Afghanistan

by William H. Benson

May 9, 2013

     “In June 2010, the Afghan War surpassed the Vietnam War as the longest American war in United States history.” Operation Enduring Freedom began on October 7, 2001, a month after Al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The war’s goal was to capture those responsible for the terrorist attacks, destroy Osama bin Laden’s terrorist boot camps, and remove from power the Taliban, that Islamic fundamentalist party that controlled the country and that hosted Al-Qaeda. A year later it appeared that the Americans had accomplished those three goals, but today American troops are still dying on Afghan soil.

     The war’s high point occurred two years ago, on May 2, 2011, when U.S. troops invaded a compound in Pakistan at night, found and killed Osama bin Laden. Otherwise, the continual news that another bomb has exploded and killed more Americans has dented America’s resolve to fight to win in this war-torn country. Last week another roadside bomb killed five more American soldiers.

     Hopes are high for a draw-down that will culminate in 2014 when President Obama is expected to reduce American troop strength from the current 74,000 to as little as 10,000. A genuine fear exists that Afghanistan will deteriorate into another civil war, or that the Taliban will regain control. Either way the Afghan people will suffer.

     Two weeks ago, a French envoy to Afghanistan named Bernard Bajolet spoke at his going-away reception in Kabul and outlined the challenges he sees facing the Afghan people. A New York Times reporter said that “His tone was neither shrill nor reproachful. It was matter-of-fact.”

     Bajolet said, “I think it crucial that the Afghan leadership take more visible and obvious ownership for their army.” He said that the Afghan government needs to “cut corruption, which discourages investment, deal with drugs and become fiscally self-reliant.” The drugs have “caused more casualties than terrorism in Russia, Europe and the Balkans,” and that the Western governments should discontinue spending billions in Afghanistan “if it remains the world’s largest heroin supplier.”

     Such straight talk from a diplomat is welcome and refreshing. The corruption is appalling. In recent days, the news broke that the CIA has been dropping off bags of cash at Amid Karzai’s office. Afghanistan’s top leader hinted that he used American taxpayers’ money “to pay off warlords and power brokers.” Members of Congress expressed their dismay.

     Yet, this is not unusual. The CIA has worked for decades in Afghanistan. Read Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History for an explanation. A Congressman from Texas, Charlie Wilson ran Operation Cyclone throughout the 1980’s. His CIA operation supplied anti-aircraft weapons, Stingers, to the Afghan mujahideen who were fighting the Russians after the Soviet Union had invaded their country on December 24, 1979.

     The Russians learned too late that the Afghan is a tenacious foe, and that once the CIA began arming the mujahideen, the war turned against them. The former invincible Russian army withdrew in tatters.

On February 15, 1989, General Boris Gromov, stood on the Friendship Bridge at Afghanistan’s border and told a television reporter, “There is not a single Soviet soldier or officer left behind me. Our nine year stay ends.” It was nine years, fifty days.

     A wasteland lay behind Gromov. Fifteen thousand Russian soldiers died in what is now called Russia’s Vietnam, the Soviet Union spent billions of rubles, a million Afghan people died, and seven million Afghans streamed into Pakistan and other countries. Other foreigners streamed into Afghanistan to join the mujahideen in their fight. One such foreigner was the Saudi, Osama bin Laden.

     In the power vacuum created when the Russians departed, the mujahideen quarreled and fought among themselves. A vicious civil war broke out in 1994 that made the fight with the Russians look tame. Mullah Mohammed Omer and his Taliban party emerged victorious.

     What will happen once American troops leave Afghanistan and another power vacuum opens up? What will that last American general say? Will another civil war erupt? Will the Taliban regain power?

Questions pile up, but answers elude us.

     The Afghan people deserve better. They deserve peace. The children play in cemeteries because those are the only open fields without land mines. Their land is a battleground where the Western powers play their war games, and the Afghans are shot and killed in the crossfire.

     After eleven years and seven months, it is time that the American troops leave Afghanistan.  

Mars: The Red Planet

by William H. Benson

April 25, 2013

     Mars One announced startling news last week that they would receive applications from those willing to travel to Mars and establish a permanent colony on the Red Planet. A Dutch entrepreneur named Bas Landsdorp heads Mars One, and he hopes to send four astronauts to Mars by 2023, and then another four every two years thereafter. Landsdorp and his associates say, “this is not a hoax.”

