Written 2006-01-04
Long-time readers of my blather know how very upset I was (and still am) over the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms’ (BATF) armed-to-the-teeth raid on the Branch Davidian’s communal home near Waco, Texas on February 28, 1992 to serve two warrants.
BATF’s handling of this publicity stunt** has been pretty much white-washed and I have no intention of rehashing that now. But how the warrants came to be issued in the first place is an often overlooked aspect to the story. The government made numerous misstatements and misrepresentations to obtain the warrant.
<http://www.davekopel.com/Waco/LawRev/warrant.htm>
“A careful study of the Waco search warrant reveals numerous flaws, not just with the warrant application but with search and seizure law as it has developed in the 1990s.”
“Part one of this article sets forth the background to the BATF investigation of the Branch Davidian residence at the Mount Carmel Center, outside of Waco, Texas, and suggests that there is no good reason for the federal BATF to have jurisdiction over the tax offenses it was allegedly investigating. Part two studies the warrant application and reveals how the application was riddled with errors of law and fact, and offers reforms for how to reduce false or misleading statements in future warrant applications…”
Anyway, the article makes interesting reading and is heavily footnoted.
**
BATF’s budget was up for review and the agency had some recent bad press at the time. The Branch Davidian raid was intended to generate good publicity. The BATF public relations director was in Waco with a bank of fax machines ready to send out a press release about the successful raid. Numerous media contacts were alerted to the impending raid.
When 60 Minutes covered the story, host Mike Wallace opined that almost all the agents he talked to believed the raid was a publicity stunt — the main goal of which was to improve BATF’s tarnished image. The codeword for the beginning of the raid was “showtime.”
It was a publicity stunt gone wrong.