Waco was a publicity stunt gone awry. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, fearful of budget cuts in the wake of the Ruby Ridge fiasco, wanted to create a hysteria about militia members, and stage a coup to justify their existence.

The charges of child abuse and gun stockpiling--the alleged reasons for the siege--were never proven, and the evidence points to the fact that both issues were trumped up by federal authorities to justify the attack.

The Branch Davidians did not die as the result of mass suicide. Many may have died when the CS gas inserted into the building, ignited, causing deadly cyanide to be released through the compound.

Based on the FBI's own infrared surveillance tapes, experts contend the agency itself started the fire that destroyed the compound, and may have machine-gunned Branch Davidians fleeing from the rear of the building.

Producer Dan Gifford spoke with journalist Anthony DellaFlora about the movie and the issues it raises.

AD: What was it that got you involved in putting this together?

DG: The whole thing happened quite by accident. I had left the news business in New York and was working there doing some films and acting and came out here and started a production company and one of the people I met out here showed me this aerial surveillance tape that was taken by the FBI the day the building burned down. He said there was a story going around that some of the Davidians had tried to escape out the back and had been gunned down by the FBI and they were bulldozing the bodies inside to hide the evidence.

Who was telling you this?

A fellow named Michael McNulty, who is credited on the film as a researcher. So you could see a tank with a bulldozer blade bulldozing something, you didn't know what it was. He was going to take it around to the news department, so I called some people on his behalf. He did, and then he popped up about seven months later and said nobody would give him the time of day and he was running around town at the time looking for somebody to put together a piece on this, to look into it. So this started out as a one-hour made for television documentary we'd hoped to sell to PBS. It was only about the last seven hours of the 19th, the day the building burned down. As we got into it and started finding out that the official story just was not true, that's how it expanded into its present format as a feature film because we realized that unless the politics changed drastically, there would be little to no chance that this would ever be on American television. The networks certainly. We've been picked up by the BBC, but that's a whole different bag. That's pretty much consistent with what I saw at Sundance last year. We were approached by a number of people and they all got cold feet, and it wasn't just Park City in wintertime. It's a tough subject.

Did you meet a lot of official resistance putting this together?

No, we didn't need any official cooperation. The only resistance, if you will, is that nobody who was involved on the government side would agree to a sit-down interview, except one, the forensic photographer who was there at Waco and talked on camera. He, on camera, said "this was not a mass suicide. It was a mass homicide." He's very upset. When you see this, I put this together with the intention that it could not be done like many documentaries are done. There's so much detail, there's so much intricacy in things, that I put it together as a story, with characters. You'll see them. And really with their subtext. You'll pick up what they're about and what really happened from, not as much as what they're saying, but how they're saying it. The semantics that are used are extremely important, if not more important than what is actually coming out of their mouths. When I was a reporter in Washington for years, that's the thing that's always been the key to me, is this very carefully constructed lawyers' language, or politicians' language and it's totally different. The terror you have in government is totally different than the terror that is portrayed in motion pictures with car chases and people jumping off buildings, that sort of thing. It's the subtleties, it's the omission, it's the quietness. Did you see "Wag the Dog?" When you see what happens to the Dustin Hoffman character, that's what I'm thinking about. Keep that one in mind. That's the terror. There's lots of that here. So, the thing that we did, the only bit of skullduggery we had to get was, there are internal memos we obtained from 60 Minutes showing that they spiked the story. They knew about it. They had the video taken to an expert. He said "yes, that's automatic weapons fire being poured from the government positions into the Branch Davidian building." Then they spiked it.

You got something leaked to you, the notes? Memos?

Yes. Memos.

Did they go on camera at all for this?

