Waco

THE BUCK stops with me," Attorney General Janet Reno said after the Waco disaster. She projected a plain, earthy responsibility that struck the right note with the public. There was no official defensiveness or air of superior knowledge.But what exactly does it mean to say "The buck stops with me"? In Japan, the person who takes responsibility for a failure resigns. The head of the airline whose plane crashes did not himself misdirect it, but in a hierarchical culture he takes the fault as his own.We have a different culture.

DALLAS -- From the moment he informed Washington that a raid on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas, had gone disastrously awry, the commander of the assault sensed that his career was on the line, he said yesterday."

WASHINGTON -- Residents of the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, intentionally set the fire that destroyed their building and then remained inside despite having ample time to flee, arson experts told Congress yesterday.Using an infrared videotape, University of Maryland arson expert James Quintere graphically displayed how at least three fires erupted almost simultaneously in different parts of the compound on April 19, 1993."These three fires that occurred nearly one minute apart were intentionally set from within the compound," he said.

WASHINGTON -- Federal agents legally acquired military assistance for their 1993 raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, a panel of Army officials told a congressional hearing investigating the botched assault.And yesterday, President Clinton continued to support the law enforcement community and tried to keep the focus on Davidian leader David Koresh.In the second day of hearings, Republicans turned to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms' use of the military. But they were rebuffed in their attempt to show that the ATF misled the military in order to receive the training, helicopter assistance and medical support provided for the execution of the raid.

Even as those horrific sheets of orange flame leapt into the inky, wind-swept clouds of smoke boiling from the Branch Davidian compound near Waco yesterday, the questions began to fly.Why tear gas? Why the assault? Why the fire? Why suicide? Why now?A simple, haunting "why" may turn out to be the most often asked question in the wake of the fiery end yesterday to the 51-day holdout of a heavily armed religious cult against hundreds of federal agents.Only nine of cult leader David Koresh's followers appear to have survived as the fire took less than an hour to devour a multitowered compound that had become all too familiar to television news viewers in the last seven weeks.

THE siege at Waco ended a year ago today, a little after 11 a.m., in a conflagration that Americans experienced first with horror and then confusion.The temptation was to interpret the event in tragic or heroic terms.Some used the word "holocaust"; some compared the death of the Branch Davidian community to the mass suicide of Jews at the fortress of Masada in A.D. 73.Others tried to laugh it off.Today, after much congressional celebration, an evasive Justice Department report and an inconclusive criminal trial, the events and images at Waco are so absurd that the temptation is to tell the story as a satire.

WASHINGTON -- Justice Department documents released yesterday by a senior House Democrat raise questions about Republican allegations that the FBI and Justice Department deliberately covered up the use of military rounds at the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco.The documents, which have been in the possession of House Republicans for four years, disclose the FBI's use of potentially incendiary tear gas rounds during the disastrous assault on Waco in 1993."They appear to conflict fundamentally with the assertions that evidence about the use of military tear gas rounds was deliberately withheld from Congress," said Rep. Henry A. Waxman, a California Democrat, in a letter to former Republican Sen. John C. Danforth, the newly appointed special counsel investigating Waco.

WASHINGTON -- The White House is making an elaborate effort to hold President Clinton politically harmless from the disaster at Waco by focusing, correctly, on the insane behavior of cult leader David Koresh. And the odds are the campaign will succeed so long as Clinton doesn't allow whatever went wrong at Waco to be seen as part of a pattern.Instant opinion polls predictably put most of the blame for the tragedy on Koresh rather than the president, Attorney General Janet Reno or the FBI. And that is likely to be the consensus unless subsequent investigations uncover some evidence of blundering that go beyond a mistaken judgment on what was feasible in ending the standoff.

DALLAS -- House Republican aides preparing for hearings on the Branch Davidian standoff brought NRA-paid consultants to examine firearms recovered from the sect's compound and refused to say who was bankrolling them, Texas and congressional officials said yesterday.The aides told Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) officials that the consultants were assisting in the congressional investigation of the 1993 siege at Waco and demanded that they be allowed to X-ray the guns during a June 26 visit to Austin, said a DPS official and a federal official who witnessed the incident.

WASHINGTON -- The FBI tactics that resulted in the apparent burning deaths of 24 children and dozens of adult cult members near Waco, Texas, yesterday were approved personally by President Clinton after he was briefed on the plan -- and other options -- by Attorney General Janet Reno.Even before the magnitude of the carnage in Waco become evident and calls rose for a Senate investigation into the episode, the White House sought to distance the president from what even administration officials were characterizing as a tragic and disastrous end to the 51-day standoff.