelling on his private miseries, refuses to go onstage. Sophie, in a mortifying and triumphant display, presses on alone in several long takes that showcase Corio’s tremendous performance as her anxiety gives way to disbelief and finally disappointment and sadness, mixed in with a brave insistence on finishing the song. Afterward, Sophie decides to spend her evening with the teens, and has her first kiss with clumsy Michael.

Calum, chastened and ashamed, gets drunker, stumbles down to the shore, and walks into the sea. The camera looks out at the dark water for several agonizing moments. He does not return. It is Aftersun’s first explicit acknowledgment of what has otherwise only been suggested, but it is also not Calum’s death. The film has been told to this point from Sophie’s perspective, and she wouldn’t have seen Calum’s lonely descent. It is, rather, the manifestation of her terror, a nightmare illustrated with the almost pure archetype of a parent vanishing into darkness.

After her kiss, Sophie returns to their hotel room to find herself locked out. Hours later, when the concierge wakes up to let her back into the room, we are as shocked and relieved as she is to find Calum passed out on her bed. With the quick elasticity of a child’s mind, she incorporates this news and the story returns to its gentler course. The next morning, Calum apologizes at the mud bath, and they wash each other’s backs. The camera pans over the water as eddies of mud and silt curl away under the sun. She was being silly after all, no need to worry.

The final scenes, following the introduction of a haunted adult Sophie in Brooklyn, signify much harder, abruptly jostling what has otherwise been cradled. Father and daughter’s joyful last day on vacation, dancing together at a supper club, Calum at his most handsome and charming, are intercut with a metaphorical vision of his death, sweaty, drunk, and high, dancing in a strobing nightclub, as adult Sophie screams soundlessly, desperate to get his attention.

At my mom’s wake, I asked an old family friend who had also lost his mom unexpectedly, many years before, if it ever got less painful. “Eh,” he said. This was comforting. My mother’s books and sunhats, her collection of sea glass and stacks of notepads are arrayed about my home, and I have taken to using her preferred sunscreen, Olay Complete. Letting any of it go is unthinkable. Wells knows the solace of holding onto grief. 

A cliché about maturity is that you learn to appreciate your parents more fully, as nonidealized people, as human beings who struggled also, who don’t know the answers, who have been plodding along all this time, just like you. This is half true. You also come to see them as fragile, weakened by struggles you don’t yet, or might never, know. Then one day you see their lives entire, a complete form that will fall away behind you—that has fallen away behind you. 

-Daniel Drake

[queersatanic]

"Lucien Greaves" on the Oklahoma City Bombing and bad PR

Via The.Satanic.Wiki

On Sept. 11, 2003, future co-owner of The Satanic Temple Doug “Lucien Greaves” Misicko, his friend and collaborator Shane Bugbee, and Shane Bugbee’s wife Amy Stocky hosted a 24-hour Internet radio stream with guests and callers to mark the release of their new edition of the proto-fascist manifesto Might Is Right. This is an excerpt from that recording.

CW: terrorism, praise of white nationalist violence, misogyny

Full transcript:

Shane Bugbee: Yeah, no, but that Waco- that Waco chunk was given to us by a guy in Waco. One of the survivors had half his body burned off, that we just played. And that's something that a doc, a gentleman doing a documentary had done. And he couldn't get it released, couldn't get it played anywhere. Nothing. And he basically just gave it to those- the fine folks at the Branch Davidian. And, um... that was it. They distributed to who they thought was trustworthy and such, and I wanted to disseminate that information for you. I'd like to hear if anyone is listening. Get on the chat boards at RadioFreeSatan.com. Leave a voicemail message at RadioFreeSatan.com. I think the number is... I'll get you the number in a second.

Amy Bugbee: A major person who did help pass around Day 51 was Tim McVeigh.

Shane Bugbee: Yeah, exactly. That was one of the people that gave it to and we're trying to live to- some people call McVeigh a terrorist and American terrorist. I call him an American hero. Okay?

Amy Bugbee: That's right. And I just finished reading American Terrorist, Timothy McVeigh story, and it's... fascinating. It's really a shame and the major- the thing that he was most upset about what the Oklahoma City bombing was the fact that the children dying outshined what the message was he was trying to convey by blowing up the building. And it's a real shame. He said, if he would have known that there were- there was a daycare center in there, he would have picked a different target because of that.

Doug Misicko: All right, that was the biggest mistake. And of course, it was easy for the media to take that away.

Shane Bugbee: What was the biggest mistake?

Doug Misicko: The fact that there was kids in there.

Shane Bugbee: That was your... you consider that a mistake?

Doug Misicko: Well, it's a PR mistake.

Shane Bugbee: Who gives a fuck? They're cops' kids. The only thing that would be better is if the cops were inside that building as the kids in the fucking wives got to watch their fucking husbands burn like pigs.

Doug Misicko: True, but he didn't generate any support.

Shane Bugbee: He wouldn't have no matter what he does he could fire a gun up in the air, he's gonna get arrested and treated like an asshole.

Doug Misicko: Nonetheless, anytime a cunt like Janet Reno runs amok and pulls a Waco, you're gonna produce hundreds of more McVeigh's or people that McVeigh mindset it's like they say about Iraq now. Or Afghanistan. You know, whereas you might have had one Osama bin Laden, now you have legions.

Shane Bugbee: Now when you talk about "bad PR", the real powerful folk don't give a fuck about bad PR. You think the- the Bush folks or people that go into Ruby Ridge and slaughter a pregnant woman, slaughter 14-year-old kid, shooting them two times in the back, all that bullshit? They didn't give a fuck about mowing down those kids at Waco. They did that shit so incredibly intense. Man, we saw this video where they've got- they've got infrared cameras above Waco and they're showing guys with M-16s sharpshooting in where the kids and women are running out. The fucking cop- and the army guys are shooting at these kids and- they don't give a fuck. They don't give a fuck about bad PR, do they?

Doug Misicko: Yeah, they figured they can cover the PR. You look at...

Shane Bugbee: Nah, it's about fear. They fucking scared everyone in the fucking listening again.

Doug Misicko: People don't believe it'll happen. Why do you think Junior's crew now is trying to buy out radio?

[orbleglorb]

Happy wip Wsaturday! Person pit time?

you fucking know it babey! lore drop for the pit:

the pit is an entity itself and is responsible for forming the lookouts, as well as many other things that nobody understands

people cannot enter the pit. the openings are covered with a dark gelatinous substance that is surprisingly strong (and also attacks back). there's a small hole in the middle of the openings that expands whenever someone is getting out

barb is the pit's unofficial caretaker, and barb's lighthouse overlooks both the ocean and the pit

the pit is located in southern nova scotia. most (if not all) of the blaseball happenings occur there as well

although the pit is sentient and formed the team, it does not count as a patron deity for the team, because it does not communicate with anyone besides barb. plus, the only way it communicates is by giving people feelings and impulses (which can make it hard for barb to distinguish from barb's own feelings and impulses & the pit's). on top of that, it doesn't really communicate often and is generally somewhat vague. so, it isn't in the proper position to manage a team. barb started out as the team captain, but bestowed that role upon kit, since kit is better at the whole communicating with people thingy.

also, some lore for one of the other teams i've done lore for, the perth polycule:

despite the name, they're not all dating each other

players so far: nicole back, janet linh, jamie abrams, adela brown, aoife mcloughlin, parker loser, kenneth pham, and perry park

parker loser is the one guy everyone absolutely wants to date. and he's so oblivious to this

parker is also the humanization of all of those "sorry we x your boyfriend" memes

nichole back is a parody of nickleback that started because my australian friend (@stxrsprxte) asked who nickleback was, and their phone autocorrected it to nichole back. i've been considering doing this for a friend who accidentally typed vanilla cock instead of vanilla coke, but that's... significantly more nsfw. but if i do it, i'd probably put them on the reno clowns

[naturalrights-retard]

30 Years Later, Waco is Still Damning

by Jim Bovard

Thirty years ago, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never honestly portrayed the federal abuses and political deceit that led to that carnage.

