R&I NV — Twenty-two years ago in CounterPunch, Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn aptly described the press’s coverage of federal atrocities at Waco, Texas as “one of the great failures of American journalism, one of the most sickening, one of the most predictable and one of the most revealing.” They observed that the “central mission of the Fourth Estate” was to serve as “accomplices in the great and ongoing Cover-up of Everything that Really Matters.” The Waco coverup is once again relevant since one of its prime players, President Joe Biden, has re-ignited the fire.
Last week, Biden nominated David Chipman to be head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, the premier federal firearms enforcement agency. Biden complemented that announcement with a call for a national red flag law to entitle police to preemptively confiscate firearms from citizens suspected of being a threat to themselves or others.
Chipman was a 25-year ATF agent and a key official at the 1994 federal trial of the Branch Davidians who survived the ATF and FBI assaults the prior year. Many federal agents posed for grisly “victory photos” in the rubble of the Branch Davidians’ Waco, Texas, home after it burned to the ground during an FBI assault. One photo allegedly shows Chipman proudly holding a rifle in front of the wreckage where scores of children died shortly before. The White House and Chipman’s current employer, the antigun Giffords organization, did not respond to repeated email requests to confirm or deny that Chipman is the federal agent in that photo; the Daily Mail and many online sites have tagged Chipman as the agent. In a Reddit public question and answer session in 2019, Chipman sought to spur support for an assault weapons ban by falsely claiming that the Davidians shot down two federal helicopters that were attacking their compound.
Mr. Sniff and Bad Touch
Article URL : https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/04/15/biden-fires-up-the-waco-controversy-anew/