5 ms·

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee Ruby Ridge. Waco. The FBI hasn't "gone rotten" recently; they've

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee Ruby Ridge. Waco. The FBI hasn't "gone rotten" recently; they've been like this for quite some time.

IYasha 3y ago
It's rather just "by design".
llamaimperative 3y ago
The Waco incident obviously had a less than ideal outcome but actually I’m a huge, huge fan of the fact that someone went after a compound of militant child-enslaving rapists. Kind of weird to put it here as an indictment of the FBI.
- at_a_remove 3y ago
  They killed twenty-eight kids. This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children. They could have hardly performed worse in said child welfare unless they had made an itty-bitty Dachau and ran the kids through it.
  - bacchusracine 3y ago
    >They killed twenty-eight kids. >This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children. Not just that, but given the way things played out repeatedly (not just Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Elián González situation, etc) it's hard to believe much of what the FBI asserts happened in those cases. It's too difficult to not see some higher up putting their fingers on the scale and trying to whitewash what happened after the fact. What little we do know seems to really reek of REMFer controls over what was allowed to happen. And who can forget the infamous images of some of the agents standing over the ashes with grins? No the official story on Waco is one of the things that I cannot take at face value. It certainly didn't help going to public school and hearing about the events while attending a church that had an (undeserved) reputation due to busybodies who made up stories. I grew up sincerely wondering if one day the government was going to show up at my church one Sunday. For all that we're told the Branch Davidians were a cult (and certainly it sounded like they were depending on the sources you read up on) they had all the trappings of being just another church. It is only because we were told that they were cultists, that we were told they were child abusers that we mostly didn't wonder at how the government was acting towards a CHURCH, a place of WORSHIP. It's a serious blindspot, compounded by the fact that it was the government, their accusers who were responsible for all these deaths. Yeah, I've got questions.
  - sillystuff 3y ago
    Waco was a difficult situation. The authorities claimed a belief that doing nothing could lead to a mass suicide[1] (really a mass murder/suicide due to the children). This belief may have been reasonable based on the apocalyptic beliefs central to this Christian cult. But, the authorities when discussing the decision to go on the offensive with an armored vehicle punching holes into the buildings and firing teargas canisters into those holes made claims that seem contradictory. The authorities said that they were aware that the Dividians possessed enough gas masks for all the adults, but that they hoped that "motherly instincts" would take over, and the parents would allow the children to flee[1]. I don't see why they would believe this, if they believed the Dividians were capable of murdering their children in a mass murder suicide. Money is usually a factor in all things in the US. Perhaps cost was a factor in attempting to end the stand-off? Neighbors seemed to be becoming fatigued by the standoff too. An even more protracted siege may have ended better, or the Dividians might have chosen murder+suicide rather than surrendering no matter how long they were given. Wikipedia article[2] states: "Of the 85 Branch Davidians in the compound when the final siege began, 76 died on April 19 in various ways, from falling rubble to suffocating effects of the fire, or by gunshot from fellow Branch Davidians.[34] The siege had lasted 51 days." But, skimming through that 34th citation[3], I didn't see anything that stated that Davidians were killed by gunfire from other Davidians (perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so). But, it and the LA Times article report on fire investigators who found various fire accelerants including kerosene and lighter fluid in multiple locations and on multiple members of the Christian cult. And, quite the armory of weapons including over a million spent round casings (many firearms illegally modified to be fully automatic) in the possession of the Davidians. I heard an interview with an divinity scholar who said he and others had tried to reach David Koresh to try to convince him that his reading of the Apocalypses was incorrect (IIRC these attempts included messages delivered through advertisements taken out with local media). They believed that if they could convince Koresh he would end the standoff. Having interacted with religious zealots, this seems naive to me, but it certainly would have been worth trying. (I cannot remember the divinity scholar's name and my vague subject searches did not return anything useful) [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-20-mn-25027-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-20-mn-25027-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians [3] (this is wikipedia article citation #34) https://web.archive.org/web/20170511015809/https://www.justice.gov/publications/waco/report-deputy-attorney-general-events-waco-texas-aftermath-april-19-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20170511015809/https://www.justi...
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  I think you can both support going after "militant child-enslaving rapists" and disagree with the methods they choose in waco... To move it away from political charged event like waco generally the police have a habit today of creating more violent situations, often under the guise of "officer safety" when in reality is "street justice" they are after.
  - beebmam 3y ago
    What specific methods do you disapprove of in their handling of this child rapist cult?
    - SoftTalker 3y ago
