Text Excerpt 4: Waco Holocaust Electronic Museum

			   Designed to Fail

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    [Image of newspaper headline: Slain agent is eulogized as 'one of
    the very best'] The deaths of the ATF agents were necessary to
    justify a military siege and testing of the National Response
    Plan. Armed with headlines (like this one in the Waco
    Tribune-Herald, March 4, 1993), the US military had all the public
    approval they needed to escalate their war against the Branch
    Davidians. Compare tactics used in Waco to those used in the Gulf
    of Tonkin, described below.
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Few military operations are designed for failure. But the February 28,
1993 assault on the Mt. Carmel Center seems to have been one such
operation.

Given the desire of the new military to establish new paradigms (see
"The New Military and the New Paradigms" in the War Gallery), there
was reason for the failure of the raid. Without the death of the four
ATF agents in the failed raid, it is doubtful that the American public
would have supported moving in massive war equipment and escalating
the war against the Davidians during the next 50 days. Without the
deaths of the four ATF agents in the failed raid, the new paradigm of
the military annihilation of citizens under the color of law would not
have been established.

The Commander-in-Chief himself validated this observation: "The first
thing I did after the ATF agents were killed, once we knew that the
FBI was going to go in, was to ask that the military be consulted
because of the quasi-military nature of the conflict, given the
resources that Koresh had in his compound and their obvious
willingness to use them," President Clinton said (Washingon Times,
April 24, 1993).

		       Gulf of Tonkin Incident

Modern history furnishes other examples of incidents deliberately set
up to achieve a political result. The Pentagon Papers disclose that
for six months before the Tonkin Gulf incident in August, 1964, the US
had been mounting clandestine military attacks against North Vietnam,
including kidnapping North Vietnam citizens for intelligence
information, commando raids to blow up rail and highway bridges, and
bombardment of North Vietnamese coastal installations by PT
boats. (Pentagon Papers, pg. 238).  This was done while planning to
obtain a Congressional resolution that the Administration regarded as
an equivalent to a declaration of war. (Pentagon Papers, pg. 234.)

On August 5, 1964, President Johnson called congressional leaders to
the White House and told them that North Vietnamese naval vessels had
flagrantly and without provocation attacked two US destroyers in the
Gulf of Tonkin. President Johnson had the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution
drawn up, and it flew through both the House of Representatives and
the Senate with virtually no debate. On August 7, the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution had been passed, continuation and escalation of military
reprisals against the North were given congressional blessing. "In the
heat of the Tonkin clash, the Administration had accomplished
. . . preparing the American public for escalation" (Pentagon Papers,
pg. 269).

"The Tonkin Gulf reprisal constituted an important firebreak and the
Tonkin Gulf resolution set US public support for virtually any action"
(study quoted in Pentagon Papers, pg. 269).

Several years later the Senate Foreign Relations Committee conducted
an inquiry into the events of August, 1964. Senator Fulbright would
later write that the Pentagon had misrepresented the actual event, and
that the US had provoked the attack.

"Only when we began those later hearings on the Tonkin Gulf did it
really begin to dawn on me that we had been deceived. In the
beginning--before Vietnam, that is--it never occurred to me that
presidents and their secretaries of state and defense would deceive a
Senate committee.

"I thought you could trust them to tell you the truth, even if they
did not tell you everything. But I was naive, and the
misrepresentation of the Tonkin Golf affair was very effective in
deceiving the Foreign Relations Committee and the country, and me,
because we didn't believe it possible that we could be so completely
misled." (J. William Fulbright, The Price of Empire, pg. 107.)

Next: Excerpt 5, The Secret Raid that Lacked a Marching Band
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Entire set of text excerpts from the Museum available with anonymous
ftp from ftp://ftp.public-action.com/wm2-0txt.zip Excerpted by Carol
Valentine. Images omitted. Visit the Museum at
http://www.holocausts.org/waco

SkyWriter@holocausts.org

Copyright 1996-2000 by Carol A. Valentine, on loan to Public Action,
Inc. All commercial rights are reserved. Full statement of terms and
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