What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains 30 years ago?

Purported Good Intentions Absolve Real Deadly Force

Janet Reno, the nation’s first female attorney general, approved the FBI’s assault on the Davidians. Previously, she had zealously prosecuted child abuse cases in Dade County, Florida, though many of her high-profile convictions were later overturned because of gross violations of due process. Reno approved the FBI assault after being told “babies were being beaten.” It is not known who told her about the false claims of child abuse; Reno claimed she couldn’t remember. Her sterling reputation helped the government avoid any apparent culpability for the deaths of 27 children on April 19, 1993. After Reno publicly promised to take responsibility for the outcome at Waco, the media conferred instant sainthood upon her. At a press conference the day after the fire, President Bill Clinton declared, “I was frankly—surprised would be a mild word—to say that anyone that would suggest that the Attorney General should resign because some religious fanatics murdered themselves.” According to a Federal News Service transcript, the White House press corps applauded Clinton’s comment on Reno.

It Is Not an Atrocity If the U.S. Government Does It

Shortly before the Waco showdown, U.S. government officials signed an international Chemical Weapons Convention Treaty pledging never to use nerve agents, mustard gas, and other compounds (including tear gas) against enemy soldiers. But the treaty contained a loophole permitting governments to gas their own people. On April 19, 1993, the FBI pumped CS gas and methyl chloride, a potentially lethal, flammable combination, into the Davidians’ residence for six hours, disregarding explicit warnings that CS gas should not be used indoors. Benjamin Garrett, executive director the Chemical and Biological Arms Control Institute in Alexandria, Virginia, observed that the CS gas “would have panicked the children. Their eyes would have involuntarily shut. Their skin would have been burning. They would have been gasping for air and coughing wildly. Eventually, they would have been overcome with vomiting in a final hell.” A 1975 U.S. Army publication on the effects of CS gas noted, “Generally, persons reacting to CS are incapable of executing organized and concerted actions and excessive exposure to CS may make them incapable of vacating the area.”

Rep. Steven Schiff (R-NM) declared that “the deaths of dozens of men, women and children can be directly and indirectly attributable to the use of this gas in the way it was injected by the FBI.” Chemistry professor George Uhlig testified to Congress in 1995 that the FBI gas attack probably “suffocated the children early on” and may have converted their poorly ventilated bunker into an area “similar to one of the gas chambers used by the Nazis at Auschwitz.” But during those 1995 hearings, congressional Democrats portrayed the CS gas as innocuous as a Flintstone vitamin.

Orwellian Language Will Vaporize Federal Aggression

As Abrams tanks driven by FBI agents continually battered the Davidian’s home, FBI loudspeakers broadcasted endlessly: “This is not an assault.” According to FBI apologists in the media, that proved the feds did not assault the Davidians. Prior to the fire, the tanks had collapsed 20 percent of the building atop its residents and the FBI planned to totally demolish the home. Grenade launchers on the tanks and other armored vehicles fired almost 400 ferret rounds of CS gas through the thin wooden walls and the windows of the building. Yet Attorney General Reno later insisted: “We didn’t attack. We tried to exercise every restraint possible to avoid violence.” Demolishing someone’s home was supposedly no more bothersome than leaving a Federal Express package on their doorstep. A 1993 Justice Department investigation was so shoddy that even The New York Times denounced the “Waco whitewash.” But that blunt condemnation was soon memory-holed in the rush to absolve the feds.

Don’t Trust Congress to Expose Federal Misconduct

A few days after the conflagration, Reno was heartily praised at a Senate committee hearing and the media made her a national hero. There was little or no sympathy on Capitol Hill for those who died during the final FBI assault. Rep. Jack Brooks (D-TX), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, commented that the Davidians were “horrible people. Despicable people. Burning to death was too good for them.” If Republicans had not captured control of Congress in 1994, there would have been no substantive hearings on Waco. And even those hearings faltered badly at times because so many Republican congressmen wasted their time boasting of their love of law enforcement rather than seeking the truth.

