Recent movies I've seen

Shaun of the dead(2004)
Highly entertaining and to it's credit, joins the ranks of only two other films (as far as I can remember) of those I've seen in the US where the movie ended with a round of applause in the theatre. The two others being Titanic (at a packed 300+ seater Chicago multiplex) and Farenheit 9/11 (on the opening night at the Coolidge Corner Theatre).

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Waco: The rules of engagement(1997)
I stumbled on this documentary yesterday by chance while channel surfing. It is an investigation of the "rules of engagement" used by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) at Waco and subsquently by the FBI which took control of the situation. In my little teacup, any documentary that succeeds in shocking/provoking me to think deeply about it's content gets multiple stars, whether or not I concur with the message. This documentary one scores very high!

Apart from the actual events that transpired at Waco, there is a larger issue that this documentary deliberately engages with. In an article written in 1999, David Gifford (one of the writers of the film and it's executive producer) noted that - "...the willingness to uncritically regurgitate official demagoguery manufactured to manipulate or inflame public opinion for political gain or careerism simply encourages the technique's repetition to justify and hide heinous official acts....Through study and practice, savvy police and political PR professionals know that facts are seldom allowed to prevent a profitable news scare --- particularly when the designated heavy is a person or group whose lifestyle or belief system is a repugnant cliche or stereotype to most."

In these modern troubled times, many would willingly nod their heads vigorously in agreement to this observation and as an example readily point to the White House conservatives and their ability to retain numerous zealous supporters despite the numerous factual inconsistences to do with the Iraq war. What Gifford is trying to point out is that this capability is symmetric -- it was the White House which also stoked people's biases with regard to the Waco incident. The Branch Davidians, were readily stereotyped and caricatured as being ultra-religious, gun-toting, polygamous, white-supremacist, child-molesting nuts which made a lot of the stuff that happened easily palatable and slip by unquestioned (even though many of these labels turned out to be highly questionable).

The film-makers, who seem to have drawn the ire of many in the liberal establishment due to the film's sympathies for the perspective of the Branch Davidians, note that - "Because people tend to see the events at Waco through the prism of their politics and fundamental belief systems, many of the questions we receive reflect, not an intellectually honest interest in learning what really happened, but an effort to deny what really happened by demonizing the messenger. Most of these latter questions rely upon the argumentative appeal to authority falsity that because an authority figure, government officials or agents of the FBI, ATF, etc. claim or testify that something is true, it must be.".

To summarize: the bigger message of the film is to undercut what they believe is the government's attempt to manufacture consent using people's biases to hastily cover up the horrific mistakes made all along the chain of command in the handling of the situation at Waco.

Links to some articles about the movie that do some hard work to evaluate the presented evidence:

• Sifting Waco's Ashes by Alan A. Stone (Boston Review)
  This is a must-read because Stone also wrote an official report for the Justice Department and is a talking head in the documentary
  
• Still Burning: Was Waco a Massacre? Four Years Later, The Question Hasn't Been Extinguished, by Richard Leiby and Jim McGee (The Washington Post, April 18, 1997)
  The writers of this article interview different experts about one of the critical pieces of evidence -- the thermal camera footage from the reconnaissance plane that shows flashes possibly indicating gun-fire directed at the people holed up inside in the house
  
• "Waco": Breaking The Rules Of Disengagement by Stephen Hunter (The Washington Post, June 20, 1997)
  Probes some of the epistemic assumptions in the documentary