President Bill Clinton and Attorney General Janet Reno are responsible for the cold-blooded murder of 86 people, including 17 children, outside Waco, Texas....

This heinous crime exposes the true face of the bipartisan imperialist government in the United States--its imperial presidency, Congress, armed forces, cop agencies, and courts. The entire operation had been carried out over weeks with coarse disregard for democratic rights and with callous indifference to the human life of anyone outside of--or viewed as an obstacle to--ruling-class circles and their multitude of professional and middle-class retainers.

To cite just one example, federal officials had cut off electricity in the first weeks after their initial February 28 assault on the buildings and knew full well that kerosene lamps had to be used for lighting inside. Yet, despite plans for armored vehicles to ram the wooden structures for hours on end, and to inject massive quantities of tear gas into the premises, the FBI had no fire trucks on hand....

Using the Waco events to bolster Washington’s murderous policies elsewhere, the president ominously added. "There is, unfortunately, a rise in this sort of fanaticism all across the world. And we may have to confront it again.... In Waco there were close to 90 victims. In the Gulf War two years ago, the roster of Iraqis incinerated trying to surrender, or murdered in one of the U.S.-organized "turkey shoots," totaled in the tens and possibly hundreds of thousands. In Vietnam, the toll rose into the millions....

What happened to due process? Protection from illegal search and seizure? Freedom of religion?

Did the right to association and equal protection under the law not apply to the Branch Dividians? If so, who else might someday find themselves labeled fanatics or fundamentalists or radicals? A Black rights organization? An immigrants’ rights group? Defenders of an abortion clinic? A striking union local...?

For workers around the world, watching the carnage in Waco was an almost unbearable reminder of the kind of violence the capitalist government, capitalist political parties, and their armed gangs--whether cops or rightist goons--will not hesitate to use.... Fewer than 100 days into the new Democratic administration, workers in the United States and the world over have been given the chance to take a cold, hard look at the truth about the Clinton White House and bipartisan Congress. That reality should redouble our determination to unite and organize as a class--acorss national borders and beyond skin color, language, or sex--to defend the economic, social, and political rights of working people, which are under attack both at home and abroad by the employers and their government.  
 
 
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