At 9:00 AM -0500 1/20/01, Declan McCullagh wrote:
Reno probably didn't expect the situation to, um, blow up in her face.
It is also undisputed that if they wanted to avoid a show of force, they could have nabbed Koresh during his jogs around the property line or whatnot in the morning. Reese, you blather too much.
I also believe that neither Waco nor Ruby Ridge were expected to go down as they did. Neither Reno nor Clinton gained anything from these debacles. What I fault is the general trend toward "militarizing the police," especially the trend toward using federal police instead of local sheriffs and law enforcement. In both cases, Waco and Ruby Ridge, local law enforcement was bypassed, even "kept out of the loop." This should not be acceptable in a constitutional republic consisting of states. There are also fundamental problems with the War on Some Weapons, the War on Some Drugs, and the War on Some Religions. Claims that Randy Weaver had sawed an inch or so off a shotgun, part of an entrapment by Feds who wanted his cooperation in other matters, tell us how close we are coming to being a police state (though we are not yet there in any plausible sense). Claims that David Koresh was mingling in unapproved ways with young women, or was selling weapons illegally (never proved, even after the ashes had been sifted), should have been handled locally, not by calling in federal ninjas. As for Ashcroft, we'll see. Bush won, so Bush gets to appoint his staff. The whole "review by the Senate" thing is a relic of the McCarthy era, actually, and should be done away with. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns