Waco

by David Thibodeau

  Mount Carmel and its fate had become a weight on my spirit. My friends said I’d lost my feeling of fun along with my sense of humor. I’d surely lost touch with the kid in me, that lighthearted side that delighted in toys and cartoons. “As an artist, you have to keep close to your childish stuff,” Ryan warned, and he was right.

  I kept in contact with other Mount Carmelites. From jail, Renos Avraam wrote that he believed he had his own message to give the world. Livingston Fagan sent letters to all and sundry from his Leavenworth cell. In Waco, Clive Doyle was struggling to hold the frayed threads of our community together. He now lived in a cottage near the site of Mount Carmel, leading a small group of survivors, mainly older women like Catherine Matteson and Tillie Friesen, who had remained in the Waco area. This group included Sheila Martin and her three surviving children.

  Some remaining members of our community appeared to believe that David would eventually be resurrected to bring in the final Day of Judgment. They continued to have faith that this would happen.

  Jack Zimmerman’s hope that a congressional oversight committee would investigate the Mount Carmel tragedy was realized in the summer of 1995. For ten working days, beginning July 19, the Joint Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee on Crime and the House Government Reform and Oversight Subcommittee on National Security, Internal Affairs, and Criminal Justice (made up of twenty-eight Republicans, twenty-three Democrats, and one independent) heard some one hundred witnesses and reviewed thousands of pages of testimony about the ATF raid on February 28, 1993, and the siege and fire that followed.

  But if Jack hoped that any light would come of all this heat, he had to be sadly disappointed by the outcome. From day one of the hearings it was clear that David Koresh was on trial, not the Justice Department or the politicians or the bureaucrats or the mechanisms that made it possible for the federal government to kill innocent Americans. Also, it was soon obvious that the hearings were essentially a partisan circus in which the Republicans were out to tarnish the Clinton administration, while the Democrats were determined to defend it.

  I was called as a witness the first day, taking my seat in the Capitol hearing room at one of a series of tables facing two raised tiers of congressmen backed by a large Stars and Stripes. Squatting on the floor between us were TV cameramen and photographers, set to capture our expressions as we testified. The high-ceilinged hearing room, with its tall, draped windows and partly paneled walls decorated with portraits, reflected an architecture of dignity belying the pettiness of the actual proceedings.

  For the occasion, I wore a conservative, dark suit, a white shirt, and a tie. To appear more normal, I pulled my long hair back with an elastic band. Looking down the row of witnesses, I saw some familiar faces, including sociologist Stuart Wright, whom I’d met at an American Academy of Religion conference in Washington on Thanksgiving 1993, and Henry McMahon, the Waco gun dealer whom I’d introduced to David in 1990.

  Committee co-chair Bill McCollum, a Florida Republican, banged his gavel and opened the first day’s session with a solemn statement that the hearings were to be solely about constitutional oversight, not gun control, the militias, or any other issue. He described the siege of Mount Carmel as “the single most fatal episode in the history of federal law enforcement.” However, he showed his true colors by reading out the names of the four ATF agents who died during the raid on Mount Carmel, but not those of the six members of our community whom the ATF had killed, or the seventy-four others who perished in the fire. “With Waco, Americans got rationalizations instead of accountability,” McCollum declared.

  No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a dogfight erupted over the National Rifle Association’s advisory role to the Republicans. New York Democrat Charles Schumer alleged that the hearings were a plot by the gun-rights group to repeal the Brady gun-control law and the assault-weapon ban and to abolish the ATF. The National Rifle Association, roundly characterized as “rifle rackers in hunting vests,” became the hearing’s biggest red herring.

  The strategy of the Democrats was summed up by presidential press secretary Mike McCurry. “The NRA [National Rifle Association] bought and paid for the congressional investigation that’s under way here,” he declared. Leon Panetta, White House chief of staff, damned those who supported the hearings as “despicable,” and Clinton himself denounced the hearings as nothing short of an ideological “war against police.” He added that it was “irresponsible for people in elected positions to suggest that the police are some sort of armed bureaucracy acting on private grudges and hidden agendas.”

