Our Lying Eyes

At a theatre in Washington's Union Station, where D.C. metro lines and commuter trains from New York converge, a strange opening was celebrated on Nov. 3 -- the premiere of a documentary called Waco: A New Revelation. The film's producers picked Union Station because of its location near the Capitol, and they had invited a horde of pols and press people, separately, to different showings. But only 50 journalists came, and the pols could have been counted on one hand. Clearly A New Revelation, like its predecessor, Waco: Rules of Engagement, will face an uphill climb with the intellectual and political establishment. Rules was originally produced as a film, then released as a home video. Revelation takes the opposite route. It can be ordered today by calling 877-GET-WACO or by tapping http://www.waco-anewrevelation.com. But it won't be in theatres or on television for months, if ever. Rules, like most serious films, ran nearly three hours in length. Revelation, made with a the broad public market in mind, runs just short of two hours. Rules was nominated for an Academy Award, and in September -- after HBO had put a half-sized version onto the small screen -- it won an Emmy. It is one of the few documentaries carried by the Hollywood and Blockbuster chains. But although Rules took the world by storm, it's not safe to assume that Revelation will do the same.

The mind behind both films is Mike McNulty, 53, researcher for Rules and both researcher and producer for Revelation. A Vietnam vet, a converted Mormon, and a former insurance broker, he has for the past five years been teaching himself journalism and film, from his home in Boulder, Colorado. But he may have failed at the talent that, sadly, lies at the heart of all American undertakings -- marketing. McNulty has already given away Revelation's goods.

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What We Used to Believe

A bit of history is in order here. Shortly after Mt. Carmel burned to the ground, polls showed that some 80% of the American people believed that "David Koresh was wholly responsible." They took that view because they had seen much of the 51-day Waco siege on television. They saw Mt. Carmel burn to the ground. They didn't see any FBI agents setting fire to the place. Therefore, they concluded, the residents had torched their home. As President Clinton said, "some religious fanatics murdered themselves."

But some people didn't buy the official line -- nor that of various conspiracists who began to challenge it. McNulty's first film wasn't Rules. It was a homemade 1994 video that challenged a dishonest but popular visual screed called Waco: The Big Lie, by an attorney named Linda Thompson. The Big Lie showed footage of "flame-throwing tanks" setting fire to Mt. Carmel. The problem was, Thompson's supposedly damning footage came from outtakes of commercial television, made two hours before any fire developed.

By the time that Lie was debunked, a dozen theories and rumors were circulating about what had "really" happened at Waco. A survivor of the blaze named Derrick Lovelock, it was said, had told his Davidian jailmates that he'd tried to escape out of the back of Mt. Carmel, but was turned back by gunfire from federal agents. Lovelock wouldn't repeat his story, but Wacoheads noted an oddity that seemed to speak for it: With one exception, none of the nine people who jumped out of the burning building came from its back or "black" side, the side that television cameras couldn't see. The one exception was Graeme Craddock, who said under oath that when he came out, he couldn't see very well, because smoke filled the air. But he could hear, and what he heard literally made him crawl. He heard gunfire.

What had happened on the "black" side wasn't recorded by television cameras, but from up in the air, the government was filming with a Forward-Looking Infrared Radar device, or FLIR. In their effort to send 11 survivors to prison, federal prosecutors used the FLIR tape to show that the fatal blaze had three simultaneous points of origin, a sure sign of arson. McNulty submitted the FLIR to a retired Pentagon expert for analysis, and the expert, Dr. Edward Allard, saw something else -- flashes of light which, he said, were the visual tracks of gunshots, fired toward Mt. Carmel from federal positions. The claim gave viewers of Rules a new Waco story line, in which federal agents had murderous intent.

In early 1998, McNulty, with a new set of partners, began developing A New Revelation. Meanwhile, survivors of those who had died at Mt. Carmel filed a wrongful death suit against the government. The suit lingered in the court of Judge Walter Smith of Waco until last July, when McNulty gave the plaintiff's attorneys an outline of New Revelation. They filed a brief based upon his information -- and a new game began.

McNulty had talked his way into examining evidence that was held by the Department of Public Safety in Austin. What he had found was important, and he freely told the authorities what it was. He had run upon evidence, he said, that the FBI had detonated seven incendiary rounds on the day of the Mt. Carmel fire. DPS records, he said, showed that the Texas Rangers had recovered three of these devices near the three spots where the fatal blaze was supposedly set. Judge Smith was persuaded to proceed with a trial, now set for this spring.