     The catch is that no Martian colonist can expect to return to Earth. Those chosen for the Mars flight would live, die, and be buried there in that planet’s reddish soil, at least 34 million miles from Earth. Absent the expense required for a return flight, the foundation will reduce their costs enough to make the colony feasible. Landsdorp says that the technology is in place now to establish a Martian colony.

     Space travel lures men and women, just as land and ocean travel has called our ancestors to pick up and move across Earth for millennium. Human beings wander.

     Looking back, NASA’s Space Shuttle program ended almost two years ago, on July 21, 2011, when Atlantis landed at Kennedy Space Center after carrying four astronauts into outer space. The Space Transportation System program began on April 12, 1981 with the Columbia, and over the next three decades, NASA launched 135 missions, and only two failed: Challenger on January 27, 1986, 73 seconds after liftoff; and Columbia on February 1, 2003, upon re-entry.

     But there is a vast difference between a shuttle flight and a one-way mission to Mars. Instead of counting days inside a space shuttle orbiting Earth, an astronaut to Mars would count between 150 and 300 days of space travel just to get to Mars, and once there, they would live in an environment utterly inhospitable to men and women. People’s willpower would break down under such harsh conditions.

     Except for ice crystals on Mars’s polar caps or below the rocky surface, water is absent. Because Mars has such a thin atmosphere, water cannot exist in liquid form. The Red Planet offers no plants, trees, animals, or insects, and the astronauts would walk on land  with only 40% of the Earth’s gravity.

     To survive, men would have to transport their own food, water, housing, and protection from cold and radiation, and those supplies must last for years. Incredible it is to think that they can do it.

     The debate between manned and unmanned space exploration to Mars continues, but NASA has pursued unmanned flights there for decades. In 1996, rocket scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory responded to a challenge to complete a Martian expedition that was “faster, better, and cheaper,” meaning complete it in less than three years, obtain a great result, and keep the cost under $150 million.

     The result was Pathfinder, a rocket that bounced onto Mars’s surface on inflated air bags, and Sojourner, a small rover the size of a microwave that took 550 photographs and collected soil samples.

     Right now two additional rovers named Opportunity and Curiosity roam across Mars’s surface, and two satellites named Odyssey and Reconnaissance orbit above the planet. Another project, MAVEN, will launch in November this year to study Mars’s scant atmosphere.

     Carl Sagan, the planetary astronomer at Cornell University, died in 1996, but prior to his passing he recorded a message to future explorers that he called his “Vision of Mars.”

     “Science and science fiction,” he said, “have done a kind of dance over the last century with respect to Mars. The scientists make a finding. It inspires science fiction writers to write about it, and a host of young people read the science fiction and are inspired to become scientists to learn about Mars.”

     At an early age, I read Ray Bradbury’s “Martian Chronicles” and also Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian stories that feature John Carter, an American who finds himself transported to Mars where he discovers a civilization slowly dying, but my dance with science fiction was tentative and did not result in a life-long commitment to astronomy.               

     Unmanned missions make better sense for now, because they are faster, better, and cheaper than manned missions, but with the technology for space travel expanding, that may change before 2023.

     Marc Shepanek a NASA official, said, “If the kings of Spain and England could send people around a world that was potentially flat, I could not imagine that we would not be capable of going to Mars and coming back. People are flexible; they adapt. There are all kinds of people in history who have survived heroically. It’s amazing what people can do when they have to.”

     Not anytime soon will I sign up for a one-way trip to Mars. I prefer seeing Earth’s sunrises and sunsets. I like watching the seasons change, and I am partial to water, food, grocery stores, books, my cell phone, my house, and above all else I enjoy meeting people. Call me an Earthling.

De-Extinction

by William H. Benson

April 11, 2013

     Spring has sprung, temperatures have warmed, and plants and animals have revived again after another winter. This all happens without human direction. No one tells the grass that now is the time to green up, or that trees should sprout leaves, or that pheasants should produce chicks. We call it Mother Nature’s invisible hand. The ancient Greeks had their own myth, that Hades forced Persephone, Zeus’s daughter, to live in the Underworld for six months every year, and then he released her in the spring.

