"They design their fate." -- Well, I guess I'll take this perjuring, murderous federal bastard off my email list: "Waco Jim" Cavanaugh retires.

My thanks to FFFW for drawing my attention to this.

I knew this was coming, having been warned by an informant who regularly visits the Nashville ATF office. I also knew that such a media-image conscious guy like the perjuring, murderous federal bastard I knew as "Waco Jim" wouldn't go quietly into the night of retirement without trying to craft, one last time, his press image.

I will have a comment or two after the story.

Retired Top ATF Special Agent Tells All

Jim Cavanaugh's Career Included Channel 4 Bomb Threat

Reported By Dennis Ferrier

POSTED: 4:04 pm CST March 1, 2010

NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- When something really bad happened in the southeastern United States, on many occasions, a phone would ring in Nashville. That phone belonged to Jim Cavanaugh, the Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent in charge in the Nashville office.

After 36 years, he's retiring and speaking candidly about an amazing career.

Cavanaugh was the negotiator with David Koresh during the Waco, Texas, standoff; the deputy commander in the Washington, D.C., sniper case; and he identified the Olympic bomber as Eric Rudolph. Those are just three of his famous cases.

He also knows things about Nashville that weren't publicly spoken about, such as the time someone tried to blow up the Percy Priest Dam.

"Their sort of lunatic scheme was to flood Nashville and loot the jewelry stores," said Cavanaugh.

He also knows about when the Mafia got involved in a strip club war and assembled the biggest car bomb in U.S. history and then parked it on 5th Avenue and Broadway at the Classic Cat.

He knows about a 1981 Ku Klux Klan and Nazi bomb and murder plot out of Madison.

"We had infiltrated the clavern in Madison, and while we had someone in the clavern, they plotted to bomb the synagogue and all the pawn shops on Broadway and Channel 4 ... It was because the anchor they had was Jewish," Cavanaugh said.

The ATF gave the Klan a fake bomb. When the KKK placed it on the doorstep of the synagogue, the ATF swooped in, arresting three Klansmen and three Nazis.

Cavanaugh is special agent in charge of one the most productive ATF bureaus in the country, which is measured in arrests and convictions, and he does it without memos or meetings -- both of which he hates.

He said he likes to focus on what he calls the main thing: solving violent crimes and catching violent criminals.

In 1993, Cavanaugh was the man on the phone with the branch Davidians and David Koresh -- a standoff that led to the largest gun battle involving law enforcement in U.S. history. There were almost 15,000 rounds fired.

Cavanaugh was negotiating with Koresh the whole time, always pushing to get the kids out of the compound.

Four law enforcement officers died; 76 people died in the compound. But Cavanaugh was able to get 21 children and two adults out safe. It wasn't perfect, but it was better than nothing.

"The thing with people like that is they design their fate. They design how it's going to happen," said Cavanaugh. (Emphasis supplied, MBV)

Cavanaugh's team put together all the clues that identified Rudolph as the Olympic bomber, even though Rudolph changed his entire method of operation during the bombing spree.

"His goal was mass murder," said Cavanaugh. "He never achieved it."

It took nine years to put one of the United States' most dangerous men behind bars.

"He was really just a hater and a bigot," Cavanaugh said.

Cavanaugh is most revered and even studied for his role as deputy commander in the D.C. sniper shootings in 2005. There were 8,000 law enforcement people involved in that manhunt, yet somehow it stayed focused and caught the killers in three-and-a-half weeks.

But now the quick-thinking agent, always armed with a back-up strategy, finds himself without an option. Ready or not, it's mandatory retirement, and the next gun he turns over will be his own.

I suppose I should consider it a victory to have outlasted this bastard. Since 1994, he has hated my guts and wanted me dead, according to local ATF sources. I suppose, too, that I should be grateful that his common sense thus appears to have improved since he crafted the Waco raid. So, I suppose 80 plus Davidians did not die in vain after all? Small comfort to the dead babies and their families.

There is a bit of language that I draw your attention to in the story:

"The thing with people like that is they design their fate. They design how it's going to happen," said Cavanaugh.

Note that this is the claim of tyrants everywhere and throughout history. Blame the victim. It is the same as the bandit Calvera's line to Yul Brynner in The Magnificent Seven:

"If God did not want them sheared, He would not have made them sheep."

Or this, from Hitler:

“If only one country, for whatever reason, tolerates a Jewish family in it, that family will become the germ center for fresh sedition. If one little Jewish boy survives without any Jewish education, with no synagogue and no Hebrew school, it [Judaism] is in his soul. Even if there had never been a synagogue or a Jewish school or an Old Testament, the Jewish spirit would still exist and exert its influence. It has been there from the beginning and there is no Jew, not a single one, who does not personify it.” - Robert Wistrich, Hitler's Apocalypse, p. 122; from a conversation with Croatian Foreign Minister General Kvaternik, July 21, 1941

The thing is, one day Cavanaugh will come face to face with Adolf Hitler in Hell, and they can chat about how much they have in common.

Mike
III