Plus ça change, plus cest la même chose.... Today's Brasscheck delivery is the film Waco: The Rules of Engagement, by director William Gazecki. Perhaps the underlying message in the timing of presenting this film and those of yesterday, which were on the Iran-Contra-Mena crimes, is to disabuse us of illusions we may entertain that any of the war crimes, the crimes against humanity, or the multitude of other crimes committed by the current administration might be prosecuted by the next administration, even if it be Democratic. No administration in my lifetime, which goes back to Eisenhower, has been without its grave crimes, but not one has been held responsible for his or her crimes against humanity. As the French proverb goes, "plus ça change, plus cest la même chose" (the more things change, the more they stay the same). "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" is an excellent documentary, even if it leaves one at the end with a sore bitterness that 15 years later that Clinton wasn't impeached for his real crimes and that the cover-up of the Waco murders continues to succeed. Actually, that's one of the reasons it's so good. We should be bitter, and we should remind each other over and over about the crimes committed against David Koresh and the Branch Davidians in 1993, and what happened--more to the point, what didn't happen--afterwards, in Washington. Cover-ups should not be allowed to succeed in the courts of public opinion, even if the politicians and their appointees and bureaucrats manage to elude even poetic justice. Toggling between the events of February 28 through April 19, "Waco: Rules of Engagement" tells the story of the government's murder--it's impossible to weigh the evidence presented without seeing it as anything but mass murder and a cover-up of the crimes--of the Branch Davidians, presenting numerous viewpoints, including taped interviews of victims who died in the final holocaust, and footage from the Joint Hearings of the Oversight Sub-Committee on Crime of July to August of 1995, the hearings which followed two years of unrelenting criticism by members of the public who saw the tragedy as a case of savage brutality by several government agencies against US citizens. But Rep. Tom Santos could play for the greater public who knew nothing more than what the media reported to them, which was for the most part propaganda. US Rep. Tom Lantos of California, a Democrat, was no stranger to the power of propaganda. He had been a victim of it in Europe, but after surviving the Holocaust he was able to use propaganda techniques to his own advantage during his political life in the US. "This is the approach of what I call the lunatic fringe," he said during the hearings, "[who] still clings to the notion that there was a gigantic governmental conspiracy that brought about this nightmare. Its difficult to see how any rational human being subscribes to such a notion, but obviously many do." Similar words were used, even by Jews, to refute reports that the unthinkable was occurring in Europe. They've been used more recently to discount dissenting theories of the government about the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. Plus ça change.... "What I am telling you," Rep. Lantos said, "is that the most plausible single explanation for this nightmare, namely the apocalyptic vision of a criminally insane, charismatic cult leader, who was hell-bent on bringing about this infernal nightmare in flames and the extermination of the children and the women and the other innocents is not an explanation that should be cast aside." What Lantos was referring to was not necessarily the most plausible, but the simplest. However, when departments and agencies such as the DoJ, FBI, and ATF are involved, the simplest explanation is not the most plausible. Despite all the evidence to the contrary, the committee not only did not cast aside what Lantos insisted was the most plausible, they embraced it. After all, that's what Congress does: they make deals: "You help us cover up the crimes of our party's administration, and when the time rolls around again for you, we'll do the same for yours." The committee was not without dissenters. Rep. Adam Schiff appeared in the film as one of the more sceptical committee members. (During the recent House Judiciary Committee Hearings on the Limits of Executive Power, Rep. Schiff stated his intention to establish a new "Church" committee to investigate deep state secret operations.) But the bipartsanship of the conclusions was clear. Utah Sen. Orrin G. Hatch, a Republican was unequivocal: "Let me be clear. This investigation has not uncovered any evidence of political corruption or influences. We have not found any of that. There was no conspiracy to kill Branch Davidians." But Delaware Sen. Joe Biden, a Democrat, should have been given an award for the most emphatic liar: "The record of the Waco incident documents mistakes. But what the record from Waco does not evidence, however, is any improper motive or intent on the part of law enforcement. David Koresh and the Davidians set fire to themselves and committed suicide. The government did not do that." Psychologists have said that it's some amount of lying is considered to be healthy. The lies that were told during the hearing were of the same sort told by a sociopath, whether it be beating his wife or murdering her and dismembering her body: "I could never do that," he is often heard saying, which is to say not that he didn't do it but that he neither wants you to believe he has committed the crime of which he is accused, nor does he even want to believe he is capable of it. Of course both statements of Sens. Hatch and Biden fly in the face of the evidence presented in the film, evidence that is but a fraction of what was presented to the committee in testimonies, graphics, and documents. "Waco: The Rules of Engagement" gives one of the last words to a dissenting viewpoint by former FBI forensic photographer Farris Rookstool, who was part of the evidence response team, and is no doubt as haunted today by the memories of what he witnessed as he was during those interviews. Speaking of the conclusionary statements of Hatch and Biden, he said, "That assertion to me, that the media and that the government has made a blanket declaration that the Branch Davidians committed quote mass suicide, to equate it to a Jonestown, Guyana suicide, is