No, they did not, but we have the memos on camera. The things on there, it's very plain. I know what happened there. They chickened out. It's very consistent, I must say, with network news operations. As I sit here, I cannot think of an expose or ballsy kind of documentary expose, that was not politically safe to do. Starting with the classic one, "Harvest of Shame," Edward R. Murrow. Who is going to take up for landowners abusing migrant workers? And even during the Vietnam era you didn't really have these things about Vietnam until it was politically safe to do them. You had a very vibrant anti-war effort going on, lots of shouting on the side. But there's no constituency for demonizing a group like the Davidians, especially demonizing a group and saying they're child abusers, or gun stockpilers or Christians, or whatever. It's very difficult. And quite frankly, at the top level, your sources of information get cut off, you get taken off the dinner party circuit. You're persona non grata. There are ways of punishing the journalists who get out of line. That's one of the problems. I found that plenty when I was a reporter. My specialty was white collar crime and fraud, so I was forever angering very prominent people.

I noticed here that in addition to the 60 Minutes memos, you've got FBI videos and things. How were you able to obtain those?

Those were sent to the Branch Davidian defense attorneys during the trial. There was an aerial surveillance tape which included the FLIR (Forward Looking InfraRed), which was part of discovery stuff sent. Whenever someone gets in a lawsuit with Uncle Sam, or a court case with a giant corporation, one of the tricks they do is just overwhelm you with stuff. They'll bring in the trains and just dump all this. "You want documents, here they are, now let's see if you have an army to go through them." That's where they originally came from, through that source.

So they actually just put this in your lap?

Oh yeah. Everything in this film, this film could have been done back in 1993, it's just nobody wanted to. It's always been there. In fact, we've learned of other stuff since we did the film.

Like what?

There's just, well, for instance we had confirmation that--it's implied in the film that the government destroyed the evidence as part of a cover up after the building burned down and has never allowed anybody to examine any of the evidence, the firearms. We confirmed from good sources that the government in fact, people did in fact, plant firearms at scene. So, I hate to say it, but the conclusion I'm left is that first of all, that there was probably nothing illegal there to have justified that raid in the first place. What I was coming to is that during when we were doing this, that if there was in fact anything after the building burned down that was illegal in the way of a firearm, it was probably constructed during the standoff. But then when they wouldn't release the evidence, they wouldn't allow anybody to see it--the FBI's held onto this stuff, it's all been stamped national security and all the rest of this crap--it really does lend credence to some other stories that things were planted there to just to cinch the case.

You obviously have some background in the news business. Was some of this, at some point, unbelievable to you, this stuff you were finding? Could it really have happened like this?

It was and it wasn't. I've seen it before. One of the great untold stories around the country, all over the world, in fact, is the police fabricating evidence, planting evidence at crime scenes. Have you seen "LA Confidential?" Remember the questions that the detective, the Arthur Cromwell character asks the young guy that wants to be a detective? "Would you be willing to fake evidence to convict somebody? Would you be willing to fake evidence to go along with the prosecutor's hypothesis? Would you be willing to shoot somebody in the back?" Yeah, that's reality. If you have a NEXUS, look up that subject and you'll see there's been a massive evidence tampering scam up in New York state with the State Police there. It's been going on for years now. They have a thousand people or more that have been locked up with bogus evidence. They were planting fingerprints at crime scenes. Because if you were a cop, you get pay raises, your performance rating goes up. If you are a prosecutor, you get re-elected because your conviction rate goes up. There's very much of an incentive for this. The problem is that most nice Americans don't want to believe that. You want to believe the police. But the reality is there's a tremendous incentive there. I'm not saying all police are crooks and they all do it, but there is a code of silence, there is a unanimity throughout the ranks, one cop does not squeal on another.

As you were describing it before, the attack itself, a lot of it is omission or looking the other way?