  McCollum’s retort to all this was succinct. Such statements were, he said, “plain political hogwash.” Through the session and the days following, the hearings degenerated into a scratching match between the dimpled, prissy Republican co-chair and Schumer, a saturnine street fighter. These two pecked at each other as if in a cockfight—a puffed-up hen versus a spur-flashing bantam rooster. The shadow looming over this political pettiness was the recent Oklahoma City bombing. The smoke that still rose from the memory of that catastrophe clouded the issues, reducing the chance that the FBI and ATF would ever be hauled over the coals for their conduct in Waco.

  But Schumer’s ferocious attitude still floored me. It crystallized the depths of the liberal left’s antagonism toward the Mount Carmel community, its absolute lack of sympathy for our fate. Schumer implied that child-abuse allegations alone justified the ATF raid, conveniently ignoring the fact that federal law enforcement had no jurisdiction over child abuse. It staggered me that Democrats like Schumer could have opposed such injustices as the Vietnam War, only to back the brutality of the feds in Waco. As one reporter wrote, “Conservatives defended the counterculturalists while Liberals took a law-and-order stance.”

  When my time came to testify I was sworn in and questioned by Georgia Republican Bob Barr. Along with Clive Doyle, I was the only survivor who gave testimony at the hearings. While the court reporter beside me tapped at her machine, Barr led me through a series of questions about David’s movements in the weeks before the ATF attack, the ATF affidavit, our weapons, and the accusation that we operated a drug lab. I tried to answer calmly and honestly, not claiming to know things I hadn’t seen, trying by my sober demeanor to contradict the widely held notion that we were a bunch of religious freaks.

  I wanted to read a statement I’d written, but I was allowed only to enter it into the record. It began: “On February 28, 1993, the world witnessed a vulgar display of force set against a community of people living in a large home on the barren prairie lands of Texas,” ending with the declaration that this “shows nothing but cowardice and fear, strength in numbers, power in oppression. Not the America I remember.”

  New York Democrat Louise Slaughter grilled me about the alleged child abuse in Mount Carmel, including the merciless beating of eight-month-old babies. I tried to tell her that I had never seen anything of the sort, but she rolled right over my answers before the words were out of my mouth.

  Whatever I had to say about this subject was drowned in the drama of the story told by Kiri Jewell. Accompanied by her father, who sat beside her stroking her back, Kiri repeated her tale of being molested by David in a motel room when she was ten years old. “David took his penis and rubbed it against my vagina,” the fourteen-year-old said, reading from her prepared script. Urged on by the maternal Florida Democrat Karen Thurman, Kiri talked about some other young girls whom David had slept with. She said that Michele had told her that her heart was pounding in panic as David penetrated her when she was only twelve years old, a detail that shook me.

  When Kiri added the graphic quote she claimed came from David—“Jeannine Bunds had the type of pussy that really hangs onto my dick”—Bill McCollum’s prim mouth went into spasm, and he immediately warned the TV audience who might be watching the C-SPAN broadcast to beware.

  I was shocked by Kiri’s tale. Sitting next to her, watching her flick her long, fair hair from her swee
t, girlish face, listening to her teenage lilt, I couldn’t easily believe she was lying. “Ever since I was little I’ve had big ears,” the girl said. “This is my truth.” After ending her fifteen minutes of testimony, Kiri rested her head on her daddy’s strong shoulder. This is not the David I know, I told myself. But maybe I hadn’t known him as well as I thought. Or maybe he had changed in the years before I met him.

  “We have a very brave young girl here,” Congresswoman Thurman murmured, as Kiri dabbed the tears from her eyes, and it was hard not to agree with her. To comfort Kiri, I poured her a glass of water.

