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WACO The controversy surrounding the events near Waco, Texas seems to increase daily. Since the cover story for FT133 (We Didn’t Start The Fire, full-length version online soon), we have seen the court appointed field test take place on March 18 at Fort Hood, Texas. The reconstruction aimed to establish whether the ‘repetitive flashes’ shown on the Bureau’s FLIR surveillance tape of April 19, 1993, were gunfire or not. At the time of writing both sides are still claiming the reconstruction supports their version of events. The Department of Justice claims that the muzzle flashes of only a crew served Mark 19 automatic grenade launcher and an M60 general-purpose machinegun appeared on the FLIR cameras used in the field test. The Bureau claims that there were no Mark 19s deployed at Waco and the single M60 that the FBI Hostage Rescue Team (HRT) brought with them was never fired. James Caddell, representing the prosecution in the Davidian wrongful death suit, says that four different weapons produced muzzle flashes on the new tape including the Mark 19 and M60. The other two weapons were the M79 grenade launcher and the CAR15/M4 Carbine. Both were deployed by the HRT at Waco and the M4 is a perennial favourite of the Army’s Special Operations Command including the secretive counter-terrorist Delta Force whose operators were at Waco in what the Bureau described as a ‘purely advisory’ capacity.
The field test was carried out on a secure Army firing range at the sprawling Fort Hood complex. A British Royal Navy Lynx mounting a GEC Marconi Sea Wolf FLIR camera and a FBI ‘Nightstalker’ aircraft carrying a modified version of the FLIR used at Waco took footage at both 4000 and 6000 feet. The Royal Navy’s Sea Wolf was selected as the camera closest to the specifications of the original FBI FLIR camera and was loaned to the US government for purposes of the test. A bone of contention has been the lack of distinctive footage of any alleged shooters whether they be HRT or Delta. Caddell has shown portions of the April 19 tape that shows figures moving about across the roof of the concrete building where most of the women and children died. These figures fade in and out of view, an effect probably caused by fluctuating background heat. Another possibility is that these figures wore US Army Infra Red suppressant clothing.
The shooters used in the reconstruction (actually US Postal Inspectors on loan to John Danforth’s special investigation) also seemed to fade in and out of the recording according to Caddell. Initial Reports of Field Test The Federal judge sealed release of the videotapes until the British firm contracted to mediate the field test, Vector Systems, completed a written report for the court. An oral briefing was given to the judge this week by Vector which seemed to dash the prosecution’s case by stating that the flashes on the April 19 FLIR were NOT gunfire. Vector are saying that debris and the exhausts of the Army Combat Engineering Vehicles and Bradleys caused the flashes. The Vector test tape from March 18 DID however record muzzle blasts from seven of the weapons tested including the M4 Carbine, shotguns and M79/M203 grenade launchers. Vector say that these flash recordings were of a much shorter duration and do not match the characteristics of the anomalous flashes seen in the original tape. Vector also state that the gunmen were visible during most of the testing only fading out on a handful of occasions. The attorneys representing the Davidians have countered that the actual temperature on the ground on April 19 1993 was much hotter than the test day and there are inaccuracies regarding the height of the aircraft mounting the FLIR cameras in the reconstruction. The judge has admirably taken the stance that Vector is simply another expert opinion in common with the FLIR experts presented by both the Department of Justice and the Davidians and the data from the field test will be taken as such. He publicly stated this week that he is not throwing out the allegations of government gunfire. Hopefully the Davidian attorneys have some more concrete evidence to support these allegations. Video Evidence? From cleaner copies of the FLIR tape included in the new Waco: A New Revelation documentary, I must say that personally and to my admittedly untrained eye there are several sequences which are highly suspect. One in particular involves a Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle smashing into a wall at the rear of the building. The rear passenger door then appears to open and two indistinct shapes appear. These seem to take cover at the rear corners of the vehicle and proceed to fire short bursts into the building. I would hasten to add that pieces of debris do not normally move in such a concerted fashion. However, like the Davidian attorneys, I am happy to be proven wrong.
Another sequence involves an Army Huey UH1N helicopter which was dispatched to intercept a Davidian seen running in the middle of the compound as the fires began to break out. This Huey appears to hover and a sustained flash occurs near the open side crew doors. The footage, taken on a standard VHS camera, is shot too far away to see whether anyone is firing from the helicopter although as the Huey turns and flies past the camera what appears to be a doorgunner mounted M60 general-purpose machinegun can be seen. The Davidian involved died from multiple high velocity rounds however the calibre of these rounds was unable to be proven due to the later burn damage to the body. Delta Force The continuing question mark regarding the presence of Army counter terrorist operators from Delta Force, or the Combat Applications Group as they are sometimes known, has moved little closer to a resolution. A US special operations source has claimed that he personally saw 23 sets of travel orders for Delta operators to travel to Waco. Claims are now being made, unsubstantiated at this point, that Navy SEALs (probably from the covert Naval Special Warfare Development Group, formerly the counter terrorist SEAL Team Six) were also in attendance at Waco. The scene must have resembled a special operations theme park. Two members of the British 22 Special Air Service Regiment’s Counter Revolutionary Warfare Wing were present at Waco as observers alongside officers from the London Metropolitan Police and presumably other foreign military and law enforcement personnel.
