Surprised this hasn't gotten more attention. This from Fox News. Why am I not surprised.
http://www.foxnews.com/js_index.sml?content=/national/100899/waco.sml
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New Waco Revelations Stoke GOP Fears That Investigation May Backfire Politically
Updated 2.51 p.m. ET (2151 GMT) October 8, 1999
Congressional Republicans are beginning to consider the effect new hearings on the 1993 Waco siege will have on their prospects in next year's elections.
Democrats need only pick up six seats in 2000 to win control of the House, leading some Republicans to speculate that yet another GOP-led investigation of the Clinton administration could backfire with voters.
"There's a feeling that the political risk may be higher than the political gain of pursuing this subject at this time," House Majority Leader Dick Armey, R-Texas, said Thursday.
On Sept. 9, the day after Reno announced Danforth's appointment, Armey said he wanted the House probe to be more sweeping than the independent prosecutor's: "I want to know it all."
Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., agreed then that congressional investigators should "do [their investigation] in the broadest possible way." He said the revelations made him doubt the conclusion that the Branch Davidians, and not the FBI, started the fire.
Since then, Senate Republicans have been feuding among themselves over the investigation's scope and proper venue.
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, wanted his panel to handle it. Instead, Lott last month announced a task force led by Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., a Judiciary Committee member, that would investigate the espionage charges as a first priority. Waco would be secondary, along with charges of Democratic campaign fund-raising abuses.
Hatch has made another pitch to take over the investigation. In an Oct. 5 letter to Specter obtained by The Associated Press, Hatch said the probe would have more credibility if it were done by a Judiciary Committee panel with the Democrats' participation.
Beltway speculation was stoked further on Friday when the Dallas Morning News quoted a now retired Army colonel as saying he heard Davidian leader David Koresh give the order to set the fires through bug transmissions on speakers in the FBI Waco command center's monitoring room.
Col. Rodney L. Rawlings, who retired from the Army in 1997, told the newspaper that he heard Koresh's order and then the sound of gunshots within five minutes after the FBI began its assault on the compound.
"I heard it. Anyone who says you couldn't at the time is being less than truthful," said Rawlings, who said he was in an adjacent room in the FBI command center at the time.
FBI officials have previously said transmissions from eavesdropping devices inside the Davidians' compound were too garbled to allow agents to hear the sect's discussions. Only later, after the fire and the tapes were enhanced, did the FBI learn that the Davidians were spreading fuel and preparing to set a fire, they testified before congressional committees.
Had FBI leaders heard that people in the compound were preparing a fire, they would have stopped the assault, they testified.
Deputy FBI Director John Collingwood would not comment on Rawlings' account. "We have appropriately relinquished all of these issues to Senator Danforth and are confident he will get to the bottom of this," he told the Morning News.
The chairman of the House Government Reform Committee, Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind., has promised to move forward with Waco hearings. His investigators expect to receive more than a million Waco-related documents from the Justice and Defense departments within a week in response to a subpoena.
Burton did not respond to a request for comment Thursday, but Rep. Mark Souder, R-Ind. coined a new term that nicely explains Republicans' 2000 fears: "Waco fatigue."
In part to avoid playing contentious hearings to a fatigued public, the focus of the Senate's call for new investigations will fall on the Justice Department. The allegations against Justice have less to do with Waco than with complaints that the department bungled its investigation into Chinese espionage.
The new investigations were sparked by the FBI's admission in August that its agents fired potentially flammable tear gas canisters at the compound April 19, 1993, which the agency long denied. The FBI says the canisters, launched hours before the start of the fire that consumed the compound, bounced harmlessly off the roof of a nearby bunker and did not contribute to the fire that killed about 80 Davidians.
— AP contributed to this report [/quote]
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“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed—and thus clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”—H.L. Mencken