Media Favorites Can Perform Rhetorical Magic Tricks

When Attorney General Reno testified to the House Waco hearing on August 1, 1995, she was challenged on the FBI’s use of 54-ton tanks to assail the Davidians. Reno replied that the tanks were “not military weapons… I mean, it was like a good rent-a-car.” When Rep. Bill Zeliff (R-NH) challenged her, Reno hectored: “I think it is important, Mr. Chairman, as you deal with this issue, not to make statements like that can cause the confusion.” This is the high-toned DC version of the old saying: “Who are you going to believe—me or your lying eyes?” Media coverage of Reno’s showdown with congressional Republicans ignored her rent-a-tank absurdity, and instead praised her toughness and demeanor. (My article in The Wall Street Journal on the day after the hearings was practically the only place Reno got thumped for her “rent-a-car” line.)

Bad Attitudes, Not Federal Atrocities, Are the Real Problem

Waco illustrates how “truth will out” is Washington’s biggest fairy tale.The FBI speedily asserted that the Davidians ignited the fire that consumed their dwelling but never provided convincing evidence on that score. Six years later, independent investigator Michael McNulty found pyrotechnic ferret rounds the FBI fired at the scene prior to the flames erupting in a Texas government evidence warehouse. Attorney General Reno lashed out at the FBI for destroying her credibility but neither she nor FBI officials suffered any consequences from the collapse of the official narrative.

Reno could have recused herself from any role in choosing a new person to reinvestigate Waco. Instead, she personally chose John Danforth, a former Republican senator and a golfing buddy of Clinton’s, to be in charge of the reinvestigation. Danforth, an ordained Episcopal priest whose piety earned him the derisive nickname “Saint Jack,” was one of Washington’s favorite useful idiots of Leviathan.

In lieu of investigating Waco carnage, Danforth appointed himself as the nation’s political faith healer. His investigation found that numerous federal officials had lied about Waco but thankfully it wasn’t their fault. Instead, the culprit was the American people’s distrust of federal agencies. Danforth defended federal deceivers:

(Danforth did not specify the provision of federal law that absolves government agents from candor when it is not in their self-interest.)

Danforth’s bizarre downplaying of federal aggression could only have passed the laugh test in Washington. At a Senate hearing on his report, he was asked about the flash-bang grenades the FBI threw at Davidians who tried to escape and may have thrown inside the Davidians’ residence. Danforth claimed that flash-bangs were little more than “firecrackers. They make a flash and they make a bang. And they don’t cause injury, as a general rule.” In 2020, the North Carolina Supreme Court labeled flash bangs as “weapons of mass destruction.” A 2019 federal appeals court decision noted that flash-bang grenades are “four times louder than a 12-gauge shotgun blast” with “a powerful enough concussive effect to break windows and put holes in walls.” Flash-bangs burn hotter than lava and have started more than a hundred fires across the nation.

But the real WMD was Americans’ bad attitudes. When Danforth released his whitewash report, he hoped his findings would “begin the process of restoring the faith of the people in their government and the faith of the government in the people.” Danforth declared that the  burden is on “all of us” to “be more skeptical of those who make sensational accusations of evil acts by government.” No wonder PBS NewsHour host Jim Lehrer responded by gushing over Danforth on national television, “You did tremendous investigating.” Danforth became a hero in DC for championinga “move along, nothing to see here” version of “consent of the governed” in which citizens are obliged to swallow unlimited federal malarkey.

Unfortunately, that same storyline still prevails in much of the nation’s media. Last month, a Houston Chronicle editorial declared, “’Waco’ has become an Alamo of sorts, a shrine for…anti-government extremists and conspiracists.”Waco should have taught the disastrous consequences of unleashing government agencies from the law and the Constitution. Thirty years after the FBI’s final assault, millions of Americans still refuse to recognize tanks and flash-bang grenades as federal paternalism at its best.