Waco: The Rules of Engagement, William Gazecki's long and somber documentary, is a chilling indictment of governmental ineptitude and arrogance. During that fiasco, four government agents were killed and, after a bungled siege by the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, 76 Branch Davidians perished in a fire that raged out of control in their Mount Carmel compound.

In the government's authorized version of the incident, the Branch Davidians are depicted as a rabid and out-of-control religious cult and their leader David Koresh as a megalomaniacal crackpot, beckoning his unthinking followers to mass suicide in the wake of the AFT and FBI intrusion into their sacred compound: a Heaven's Gate cult with both a millennial and frontier mentality.

But Gazecki's documentary paints a different picture. Jumping off from a PBS Frontline documentary, Waco: The Inside Story, and in a Jean-Luc Godard style montage of interviews, home video footage, 911 telephone conversations, infrared surveillance footage, and C-SPAN congressional hearings, Gazecki depicts an alternate reality: The ATF blasted into the Branch Davidian compound like bulldogs with their eyes on the bone of federal funding and that the FBI colluded in covering up both ATF and FBI blunders.

The film reevaluates the popular portrayal of the Branch Davidians as demonic by looking into their history (albeit in a cursory way) as a religious sect breaking off from the Seventh Day Adventist Church. Rather than goggle-eyed lunatics, the Branch Davidians in the film come across as intelligent and intense believers. David Koresh still comes across as a lit fuse and something of a paranoiac... but in light of the evidence seen in the film, he seems to be a lit-fuse paranoiac with a reason.

Gazecki also refutes two government mantras about the crazed Branch Davidians -- that they started the killing blaze and that they were stockpiling guns for the Second Coming in the form of David Koresh. The film does not deny that the Branch Davidians poured gas into the building but implies that the FBI set off the fire. And with the government's contention that the Branch Davidians were stockpiling guns, Gazecki enlists an interview with a reporter who points out that the Branch Davidians used guns as a source of income, selling them at Texas gun shows. As the reporter remarks, "We call those stockpiles 'inventories.'"

If the Branch Davidians come off as less than monstrous, the FBI and the ATF come off as monstrous idiots. The FBI's contention was that they never fired into the compound, but Gazecki's film refutes their assertion on a number of points. Using surveillance videos, flashes from tank guns can be seen firing away into the compound. Beyond firing into the compound, Gazecki points out that it was not the standard form of tear gas that the FBI used to penetrate the compound but rather a gas called CS Mist, a highly combustible type. Further rejecting the FBI story, the film points out that when Attorney General Janet Reno approved the assault on the compound, the FBI had already broken the standoff.

And if the FBI comes off bad, the ATF comes off even worse. Gazecki shows that the ATF was consumed by the upcoming congressional funding hearings. The ATF was rushing into Waco with the intention of engineering a big, ostentatious success just in time to get the agency its much needed funding. Approaching the Waco situation as a showcase, the ATF messed up everything, from the arming of its own agents to losing any element of surprise (the Branch Davidians knew about the impending assault by the ATF when television camera crews arrived outside their compound 30 minutes before the arrival of the ATF).

While the film indicts both the FBI and the ATF and tones down the popular view of the Branch Davidians, what the film ultimately portrays is an American sub-culture that uses guns as articles of religion, commerce, and power. In Waco: The Rules of Engagement, this gun lust is played out when a bullying government with guns overpowers a religious cult with guns.