After Smith's ruling, Lee Hancock, a reporter for The Dallas Morning News, contacted McNulty, who was already showing a rough cut of Revelation to congressional figures. He gave her a look, too. Hancock turned to official sources for comment on the film's content. What she has thus far mined are partial confirmations. Retired agent Danny Coulson told her that the FBI had used at least one incendiary device, and his admission set off a storm in Washington. And although government spokesmen originally pooh-poohed Revelation's claim that Delta Force operatives took part in the April 19 assault, Hancock's prodding has substantiated this allegation as well.

As a result of the charges contained in the rough cut, Congressman Dan Burton has promised or threatened to hold new Waco hearings, and U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno has appointed former Senator John Danforth to investigate the events of April 19. For all of this, the nation owes McNulty a debt. But an unintended result of the rough cut's success may be that Revelations, in its commercial release, falls dead at the box office. Its most important "revelations" have already been exposed in print.

McNulty isn't worried. "There are eight bombshells in the movie, and the press has picked up on only three," he says. Among those that the press hasn't touched are footage concerning a new helicopter, the use of a "shaped charge," and Vincent Foster.

Rules showed footage indicating that during the Feb. 28 ATF raid, helicopters fired into Mt. Carmel, a contention amply backed by eyewitness reports. Revelation shows footage of a helicopter that, Dr. Allard says in the film, is firing upon Mt. Carmel on April 19, from its back side.

The shaped charge theory is an old one. On April 19, women and children at Mt. Carmel took refuge in a concrete room that housed a walk-in cooler. FBI agents and the press called it (and two other sites) "the bunker." Some of those whose bodies were found there, autopsy reports indicated, died as a result of "blunt force trauma." Concrete from the bunker's roof had fallen onto their heads. Revelation shows downwardly bent rebar in a hole in the "bunker's" roof -- proof, it says, that a "shaped charge" blasted the concrete downward.

During the 51-day siege, the First Family had two liaisons to the FBI forces at Waco. The first was President Clinton's friend Web Hubbel, who worked at the Justice Department. The second was Hillary Clinton's friend Vince Foster, who worked at the White House. Revelation reviews evidence that Foster felt responsible for the Waco deaths. It provides testimony saying that on the day of his death, he was writing a report about Waco, and that after he killed himself or was murdered, Hillary Clinton ordered that the report be pulled from his desk.

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Are We Visual Learners?

Claims like those in Rules and Revelation are indeed "bombshells," as McNulty says. But even as someone who appears in both films, I am yet reluctant to give much credence to its purely visual evidence. People see flying saucers, too. My book, The Ashes of Waco -- today the primer and book of record about the events of Waco -- comes to plenty of disturbing conclusions about what happened. It does so by time-honored and low-tech means, paper and pencil and pondering. In researching it, I relied on documentary sources and interviews, and on the question, "Does what they say make sense?" What I found among government players -- and even among the press -- was an attitude like that which contaminates high schools on the eves of football games. The nation was divided into a home team, the FBI team, and an opposing team, Koresh's team.

This Zoroastrian division encouraged all sorts of bonfire and gridiron pranks and pronouncements, all sorts of spirited defamation, all sorts of mascot-stealing, and in the press, the shunning of socially maladapted nerds who, like me, wouldn't join in pep squad cheers. Both the Davidian and government executives, like most coaches, were full of arrogance and aggression, and were not above lying and cheating here and there. The players, like most employees, did their jobs in a perfunctory, negligent, and at times frivolous way. The whole affair was conducted in the absence of gravity and conscience, forethought and resolve. It was of a piece with the rest of American life today.

Murder is of a different order, I believe. If it happened at Waco, it was a serious, thought-out act, not a casual or offhand response. The visual evidence in Rules and Revelation makes plausible the thought of murder, but I can't accept, yet accept, it as fact. When McNulty first told me what he concluded from the FLIR tape, my response was, "gringos and their technology." I am a gringo, but on this point I differ with the rest: Machines are not the standard of any truth for me. Nor do I believe, as much of the nation does, that the truth is to be seen. It is instead to be reasoned. If FBI men murdered anyone at Mt. Carmel, then America is run, not by frivolous football or fraternity boys, but by human beings of the most corrupted and perverted kind. My general knowledge and my philosophic bent do not prepare me to embrace a conclusion like that: only my eyes do. But after seeing Revelation, I am again piqued because the government hasn't given its people a full and honest account of what it knows.

"Most people are visual learners," McNulty declares. If he is right, six months from now, whatever happened at Waco, the government will be on the run because home viewers will have seen in Revelation, not sleaziness or sloppiness, but official evil exposed.