WASHINGTON (UPI) – A new study by Cato Institute says that the final official government report on the 1993 Branch Davidian disaster near Waco, Texas, which exonerated federal officials from wrongdoing, is "not supported by the factual evidence."
In "No Confidence: An Unofficial Account of the Waco Incident," criminal justice scholar Timothy Lynch, director of the libertarian Cato's Project on Criminal Justice, analyzes the legal implications of certain undisputed events and concludes that the official investigation into the incident – led by special prosecutor former Sen. John Danforth of Missouri – was "soft and incomplete." According to Lynch, many obvious crimes have gone unprosecuted.
For example, says Lynch, ATF agents were caught on tape assaulting a television cameraman after he had filmed their retreat from the initial raid on the Branch Davidian complex. Lynch says that ATF agents also lied to federal investigators, a federal offense, but were never prosecuted despite recommendations by U.S. marshals.
More seriously, he says, FBI agents exhibited a gross disregard for human life when they indiscriminately fired "ferret" rounds at the Davidian residence and used tanks to ram its walls. "Since at least one child was struck by a ferret round, second-degree murder charges may be appropriate," Lynch writes.
Also, the involvement of certain FBI officials in the Waco operation "should have set off alarm bells with Special Prosecutor Danforth's investigators," Lynch writes. Those officials were suspended by the Department of Justice for their involvement in the controversial "Ruby Ridge" incident, in which the wife of white separatist survivalist Randy Weaver was killed by an FBI sniper during a nine-day standoff with agents in Idaho in 1992. One of these officials was eventually sentenced to 18 months in prison for destroying evidence and lying to investigators about his role in that cover-up.
Lynch points out that the involvement of those officials in supervisory positions at Waco was not even mentioned in the special prosecutor's report. "Danforth should have hauled those individuals before a grand jury and questioned them about missing Waco evidence," Lynch says. "He did not."
If the crimes chronicled in his study go unpunished, Lynch concludes, "the Waco incident will leave an odious precedent – that federal agents can use the "color of their office to commit crimes against citizens."