Here is something I consider very important"
What really happened at Waco
There was an article about a week in the life of President
Clinton in
the Tuesday, March 9, 1993 Wall Street Journal. You can read.
. .
For March 1:
® He also wants to know the condition of one particular
ATF agent who
was wounded at Waco: Jay William Buford, an acquaintance of his
from
Arkansas. &hibar;
AND
® And Deputy Treasury Secretary Altman is dispatched to
Waco to visit
Mr. Buford and the other wounded agents. &hibar;
And, under Wednesday, March 3:
® Mr. Altman reports on his trip to Waco and his visit
with the
President's friend, Mr. Buford, who was nicked in the nose by
a bullet.
The president wants to know if there will be any permanent scarring.
Mr.
Altman says he doesn't think so. &hibar;
Now this last sentence indicates that SOMEBODY went to a great
deal
of trouble to lie. You all know Altman, of course, from Whitewater.
If
he and Clinton didn't stage a phony conversation, the paper lied.
In Massacre at Waco, Buford's wounds are described as much
more serious
and he is said to have rolled off the roof. In the Treasury Department
report he is said to have had two wounds in the legs, which is
probably
the truth.
Now, just who is Buford? Well, he's not just any old ATF agent,
but
the special agent in charge for the ATF in Little Rock, Arkansas
and
one of the leaders of the raid. He's the one who inserted the
sex
allegations into the warrant, starting January 1, 1993. (Bill
Clinton
was in Little Rock at the time)
Now, there is some video footage of the raid, shot by TV station
KWTX,
Channel 10 in Waco, included in Linda Thompson's famous Waco video.
Bits
of it were rebroadcast for a few seconds during the CBS Evening
News of
Wednesday, May 5, 1995 although not the segment showing Buford
killing
the other agents under his command, and I'm not sure if the network
has the crucial frames. But the quality of the tape is very good.
It shows two groups of four agents climbing ladders to reach
a
second-floor window. Three go in, and the fourth apparently throws
some kind of smoke grenade into the house after them. There then
is
a short cut in the tape, in Linda Thompson's version at least,
and the
fourth man then fires a MP-5 machine-gun into the room.
Originally, the BATF claimed that three men died in that room,
and that
is what the caption in the March 15, 1993 issue of Newsweek indicates.
However, in the final Treasury Department report, the group
that went
to the "weapons" room (which wasn't actually a weapons
room, but that
was the excuse for sending them there) consisted of only three
men, and
all three survived, and one of them is Buford!! While Robert J.
Williams
is said to have died outside the room on the roof, Todd McKeehan
and
Conway LaBleu are totally bereft of any place or cause of death.
Later on, I think they were assigned some location - but not
inside
the room. All 3 men who went into the room now lived in the version
of reality after the fire (See August 8, 1994 issue of U.S. News
and
World report)
Sammy Finkelman