A whitewash of the FBI and its blunders in the tragedy at Waco, Texas, has been submitted, raising new questions about the operations of the bureau and its oversight by the Justice Department and the Clinton administration.
The whitewash, prepared by a friendly former Justice Department official, found blame for no one - from Attorney General Janet Reno down to FBI supervisors and field agents - in the FBI's decision on April 19 to attack a religious cult compound with tanks and tear gas.That raid, planned by FBI specialists to end a 51-day standoff with the Branch Davidian cult and its leader, David Koresh, ended in a fire set by the Koresh followers. An estimated 75 persons were killed, at least 25 of them children.
They didn't march peacefully out of the compound when roaring tanks spewed tear gas and rammed holes in the fragile structures, as one wacko theory by FBI experts predicted they would. Instead, the frantic inhabitants killed each other and themselves, just as other experts had predicted.
In a closely related earlier probe, a tougher report by outsiders criticized the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms for mistakes that on Feb. 28 started the appalling chain of events of death and destruction at Waco.
That ATF report, commissioned by the Treasury Department, assigned blame top-to-bottom in the ATF for the bungled initial attack on the cult and resulted in a series of forced retirements and firings.
In the initial encounter at Waco, four ATF agents were shot to death and several others wounded by gunmen inside the compound when supervisors ordered a raid to commence, even after - as the Treasury probers established - ATF leaders knew Koresh and his followers had been warned agents were coming.
An element of the ATF finding was that officials had sought to cover up ATF mistakes and mislead superiors, diverting blame and accountability in the botched initial raid.
Despite evidence of similar FBI misinformation - that "child abuse" had to be stopped inside the cult compound, for example, or that FBI resources were so stretched that an immediate confrontation was necessary, or that the tank attack was the only remedy, or that there was little likelihood of mass suicide - the whitewash report on the FBI action at Waco drew no conclusions of error.
There wasn't even comment on admissions about controversies inside the FBI as to what to do about the Branch Davidian standoff and how to end it.
The evaluation of the FBI conduct in the Waco tragedy, as submitted by former Justice Department official Edward S.G. Dennis Jr., even included a bizarre assertion that the FBI "exhibited extraordinary restraint and handled this crisis with great professionalism."
So far there's been no peep of presidential protest or approval of either the FBI whitewash or the harsher finding against the ATF, both agencies clearly involved in the fatally flawed operations against the same band of cultists.
It may be another insight into the Clinton White House and a president who apparently prefers his decisions already chewed up and digested, a chief executve who hesitates to decide the hard ones for himself.