      Tanks? Setting the place on fire with people inside?
      - llamaimperative 3y ago
        The cause of the fire was thoroughly investigated and found that the child-rapist doomsday death cult brought lit the fires themselves. You know, as death cults tend to do. It could totally be possible that 1) death cult did not have death-cult level convictions AND 2) FBI felt like burning a bunch of children alive AND 3) no one has offered good evidence of this Or it's just a really gnarly situation that did indeed need to be handled by someone and came out to a pretty bad outcome still. Tanks sound ridiculous until you see they had grenade launchers, grenades, several fully automatic rifles, and 200,000 rounds of ammunition for 136 firearms.
        phpisthebest 3y ago
        Yes the FBI investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong... ::shocked pikachu face:: That said, even your telling is not the official narrative, as the official narrative was inconclusive as to the cause which the FBI claims was either intentional or accidental by people in the building. Of course there is no mention of them shooting massive amounts amounts of highly flammable gas into the building, with the full knowledge their primary heat source was open flame heaters....
- armenarmen 3y ago
  By burning all the children alive?
  - llamaimperative 3y ago
    Seems well established that the death cult lit the fires themselves as death cults tend to when under pressure. From audio recordings inside the compound: ``` 6:01 a.m.: A combat engineering vehicle (CEV) hits the building and sprays bursts of liquified CS gas powder. A Hostage Rescue Team sniper sees green tracer rounds fired at the CEV from the compound. FBI commanders shift to their "compromise plan" and gas the entire building. 6:09 a.m.: Davidians discuss pouring something in a hallway. One asks, "David said pour it, right?" Another says, "David said we have to get the fuel on." 6:19 a.m.: Koresh says, "Nobody comes in, huh?" Someone answers, "Nobody comes in." "Allright. They got some fuel around here?" Koresh asks. Schneider says, "Yeah, everybody." 6:29 a.m.: FBI commanders report that a CEV accidentally cut the Davidians' telephone line. 7:08 a.m.: A man says, "Real quickly you can order the fire, yes." 7:21 a.m.: Amid talk of spreading fuel, a man says, "So, we only light it first when they come in with the tank. ...right as they're coming in?" "Right," someone replies. A voice calls, "We should get more hay in here." ```
- newsclues 3y ago
  When did the government raid the Epstein and other elite peso compounds?
phpisthebest 3y ago
The second you grant government agents rights and privileges not given to the general population, and then on top of that provide them immunity from just about all accountability both systemic, and individual you have the makings of Tyranny... As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we have had plenty of "good intentions" granting both federal and local police ever increasing power, and ever decreasing accountability.
- o0banky0o 3y ago
  Total armchair hero here, even with accountability tyrannical behavior is still persistent, because at the end of the day you still have to go and actively put your hands on people. It's reminiscent of how DRM is always circumvented because it's inherent that the content must at some point finally be revealed, and how immune cells inevitably kill the occasional normal healthy cells. It's a genuinely unsolved problem from antiquity
herbstein 3y ago
Just take a look at COINTELPRO. It's been way longer than Ruby Ridge. One might even say it's been like that since day 1.
jjulius 3y ago
"Well, I, uhh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up, sir." - Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove
jzb 3y ago
Waco is more an example of the FBI doing something it should have been doing, but doing it incompetently. Which is certainly a discussion to have, but intervening against the Branch Davidians seems well within the mandate of law enforcement given what was going on there. It shouldn't have happened the way it did, but that doesn't mean the ATF or FBI were over-reaching. The FBI's history of over-reach and wire-tapping goes back to the 40s and was well-known [even in the mid-80s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies).
- Quillbert182 3y ago
  I would argue that the FBI and ATF should not have been there at all, and the situation should have been handled by local and state law enforcement.
  - ethanbond 3y ago
    They had the option to handle it any time between 1957 and 1993 > After the siege, McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell told The Dallas Morning News: "I would have tried to arrest him, and I would've never walked out of there alive. One day there had to be a confrontation with them. They were building for this."
- phpisthebest 3y ago
  I think the ATF has a much higher incident rate of over-reach then the FBI, the FBI tends to create thier own crimes by "infiltrating" non-violent groups, then making them into extremist, providing them with a plan for a crime, then arresting them before they carry out the FBI informants plan... ATF however tends to just rewrite regulation based on political goals, and then use their new regulations to make people felon's then respond to these new felons with extreme violence. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and many other famous cases like them were all started by the incompetent ATF not FBI. ATF routinely violates the civil rights of citizens and an business owners, openly and with out remorse. Personally I think Waco would have turned out far differently if the FBI was the original agency going after them. the FBI only came in after the ATF royally fucked everything up, as usual
- 3y ago
dumpsterlid 3y ago
[dead]
permo-w 3y ago
>The FBI hasn't "gone rotten" recently was the article even remotely suggesting this?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee Ruby Ridge. Waco. The FBI hasn't "gone rotten" recently; they've been like this for quite some time.

