|
CounterPunch
September
24, 2002
America's Saddam?
by JACK WHEELER
In light of Janet Reno's concession of defeat
in Florida's primary elections, and as an addendum to Chris Ruddy
and Carl Limbacher's current best seller, "Catastrophe,"
America needs to remember the horrific evil perpetrated by then-Attorney
General Reno in the first months of the Clinton presidency.
In March of 1993, I was the keynote speaker
at a conference of business and civic leaders held in Indianapolis.
One of those attending was a federal judge named Joe (it's best
not to mention his last name). He seemed a nice, decent fellow
who not once hinted that (as I had been informed by the organizer
of the conference) he was on the short list of candidates to
be the new director of the FBI. The current FBI director, William
Sessions, had announced his attention to resign as soon as the
recently inaugurated Bill Clinton found a replacement.
Joe and I sat together at lunch and the
conversation was pleasant ? until someone at the table brought
up Waco.
The ATF had assaulted the Davidian church
complex a month earlier and the standoff was ensuing, with the
final holocaust a month away. When I asked Joe what he thought
of what was going on at Waco, his entire demeanor and body language
changed, his face turned purple with rage, and he announced:
"I'll tell you what the FBI should do. Those people [the
Davidians] killed federal agents. We should go in there and kill
every last one of them."
Someone responded, "There are children
in there, Joe." Joe brushed the comment aside with a wave
of his hand. "You don't understand. No one can get away
with killing federal agents. They all deserve to be killed in
return."
Joe was passed over in favor of Louis
Freeh, but he exemplified the mindset not just of the FBI but
also of so many in law enforcement in general. As anyone who
has made the mistake of arguing with a police officer giving
them a traffic ticket understands, the most heinous crime anyone
can commit, more evil and depraved than child molestation, is
Contempt of Cop.
You know the joke: A conservative is
a liberal who's been mugged; a liberal is a conservative who's
been arrested. Smart-mouth a cop and you're asking for a world
of grief. Fight back and defend yourself from police action,
no matter what the action is, and your life is in danger.
This is what happened at Waco. The Davidians
tried to defend themselves from an armed ATF raid, set up as
a pure publicity stunt to better argue for increased funding.
That the raid had a flimsy pretext and was botched was irrelevant
to the federal law enforcement community, however. No matter
how and why, federal agents were killed and revenge had to be
taken. The FBI man in charge of the siege and final death raid
of April 19, Richard Rogers, thought exactly like Joe.
It is important to grasp that what happened
in Waco was no accident, that the Davidians were killed on purpose
in an act of revenge by the American government. And it is important
to know just how they were killed, that the method of their killing
was as grisly and evil as anything perpetrated by Saddam Hussein.
On the morning of April 19, 1993, the
FBI smashed holes into the Davidian church complex and began
pumping in a chemical warfare agent known as CS (o-chlorobenzylidenemalononitrile).
It is a solid in the form of white crystals. The FBI dissolved
the CS powder in an organic solvent so they could liquid spray
it into the buildings.
A lot of attention has been paid to the
horror of CS, but not much on the solvent. It's called methylene
chloride, MC. Ever bought paint remover and noticed the label
warning to use it "only in a well-ventilated area"?
That's because it contains MC.
The effects of MC are exactly the same
as those of chloroform if you use twice as much of it. When a
person breathes MC (or chloroform at half the concentration)
vapor he or she first becomes irritable. Second, they lose their
coordination and judgment, while their vision becomes blurred.
Third, they become paranoid and hyper-excitable. Fourth, they
experience auditory and visual hallucinations. Fifth, they lapse
into muscular paralysis and unconsciousness.
It is this fifth stage that caused surgeons
to use chloroform as the first anesthetic in the 19th century.
But doctors switched to ether because of uncontrollable behavior
of the patients going through the first four stages ? and because
of a last sixth stage. If you use only about two times as much
chloroform as it takes to render someone unconscious, the patient
suffers respiratory paralysis, stops breathing, and dies. It
is the same with MC.
The FBI cut off the electricity to the
Davidians and knew all they had
for light were kerosene lamps. Yet they
sprayed into their buildings hundreds of pounds of methylene
chloride, which makes people stumble around like they're drunk,
with no coordination, with blurry vision, hallucinating and excitable:
a guarantee that kerosene lamps would be knocked over and fires
started.
In the presence of fire, MC vapor decomposes
into hydrogen chloride, which has the same effect on any moisture-laden
area of the body as sulfur mustard gas used in World War I: excruciating
searing pain in the eyes, the mucous lining of the nose, and
the lungs.
Remember that the FBI used MC as a solvent
to dissolve CS crystals. It turns out that when CS is burned,
it produces hydrogen cyanide, the same gas used to execute prisoners
on Death Row.
During the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein
discovered the most lethal chemical warfare agent was a combination
of sulfur mustard gas with hydrogen cyanide, which he used in
artillery shells to slaughter thousands of Iranians. It was in
effect this same combination that the FBI used to slaughter 87
men, women and children in Waco.
The question is: Who authorized the CS/MC
combination? CS is not normally dissolved into a solution. Who
knew about MC and could order it to be a solvent for CS? Sit
down, folks, and hold on tight: Janet Reno has a Bachelor of
Science Degree in Chemistry from Cornell University. Cornell
has a very good chemistry department. MC is used as an organic
solvent for many experiments. There is no question Reno would
be very familiar with it, and was informed of its dangers by
her professors. Janet Reno is America's Saddam Hussein.