     Earth is unique in the solar system. It is alive. Life exists here, but no one life form is permanent. Species arise, and then they disappear. Humans bear responsibility for numerous species’ extinction because men have hunted them or wrecked their habitat. In National Geographic‘s April issue, the author Carl Zimmer lists some extinct animals, all because of men: the Pyrenean ibex, the dodo, the auk, the thylacine, the imperial woodpecker, the Chinese river dolphin, and the passenger pigeon.

     The early settlers to North America were amazed at the extraordinary numbers of passenger pigeons. In the nineteenth century, the ornithologist John James Audubon once encountered a tremendous flock.

     “The air was literally filled with Pigeons; the light of noon-day was obscured as by an eclipse, and the continual buzz of wings had a tendency to lull my senses to repose. Before sunset I reached Louisville, distance from Hardensbugh fifty-five miles. The Pigeons were still passing in undiminished numbers, and continued to do so for three days in succession.”

     Hunters shot them, gassed them from trees, and carted them by wagon and railroad car to the east where the poor and the slaves ate them. The last passenger pigeon named Martha died in a Cincinnati zoo in 1902. The same fate befell the Carolina parakeet. According to the writer Bill Bryson, “it existed in vast numbers,” but due to relentless hunting, its numbers diminished until the final one died in that same Cincinnati zoo in 1918.

     More fortunate was the American bison. A South Dakota rancher named James Scotty Phillip rescued five buffalo calves, almost the last survivors of the proud herds that once covered the plains. 

     Ancient hunters may have contributed to the Ice Age animals’ extinction, but the evidence is not certain. Gone are the saber-toothed cat, the giant sloth, and the woolly mammoth. That same issue of  National Geographic tells of men who roam across Siberia every summer searching for the tusks that dot the landscape, the only remains of those long-haired elephant-like animals that ranged for eons across northern Siberia, until about eight thousand years ago.

     Bill Bryson wrote in his book A Short History of Everything that “as many as ten million mammoth carcasses are thought to lie frozen in the tundra of northern Siberia alone.” Why did they all die out? Hunters may have contributed to their demise, but so may have climate change or an epidemic.

     Some life forms thrive despite humans’ best efforts, an astonishing fact. Consider the coyote or the prairie dog. Poisoned, trapped, shot, or torched, and yet they still live to produce more progeny.

     Scientists are now poised to reverse extinction by the process called de-extinction, bringing back to life a clone from a perished species. That National Geographic article mentioned the birth of a Pyrenean ibex that lived for only minutes in 2003, handicapped from breathing because of a third lung.

     James Graff, a writer for The Week magazine, suggested that scientists should resurrect the Neanderthals, another species that Homo Sapiens may have hunted to extinction, but then Graff warned his readers: “I can’t imagine a sadder fate than being a specimen of a lost species. Sure, a woolly mammoth would be a zoological sensation. But is that reason enough to make one? And what moral quandaries are posed by a mix-and-pour Neanderthal?”

     Read Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park to see how scientists’ experiments can backfire. Carl Zimmer wrote, “In Jurassic Park dinosaurs are resurrected for their entertainment value,” and the consequences terrify.

     Mary Shelley wrote a haunting story in 1818 that she entitled Frankenstein. A college student, Victor Frankenstein spent time “in vaults and charnel-houses” assembling dead human body parts into an eight-foot giant that came to life through galvanic action. One day the creature stared into the eyes of his creator. “How dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge,” said Victor Frankenstein.

     Mary Shelley delved deeper into these issues of life and death and extinction, and so in 1826 she wrote a science fiction book, The Last Man. Her hero, Lionel Verney, lives alone in the year 2100 A.D., after a plague kills off all all other human beings.

     She may be right. A bacteria named Yersinia pestis causes the plague. If human beings go the way of the dinosaurs, bacteria will survive. Earth belongs to them. It is their planet. Bill Bryson writes, “Every human body consists of about 10 quadrillion cells, but about 100 quadrillion bacterial cells. It is part of us.” Bacteria live to produce more progeny.

     Spring represents a revival of life, when Hades releases Persephone. We live and we enjoy life.

Ten Years Ago the United States Invaded Iraq

by William H. Benson

March 28, 2013

     On March 19, 2003, President George W. Bush ordered General Tommy Franks to invade Iraq. That day jets rained down bombs on military targets in Baghdad, and the next day the land troops marched into Iraq. Last week marked the invasion’s ten-year anniversary.

