In the Saturday morning 8/28/99 broadcast, NPR's Susan Stamberg made it sound as though anyone who seriously doubts the US Government's explanation of the Waco fire must be part of the "militia movement." Many people who have no sympathy at all for the right wingers, government haters, or the religious extremists have never for a moment believed the FBI story about how the fire started: deliberately set by the Branch Davidians as a mass suicide.
According to reports, the Branch Davidians had piled bales of hay or straw against the outer doors and walls of their compound as baracades and possibly as protection from incoming bullets. Since their electricity had been cut off, they were using kerosene and possibly candles for light. Then the government forces began ramming the walls with armored vehicles. It takes no great stretch of the imagination to add all these circumstances together for an entirely plausible explanation for the ignition of the conflagration: battering the walls caused the lamps or candles to ignite the straw.
This explanation does not answer the harder question of whether the government was negligent or overly aggressive and, therefore, to one degree or another culpable in the ensuing horror. However, the official blanket denial of responsibility amounts to one of the worst offences governments routinely commit: propagandizing their citizens. Such propagandizing destroys the government's credibility and becomes the basis for public suspicion and the paranoia reflected in the militia movements and other extremist conspiracy theories.