Military involvement

Why they chose two stage two daylight assaults boggles the mind.

The reason the ATF chose to make the dynamic entry raid was:

1. To maintain their budget and
2. To gain some much needed good publicity after the Ruby Ridge fiasco.

They conducted the raid in daylight because they were filming it and daylight allows for better news footage. They had several camera crews on the ground with them right from the beginning.

The reason they chose the Mount Carmel Center and David Koresh was because David had co-operated with law enforcement several times in the past, and he was considered to be a low risk target. Indeed, the ATF had two other places they were considering to raid, before they chose the Mount Carmel Center.

The ATF had agents in the farm house across the street, monitoring the Mount Carmel Center for several weeks before the raid. David Koresh made a daily jog up and down that road in front of them. The ATF's warrant called for the arrest of Koresh. It would have been easy to arrest David while he was jogging. But instead, the ATF chose the dynamic entry raid plan, because this would generate more publicity.

Koresh invited ATF agents to the Mount Carmel Center to inspect the firearms several months before. Koresh claimed that none of the semi-automatics had been converted to fully automatic, and therefore no law had been broken, and no tax had been unpaid. He claimed that one of his firearms had been modified legally with a hell-fire kit that allowed the firearm to fire 3-round bursts. The ATF chose not to accept Koresh's offer to inspect the firearms.

On the day of the raid, the ATF command post was set up with secretaries and fax machines, ready to fax out news reports to all the major news agencies, telling them about the successful raid, the many arrests and the huge cache of firearms seized. That was what was supposed to happen.

And that's why 83 people died. The ATF leadership was seeking good publicity.

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