  It was only later, when I talked to Ruth Mosher, Kiri’s grandmother, back in Anaheim, California, that I began to doubt the details of her story. Kiri was also less than convincing when she talked about the plans for mass suicide she said she’d heard in Mount Carmel. She claimed she was told that “the best way to shoot yourself in this battle with Babylon was to put the gun into your mouth back to the soft spot above your throat before pulling the trigger.” From my experience in Mount Carmel, ten-year-old children weren’t allowed anywhere near a firearm, much less practice any soft-spot-in-the-mouth maneuver. That part of the girl’s testimony smacked of manipulation, probably by her father, who’d already exploited Kiri’s story by putting her on Donahue during the siege and marketing her appearance on a number of TV programs.

  With Kiri’s testimony, the demonization of David was planted center stage. Brandishing an AR-15, Schumer ranted about “this evil man,” and no one disputed him. California Democrat Charles Lantos babbled about the “apocalyptic vision of a criminally insane charismatic cult leader… hellbent on bringing about this infernal nightmare.” This amazed me, coming from Lantos, a Hungarian Jew who had survived the Holocaust.

  The witness list had been heavily weighted against us. Of ninety-four total witnesses, only eight presented our viewpoints. Webster Hubbell and William Sessions, the now-disgraced duo that had spurred Reno to make her fatal moves, were there, wagging their wattles. The forensic experts called to testify about such issues as how the fire started were either current or former government employees or consultants.

  However, the issue of automatic weapons allegedly found at the Mount Carmel site was never resolved. Questioned by Republicans, officials from the Department of Justice said they could have conducted tests to see if some of the guns allegedly found at Mount Carmel were, in fact, fully automatic, but they’d decided the tests were too expensive. To date, no competent authority has been allowed to examine these weapons. To add insult to injury, none of the witnesses who defended the government’s conduct at Waco referred to Mount Carmel’s destruction as a tragedy, massacre, or disaster. To them, it was just the “Waco incident.”

  The Clinton administration withheld crucial documents and set up a war room inside the White House to coordinate the media and the committee Democrats in an attempt to undermine the hearings. Their efforts were so blatant that Oklahoma Democrat Bill Brewster publicly complained about pressure from the U.S. Treasury secretary not to embarrass the administration during the hearings.

  “Apparently out of fear that revelations in these hearings could damage the Clinton presidency,” Bill McCollum stated, “the White House, Congressman Schumer, and some at Treasury and Justice set out this past week to ridicule, trivialize, and discredit these hearings.”

  But the Republicans really were no better. As nationally syndicated columnist Samuel Francis wrote: “What the Republicans cared about was trying to pin the whole boondoggle on President Clinton and thereby chalking up yet another cheap point to score against him in next year’s presidential campaign. By avoiding the real and important issues raised by Waco… [the Republicans] not only made themselves look like fools but also may have destroyed the usefulness of Waco as Exhibit No. 1 for what is wrong with federal law enforcement.”

  Congressman Barr was finally moved to comment that “the tragedy at Waco is, I think, probably without doubt the single most tragic incident in American law enforcement history. We must get to the bottom of the unanswered questions, and take some steps to do everything possible to ensure that this sort of thing does not happen again.” He added: “Because I don’t believe the American public would stand for another Waco.”

  I wasn’t asked to attend the two-day Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Waco held at the end of October, but I knew its results would likely be no better than those of the House hearings. Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, the committee chair, declared that the hearings were not out to blame anyone, and Delaware Democrat Joe Biden stated that there was no need for more investigations of what happened at Mount Carmel. Treasury official Ron Noble dismissed the disaster as “a single tragic aberration.” This was the closest any government official testifying at either hearing came to referring to the destruction of Mount Carmel as a tragic occurrence rather than a mere “event.”

  Graeme Craddock, brought inside the Beltway from his prison cell, impressed the senators with his honest, straightforward answers to tricky questions. “If we were deceived [by David Koresh], we were genuinely deceived,” he said. Professor James Fyfe of Temple University, a specialist in criminal justice, put his finger on the heart of the matter when he stated that “there is no FBI to investigate the FBI. There is no Justice Department to investigate the Justice Department. There is no independent non-partisan citizen review of incidents like Ruby Ridge and Waco. There should be.”