     In the war’s run-up, Bush had sought and received Congress’s vote of support, but, according to Kofi Annan, the U.S. president had “bypassed the UN Security Council and violated the United Nations founding charter.” The world’s nations opposed the invasion, except for Italy, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Denmark, Hungary, the Czech Republic, and the United Kingdom. On February 15, some six million anti-war protestors took to the streets in 600 cities across the globe.

    On February 26, Hans Blix, the UN chief weapons inspector said that “there was no evidence that Iraq has any weapons of mass destruction,” despite Bush and his cabinet’s proclamations to the contrary. The same day Bush spoke of a post-invasion democracy as a model for the region.

     On March 17, Bush gave Saddam Hussein 48 hours to leave Iraq, but because the dictator failed to comply, the president commenced the war. By May 1, combat operations ceased, and the White House declared “Mission Accomplished.” On December 13, U.S. army soldiers lifted Saddam Hussein from a hole in the ground, and three years later, on December 30, 2006, authorities hung him. The war officially ended December 18, 2011.

     That spare time-line of events fails to convey the human cost that resulted from the U. S. president’s “unilateral” choice to invade Iraq. According to the “Costs of War Project,” the number of Iraqi’s killed were between 176,000 and 189,000. Of the coalition forces, 4,805 were killed. Those numbers represent a huge psychological scar upon the Iraqi people, as well as the Americans.

     The U.S. invasion of Iraq reminds me of Mussolini’s attack on Ethiopia in October 1935. Italy’s troops possessed rifles and cannons, but the Ethiopians were armed with spears, bows, arrows, and a few antiquated rifles. It was a gross mismatch, but not as unequal as Bush vs. Hussein.

      Throughout the eight-year Iraqi war, the anti-war protest movement here and abroad fizzled, a reversal of what occurred during the Vietnam War. When President Kennedy sent the first 7,000 troops to Vietnam in November 1961, there were no protests, but as the war effort sank into a quagmire, college students took to the streets, demonstrated, protested, carried placards, burnt the American flag, and torched buildings. By contrast, during the Iraqi war, U.S. college campuses were quiet.

     Noam Chomsky, a professor at MIT and an early opponent of the war, said that “the activist movements of the past forty years have had a civilizing effect,” and yet those movements dissolved once the bombs began dropping in March 2003.

     When a person or community or nation picks up a weapon and assaults another, everything changes, and for the worst. Nonviolent techniques, though slower than rifles and tanks, will conquer dictators. Newsweek pointed out in its March 8 edition that Srdja Popovic, one of the leaders of the Serbian resistance, OTPOR, overthrew the murderer Slobodan Milosevic in 2000 with nonviolent methods.

     Gene Sharp, a professor at University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, drew up a list of 198 methods, each designed to extricate a tyrant from his or her position, and they include “street theater, social networking, speeches, letters, petitions, slogans, banners, leaflets, and skywriting.” It is unfortunate that Syria’s rebels yielded to the temptation to pick up a gun, because ever since, the continuous cycle of violence has become tragic, with no endgame visible today.

    Could the Iraqi people have removed Saddam Hussein by nonviolent means ten years ago? Could the United States president have accomplished his goal without sending in bombers? For some, the answer is a resounding “yes!” For others, it is not so clear. But nonviolent methods look appealing now in light of the immense destruction heaped upon the Iraqi people over the past ten years.

     To children, words like “weapons of mass destruction,” and “models of democracy,” are concepts that sit high atop the ladder of abstraction. At that ladder’s base reside more concrete concepts, those a child can understand, like feeling terrified when a jet roars overhead and drops a bomb on a neighbors home and kills those inside. Then, there is the despair one feels from loosing a leg or an arm; or burying your brother; or seeing your school leveled, a home turned to rubble, or your sisters cut down. 

     The journalist, Anthony Shalid, asked, “What’s the sin of the children? What have they done?”

     How can we prepare ourselves for another president who will declare another “unilateral” war? We need a more organized and better prepared anti-war protest movement, we need Congressmen who will dare to vote “no,” we need a more united United Nations, and we need some means of reigning in a “shock and awe” president.

THE CHURCH OF SCIENTOLOGY

by William H. Benson

March 13, 2013

     Today is March 13, L. Ron Hubbard’s birthday, a day that Church of Scientology’s members on every continent observe. Born in 1911, Hubbard’s biography is an incredible story of erratic behavior, pathological lying, adultery, and estrangement from previous wives and children. You can read about Hubbard’s trail of deceit in a new book by Lawrence Wright, Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, & the Prison of Belief.

