-Caveat Lector- From: http://www.startext.net/news/doc/1047/1:STATE71/1:STATE71091899.html Updated: Saturday, Sep. 18, 1999 at 22:03 CDT Documentary raises new allegations about Davidian siege By Karen Brooks Star-Telegram Staff Writer FORT COLLINS, Colo. -- They were three old high school buddies -- aspiring filmmakers with a willing investor and the goal of making a compelling movie. Their documentary, they decided, would challenge the conspiracy theories surrounding the government's 1993 standoff with the Branch Davidian sect near Waco. It would capitalize on the exposure and insight of an Academy Award- nominated researcher who had made a film about the siege, whom some considered an expert on the subject. It would be a quick job -- four months, tops. And maybe the filmmakers would dig up some new facts along the way. "One of my goals was, How much merit was there to this argument?" said Jason Van Vleet, 28. That's how Van Vleet, technical director Aric Johnson and composer Dan Hoeye -- who make up the majority of the staff at tiny, independent MGA Entertainment -- approached a new movie with Fort Collins researcher Mike McNulty. McNulty's 1997 documentary, Waco: The Rules of Engagement, recently earned an Emmy Award for investigative journalism and an Academy Award nomination for best documentary. As they researched their soon-to-be-released documentary, Waco: A New Revelation, they became lightning rods for the public uproar over the government's handling of the siege, which ended April 19, 1993, with a fire that consumed the sect's compound. The bodies of sect leader David Koresh and at least 80 of his followers, including several children, were found in the charred ruins. The film builds on assertions in the first documentary and responds to critics of the contention that the government misled the public in its characterization of the events. Their findings, based partly on the Texas Department of Public Safety's stores of physical evidence from the case, has stirred up a maelstrom on Capitol Hill and prompted pledges by Congress to investigate the matter. "We've got a film that's going to answer questions that you don't even know you should be asking," said Van Vleet's father, Rick Van Vleet, who owns the production company with his son. None of them are formally trained investigators, nor are they former federal agents or conspiracy theorists with an agenda, they say. McNulty and Jason Van Vleet, who is directing, producing and helping research the film, were the first private citizens to gain access to tons of evidence collected by the DPS and federal investigators at the scene of the tragedy. Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Johnston pushed to give them access to the evidence after McNulty and Van Vleet made public-information requests for months. Johnston has recused himself from any part in further investigations. They have stacks of photographs, diagrams and documents and more than 400 hours of videotape -- crime scene footage from federal investigators, personal interviews and surveillance video. They read thousands of pages of testimony and reviewed 51 days of tapes of recorded negotiations between the Davidians and federal agents. They interviewed theologians, experts on explosives and infrared photography, witnesses, survivors, former federal employees, attorneys representing the Branch Davidians, and investigators from federal, state and local agencies. McNulty and Van Vleet say they have sent their findings to people in Washington and requested interviews, which were declined. Their findings, some of which they have turned over to lawmakers pushing for a more thorough examination of the government's role in the siege, include the first public hints that Delta Force, an elite anti- terrorist military unit, may have done more than observe and advise in the operation. McNulty alleges that at least six pyrotechnic "flash-bang" devices were mislabeled as silencers and gun parts. A recent Texas Ranger review of the evidence mentions those concerns and states that those items will be kept separate for further review when all the evidence is cataloged and shipped to U.S. District Court in Waco, where the Branch Davidians have filed a wrongful death suit against the government. ATF officials acknowledged in congressional hearings that they used two additional devices during the initial raid Feb. 28, 1993. Ranger officials have declined to confirm the presence of those devices. The Van Vleets allowed a reporter to view film footage on the condition that only approved portions could be publicized. The movie asserts that: * Delta Force members fired on the Davidians during the blaze from concealed positions behind armored vehicles, out of reporters' sight. Infrared film from a surveillance aircraft shows figures on the ground behind the Bradley fighting vehicles punctuated by quick, bright flashes that an analyst contends are gunfire. Edward Allard, a former intelligence scientist who has worked with forward-looking infrared film, also known as FLIR, for 20 years, analyzed the tape. The same footage was shown to members of Congress during hearings in 1995 and was supplied to the Davidians' defense attorneys during 1994 criminal trials. It was also featured in McNulty's first film. Van Vleet's follow-up documentary takes a closer look at the footage and presents arguments rebutting the FBI's analysis of it. * The FBI may have engaged in gunfights and used at least six Defense Technologies flash-bang devices -- which spew flames, smoke and heat -- inside the compound in the seconds before the fire broke out. According to evidence that Van Vleet and McNulty found in the Rangers' evidence locker, three of those were found at or near the places that officials said the fires started. McNulty has made the allegations in newspaper and TV interviews, but the Rangers have not commented officially. But much of what Van Vleet and McNulty found didn't make the final cut because "we didn't put anything in the movie that we couldn't confirm two, three, four times," Van Vleet said. Other footage, such as shots of all six flash-bangs that were found, were left out for aesthetic reasons, McNulty said. "If we put every little thing in the movie, it'll be 12 hours long," he said. "People would fall asleep." Their work has captured national news media attention. Interview requests have flooded their offices for weeks. But they are withholding some details until they hold a premiere, which they hope will be in Washington. They plan to invite Attorney General Janet Reno and John Danforth, a Republican and former senator appointed by Reno as an independent investigator. The reason? "We don't want to give any of them a chance to form their public positions before everyone sees it at the same time," said Johnson, 30, who is also the film's sound designer. McNulty and company have already suffered criticism, and Reno publicly denounced their conclusions shortly before appointing Danforth on Sept. 9. MGA Entertainment, which includes music-recording and filmmaking divisions, was the brainchild of Rick Van Vleet, 54, a Conway Twitty look-alike