  Thus, with barely a whimper, and the hope that time would dim memory, the organs of government digested our terrible experience and excreted a ton of more or less useless paper, which, they hoped, would bury us forever.

  “Precisely because there will probably be no meaningful judicial review of any of these constitutional issues in the Waco case, it is all the more imperative in our democracy that we, the people, think critically about what the government did at Waco,” professor Edward Gaffney wrote, “lest the raid on the Davidians becomes by our silence or our complicity a precedent for doing it again to some other marginalized religious group of which the government disapproves.”

  20

  THE DOUBLE HELIX

  During the return flight to Los Angeles following the congressional hearings, I was more depressed and confused than I’d been in a long time. Some of the things I’d heard in Washington disturbed me deeply, especially the accusations about David. Kiri Jewell had said David told her the biblical King David had taken young women to warm his blood, and the image of Michele’s twelve-year-old heart pounding wildly as David took her virginity burned a hole in my mind. I knew that if Michele had been my sister I would have considered what he did with her as very evil and very wrong.

  Did I still believe in everything David had taught me? I wondered. I realized I hadn’t opened a Bible in months; and when I did, my eyes glazed over. David had said, quoting Scripture: If inspiration is cut off, what are the saints to do? At that moment, I didn’t have a clue. Riding above the clouds, I realized I’d come halfway back through the fence dividing belief from disbelief. I was caught in an act of retreat, and that made me feel very weak.

  When I’d been with David, I shared his strength, his spiritual awareness. Now that that had been taken, I was left to fend for myself. But his legacy was imprinted on my mind and spirit, making my native sensuality a source of guilt. The spiritual and the sensual threads of my character were unraveled, the strands floating loose like a disconnected double helix. Would I ever be able to weave them together into an integrated pattern? Use my spirituality to refine my sensuality, my sensuality to ground my soul? Make a whole life out of a pair of uncoupled spirals?

  “I’m not going to kill myself over who I am,” I muttered, drawing a curious look from the man in the seat beside me.

  I was truly depressed by the futility of the procedures I’d been part of inside the Capitol. Their main aim seemed to be to grind down the harsh realities of our pain and loss so that they could be swallowed and forgotten. But thinking it over, I began to co
mprehend that maybe that was how it had to work. Perhaps, despite the politicking, manipulation, and ass-covering—or maybe because of them—the ground of opinion had begun a slow seismic shift.

  At the hearings, even earlier, it had been tacitly recognized that the attitudes and tactics displayed by the FBI and ATF during the siege and raid were badly out of whack. Sure, there’d been no outright apologies for the feds’ appalling actions; and with the reinstatement of ATF raid leaders Charles Sarabyn and Philip Chojnacki, no government official had ever really been punished for those actions. Certainly, none had been indicted, as David had demanded during the siege; and Janet Reno, who’d made such ill-informed and devastating decisions, was still in office.

  This enraged me. However, in a calmer frame of mind, I came to see that even though bureaucracies protect their own they inevitably feel social pressure and slowly shift the basis of their methods. I began to hope that the ATF and FBI would act very differently next time they focused on an “alternative” community like ours.

  Still, I had to wonder what might have happened if only Janet Reno had shown some contrition; if only she could have brought herself to admit that what she had allowed to happen in Mount Carmel was a terrible mistake. If she had, the true healing process over this American tragedy might have finally begun. Without that generous admission, the public conscience has remained in limbo, strung out between guilt and outrage.

  David Koresh’s own actions, both positive and negative, certainly contributed to the Mount Carmel disaster. However he justified his sexual relationships with young girls, he was guilty of the crime of statutory rape, and he had to know that would eventually provoke the authorities to investigate the community, as indeed it did. This issue opened us up to all kinds of hostility that might well have been avoided, given that the community had peacefully coexisted with locals for fifty years before David arrived in Waco.