IYasha 3y ago

It's rather just "by design".

llamaimperative 3y ago

The Waco incident obviously had a less than ideal outcome but actually I’m a huge, huge fan of the fact that someone went after a compound of militant child-enslaving rapists. Kind of weird to put it here as an indictment of the FBI.

at_a_remove 3y ago
They killed twenty-eight kids. This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children. They could have hardly performed worse in said child welfare unless they had made an itty-bitty Dachau and ran the kids through it.
- bacchusracine 3y ago
  >They killed twenty-eight kids. >This suggests that "going after" the compound was not really about the welfare of any children. Not just that, but given the way things played out repeatedly (not just Waco, Ruby Ridge, the Elián González situation, etc) it's hard to believe much of what the FBI asserts happened in those cases. It's too difficult to not see some higher up putting their fingers on the scale and trying to whitewash what happened after the fact. What little we do know seems to really reek of REMFer controls over what was allowed to happen. And who can forget the infamous images of some of the agents standing over the ashes with grins? No the official story on Waco is one of the things that I cannot take at face value. It certainly didn't help going to public school and hearing about the events while attending a church that had an (undeserved) reputation due to busybodies who made up stories. I grew up sincerely wondering if one day the government was going to show up at my church one Sunday. For all that we're told the Branch Davidians were a cult (and certainly it sounded like they were depending on the sources you read up on) they had all the trappings of being just another church. It is only because we were told that they were cultists, that we were told they were child abusers that we mostly didn't wonder at how the government was acting towards a CHURCH, a place of WORSHIP. It's a serious blindspot, compounded by the fact that it was the government, their accusers who were responsible for all these deaths. Yeah, I've got questions.
- sillystuff 3y ago
  Waco was a difficult situation. The authorities claimed a belief that doing nothing could lead to a mass suicide[1] (really a mass murder/suicide due to the children). This belief may have been reasonable based on the apocalyptic beliefs central to this Christian cult. But, the authorities when discussing the decision to go on the offensive with an armored vehicle punching holes into the buildings and firing teargas canisters into those holes made claims that seem contradictory. The authorities said that they were aware that the Dividians possessed enough gas masks for all the adults, but that they hoped that "motherly instincts" would take over, and the parents would allow the children to flee[1]. I don't see why they would believe this, if they believed the Dividians were capable of murdering their children in a mass murder suicide. Money is usually a factor in all things in the US. Perhaps cost was a factor in attempting to end the stand-off? Neighbors seemed to be becoming fatigued by the standoff too. An even more protracted siege may have ended better, or the Dividians might have chosen murder+suicide rather than surrendering no matter how long they were given. Wikipedia article[2] states: "Of the 85 Branch Davidians in the compound when the final siege began, 76 died on April 19 in various ways, from falling rubble to suffocating effects of the fire, or by gunshot from fellow Branch Davidians.[34] The siege had lasted 51 days." But, skimming through that 34th citation[3], I didn't see anything that stated that Davidians were killed by gunfire from other Davidians (perhaps I missed it, but I don't think so). But, it and the LA Times article report on fire investigators who found various fire accelerants including kerosene and lighter fluid in multiple locations and on multiple members of the Christian cult. And, quite the armory of weapons including over a million spent round casings (many firearms illegally modified to be fully automatic) in the possession of the Davidians. I heard an interview with an divinity scholar who said he and others had tried to reach David Koresh to try to convince him that his reading of the Apocalypses was incorrect (IIRC these attempts included messages delivered through advertisements taken out with local media). They believed that if they could convince Koresh he would end the standoff. Having interacted with religious zealots, this seems naive to me, but it certainly would have been worth trying. (I cannot remember the divinity scholar's name and my vague subject searches did not return anything useful) [1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-20-mn-25027-story.html https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1993-04-20-mn-25027-... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_Davidians [3] (this is wikipedia article citation #34) https://web.archive.org/web/20170511015809/https://www.justice.gov/publications/waco/report-deputy-attorney-general-events-waco-texas-aftermath-april-19-fire https://web.archive.org/web/20170511015809/https://www.justi...
phpisthebest 3y ago
I think you can both support going after "militant child-enslaving rapists" and disagree with the methods they choose in waco... To move it away from political charged event like waco generally the police have a habit today of creating more violent situations, often under the guise of "officer safety" when in reality is "street justice" they are after.
- beebmam 3y ago
  What specific methods do you disapprove of in their handling of this child rapist cult?
  - SoftTalker 3y ago
    Tanks? Setting the place on fire with people inside?
    - llamaimperative 3y ago
      The cause of the fire was thoroughly investigated and found that the child-rapist doomsday death cult brought lit the fires themselves. You know, as death cults tend to do. It could totally be possible that 1) death cult did not have death-cult level convictions AND 2) FBI felt like burning a bunch of children alive AND 3) no one has offered good evidence of this Or it's just a really gnarly situation that did indeed need to be handled by someone and came out to a pretty bad outcome still. Tanks sound ridiculous until you see they had grenade launchers, grenades, several fully automatic rifles, and 200,000 rounds of ammunition for 136 firearms.
      - phpisthebest 3y ago
        Yes the FBI investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong... ::shocked pikachu face:: That said, even your telling is not the official narrative, as the official narrative was inconclusive as to the cause which the FBI claims was either intentional or accidental by people in the building. Of course there is no mention of them shooting massive amounts amounts of highly flammable gas into the building, with the full knowledge their primary heat source was open flame heaters....
armenarmen 3y ago
By burning all the children alive?
- llamaimperative 3y ago
  Seems well established that the death cult lit the fires themselves as death cults tend to when under pressure. From audio recordings inside the compound: ``` 6:01 a.m.: A combat engineering vehicle (CEV) hits the building and sprays bursts of liquified CS gas powder. A Hostage Rescue Team sniper sees green tracer rounds fired at the CEV from the compound. FBI commanders shift to their "compromise plan" and gas the entire building. 6:09 a.m.: Davidians discuss pouring something in a hallway. One asks, "David said pour it, right?" Another says, "David said we have to get the fuel on." 6:19 a.m.: Koresh says, "Nobody comes in, huh?" Someone answers, "Nobody comes in." "Allright. They got some fuel around here?" Koresh asks. Schneider says, "Yeah, everybody." 6:29 a.m.: FBI commanders report that a CEV accidentally cut the Davidians' telephone line. 7:08 a.m.: A man says, "Real quickly you can order the fire, yes." 7:21 a.m.: Amid talk of spreading fuel, a man says, "So, we only light it first when they come in with the tank. ...right as they're coming in?" "Right," someone replies. A voice calls, "We should get more hay in here." ```
newsclues 3y ago
When did the government raid the Epstein and other elite peso compounds?