whose basement-turned-practice room is filled with a collection of guitars and other instruments. Van Fleet, a certified financial planner, spent much of the 1960s touring with bands and is seldom seen without his pet dog, Kramer the Wonder Poodle, the unofficial studio mascot. Van Vleet created the company to promote local bands by making demonstration recordings for them. He is currently working with the band Eight Days, which is getting play on college radio stations. He also wants to make family-oriented home videos. "We're not a religious group. We just thought there were too many slash-and-gash movies out there already," he said. His son, meanwhile, was working full time at another local production company -- directing, writing and producing corporate videos and Walt Disney music education tapes for elementary students. Jason Van Vleet studied acting for more than five years, preparing for his dream of becoming a director. When Jason Van Vleet heard about McNulty's Oscar nomination -- and realized that he was local -- he approached him for insights on projects for MGA's first film. He had not seen McNulty's documentary and was unfamiliar with the details of the Branch Davidian siege. A week later, he watched the movie and walked away a skeptic with an idea -- answer the unanswered, debunk the implausible and get to the bottom of what happened outside Waco. McNulty, meanwhile, had little intention of making another film with director Dan Gifford of the Fifth Estate production company, with whom he had artistic differences, he said. He was receptive to the idea of a new film, as he had continued his research independently. Rick Van Vleet was intrigued. He had watched the standoff, trials and subsequent congressional hearings and thought, "The whole thing reeked," he said. He would bankroll the movie, he told his son and McNulty, but with a few stipulations. "I just want to know what happened," he told them. "I don't want any patriot myths. I don't want any B.S." He wound up funding most of the film's $1 million budget. "He put his money where his mouth was," McNulty said. They employed the legal services of California lawyer Steve Novak, a former assistant U.S. prosecutor, to advise them and act as a news media liaison. "We're not just here to make money," Rick Van Vleet said. "We do have bills to pay, but we realized we could actually do this and do it right. Justice doesn't have to be overburdened if society can figure out how to be fair. That's what we're about." But the Van Vleets' enthusiasm for the film project was not echoed throughout the studio. Johnson was initially angry about it. When he was 8, Star Wars reinforced his dream of becoming a filmmaker. His father, however, was a federal employee, and Johnson had grown up fully believing in the federal government's integrity. So he resisted. "I wasn't prepared to accept anything he had to say," the ponytailed Johnson said of McNulty. "I was against MGA doing the movie." But he worked on it because he was a professional who had studied filmmaking at Brigham Young University and completed a stint as art director for the Sundance Film Institute near Park City, Utah. And then he had an epiphany. "All along I continued to fight it -- until I saw the actual evidence, the footage, the testimony," Johnson said. "I was forced to admit that there was something very, very dark, very unjust, about the whole engine. Now I'm fully passionate about this project. Personally, I've yet to fully come to terms with it." The reawakening of public opinion and interest in the issues surrounding the Branch Davidian siege has the crew a bit overwhelmed. They aren't rabble-rousers, they say; they're just normal guys. "We started out as moviemakers, and in the end, that's all we are -- we wanted to make a good movie," said Hoeye, 30, the father of two, who composed original music for the film. "We found a sense of patriotism and the desire to make a difference." Johnson, Hoeye and Jason Van Vleet went to high school together in Fort Collins. Hoeye received his music education and composition degree from Colorado State University in Fort Collins. He toured with an a cappella group and then resettled in his hometown. Jason Van Vleet is married and has two children. Johnson spent a few years doing social work in North Carolina. McNulty, who has been needling the federal government for five years over the issue, disavows any extremist philosophies. Rick Van Vleet doesn't affiliate himself with any political party and says he has never voted in a primary election for that reason. None of the filmmakers claims to sympathize with Koresh's religious beliefs or practices, or even the way he and the others handled the siege. "We aren't anti-government," McNulty said. "We believe these agencies need to be here, and they need to be clean and honest and for one reason: They represent us." They simply are, they say, moviemakers who started out with an intriguing idea and found a deeper purpose. McNulty is a firearms and munitions expert who has given expert testimony in California trials and did three tours of duty as a Navy combat photographer in Vietnam. He also spent 11 years in public relations and worked on the campaigns of four California Democrats, most notably former Gov. Jerry Brown, during the 1970s. In their efforts to find answers to questions about the standoff that trouble many Americans, they went to firsthand sources for their information. "It had to be an independent, outside investigation," Johnson said. "That was the only way the truth would come out. Part of our story is that we aren't anybody in particular. That's why we found the experts, the people that we found, to tell it for us." For example, in analyzing the forward-looking infrared film, they went to Allard and Maurice Cox, a retired intelligence analyst who worked on military satellite operations. Their assertions have been disputed by other analysts who have said the flashes, which Allard says are at a speed of 600 per minute, could be Davidians' bullets ricocheting off the Bradley fighting vehicles. The FBI has said the flashes are light reflections -- an assertion that Allard and Cox dispute in the film. Cox employs geometry in the film to demonstrate their rebuttal: That the FLIR plane would have had to circle the compound at a speed of Mach 1.8 to capture reflections in the manner in which the flashes appear on the tape. The filmmakers have mixed feelings about how the information has played out in the news media, and they anticipate more controversy when the film is released. They toyed with the idea of dropping the project several times because of its difficulty and sensitivity. But they couldn't force themselves to abandon it, Rick Van Vleet said. There were too many questions unanswered by other documentaries, books, trials, hearings and extremist writings. "We wanted as many questions answered as possible," Rick Van Vleet said. "We kept digging and digging and digging, and when we got into the evidence locker, that was it. ... I couldn't live with myself if I had walked away from this." 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