It's omission. It's shades of meaning. In the case of the Waco hearings, in Congress and in the Senate, it's theater. It's not what it appears to be. It's not really a look to get at the real facts. Certainly, maybe there were several people on the Congressional side who really wanted to do that, but everybody has a vested interest. If you were, let's say, on the Democratic side, you have a vested interest in protecting the administration. You also have a vested interest in protecting the law enforcement side of this, because you have the firearms bills that were coming up. That's a large part of what that raid was about, was to scare the public about this boogieman that's been created--that we have these crazies with these powerful weapons that are going to go out and kill people and it's a domestic terrorism thing. I use the term very reluctantly, but this was a Reichstag fire, and this has been going on in my life time. I've been a reporter throughout the civil rights era, to stir up the public, get opinion and find an enemy and focus and freak them out. What are we seeing now with the FBI saying we have to be able to decrypt your e-mail or tap your telephones? It's all part of the same thing. It's not to say there aren't bad people out there, of course there are. One of the things I constantly hear is the Davidians referred to as part of the militia. They weren't any such thing. This patriot bunch, or militia, and I've had lots of contact with them since this film came out, if anything, this is about the most inept, harmless bunch I've ever seen in my life. There's no leadership, there's no brains. They couldn't find their way out of an unlocked closet. It's just an absolute joke. Sure there's a Timothy McVeigh out there that might do something on his own, but that's just not a widespread phenomenon that I can see at all. But it serves the purpose.

The Academy Award nomination, does that look like it's going to get this out to a wider audience?

So far, no. Again, look at the politics of that. That's the real issue here. This is not a popular subject, it's not a very PC thing. There's just, comparatively, there is very little interest in this film. It's just kind of slid along underneath the radar screen, if you will.

Maybe it'll take 30 or 40 years?

It would have to percolate up. I think it really does prove that mass murder by one's own government in this country is very possible, very likely, as long as the victims are properly vilified and dehumanized ahead of time, and then do anything you want. Here again, it was a brilliant selection because you have a bunch that has a weird lifestyle, living out in the middle of nowhere and for all intents, really minding their own business. But you could vilify them. They fit a paradigm. It's just like that yahoo up in Idaho whose name I never remember, whose wife was shot. Randy Weaver. He fits this paradigm of the angry white guy who's going to do something that's going to bring down the whole country. These are very easy things to play. The fact that this has gone on and not been talked about is a major failure of the press in our country and it's a major failure of the left. The left traditionally, has had the moral high ground because they were willing to hold government accountable to some sort of principal in politics. What have I heard from my fellow liberals here in Hollywood? I've gone through, basically, versions of "I want my government to get rid of people like that. They're dangerous." Who can you make jokes about? You can't make them about Blacks, Asians, Jews. It's about Bubba living out in the hinterland. A lot of what Waco is about is class warfare. There's a lot of stuff going on here that has nothing to do with the way it's presented. The initial raid was about getting publicity for the agency. It was about racism. This is the agency that gave us the good old boys roundup, photos with the signs saying "No Niggers Allowed." That was one of the stunners, is when we saw the photos that the Branch Davidians took of themselves. There was home video in there. We started seeing black face after black face. I thought they were all white. It turns out that half of them were Black. I never heard that!

Do you think anybody in the press is doing their jobs anymore, in any kind of sense? Seems this is one instance they failed to look into things and you can go back and look at any incident since Watergate essentially, and you can find dozens of examples of where they took the government word for stuff like this.

Oh yeah. That's very easy to do. Certainly, there are pockets. But it's very difficult to buck a trend. I think it's television, of course, that has the biggest impact on the masses, and there you have to have pictures and people want to see car chases, they want to see blood." The television, just the format, does not allow for any kind of, really getting at an issue in 90 seconds. Or 60, which is your typical story. I understand some stations are cutting down stories to 45 seconds. Here in L.A. and New York, the traffic report will be two declarative sentences, with five words in each. The real problem I have with news and one of the reasons I got out of it was we're playing to paradigms, we're playing to stereotypes. There's very little effort that I've seen to find out what are the real facts, and tell that. Certainly if you have an accident scene, you don't know what the facts are. But you can determine what the facts, as nearly as possible, what they are, which is what we attempt to do here. What are the facts as near as we can find? Here's what they are, so you have accurate information to make informed decisions and people see the facts through the prism of their own politics and their own belief systems and their own biases, or what have you. You've always had that. And frankly, a lot of reporters I've seen around aren't, they're not equipped. They don't have the life experience, I would have to say, on many issues. There, I would go back to when I started in the news business in the mid-60s, out of high school, in Baltimore. We had kind of a transition to that time from the H.L. Mencken--older guys, cigar-chomping, the guy who ate onion sandwiches in the newsroom, smoked cigars and that sort of thing--to a new type that was coming in that was much younger and more of a political ideologue. I remember some of the older editors that I used to have and you could show them a story and they'd look at it and they'd just say "You know, this doesn't look right. Go back and check it out." And they're right, it doesn't look right. Something is wrong. That doesn't happen with the new breed. They haven't been in the smoke-filled rooms. They haven't followed around the political trail. They really haven't lived in the same way that these other characters have. They've lived in a different way. There's also a different belief system that's been dragged in. One of the things I could never understand in the late 60s, was how many reporters I used to work with, just loved Angela Davis and were supporting her presidency. She was the University of California radical, she was a Marxist. And they could not grasp the fact that if she actually won and did what she said she going to do, they'd be out of a job. They couldn't grasp that. There's a mind freeze that goes on. Also, on both sides, you had certainly more--yellow dog journalism was yellower than it is today in some ways, but at some point there seemed to be a moral mechanism or something that would snap and say this is beyond the line, this is over the top. I don't mean to sound like everyone was virtuous. But I think there was a much different take on who politicians were and what they were about. There was more gentlemanly pacts, but it got to be a much more skewed thing from what I have seen coming in later on.

