Are Other Wacos Waiting to Happen? : Cults: Koresh’s band followed a pattern seen before. Common threads need to be understood to prevent similar tragedies.

The general reaction of the public has been to distance itself from the tragedy in Waco, Tex., as if the deaths of the Branch Davidian cultists were merely a minor blemish on the face of American society.

However, if we place Waco in a wider context of how extremist groups function in this country, we may find a festering infection not easily dismissed.

Investigators found that the children of David Koresh’s followers who were released from the Waco compound in the early days of the siege had been disciplined regularly with a paddle called “the helper” or by being denied food. They were “living in an environment which had an unhealthy, malignant and predatory quality of sexuality,” said the psychiatrist in charge of the team interviewing the children. Most of them, he said, felt “a great deal of fear of David Koresh.”

On Jan. 17, 1991, seven members of Ecclesia, a Los Angeles-based group that had moved to an isolated area of Oregon, pleaded guilty to conspiracy to deny civil rights, plea bargaining in exchange for dismissal of 29 counts of involuntary servitude for enslaving more than 50 children and regularly beating them with paddles and other instruments; one 8-year-old died from a beating she sustained for stealing food.

Is there a common thread here?

FBI documents report that Koresh and his followers possessed such illegal weapons as grenades and fully automatic assault rifles. Koresh’s people spent $199,715 on weapons and ammunition, including .50-caliber armor-piercing bullets, in the months before the Feb. 28 raid by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

On Oct. 13, 1989, Ed Francis, husband of guru Elizabeth Clare Prophet of the Church Universal and Triumphant, based at a 2,000-acre site in Montana, pleaded guilty to conspiring with another member to purchase an estimated $130,000 in illegal weapons. The cache included armor-piercing bullets and seven tripod-mounted .50-caliber semi-automatic rifles equipped with sophisticated range finders.

Is there a common thread here?

Koresh followers, including children, tell of suicide drills. Independent arson experts who examined the remains of the compound say that the fire that destroyed it was deliberately set by Koresh followers. Pathologists have reported that several of the bodies removed from the compound bore bullet holes.

Tapes recovered from Jonestown, Guyana, in 1978 reveal how Jim Jones had his followers practice suicide drills. On Nov. 18 of that year, the faithful drank punch laden with cyanide; children who refused to drink the lethal mixture had it forcibly squirted down their throats; 913 people died, including nearly 300 children.

If we don’t look closely, we will not be able to truly determine how many of these common threads are, in fact, being woven through the fabric of American society.

Civil libertarians might cry that any examination of groups that are “religious” in nature is tantamount to a witch hunt.

It was not a witch hunt that NBC cameraman Bob Brown recorded for the evening news in 1978 even as he lay dying on an airstrip in Guyana. Brown’s footage captured my father--Rep. Leo J. Ryan of South San Francisco, a respected member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee who had traveled there to investigate human-rights violations of American citizens--as he was assassinated along with Brown, Don Harris of NBC, Greg Robinson of the San Francisco Examiner and others, at the order of People’s Temple leader Jim Jones.

It was not a witch hunt as Americans witnessed on April 19 on the national news 24 children and 62 adults being burned to death because of David Koresh.

The road from Jonestown to Waco is littered with the suffering of thousands of innocent victims who became caught up in fanatical, and often dangerous, groups. We can face responsibility for this infection in American society now, or we can face it later, on the nightly news.