Yesterday CNN rebroadcast “CNN Presents: Waco – Faith, Fear and Fire.” That twenty year old event in Waco, Texas will reverberate in Brooklyn, New York during the 2013 race for District Attorney

That program and many other reports of investigations and hearings about the government’s misfeasance and malfeasance at Waco in 1993  need to be dusted off before Brooklyn voters select their next District Attorney, because one man running for DA, Kenneth Thompson, was instrumental in putting together a report that responsible journalists, commission members and members of the U.S. Congress have described as a “Whitewash” of high officials in the U.S. government, whose faulty actions and/or inaction lead to the violent deaths of eighty-six (86) Americans on American soil, including four (4) U.S. Agents and twenty-six (26) children

Reports like  “...Waco – Faith Fear and Fire” and the general history of the repeated U.S. Government attacks on the scores of Americans surrounded by governmental paramilitary forces gathered at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas is proof to many millions of Americans why the right to keep and bear arms is much more than an arguable  “Constitutionally Protected Privelege” it is a fundamental human right dictated by necessity.

On Feb. 28, 1993, federal ATF agents ( aka "BATF," referring to the U.S. Department of the Treasury Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) tried to serve search and arrest warrants for allegedly illegal weapons at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas (although later on the U.S. Attorney General, Janet Reno, indicated that reports of sexual abuse of children inside the compound also motivated her decisions).  After a botched attempt at a surprise incursion by a heavily armed ATF force, a full-scale gun battle between the ATF invaders and the encircled church followers erupted with heavy casualties on both sides. A cease-fire was negotiated to collect the dead and minister to the wounded. The FBI intervened to negotiate Koresh’s surrender to authorities (and formal authority shifted from Clinton's Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen to Clinton's Attorney General Janet Reno). However, after David Koresh repeatedly refused to surrender without conditions, the government brought in heavy reinforcements, including military equipment and support personnel.  After a 51-day siege, and a final assault using tanks on the ground and Huey helicopters in the air, 82 people from the Branch Davidians "Cult," including twenty-four children, together with four ATF agents, had lost their lives and scores of civilians and government agents had to be hospitalized with and recover from various war-type wounds, including PTSD.

Neither the CNN report nor the saga of Waco is new.  As told by the American "Right," including many mainstream Republicans, early in the Clinton Administration, paramilitary forces of multiple agencies of the United States Government went to war against U.S. citizens inside the borders of the  United States. Before the end of the first protracted battle of that war, the “Battle of Waco,” which included a 51-day siege and two violent assaults by heavily armed agents in full military gear, eighty-six (86) "Americans" (not everybody was a U.S. citizen, but everybody was lawfully on U.S. soil and entitled to full constitutional protection) had died, including at least twenty-four (24) children; and in addition, four (4) government agents were killed along with a score of injured officers. Make no mistake, the reason the ATF was there was that they had been ordered to forcefully disarm a large group of Americans, without any actual knowledge that any of their weapons were illegal. [It has also been reported that several of the local ATF agents and other local law enforcement officials later indicated that other avenues of inspecting the suspected "illegal" weapons were being pursued with the Davidians.]

Kenneth Thompson is running as the candidate of a large segment of the Brooklyn Democratic establishment who are now opposed to the incumbent Kings County DA, Charles Hynes, who still enjoys the support of most mainstream Democrats ( and who has consistently run with the endorsement of the Republican and Conservative Parties since 1997) and against another declared candidate for the Democratic nomination. The people of Brooklyn should not consider Kenneth Thompson as the possible chief law enforcement official in Brooklyn without knowing that he had once been an agent of the U.S. government with a hand in trying to bury actual wrong-doing by high U.S. government officials in authorizing and directing the attacks by Americans on Americans at the Waco compound in 1993.

Mr. Thompson’s campaign website  repeatedly boasts about his part in preparing a report on Waco that limited the blame for the fiasco that claimed eighty-two (82) civilians' lives on  low level law enforcement officers, while exonerating higher governmental officials, like Thompson’s immediate supervisors. That report, signed by Thompson’s immediate boss and long-time patron Ronald Noble, has repeatedly been called nothing but a “Whitewash” by witnesses, reporters, law enforcement officials and congressional chairmen.

I am gathering source material for several items about Mr. Thompson’s part in the aftermath of Waco, including several reports of the journalistic and governmental investigations, commission and congressional hearings, and the legal cases and proceedings directly involving the immediate victims of the government's 51-day war on its people. That job is still in its early stages. In the mean time, if you get an opportunity to do so, make every effort to see “CNN Presents: Waco - Faith, Fear and Fire” if it is rebroadcast (perhaps next weekend) on CNN or another cable station. It is also available on the internet via video link (see “What Happened in Waco –
‘CNN Presents – Waco: Faith, Fear, and Fire’” 4/11/11, CNN Pressroom [http://cnnpressroom.blogs.cnn.com/2011/04/11/what-happened-in-waco/]).