      Hubbard was a prolific writer who wrote hundreds of books, mainly pulp fiction, adventure tales, and science fiction, but then in 1950 he wrote Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, a self-help book that explores how the mind works within the body. By the process called auditing—holding cans or rods wired to an Electro-psychometer or E-meter—a person is supposed to rid his mind of negative human emotions and experience a “clear” state of happiness and fulfillment.

     In December of 1952, Hubbard opened his first Church of Scientology, transforming dianetics into a theology. Thetans, he wrote, are the souls that Xenu banished to Planet Earth where they are forced to live in a series of human bodies for millions of years. Yes. It does sound like science fiction.

     There are at least eight levels of Operating Thetans, or OT, above “clear.” Disciples of scientology pay thousands of dollars for Hubbard’s books, courses, and audio tapes in order to move up the Bridge to Total Freedom. A religious scholar, J. Gordon Melton, said that “It’s basically a variation of the Gnostic myth about souls falling into matter and the encumbrances that come with that.”

     There are three tiers of membership in the Church. The first are the public scientologists who buy the courses and work to recruit others. The second are the Hollywood celebrities: John Travolta, Kirstie Alley, and Tom Cruise. The third tier is the Sea Org, the church’s equivalent of the clergy.

     Because Hubbard once belonged to the U.S. Navy, and he later traveled about the world aboard a yacht, he considered those with him on the sea as most-favored. Thus, the Sea Organization, or Sea Org. The church is well organized, and administered similar to the navy’s chain of command.

     The current COB, or chairman of the board of the Religious Technology Center (RTC) at Hemet, California is David Miscavige, fifty-two years old, who seized control of the church following Hubbard’s death twenty-seven years ago in January 1986. Critics say that “Scientology is more and more whatever David Miscavige says it is.”

     The church is exceedingly wealthy. According to Lawrence Wright, it has “one billion in liquid assets,” plus hotels in Hollywood, plus the RTC in Hemet, and properties in Clearwater, Florida.

     Defections from the Sea Org are constant, and membership has declined. Lawrence Wright believes that there are at most 25,000 members today, and perhaps 5,000 Sea Org members. David Miscavige’s father recently left the church, as did David’s brother, Ron, and Ron’s daughter Jenna. Marty Rathbun and Amy Scobee, members of WDC, the Watchdog Committee, have also left, and Shelley Miscavige, David’s wife, has not been seen in public for years.

     It is not easy to leave the Sea Org. If a person “blows,” or leaves without being “routed out,” he or she is labeled an SP, a Suppressive Person, and other scientologists are forbidden to speak to SP’s, a policy that divides families and friends.

     Marty Rathbun says that Tom Cruise divorced his first two wives—Mimi Rogers and Nicole Kidman—because “both women got cold on David Miscavige.” In 2012 Katie Holmes divorced Tom Cruise and with her daughter Suri moved to New York City because she wanted out of the Church.

     To remain in the Sea Org is also difficult. There is the family disconnection policy. Husbands are sent on missions different from their wives. A woman said that she had not seen her husband in nine years. This policy leads to affairs, divorces, and re-marriages. Children in the Sea Org suffer. Jenna Miscavige said that between the ages of twelve and sixteen she saw her mother only three times.

     The pay for a Sea Org member is poor, $45 per week, according to Amy Scobee, but the work is non-stop, often around the clock, and so people are sleep-deprived. If they turn negative on the church, Miscavige and his henchmen will send them to an RPF,  Rehabilitation Project Force, where they scrub dumpsters or clean toilets with a toothbrush.

     In the 1960’s comedy “Get Smart,” Maxwell Smart belonged to CONTROL, and he and agent 99 were constantly fighting KAOS. In most institutions those in control fear that others will attack and drive them out, and chaos will rush in, and so they adopt an us-against-them attitude.

     Defectors have admitted that David Miscavige is vicious, and has verbally and physically abused his underlings, calling them “scumbags,” and slapping them in public. Chaos has overwhelmed control.

     L. Ron Hubbard created an organization similar to himself: vindictive, committed to a wild and questionable mythology, paranoid, desperate, adulterous, litigious, grasping for more money, and capable of defamation and dirty tricks—a miserable prison of belief. Today is LRH’s birthday.