phpisthebest 3y ago

The second you grant government agents rights and privileges not given to the general population, and then on top of that provide them immunity from just about all accountability both systemic, and individual you have the makings of Tyranny... As the saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions, and we have had plenty of "good intentions" granting both federal and local police ever increasing power, and ever decreasing accountability.

o0banky0o 3y ago
Total armchair hero here, even with accountability tyrannical behavior is still persistent, because at the end of the day you still have to go and actively put your hands on people. It's reminiscent of how DRM is always circumvented because it's inherent that the content must at some point finally be revealed, and how immune cells inevitably kill the occasional normal healthy cells. It's a genuinely unsolved problem from antiquity

herbstein 3y ago

Just take a look at COINTELPRO. It's been way longer than Ruby Ridge. One might even say it's been like that since day 1.

jjulius 3y ago

"Well, I, uhh, don't think it's quite fair to condemn a whole program because of a single slip up, sir." - Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson, Dr. Strangelove

jzb 3y ago

Waco is more an example of the FBI doing something it should have been doing, but doing it incompetently. Which is certainly a discussion to have, but intervening against the Branch Davidians seems well within the mandate of law enforcement given what was going on there. It shouldn't have happened the way it did, but that doesn't mean the ATF or FBI were over-reaching. The FBI's history of over-reach and wire-tapping goes back to the 40s and was well-known [even in the mid-80s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_FBI_controversies).

Quillbert182 3y ago
I would argue that the FBI and ATF should not have been there at all, and the situation should have been handled by local and state law enforcement.
- ethanbond 3y ago
  They had the option to handle it any time between 1957 and 1993 > After the siege, McLennan County Sheriff Jack Harwell told The Dallas Morning News: "I would have tried to arrest him, and I would've never walked out of there alive. One day there had to be a confrontation with them. They were building for this."
phpisthebest 3y ago
I think the ATF has a much higher incident rate of over-reach then the FBI, the FBI tends to create thier own crimes by "infiltrating" non-violent groups, then making them into extremist, providing them with a plan for a crime, then arresting them before they carry out the FBI informants plan... ATF however tends to just rewrite regulation based on political goals, and then use their new regulations to make people felon's then respond to these new felons with extreme violence. Ruby Ridge, Waco, and many other famous cases like them were all started by the incompetent ATF not FBI. ATF routinely violates the civil rights of citizens and an business owners, openly and with out remorse. Personally I think Waco would have turned out far differently if the FBI was the original agency going after them. the FBI only came in after the ATF royally fucked everything up, as usual
3y ago

dumpsterlid 3y ago

[dead]

permo-w 3y ago

>The FBI hasn't "gone rotten" recently was the article even remotely suggesting this?