A lot of the stuff you present here has in fact been backed up. The Washington Post went and looked at a lot of the allegations, particularly with the infrared video shots, and the movie has pretty much stood up.

I wouldn't have let it out of the barn if it wasn't a standup, I'll promise that. That infrared, we really pulled some good contacts down in Washington. We had to have somebody with absolutely impeccable credentials and that's Ed Allard, the fellow who is in the film explaining what that stuff is. But in addition to him, I've taken that to, at this point, 11 different people whose specialty is the identification of weapons fire in night vision technology. Folks in the military and out of the military. Of course, anybody who has that expertise, obviously they're going to be in the defense industry or business of some sort and nobody disagrees. That is automatic weapons fire. It's working in coordination with the tanks. It's not just fireflies or something of that sort. It's the real stuff. But here again, you have an interesting situation, we're talking about saying that most of these flashes are gunfire. A great many people today have never even seen a real firearm shoot. They've seen depiction's of it in the movies and even there, it blows a lot of hot gases out the front end when it's going off. But some of the stuff that may come down the pipe, and has been attempted so far to say that that's not what it is, has come from the circles trading on public ignorance, trying to say that it isn't. I'm gonna use the analogy today, that if I told you that I was going to win the Indianapolis 500 by driving backwards, you'd say I was nuts. The reason is that most everybody today drives a car and they have some familiarity with what a car is capable of. There was a time when almost everybody had access to a firearm. I suspect the part of the country where you are, it still is that way.

Yes it is.

So that some of the yarns and public scares that are used in some of these things, like Waco, the assault weapons and stockpiling guns. As you'll see in the films, one of the Davidians says, "Well, in Texas, everybody has got a lot of guns. So what?" What's the big deal? But you say that to a New Yorker, he just knows his local drug dealer has a bunch of guns, and the cops have a bunch of guns, that scares him. He doesn't grasp it. So it's an easy one to sell. You go back to that background, people (reporters) having been places, done things. Of course, I'm from a generation where, I grew up, my hometown is a college town, in North Carolina, and for the time I was there, everybody's father had been in WWII or Korea, and everybody brought home war souvenirs. I remember we counted up once the number of fully operational submachine guns we knew of in this little college town, Chapel Hill, N.C, which was a pretty small town, and we came up with 17, not counting all the other bazookas and rifles. I suspect at that time, certainly every college town was like that because you had all these guys on the GI bill. But none of them, I don't remember anybody joking about spraying the street, or taking one of those things out of the closet. None of them ever walked out of the house and committed any crimes. Now we're in the process of scaring the public about something, a threat, which in effect doesn't exist. Yeah, you've got drug gangs, but you've always had that. Jesse James was a gang. I've always looked at this as a bogus issue. It's obfuscating other things that are more important to be talking about.

