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I had almost forgotten the events of 1993, the burning out of the Branch Davidians from their compound near Waco, Texas; the very heavy-handed response Bill Clinton and Janet Reno devised to end the standoff that never should have become a standoff. Bill Clinton's partisan remarks in Sunday's NYT reminds us that his actions were far from heroic, and brings back opportunity for a more internet-savvy public to further question his response to the standoff of the Branch Davidians, and call again for answers to unanswered questions - and to possibly force further reviews, opening up the possibility that Bill Clinton might have to answer for his... crimes.

The Volokh Conspiracy's Kenneth Anderson recalls a review he wrote and published on The Ashes of Waco, a 1995 book written by Dick J. Reavis (download the review in pdf file format here). The opening paragraphs of the review...

Hubris at Waco
The Times Literary Supplement (London)
Kenneth Anderson
01 September 1995
Dick J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco, An investigation, 320pp. New York: Simon and Schuster. $24 - 0 684 81132 4.

Like most Americans, I was only vaguely aware of the months-long stand-off between David Koresh's Branch Davidian cult members and the Federal government at Waco, Texas, until April 19, 1993, when it blew up in flames and billowing smoke and some eighty-six people died, including twenty-five children.

True, I was surprised by the armada the FBI unleashed against the religionists' compound nine Bradley fighting vehicles, five combat engineering vehicles, one tank retrieval vehicle and two Abrams tanks. I was less surprised that the FBI used CS tear-gas in the compound; although over a hundred nations prohibit the use of CS gas in warfare, the United States has never conceded that it is prohibited for use in domestic disturbances. I was, however, troubled to learn that despite endless discussions of whether the highly flammable compound might ignite and whose fault that would be, there were no fire-engines at the compound at the time the FBI attack began (although the FBI did take the trouble to send an aeroplane equipped with advanced radar capabilities to fly over the compound, apparently in order to have evidence that if a fire broke out, the FBI had not started it). It took forty-one minutes for fire-fighters to arrive from nearby communities, by which time most of the eightysix dead were charred remains. Nearly three hours after the fire began, there were only nine ambulances at the scene. But despite questions about FBI tactics, I, like most Americans then and today, even following the summer's Congressional hearings, was willing to write off Waco as another of those inevitable shoot-outs between law enforcement and various strange religious sects that punctuate American history every few years.

Writing this review has convinced me I was quite wrong. The actions of the Federal government at Waco, both in relation to how the enterprise was conceived and to how it was defended to the public afterwards, clearly show that (indeed, as various gun nuts, self-styled "patriots" and other right-wing populists have been insisting for two years now) Waco was not just a case of incompetent government responding to something that it couldn't leave alone, but represents a general and disturbing claim by the government about its authority over all American citizens. For, as Gary Wills wrote recently when discussing the Oklahoma
bombing in the New York Review of Books (August 10, 1995), there "is something new" in the claims of these right-wing groups, by comparison to conspiracy theorists throughout American history, and the reason is that it is hard, as Wills says, "to trace the exact line where extremism spills over into 'mainstream' concerns about liberty". They are something new because the assertion of what might be called "liberal authoritarianism", which is now embedded in law-enforcement bureaucracies and which motivated the FBI at Waco, is itself something "new", at least in its virulence and reach.

Read the post at Volkoh; the review excerpt chosen by Kenneth Anderson details the questionable use of CS tear gas on a civilian 'target'(s). And, suggests that the CS tear gas was intended to cause Branch Davidian mother's angst at their children suffering from effects of the gas, because there were no child-sized tear gas masks available in the compound. If Bill Clinton and Janet Reno knowingly targeted the BD children with CS tear gas, then yes, he needs to be brought to trial for war crimes. Against civilians. In the USA.

President Bush never used CS tear gas against civilians in the USA, or we might have heard of it from the media. One never knows.

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UPDATE:

"Waco Stamps" image found by g00gle search; from a fascinating site, "The Ashes of Waco: A blog about the digitization and online presentation of archival materials in the Dick J. Reavis Papers that are related to his book, The Ashes of Waco: An Investigation, about the 1993 raid, siege and burning of the Mt. Carmel Center near Waco, Texas."