Body Count Following the death by heart attack of Sheriff Jack Harwell, who had been involved in the principal negotiations between the Davidians and the BATF, earlier this month, comes another more suspicious passing. Carlos Ghigliotti’s partly decomposed body was discovered on Friday 28 April in his Washington area office. Ghigliotti was an infrared analyst retained by the House Government Reform Committee to examine the April 19 FLIR. His analysis was that the hotly contested ‘flashes’ were indeed government small arms fire. Mike Caddell and David Hardy, working on behalf of the Davidians, had recently seen Ghigliotti’s analysis and were highly impressed. Caddell sent a letter to John Danforth’s office, recommending that Danforth’s people contact Ghigliotti to view his assessments. Caddell also informed the federal judge in the wrongful death suit last month that he would be hiring the infrared expert after his own former Department of Defence FLIR specialist suffered a stroke. Ghigliotti’s analysis showed, in his opinion, unknown parties firing into and around the rear of the Davidian compound. One of his most telling assessments included the infamous footage of a Bradley’s rear hatch opening and what looks to be two shooters emerging which I have discussed earlier. Certain parties have already linked this latest death to the so-called ‘Clinton Body Count’ of suspicious deaths related to the presidency (most of which, to be fair, are not suspicious at all although several certainly are). The Maryland police conducted an autopsy on the weekend of 29-30 April and are currently treating the death as homicide. Caddell asked the judge on May 1 to impound all of Ghigliotti’s work related materials because "plaintiffs have no assurances that third parties will not lose, damage or destroy (innocently or intentionally) irreplaceable work product by Mr Ghigliotti". In my opinion, Ghigliotti’s death does indeed appear suspicious, as obviously the Maryland police also think, but I will be awaiting further detail before commenting further.
Below are some excerpts including an amazingly detailed ‘chronology of unidentified gunfire’: "The House Gov't (sic) Reform Committee had retained an infrared expert named Carlos Ghigliotti, of Laurel, Md. Carlos had been working on the FLIR for months, and shared a lot of his results with me. I'd pass him data when he needed it, and he knew he could count on me to keep my mouth shut. Carlos had done a lot of IR work - including using it to spot polluters contaminating Chesapeake Bay, and diagnosing electronic errors (a bad connection or phase mismatch heats up). I talked with Carlos over the phone a lot, and visited him in his lab a couple of times. I now forget the first one, but the second visit was the day Mike McNulty previewed his latest film in DC (Waco: A New Revelation- WSH ed.). Thru (sic) the committee, Carlos was able to obtain a much better quality tape than any anyone else had. He discovered that, when FBI gave out "first generation copies," it was in fact giving out copies of a digitized (sic) "master," not of the original analog (sic) tape. Digitization (sic) compresses the image, and loses some of its quality. He was thorough, refusing to make a finding until he had it pinned down from every angle. In one case, he told me last month, he'd finally managed to link by time and location an image of a person shouldering a weapon, shown on the regular media videotapes made from the media locations, with a flash on the FLIR. He found nearly 200 suspected gunshots, and had done the work necessary to verify that many of these were genuine. Understand that his idea of "verify" wasn't just to see the image. He wanted to find the shooters, as well, and to plot their movement from one flash location to another. And he wanted to correlate the FLIR images to every possible ordinary video image, to see if he could link up what the media filmed from the side with what the FLIR registered from overhead. He was really hot on getting some footage shot by DPS from a site behind the building, so that he could tie that in as well. This man was thorough – no rushing to judgement on anything. His normal standard was to study everything from every possible angle or potential critique, until he could lay all the cards on the table, be absolutely clear, and defend his conclusions against any criticism. And he knew this was no normal case ... as he once said, the Waco FLIR was probably going to be the next Zapuder film, and he wasn't going to say something that he couldn't prove against any criticism. While I was in his lab, he showed me some footage where it was clear, beyond any doubt, that a man was moving in the wreckage of the gym. The guy gets up from behind one pile of cover and races to another. In between, you see a very long flash that exists only for an instant - much longer in terms of physical length than could be attributed to a gunshot. He said that was a bullet imaged in flight – he'd imaged them before, while flying past shooting ranges. (Shooters know that a bullet after firing is too hot to pick up in the hand, a product of being rammed down a barrel ahead of burning powder, and then of air resistance as it travels at Mach 2- 3 thru (sic) the air. I'd never suspected that one would show up on IR.). These scenes I saw with my own eyes, on his equipment – it was clear there was a person there. The prelim report I have here (he wanted to keep it secret for the time being, and faxed me a copy with instructions to keep my mouth shut. As will be set out below, I think I have been released from that promise.).