In light of the fact they are finally putting the FBI sniper on trial for Ruby Ridge deal, or they were last I heard, what do you think the chances are--assuming your movie is true--what are the chances anything is going to happen to anybody in the FBI because of that?

I think in the first case, the sniper at Ruby Ridge, who was also by the way in the backside of Waco, I think the chances of him ever going through the system are practically zero. As I understand, the government has gotten it thrown out of state court and taken into federal court and now they're trying to get it dismissed. I would suspect that there's a very good chance they'll be able to do that. As far as Waco is concerned I think there would have to be such a huge uprising for the public. Of course, the major media would have to do that something on the order of the way the Monica Lewinsky thing is going on now. That's the order it would have to do and I don't see any interest in it frankly. I've been in D.C. when we've shown (the film) there. To my knowledge, we have not had any elected representatives, or even any staffers show up at the showings in the theaters. So I think the taste for that is minimal. Nobody's going to tackle this unless they're forced to. The problem is you have a number of things going on here. Again, back to the 60s when J. Edgar Hoover used to run things, it was very common for him to send a couple of agents up to Sen. Whoever's office and they would say "There's a story going around that you're out doing something scurrilous after dark. Now we know that's not true, and we want to keep that out of the papers." And you're sitting there, "My God, they know what I'm doing, I'm finished." Or "I'm not doing anything, but if they claim I am, I'm still finished." Then they'd say, "By the way, here's our position paper on the upcoming hearings." They get the message. Everybody uses the FBI. They certainly do engage in that kind of activity and no one wants to cross them. That's one thing. Whether it's true or not, there is a national security issue here, that the public faith in that agency is necessary for the well being of the country. Again, whether that's fact or not is a matter of opinion. But you have all these things here. People are compromised in various ways. Nobody wants to tackle this thing. The agency has tremendous power. So I would doubt it.

Given the situation and the response to it so far, what's the best you can hope for?

That's not why I made it. I didn't make it to right wrongs or anything. That's not the reason I made it, just so I make that clear. But in terms of it being any kind of a catalyst that's going to cause (change)--I think politics would have to change massively for that to happen. We would have to have people here in the community where I work stop saying things like "I want my government to get rid of people like that," and make jokes about getting rid of angry white guys and things of this sort. Angry white guys, that's the foil. That's the only foil you can really safely make fun of. But that would have to change, and I don't see it changing any time soon.

So at this point, you can just say I did a good job and let it go?

There it is. I'm not a causer, that's not why I made it. I just don't see that there's any haste to do it. Way down the line, if you're talking about 20, 30 years ago, somebody may talk about what went on and confirm things, but there's a code of silence, right now in effect somebody would have to crack. A lot of these things have been stamped national security. It makes you wonder. There's a heck of a lot going on there that's really bad. But there again, a key to this, is the media people would have to start seeing it differently. I don't think you'd have any kind of massive public interest uprising without that kind of leadership. Steve Schiff, who was on the Waco committee, your New Mexico congressman [editor's note: Rep. Schiff died March 25 of complications due to cancer--after this interview occured], who was very good on asking very pointed questions. I suspect even he realizes there is a point beyond which he doesn't want to go.

I didn't know that.

When you see the film he asks some of the better questions. He picks up on the fact that the girl, Carrie Jewell, who testified about Koresh molesting her, was put in there just to divert attention from the actions of law enforcement and the fact is, as we've discovered since we finished the film, it probably never happened. It was a put-up job. I talked to her grandmother who lives out here in Orange County, who was by the way, not a Davidian, and she says the whole story she told in front of Congress was scripted by her father, who was sitting right there with her, as a way for him to ride on her publicity coattails for a showbiz career he was trying to get off the ground at the time. So he got on the Oprah show and the Phil Donahue show and all the other ones. He was also helping a fellow who was an apostate Davidian in Australia, who had a falling out with David Koresh and started the whole thing about the child abuse, which as near as we can tell, ain't true. In the film, you'll see the local sheriff who talks about "well, we investigated that issue for two years with the child protective services." People were making the claim, the media was repeating the claim, but no proof. You've got to have proof to go into court. They wanted to go out and just hang this guy. But child abuse is one of those things that you can accuse somebody of today and it doesn't have to be true and it just slimes them.