DAVID KORESH

by William H. Benson

February 28, 2013

     Bill Clinton, when campaigning for President in the autumn of 1992, visited workers at an electric utility plant outside Waco, Texas. He may or may not have know that he drove past a religious compound called Mount Carmel, originally built by the Branch Davidians but controlled at that time by another Seventh-Day Adventist splinter group led by Vernon Wayne Howell, aka David Koresh.

     So immersed in apocalyptic literature were Koresh’s followers that they were armed and ready for Clinton, but his motorcade passed by without attacking them, astonishing those inside the compound.

     The actual attack, code-named “Showtime,” came at 9:45 a.m., on Sunday morning, February 28, 1993, twenty years ago today, when over 75 Special Agents for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms approached Mount Carmel with an arrest warrant for David Koresh for violating gun laws.

     Although an undercover agent named Robert Rodriguez had warned his superiors that morning that Koresh knew the attack was coming, that he had been tipped off, the agents went ahead, and walked into an ambush. David Koresh told his people to prepare themselves, that “The Assyrians are coming.”

     Agents approached the front door, but Koresh slammed it shut. No one is sure who fired first, but a gun battle erupted first at the door that morning that raged for the next two hours throughout the compound while helicopters circled overhead. Four ATF agents were shot, killed, and carried away.

     Three of Koresh’s followers were shot and killed instantly: Peter Gent, Winston Blake, and an armed woman named Jaydean Wendell. Two others were severely wounded: Perry Jones and Peter Hipsman. Forensic evidence later indicated that they were subsequently shot at close range and killed, victims of mercy killings. David Koresh was shot in the hip that morning but survived.

     At 5:00 p.m. that evening ATF agents shot a sixth person, Michael Schroeder, who was trying to gain access into the compound after working at his job all day.

     It was a botched arrest attempt. “It was as if the agents had gone to war,” and that “the government appeared to have lost.” The media arrived with cameras, and the stand-off continued for fifty-one days.

     Questions surfaced. Why did the ATF not call off the operation once the agents knew that Koresh knew? Why did the ATF not arrest Koresh when he was alone in Waco? He drove into town several times every week. How did he get all the guns, and what religion would stockpile guns and ammo? The answers to those questions elude us still.

     What happened in Waco, Texas is a hornets nest. Stick in your hand, and you are sure to feel a sting. This tragedy circles around issues of scriptural authority, of laws inscribed into the legal code, of the government’s authority to intrude into people’s lives, and of Constitutional rights spelled out in the first and second Amendments: freedom to worship and right to bear arms. The pros and cons line up straight, facing each other with little room for deviation, discussion, or consensus.

     Some filtered out, but nearly a hundred committed to Koresh chose to stay inside the compound.

     The public gradually learned that David Koresh considered himself a Messiah, the Lamb of God, that he held the secret to the Seventh and final Seal, and that although he demanded celibacy from his followers, he practiced polygamy, siring as many as “seventeen children.” Even though the Seventh-Day Adventist church frowns on eating meat, drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes, David Koresh did all three and could cite a Bible verse to justify each. Psalm 18: “Smoke went up out of his nostrils.”

     The ATF special agents went to Mount Carmel, acting as governing officials, to administer the law because of their office, but according to one media observer, James M. Wall, “these officials entered a situation already heavily stacked against them. Neither the Treasury Department officials, nor the FBI, seemed to comprehend the dangerousness of a charismatic who was immersed in apocalyptic literature. To the Davidians, the long siege that followed was proof that the final days were imminent.”

     It was Janet Reano, Bill Clinton’s Attorney General, who gave her approval to an FBI plan to inject tear gas into the compound and punch holes into the walls to allow those inside a means to exit. On April 19, armored tanks did just that, but only nine people escaped. Seventy-six people died inside, consumed by the fire that broke out hours after the last tear gas canister was injected, or crushed by falling chunks of concrete when tanks pushed over the walls, or by self-inflicted gun shots. It was all too painful, too tragic, to see the smoke and flames and know the children perished. Yet it happened.

     The government published the Danforth Report on July 21, 2000, and inside its 1,001 pages, it declared that David Koresh and his fellows were responsible, that they “spread fuel throughout the main structure of the complex and ignited it in at least three places causing the fire which resulted in the deaths of those Branch Davidians not killed by their own fire.”

     David Koresh, 33-years-old, died that day, as did his wife and his several children and dozens more.