ProgrammedToChill

Bonus Episode 52 - Weird Scenes in Waco pt. 8: Keeping Waco Weird, feat. George from CAVDEF (Patreon)

Published:

2023-03-21 22:48:32

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(8 of 9)

The eighth episode in conversation with George of CAVDEF discussing Henry Lee Lucas. In this episode, we unexpectedly plunge into Aberration territory as the bizarre milieu in Waco links up with two more familiar cases: the Branch Davidians and the Oklahoma City bombing. The Waco DA and his Tulsa lawyer friend turn out to have some surprising connections.

We begin by raising the possibility that the Branch Davidians were a Jonestown-like intelligence operation, with the ATF raid and FBI siege being a cleanup operation aimed at leaving no survivors. George then walks us through a power struggle between David Koresh and the former Davidian leader's son during the mid 80s. Under the tenure of the Waco DA, Koresh and his followers were prosecuted for a shootout that arose from this power struggle; none of them were convicted and we explore why that might be. Five years later, the now-former Waco DA and his Tulsa lawyer friend come in during the 1993 siege to offer legal assistance to Koresh.

This question of how the Waco DA went from prosecuting Koresh to helping represent Koresh is an interesting one. Exploring that question leads to the "drug nexus" which was later used to justify the ATF raid, and reveals that the Waco DA was accused of drug-related corruption by none other than David Koresh. We bring up likely precedents (especially in the Lake Waco case) of Waco cops running assets, and hypothesize whether the Davidians were part of that.

Our discussion has striking parallels to PATCON, so we consider the possibility that the Hand of Death / Waco angle is directly linked with that operation. As it turns out, we find not just similar MOs but overlapping people and places. The legal connection during the siege is just the tip of the iceberg, especially when we reveal who was the law partner of the Waco DA's lawyer friend in Tulsa.

George's Links:

https://twitter.com/CAVDEF_George

http://cavdef.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page

http://blog.cavdef.org/

series art by Dakota

George's Notes:

The connections made in this episode would not have been possible without people like @BoltzmannBooty, @BTH_Bill, and Wendy Painting in particular, whose book and subsequent revelations in her P2C episodes are essential to grasping how this underground network operates
Following the 1987 shootout at Mount Carmel, George Roden expressed fear that Koresh and his group worked for the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and claimed to have unsuccessfully sought protection from the FBI and CIA
According to a personal account by the Waco DA's wife at the time, El-Hadi Shabazz had indeed been friends with Malcolm X in Detroit
Dan Weyenberg has even more connections with both Lake Waco and the Branch Davidian case. He was a longtime confidant of Truman Simons, and was Simons' partner during his early 1983 investigation of Gilbert Melendez. In 1992, it was actually Weyenberg who asked the ATF to begin investigating the Davidians. Weyenberg also did flyover surveillance before the ATF raid (possibly with JTF-6 support) to take photos cited in the affidavit for a search warrant.
It also turns out that Truman Simons was interviewed by the Waco Tribune-Herald for their "Sinful Messiah" series on David Koresh that ran just before the ATF raid. He, along with Weyenberg, was said to be knowledgeable of the sheriff's office's "surveillance" of the Davidians.
Philip Arthur Thompson's anti-Castro Cuban connection, as mentioned back in Part 2, was Luis Posada Carriles. According to Douglas Valentine, Carriles' partner ran a CIA-backed Contra training camp in the Everglades.
Curious things occurring in Hawaii during the mid 1970s would include the drug smuggling operations of Nugan Hand and the presence of Mark David Chapman
One Waco researcher named Carol Valentine has been suspicious of David Thibodeau, alleging that he has told multiple contradictory accounts of April 19, 1993
The Oklahoma governor (a Knight of Malta) did assail bishops for stonewalling him and subsequently resigned from the Catholic Church sexual abuse panel. A more cynical observer, however, might wonder if this was a means of boosting his own image while leaving the panel in the hands of more overt hardliners like McHugh.