Schiff specifically asked questions about that.

Yeah, in the film there's a little snippet, there's a piece in there where he says something to the effect, "As serious as child abuse is, this meeting is not about child abuse and the federal agencies had no authority or jurisdiction over child abuse."

Yeah, they don't call the FBI in on child abuse cases.

Exactly. There again, you mention child abuse and people who would normally be, just strict adherents to due process, are "I don't care, why can't the ATF go in and arrest child abusers?" The fact is that in the affidavit for the warrant, there was a lot of stuff in there about child abuse, which was put in there just to inflame the judge about stuff so they could get the warrant. What the warrant was about was, I'm not sure they had anything illegal there at all. It basically boiled down, that they had gun parts, which were legal and in the affidavit it had all this stuff about "well, if somebody knew how to take this gun apart, and do this and had a machine and knew how to do such and such, you could manufacture something illegal." Alright, well?

If someone had asked the question back then why is ATF and FBI going into investigate child abuse charges and gun parts, there may have been a different ending to this.

Some of those questions were asked, but again, it was dangerous to ask that question. There were several congressmen who did not win re-election, I'm told, because they were open to charges that they were anti-law enforcement, because during those hearings they questioned what happened. That's again one of these McCarthyisms that has been created. It's a weird thing. Many have commented on this. The Democrats sounded like what you would expect Republicans to sound like, defending law enforcement, regardless of what they did. And the Republicans sound like 1960s liberals. That's how it comes off. It's really strange. I intentionally did not put in a lot of the very inflammatory things that could have been put in there because I was afraid. You have to go back and think what conditions were a year ago, over a year go, about this situation, because I didn't think they would be palatable, or it would really hinder the acceptance of the film. So what you're seeing is my best judgment, based on years of experience in dealing with issues like this, about what it was possible to put in front of the public and not have it be called again anti-law enforcement, or "Oh you just don't like Democrats, or "You don't like the FBI," or "You're pro child abuse," or "You're really a Davidian." Today, I can probably put some harder things in. But there's some tough stuff I could have put in that would have, that was very, you would really see, walk away with a really bad taste about what the media was doing. There's a little of it in there, but just a taste, about the lying and the scope of it. But I was afraid it would be seen as over the top.

Will you recut?

We may. We're cutting it right now. It's 2 hours and 15 minutes and the BBC is going to run it and we need to get it down just under two hours for them. I was in London when we had the showing over there. It's the lead film in the World Human Rights Watch film awards, so we had really good interest over there. Of course there were a number of people who were from the U.K. who were in the (Davidian) building, and from Australia, so they watched this very intently when it was going on. But the response was very telling and it was very interesting to see that while we were there, they were going through, I think it was the week you had to turn in all handguns. It's now illegal to possess a handgun in the U.K. Even as that was going on, it was interesting to see that the audiences that we got really understood this basic concept that there are limits to authority, which is really a unique to English-speaking people, that when the police show up and start shooting at you, that you do not have to just allow them to kill you. I was kind of surprised to see that. Of course, in every audience, you'll have somebody with a crewcut, or two or three who will take the side that CS [tear gas-like substance] is not a dangerous substance, the riot control agent. These people were child abusers, so you're saying that we should just let groups like this abuse children and stomp out guns. You always get that. You just start shaping the paradigm, shaping the references, the language in the media, it doesn't necessarily happen over night. At Waco, you had some ready made paradigms that you could use, the compound, stockpiling guns, child abuse, Bible thumpers, that just inflames and you could do the same thing with virtually any group and it really is a clever control of language that is used here to do that.

I understand that exactly.

It's very easy to do. Once you get that rolling, it's tough to stop. It has a lot of inertia.

To order a copy of the video "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," call 800-771-2147, ext. 19. The cost is $25 and includes shipping and handling.

After completing a documentary on UFOs, and watching the Waco movie, Albuquerque Journal reporter Anthony DellaFlora is convinced almost everything is a conspiracy. Portions of this interview appeared previously in the Albuquerque Journal.

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