("Quid coniuratio est?")
WACO "ABUSE" TESTIMONY DOUBTED
[Spotlight, 08/07/95]
There's a problem with the emotional testimony linking David Koresh to child molestation: It may not be true.
Exclusive To The Spotlight
By Andrew Arnold
Republicans heading the Waco hearings in Washington, and the U.S. Establishment media, have let a young girl pull the wool over their eyes as she tugged at America's heart strings.
The problem is, she may have been lying, according to a leading British newspaper.
When 14-year-old Kiri Jewell told the congressional panel investigating Waco she had been sexually abused by David Koresh when she was 10, there wasn't a dry eye in the house -- nor a murmur of protest from the Republican members.
But Washington-based British reporter Ambrose Evans-Pritchard wasn't satisfied he had heard the whole story. He made a few telephone calls and discovered Jewell was not in Texas at the time the alleged abuse took place.
"A few telephone calls would have told [Republicans] that Kiri had not been a resident in the compound -- despite press reports to the contrary," Pritchard wrote in the London Telegraph. "She was living with her mother and grandmother in California for most of the years in question."
"Her father, David Jewell, has been promoting her allegations on the TV talk show circuit," he added. "He is a man of questionable character."
-+- Repeat -+-
This is not the first time the Establishment has used a pretty, young abused face to further its propaganda aims.
On October 10, 1990, Nayirah, a 15-year-old Kuwaiti, tearfully told Congress how Iraqi soldiers stormed a hospital in Kuwait, pulling babies from incubators and leaving the infants to die as the machines were shipped to Iraq on Saddam Hussein's orders.
The dramatic testimony drew international coverage and swung America into its war mode.
It was more than a year before Americans realized they had been used. The girl turned out to be the daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, a member of the ruling family (Spotlight, Jan. 27, 1992) {1}.
The testimony was staged by Hill and Knowlton, one of the top public relations firms in Washington. The firm's vice president, Gary Hymel, prepared the witness list for the Congressional Human Rights Caucus.
Hymel later told an author he knew who "Nayirah" actually was when he presented her to America.
-+- Other Testimony -+-
According to attorneys for leaders of the Branch Davidians, David Koresh and the other church members were prepared to surrender within about two weeks of the Waco holocaust.
Attorney "Dick DeGuerin and Koresh were going to exit first -- to show everybody that they weren't going to be executed the minute they stepped out the door," said Jack Zimmermann, attorney for Davidian Steve Schneider. {2}.
The lawyers told the congressional panel the FBI had agreed to the surrender. Adult Davidians would walk through a metal detector, then have plastic wrist restraints placed on them. Both the government and Establishment media were going to tape the arrests.
"We had a deal," Zimmermann said. "We told [FBI negotiators] on the 14th, [the Davidians] were coming out. We told them it would take another 10 or 12 days. We asked them 'Do you have that much time?'"
"They said, 'We have all the time in the world to resolve this peacefully,'" he added.
When Rep. Howard Coble (R-N.C.) asked what frustrated the plan, Zimmermann blamed "some desk-bound bureaucrat in Washington."
The Justice Department denies a deal was cut. A spokesman said the FBI and Davidians' attorneys discussed various plans, but the FBI felt Koresh could not be trusted.
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---------------------------<< Notes >>--------------------------- {1} See also, Robert Parry's Fooling America: How Washington Insiders Twist the Truth and Manufacture the Conventional Wisdom (New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1992).
{2} The final, April 19th gas attack and subsequent immolation may have, in fact, been prompted by the very fact that Koresh and followers were indeed about to surrender. The last thing certain people in power would have wanted would have been living witnesses and an intact Mount Carmel building. The tragedy is being looked at from the angle of, "Oh, they weren't really going to surrender, so the government decided to storm the building." Consider, if you will, that maybe the government stormed the building because they knew that the Davidians actually were going to leave the building and surrender.
Harder to destroy evidence if that had happened.
I encourage distribution of "Conspiracy Nation."
Coming to you from Illinois -- "The Land of Skolnick"