Report: FBI Misled Reno On Waco
The FBI gained Attorney General Janet Reno's approval to use tear gas at the Branch Davidian siege by providing misleading or incomplete data, according to The Dallas Morning News.
The newspaper's story in Monday's editions quoted a confidential report of a veteran FBI behavioral expert's interview, in which he said key information was not provided to Reno when the agency began lobbying her to approve gassing the Mount Carmel compound near Waco.
Peter Smerick, a retired agent whose psychological profiles were termed the best predictors of the 1993 Branch Davidians' deaths by negotiators involved in the 51-day siege, told agency interviewers that he believed "the FBI misled the attorney general by giving her 'a slanted view of the operation' in Waco."
Smerick, in the 1995 report obtained by the newspaper, blamed FBI headquarters for convincing the attorney general that using tear gas was the only means to peacefully end the standoff.
Lawyers representing the Branch Davidians in a federal wrongful death lawsuit said they have not seen the 15-page FBI report, written by the agency's general counsel's office, and labeled "attorney-client privileged and confidential."
Five profiling memos, warning that using force against the sect would intensify a "bunker mentality" in which "they would rather die than surrender," were not in the briefing book that FBI leaders gave Reno when they started lobbying her on April 12, 1993 to approve using tear gas.
Seven days later, Branch Davidian leader David Koresh and about 80 of his followers died as the compound burned.
Meanwhile, several news organizations said in a federal court filing Friday that the special counsel investigating the Waco siege should not be allowed to "shroud in secrecy" a court-ordered re-enactment of aspects of the deadly standoff.
"Conducting the field test in secrecy will only increase the public's skepticism about whether all the facts surrounding the Branch Davidian raid have been completely and accurately disclosed," The Associated Press, Dallas Morning News, The New York Times and St. Louis Post-Dispatch said in their motion. The Waco Tribune-Herald also is seeking public access.
The media organizations are asking the judge presiding over the Davidians' wrongful-death lawsuit against the government to open to the public a field test that is designed to answer a key question: Whether federal agents directed gunfire at the compound on April 19, 1993.
The test, planned at Fort Hood for the weekend of March 18, is to determine whether an infrared camera used by the FBI could have detected gunfire.
The government has long denied its agents fired any shots that day, saying the Davidians died by their own hand. But the plaintiffs, in a civil case headed to trial in mid-May, contend the FBI's 1993 surveillance footage offers proof that federal agents fired into the urning building.
The re-enactment was ordered by U.S. District Judge Walter S. Smith Jr. in Waco at the behest of Special Counsel John Danforth.
Danforth has argued against public access to the test, saying "the quickest way to discredit an investigation is to provide the media with selective information during its course." The government has said it would defer to Danforth's wishes.
But the media organizations, in their filing, said Danforth has no right to object to public access because he is not a party to the lawsuit.
"This case involves a civil lawsuit -- a proceeding that is presumptively open to the public," the motion said. "Having elected to involve his investigation into this lawsuit, the special counsel should not be allowed to shroud in secrecy civil proceedings that otherwise would be open to the public."