To summarize (sic):
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PA103 In other major conspiratorial news, the long anticipated trial of the two Libyan ‘intelligence agents’ has finally begun in a makeshift Scottish court on a disused Dutch NATO airbase. The two Libyans indicted, Abd-el Basset Megrahi and Lamin Khalifa F’hima, are being tried by jury for the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988. Ever since the bombing, in which 270 people lost their lives, rumours have abounded that Libya and more specifically, the two suspects, were set-up by the British and US intelligence communities. Until Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, the primary suspects had been both Iran and Syria in retaliation for the July 1988 ‘accidental’ shooting down of an Iranian civilian Airbus in the Persian Gulf by a US frigate. The evidentiary trail led to these two countries planning and financing the operation whilst the actual dirty work was carried out by a Palestinian terrorist group known as the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine General Command. When Kuwait was invaded and both Iraq and particularly Syria became essential to the UN mandated Arab Coalition, the finger began to point toward the West’s old bugbear, Libya.
Various theories have appeared since the Lockerbie bombing. They range from the ‘terrorist for hire’ which implicates Iran in a scheme to down US civilian airliners in exchange for a million dollars for the bomber responsible to a bomb being placed on board to eliminate the eight, yes, I did say eight, US intelligence officers on PA103. I will be delving into the facts and theories behind Pan Am 103 in the next WSH update however for now I’ll just leave you with a few salient points which you might consider next time you hear ‘the official version’ in your Sunday papers. Firstly, there were indeed eight US spooks on board. These consisted of a four man team from the CIA under the leadership of a Matthew Gannon and a second team under the command of a Major Charles McKee from the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA). There has been much speculation on the identities of the DIA team but most reliable accounts describe them as undercover Army officers attached to the DIA’s ultra secret Intelligence Support Activity (ISA) which seems to be currently operating under the code-name Torn Victor. These gentlemen were carrying suitcases full of money and according to one Scottish farmer at the crash-site, something that looked suspiciously like cocaine or heroin. What these two spook teams were up to is still open to debate. McKee’s ISA team seem to have been conducting an ‘on-site’ reconnaissance and intelligence gathering operation in Beirut with the intention of paving the way for a joint Delta Force/SEAL hostage rescue of the Western hostages held in the city.
There are even darker rumours of the mission of Gannon’s CIA team. A CIA operation was certainly underway at Frankfurt airport, code-named COREA 1. This operation centred around drugs. Two versions of the tale have been heard. In one, supported by statements made by former Israeli Mossad operatives and some sources within the DIA, a rogue operation was established between the COREA 1 CIA team and the Islamic Hezbollah terrorist group. Drugs were allowed through a ‘protected route’ out of the Beirut via Frankfurt and on to London and New York. The funds generated from the drug sales in Europe and the US were intended to purchase the freedom of the Beirut hostages. McKee’s ISA team discovered this illegal operation and was on their way back to Washington to blow the whistle. COREA 1 and their Hezbollah/PFLP-GC compatriots obviously couldn’t let that happen and a device was planted on board PA103 to ensure their silence. The second version of events runs pretty much like the first except for a few minor details. The alternative theory has the bombing motivated by the downing of the Iranian Airbus in the Gulf and the Hezbollah or the PFLP-GC, to which it is closely linked, substituting one of their protected drug bags for the device which eventually blew Pan Am 103 from the sky. Whether all of this will come out in the trial is still unknown however defence sources are confident that they will be able to cast enough doubt on the ‘official version’ to guarantee the dismissal of the case against the Libyans. More details on the Lockerbie bombing next month in WSH.
Printed Matters I’ll sign off this first edition of WSH, with some essential new (ish) reading. Kenn Thomas’ marvellous Maury Island UFO: The Crisman Conspiracy is an astounding work of solid investigation into the weirdness surrounding those enigmatic, and mostly forgotten, events in Puget Sound. Kenn traces the initial UFO ‘event’ through the years as he chronicles the activities of the mysterious Crisman, later identified by Jim Garrison as one of the mystery tramps arrested at Dealey Plaza. Highly recommended. Kenn’s other latest publication is Cyberculture Counterconspracy: A Steamshovel Web Reader, a compilation of materials which have previously only appeared on the Steamshovel web site (www.steamshovelpress.com). Notables such as Rob Sterling of www.thekonformist.com, Greg Bishop from the excellent Excluded Middle, Adam Parfey from the illustrious Feral House, Jim Martin of Flatland and the late, great Jim Keith all make contributions (as do I in an interview with Kenn conducted several years ago for the lamented Immerse magazine). All brilliant stuff. Gordon Thomas’ tremendous Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors has been released in an updated paperback edition. This superlative look deep inside the Israeli intelligence agency is certainly the most exhaustive and controversial since Victor Ostrovosky’s ‘Other Side of Deception’. With new material on Pan Am 103, Irangate, the Gulf War and the death of Princess Diana (which is the first material to make me wonder for just a moment whether it wasn’t a tragic accident), Thomas’ work is a great read and an amazing look behind the headlines. MR X.