Clinton Decries ‘War Against Police’ Meanwhile, Contrarian Clash Of Words Continues At Waco Disaster Hearings
As President Clinton denounced congressional hearings on the Waco disaster as part of an ideological “war against police,” House Republicans on Thursday used the hearings to raise the specter of the government’s making war on its own people.
The president told a group of senior law-enforcement officials 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.”
He said it was wrong to equate the innocent, if fatal, mistakes of federal agents and the moral “depravity” of the leader of the Branch Davidians sect.
On Capitol Hill, in the second day of hearings into the events that led to the 1993 standoff at the sect’s compound near Waco, Texas, Republicans sought to turn attention from the cult’s leader, David Koresh, to the two failed government raids and to the threat posed by military officers’ assistance of the federal agents who stormed the sect’s headquarters.
The contrarian clash of words that marked the hearings’ opening day Wednesday continued. Conservatives defended the counterculturalists. Liberals took a law-and-order stance. Republicans and Democrats cried shame at one another for the conduct of the hearings.
The Democrats continued their accusations that the National Rifle Association had infiltrated the Republicans’ investigative staff. Republicans called the Democrats panderers for questioning a 14-year-old girl Wednesday about how she was sexually abused by Koresh.
But no significant new evidence was cited as the members of the House Government Reform and Judiciary committees questioned military officers and a five-man panel of law-enforcement experts dubbed “the hindsight team” by some of the lawmakers.
The panel offered opinions about what went wrong in the 1993 siege, which began on Feb. 28 with a raid that left four agents of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms dead and ended 51 days later with an FBI assault and a fire that killed about 80 members of the sect.
One of the experts, a former senior official of the firearms agency, told the committee that he thought the agency had pressed for an assault “for the purposes of publicity,” and that some of the agents involved in the botched raid thought the same.
The former official, Robert Sanders, who was deputy director for enforcement and resigned from the agency in 1984, said that at the time of the initial assault, the ATF was “very troubled,” facing accusations of discrimination from black and female agents and worried about its budget, which was to be the subject of appropriations hearings within days.
The agents in the field thought the assault was “something forced on them by headquarters,” he said.
Democrats on the committee seized on Sanders as an example of what was wrong with the hearings.
In an interview, Rep. Charles E. Schumer, D-N.Y., described Sanders, now a lawyer in Washington, as “a disgruntled ATF member” who had no personal knowledge of the Waco disaster, received legal referrals from the National Rifle Association and met recently with NRA officials.