Congressman Bob Barr, R-Ga., has a coroner's
photograph taken of one of the Davidian victims entitled "Doe
#57." It is of a little girl around 5 or 6 years old, her
charred body burned beyond recognition and twisted in the ghastly
rictus contortion typical of subjection to hydrogen cyanide.
There are few more monstrous crimes against
humanity than torturing children to death in screaming pain,
poison-gassing them to death on purpose. That the perpetrator
of this crime wasn't tried and executed for mass homicide, but
was instead lionized by the media, served out her term of office,
and came close to being elected as the Democrat nominee for the
governor of Florida says something very dark about human nature.
The slaughter of American citizens by
their government at Waco was dismissed by many Americans, because
the people killed were "just cultists" ? like Germans
who excused Nazi pogroms because the people killed were "just
Jews." As America comes to grips with the danger and evil
of Saddam Hussein and gets ready to extinguish it, America also
needs to come to grips with the evil it condoned at Waco.
America condoned a vast amount of depravity
during the Clinton years. Yet the depravity of Waco was the worst
of all. Unless expunged through public revulsion of Janet Reno,
it will remain an ineradicable stain on America's soul.
(C)copyright 2002
Dr. Jack Wheeler and the Freedom Research
Foundation
Today's Features
Gary Leupp
On the
Contemporary Relevance of the Manchurian Incident
Will Youmans
Campus Watch: Vigilante Thought Police
Uri Avnery
The Murder
of Arafat
Steve Hendricks
Wild,
Wild West of Politics:
Being Green in Montana
Philip Farruggio
Democratic
Party Shams
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
Another
Oil War
Rev. Robert Bowman
What Would
Jesus Do?
Lawrence Davidson
Web
War Comes to America
Chris Meyer
Six Weeks
of Quiet?
New
Print Edition of CounterPunch Available Exclusively
to Subscribers:
- Hunting Commie Perverts:
The Scarlet Professor
- DC's Best Political
Mind; DC's Most Dangerous Man;
- Dershowitz the Torturer:
Guess Why He Wants Clean Needles;
- Lese Majeste: That's
Against the Law Too;
- The Greatest Endorsement
AAA Will Ever Get;
- Merle Haggard on Civil
Liberties;
- Dullness Hailed: The Press on the Defeat of McKinney,
Traficant and Barr;
- National Review Puffs
into Town.
Remember, the CounterPunch website is
supported exclusively by subscribers to our newsletter. Our worldwide
web audience is soaring , with about seven million hits a month
now. This is inspiring, but the work involved also compels us
to remind you more urgently than ever to subscribe and/or make
a (tax deductible) donation if you can afford it. If you find our site useful please: Subscribe
Now!
Or Call Toll Free 1 800 840 3683
home / subscribe
/ about us
/ books
/ archives
/ search
/ links
/
|
September
21 / 22, 2002
Alexander
Cockburn
An Entire
Class
of Thieves
Tom Gorman
The Press & Sabra
and Shatila
Amelia Peltz
Anniversary with Life
in Palestine
Susan Martinez
By the Hand
of the Father
Ben Tripp
Advice from
a Polemicist
Adam Engel
From Above:
Forgetting bin Laden
Chris Clarke
The Ann Coulter Test
Tariq Ali
Doing as the
Romans Did
Mokhiber / Weissman
The Bush Victory
in Iraq
Ralph Nader
Greed Without Limits
Thomas Croft
The Life of Jim Cummings
Anthony Gancarski
Concerned Citizen:
a serialized Novel,
Episode One
Wolff, Dailey, Metres
& St. Clair
Poet's Basement
September
20, 2002
Joan Hoff
Debating
War:
the Forgotten Tradition
Norman Madarasz
Lessons from a Cyncial Master Jean
Chretien's
New York State of Mind
Mitchel Cohen
Toxic Wastes
and
the New World Order
Peter Lee
Why Bush
Wants This War
Bruce Jackson
20 Questions
About Bush's
War Against Arabs
Krystal Kyer
Greenwashing the Marketplace
September
19, 2002
Ron Jacobs
Cheney's
Vermont Breakfast
Ilija Trojanow
/ Ranjit Hoskote
Who Cares
for Human Rights?
It's a "Just" War
Jordy Cummings
How
to Silence
Pro Palestinian Voices
Salam Rahal
The Rape
of a Nation
Richard Falk
& David Krieger
War with
Iraq:
It's Not Bush's Decision
Ralph Nader
How Congress
Can Fight Corporate Crime
Kurt Nimmo
Bush Senior:
Hating Saddam, Selling Him Weapons
September
18, 2002
Rep. Cynthia
McKinney
Goodbye
to All That
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Cancerous
Air
Born Under a Bad Sky
Ben Tripp
Smoking
Gun
of a Hatchet Job
Peggy Thomson
20 Years
After:
Sabra and Shatila
Thomas Mountain
September
1982
Sabra and Chatila (Poem)
William Cook
Yet Another
Bush Doctrine
Kathleen Christison
Israel's Other Voices
Resources:
100s of Links
About 9/11
CounterPunch:
Complete
Coverage of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
Five
Days That
Shook The World:
Seattle and Beyond
By
Alexander Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
Photos by Allan Sekula
(Click Here to Order from CounterPunch
Online at 20% Off Amazon.com's price!)
Read
Whiteout and Find Out
How the CIA's Backing of the Mujahideen Created the World's Most
Robust Heroin Market and Helped to Finance the Rise of the Taliban
and Osama bin Laden
Whiteout:
CIA, Drugs & the
Press
by Alexander
Cockburn
and Jeffrey St. Clair
|