THE FBI has returned Washington’s attention to Waco by admitting that it used incendiary military devices during its raid on the Branch Davidians. There have been calls for special committees to conduct new investigations into the “cover-up,” and conspiracy theorists are enjoying a new respectability. But the charge of a cover-up risks masking the truly important issues raised by the Waco tragedy.
Waco diverges from the usual course of government scandals: No cover-up could possibly be more egregious than the actual event, the botched assault that left 80 dead on April 19, 1993. Yet many of those now determined to assign blame for the missing FBI audiotapes have frustrated every other attempt to establish what went wrong. For six years, Janet Reno and her fellow Democrats in Congress have depicted all efforts to review the government’s actions as dangerous attempts to undermine law enforcement.
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