ALL EYES ON WACO HEARINGS

The FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, facing in record unpopularity and mired in internal crisis, on Wednesday will have to weather new congressional hearings into the 1993 federal siege in which 91 people died near Waco, Texas. TIME's Elaine Shannon reports that two GOP-dominated House committees plan to begin eight days of testimony by examining whether the ATF should have targeted the Branch Davidian compound in the first place. "It's hard to find anybody in Washington who thinks they did," she says. "The Clinton Administration cannot come out of this looking very good, since the Branch Davidians died in circumstances that will remain murky." But Republicans, some of whom have openly courted the ATF's grassroots opposition, must conduct the hearings with dignity and "not appear to be sympathizers of the militias. What passes for wonderful stump rhetoric can, on television, make you look like a wild-eyed radical pretty fast." Still, she notes, many details of the federal operation will emerge for the first time, since the Administration has released almost no information publicly to date: "This has contributed to a great deal of confusion and mystery," says Shannon. "Probably unnecessary mystery."