It’s fascinating to see Bill Clinton surfacing – on cue – to invoke the “climate” that ostensibly led to the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. According to Clinton – then and now – it was all the fault of his critics, particularly those in talk radio. I remember it all well. At the time he singled out Rush Limbaugh for special opprobrium and – as one could reasonably expect – Limbaugh didn’t take it lying down then any more than he did last week.
While it’s always entertaining to see Bill Clinton shedding crocodile tears about other peoples’ violent acts, we must not forget that it was Mr. Clinton who approved the gassing and assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco that led directly to the deaths of men, women and children. While Clinton was quick to shed his manhood by blaming the fiasco on AG Janet Reno, his culpability was clearly established in a report on the massacre prepared for his then Deputy Attorney General, Phillip Heymann.
Writing in The Volokh Conspiracy, Kenneth Anderson describes the deliberate gassing of children in the run up to the final assault.
The plan Reno approved and took to President Clinton for approval contemplated the children choking in the gas unprotected for forty-eight hours if necessary, to produce the requisite “maternal feelings”. By taking aim at the children with potentially lethal gas, their mothers would be compelled, according to the FBI plan repeatedly defended by the Clinton administration afterwards as “rational” planning, to flee with them into the arms of those trying to gas them.
An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it “is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours”. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan.
The effect of CS gas on an unprotected infant exposed for only two to three hours is discussed in the report; in that case report, dating from the early 1970s, the child’s symptoms during the first twenty-four hours were upper respiratory; but, within forty-eight hours his face showed evidence of first degree burns, and he was in severe respiratory distress typical of chemical pneumonia. The infant had cyanosis, required urgent positive pressure pulmonary care, and was hospitalized for twenty– eight days. Other signs of toxicity appeared, including an enlarged liver.
Professor Stone’s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann’s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.
As usual, Bill Clinton – demonstrated liar and sharper – never fails to amaze us with his chutzpah.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
lol sweet stuff man.