Pining for a real conspiracy

Little Black Box
    By Alex DeMille

How many Branch Davidians can you fit in a car? Ten: two in the front, two in the back, and six in the ashtray. Ha!

I remember watching the news on Apr. 19, 1993, the day on which cult leader David Koresh and 80 of his followers were consumed by smoke and fire in a wooden compound in Waco, Tex. Shortly after images of the inferno were broadcast on CNN, amidst speculation of foul play by the FBI, it was revealed that the Davidians had set the compound on fire in a final desperate act of mass suicide. Even a 12-year-old pubescent kid like myself found this a little odd. Yes, cult members do strange things. They slit their wrists. They drink goat's blood. They chug poison and blow their brains out. But who voluntarily roasts themselves alive? Others were similarly suspicious, most notably the families of the dead Davidians. Janet Reno and a few other authority figures were under political fire for a while, but eventually the whole event dissipated into the collective depository of American forgetfulness. The wackos in Waco torched themselves, Americans decided. Nothing could have been done.

Now, six years and a TV movie later, the ghosts of Waco have come back to haunt the Justice Department and the FBI, who laid siege to the compound for 51 days before its fiery end. Suddenly, evidence appeared showing that, despite assurances to the contrary, FBI agents fired potentially flammable tear gas cannisters at the compound. This evidence was kept from Reno and the Justice Department for six years. Now, a total of six separate investigative committees have been launched simultaneously to find out who held what evidence. Who was truly ignorant and who was just feigning it? Did the FBI fire the cannisters at the compound or at a different compound some yards away? Why was there a page missing from the Justice Department's report? Who, in the end, was responsible for six years of lies?

What we have here is a perfect '90s cover-up. The '90s cover-up is different from all previous cover-ups. Gone are the days of Watergate and Iran-Contra. Secret bombings in Cambodia have become live broadcast media extravaganzas in Kosovo. No longer do we have a sinister Shadow Government. Now we just have a stupid one.

If the FBI was responsible for burning down the Waco compound, it certainly was not intentional. It was a stupid mistake, a catastrophic miscalculation. Government agencies don't regularly massacre cult members who aren't a threat to anyone but themselves; it's bad PR. Instead, this cover-up, perpetrated through concealing evidence, was pulled off simply so the government wouldn't look incompetent. We can rest easy knowing that government conspiracies are no longer devised to hide malicious agendas, but rather to save face following truly bungling acts of stupidity.

Take the China spy scandal. Here we have uncovered decades of nuclear espionage by a potentially powerful and dangerous nation. In addition, it seems that the Clinton administration, reportedly sympathetic to the Chinese, knew about a particularly damaging security breach years before it was uncovered. The public was shocked. Conspiracy theorists and paranoid X-Files fans all over the nation licked their lips in anticipation. Their hunger for evil government plots, noticeably absent from the political forum for some years now, would finally be satiated.

Yet the veil of cover-up was pulled back to reveal not a 30-year secret collaboration with China, nor an evil and manipulative scheme to reignite the Cold War. Instead, the real culprit was a completely ineffective security system run by incompetent officials followed by the sloppy, botched FBI investigation that followed.

Two points for idiocy, zero for evil. Where's the malicious scheming? What happened to the powerful, megalomaniacal bureaucrats? We don't arm rebel groups anymore, we just let them die. And where's the CIA? They haven't done anything since the invention of crack.

Yes, the American people are lied to. The Waco incident is ample evidence of that. But why do all roads lead to incompetence? If my government is going to try to hide the truth, at least let it be a truth that's worth hiding.

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• Coping with foolishness after Columbine, 9/3/99

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