Academic

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON on Bill Clinton?s culpability at Waco. An independent report on Waco writt?

By Glenn Reynolds

PROF. KENNETH ANDERSON on Bill Clinton’s culpability at Waco.

An independent report on Waco written by the Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry, Alan A. Stone, for the then Deputy Attorney General Philip Heymann, says it ?is difficult to believe that the US government would deliberately plan to expose twenty-five children, most of them infants and toddlers, to CS gas for forty-eight hours?. Unfortunately, however, that appears to have been exactly the plan. . . .

Professor Stone?s report is measured, careful and damning. It is hard to know whether Heymann?s courage in commissioning it was a reason for his subsequent departure from the Justice Department. In the mean time, questions about the performance of the Justice Department are treated by the Clinton administration not as serious allegations of criminal activity, but as little more than a below-the-belt salvo in the culture wars.

I was shocked to read in Stone?s report that the Justice Department had undertaken, and had defended in the press as such, activities which if conducted in wartime would constitute war crimes. Because exposing the children to CS gas was the point of the FBI exercise: no children exposed, no pressure.

And yet Janet Reno and Bill Clinton got a pass from the media at the time. Because, you know, they were on the right side of the culture wars. But Clinton’s re-opened this can of worms, and people are talking again.

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on April 20, 2010 (boomark / email).