20 years ago was Waco, 10 things you may not know

[InRareForm]

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/criminal-justice/10-things-you-may-not-know-about-waco/

[boutons_deux]

no mention of LAPD's "burner" gas/smoke bombs?

[BobaFett1]

David Koresh was a nut job he got what he deserved.

[ChumpDumper]

Yeah, people still don't know the Davidians started the fires.

[Winehole23]

Malcolm Gladwell on the Branch Davidians: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2014/03/31/140331fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

[Winehole23]

Not long after the Waco siege began, James Tabor, the Biblical scholar, heard David Koresh on CNN talking about the Seven Seals. Tabor is an expert on Biblical apocalypticism and recognized the Branch Davidians for what they were—a community immersed in the world of the Old Testament prophets. He contacted a fellow religious scholar, Phillip Arnold, and together they went to the F.B.I. “It became clear to me that neither the officials in charge nor the media who were sensationally reporting the sexual escapades of David Koresh had a clue about the biblical world which this group inhabited,” Tabor writes, in an essay about his role in the Mount Carmel conflict. “I realized that in order to deal with David Koresh, and to have any chance for a peaceful resolution of the Waco situation, one would have to understand and make use of these biblical texts.”


Arnold and Tabor began long discussions with Livingstone Fagan, a Branch Davidian who had been sent out of Mount Carmel early in the siege to act as a spokesman. Fagan was a Jamaican-born Brit, and one of the community’s scholars—a man known for greeting others with the very English “Hello, Livingstone Fagan here. Shall we study?” Fagan helped Tabor and Arnold understand that Mount Carmel’s adherents thought they were living through the “fifth seal”—a late stage in the end of time, during which believers are asked to suffer through a round of bloodshed, to “wait a little season,” and then to suffer a second round.


This was why the Davidians wouldn’t leave. They had been through the first round of violence, with the initial A.T.F. raid. Now they were doing as they believed the Bible compelled them to do—waiting. “We were fascinated by the way in which the literal words of this text dominated the entire situation,” Tabor writes. But they also saw the peril ahead—the promised second round of bloodshed. “Might they not provoke a violent end to things simply because they felt it was the predetermined will of God, moving things along to the sixth seal, which was the great Judgment Day of God?” Tabor asks.

same

[SnakeBoy]

All I know is that it was a victory for paramilitary police tactics.

[Winehole23]

they might have detained Mr. Koresh out of the compound, or served a warrant without force. local LE was on speaking terms. traditional LE might have worked, but wasn't tried.