Was the FBIs conduct during the siege designed to antagonize the Branch Davidians?
Government’s Take The FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team, which orchestrated both the siege policy and the final assault, presented their various forms of psychological warfare as the team’s modus operandi in such situations. Media’s Take Most media outlets accepted these tactics as a means to an end. GettingIt’s Take As confounding as the idea of goading those already construed as dangerously unstable may be, actions both by individual agents and by the bureau as a whole seem to suggest this. Agents in the field routinely pulled down their pants to “moon” women inside (remember folks, these were religious people), used tanks to demolish everything in the perimeter of Mount Carmel, and even repeatedly ran over the freshly-dug grave of a Branch Davidian killed in the initial ATF raid. Though FBI leadership called these acts aberrations, the bureau’s nightly waging of psychological warfare (bright spotlights and sound collages that would make Crash Worship jump out of a window) was certainly no a