the most irresponsible statement that can be attributed to anything having to do with the Waco incident .And I find it very offending to me, and offensive to the memory of the Davidians and everyone else involved in this tragedy, to wrap it up in a nice clean, 'Well, it was just a mass suicide, end of story'; because it was far from that." Rookstool had photographed the mutilated and charred remains of the Davidian victims, including children whose spines were racked into backward arches due to the cyanide gas canisters launched into the building by ATF, FBI, DoJ, and military personnel (they were all equally culpable). The ATF, FBI, DoJ agents and all the others responsible for these crimes had to lie. They had to lie to each other and to their families and us, but most of all to themselves. The rules of engagement were that they were only to fire if they were fired upon and had to do so in order to defend themselves--not their wives and children, mind you, but themselves. The Davidians never fired until their lives and those of the women and children were in danger, and only after they begged for them to stop shooting at them. Rep. Lantos and Sens. Hatch and Biden, as well as the other committee members, such as Sen. Chuck Schumer, who agreed that there were only "mistakes" made, but no crimes committed, by the federal government during the Waco holocaust, which they euphemistically referred to as an "incident" are just as guilty of the murders of the Davidians as anyone who is an accessory to a crime after the fact. But their constituents saw them as guiltless. Orrin Hatch and Chuck Schumer are still US senators. Of course, so is Joe Biden, who could be the next Vice President. Being complicit in crimes against humanity haven't troubled him. Murder they say is easy after a while, especially when it's committed remotely from the grand halls of the Capitol, where their own opinions are more important than those of the victims or the public, outside of their own constituency, even when the victims number in the millions. In October 2002, Sen. Biden also voted in favor of the Resolution to Authorize Military Force Against Iraq, which means that he authorized the supreme war crime: aggressive invasion against a sovereign nation. It would be shocking to hear what Rep. Tom Lantos said during this 1995 hearing, were one to know nothing more about him than that he was a Holocaust survivor. However, this was not only the same congressman who was the leading champion of the First Gulf War, but the one who gave the official stamp of approval to the sensational propaganda about Iraqi soldiers' removing Kuwaiti babies from incubators. During the hearings, Lantos, along with Schumer, demonized David Koresh and was an apologist for the real perpetrators of the crimes against the Davidians, and served as an advocate for gun control, that standard platform of the Jewish-Zionist wing of the Democratic party. His hatred of Muslims and any American Christian who dares to fly a flag with the Star of David which means anything other than the Jewish state of Israel could not be more clear. It wasn't that Rep. Lantos didn't wish to cast aside that David Koresh was a criminally insane, charismatic cult leader who was stockpiling illegal guns to use against the government; he and Schumer would allow no other explanation. The psychiatrist who appears in "Waco: Rules of Engagment" said that when he went to Mount Carmel during the days of the standoff he thought that he would be studying the pathologies of the Davidians, but he found them to be the sane ones and the pathologies to be rampant among all the people lurking about outside waiting for the command that would bring the end. It was in the end the government agents, the press, and the public at the scene who had the insane apocalyptic vision. It seemed that it was also Rep. Lantos and his committee colleagues who projected their own apocalyptic fears onto David Koresh. Whatever psychological pathologies that may have afflicted Rep. Lantos, it seems they were not what got the better of him. He would still be a US congressman, perhaps voting us into the next war, had he not contracted cancer of the esophagus. He died in February 2008. While we would hope that the only survivor of the Holocaust to serve in Congress would have been a leading champion of human rights, this could hardly be further from being the case. Last year he berated the CEO of Yahoo for cooperating with the Chinese government by turning over information on a Chinese dissident, which resulted in a ten-year prison sentence.. But, besides the denial of justice for the holocaust victims of the Mount Carmel Community and being a leading proponent of the First Gulf War against Iraq, but was at first gung-ho about the invasion of Iraq in 2003 as well. Apparently he didn't have as much sympathy for real dying Texan and Iraqi babies as he did for fictional Kuwaiti ones. Plus ça change.... Others will take the place of Rep. Lantos, others who will be as caring to some populations as they are calloused toward others. All US citizens should watch "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," and William Gazecki should be fully funded to create a sequel--one which traces the aftermath of the murders of the Branch Davidians in the growth of the Patriot Movement, and its demise at the hands of the FBI, ADL, SPC, CIA, Mossad, and all the fellow travelers of those who have feared and framed the Patriots over the years. By now we know just how brutal our own government has been against its citizens and is capable of being. By now we know that it doesn't matter if it's Republicans or Democrats who are in control. Madeleine Albright, President Clinton's infamous Secretary of State who said that 600,000 children killed by that administration's sanctions against Iraq, was a foreign policy advisor to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and she transferred to Obama's camp after he became the presumptive Democratic candidate. Shall be also see a resurgence of others? Well, yes. There's Zbigniew Brzezinski, also on Obama's foreign relations advisory committee. He's a wiz at Russia and the former Soviet Republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia. What about Janet Reno? Plus ça change.... We already know the pro-corporate, anti-environment, anti-humanity oil-war themes of McCain and Palin. ...plus cest la même chose.
