Remember Ruby Ridge, It Was Only The Beginning. Anyone, Anywhere Can Be Accused, Attacked, Invaded By Government Agents And We Can't Do A Thing About It?

Ruby Ridge: The Advent Of The Modern U.S. Police State

August 21, 2014 by Bob Livingston 

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On Aug. 21, 1992, agents of the federal government shot down 14-year-old Sammie Weaver and the Weaver family dog, setting off what has become known as the “incident” at Ruby Ridge. It turned into a multiple-day siege in which federal agents, using arrest warrants based on fabricated evidence and a stack of lies from scurrilous government informant sources, revealed the burgeoning police state in America.

Former U.S. Army combat engineer Randy Weaver moved his family to northern Idaho in the 1980s to escape what he saw as a corrupted world. The family built a cabin and began home schooling their children. He appeared on the radar of Federal law enforcement agencies after a neighbor with whom he had a land dispute wrote letters to the Federal government and local law enforcement saying that Weaver had threatened in the mid-1980s to kill the pope and President Ronald Reagan.

For the next several years, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) sought to either entrap him or get him to work as an informant and infiltrate local militia groups. They finally entrapped him — as an Idaho jury found — when they bought shotguns from him, sawed them off below the legal limit and accused Weaver of selling illegal weapons. He was indicted in December 1990.

The federal court system then went to work on Weaver’s case. He was cited for failure to appear in court when he missed a court date that didn’t match the one on a letter sent to him and his court-appointed attorney (an attorney with whom Weaver had no communication).

Because Weaver was a former military man who lived in an isolated area and sought to escape an oppressive federal government that had for several years sought to entrap him, Weaver was considered a terrorist threat by the George H.W. Bush Justice Department (sound familiar?).

So U.S. marshals dressed in camouflage and equipped with night vision goggles and M16 rifles surrounded Weaver’s cabin and began to search for a place to ambush and arrest him.

One of the marshals threw rocks against the cabin walls to test the reaction of the Weavers’ dogs. When the dogs began barking, Weaver’s 14-year-old son, Sammie, and family friend Kevin Harris came outside to investigate. They followed the dog to see what had upset him.

Marshal Art Roderick shot the dog. Sammie cursed Roderick then shot at him. Marshal Bill Degan came out of the woods shooting and hit Sammie in the arm. Harris fired back, shooting Degan in the chest. A third Marshal, Larry Cooper, exchanged gunfire with Harris. During the exchange Sammie, was shot in the back and killed.

The next day, members of the FBI hostage rescue team were deployed with the green light to shoot on sight. Agent Lon Horiuchi took the order to heart. When Weaver went to a shed where his dead son lay, Horiuchi shot him in the back. Horiuchi then shot Weaver’s wife, Vicki, in the head as she stood inside her cabin holding her 10-month-old baby.

After the shootings but while the siege was still ongoing, FBI Deputy Assistant Director Danny Coulson wrote a memo titled “Something to Consider.” The points to consider were these:

1. Charge against Weaver is Bull Shit. (sic)
2. No one saw Weaver do any shooting.
3. Vicki has no charges against her.
4. Weaver’s defense. He rand down the hill to see what dog was barking at. Som guys in camys (sic) shot his dog. Started shooting at him. Killed his son. Harris did the shooting [of Degan]. He [Weaver] is in pretty strong legal position.

Despite this knowledge, the FBI and ATF continued its siege until Aug. 30, when civilian negotiators talked the Weavers into giving up in order to stave off a threatened tactical assault by federal agents. They finally surrendered on Aug. 31.

In the aftermath, Weaver and Harris were acquitted of all charges against them. Horiuchi was indicted for manslaughter in Boundary County, Idaho. The trial was moved to federal court where it was dismissed on the grounds of sovereign immunity. The 9^th Circuit Court reversed that decision and held that there was enough evidence for Horiuchi to stand trial on manslaughter charges. By then, the district attorney who gained the indictment had been replaced in an election. The then-sitting district attorney dropped the charges.

The surviving members of the Weaver family filed a wrongful death suit for $200 million. Harris filed a civil suit for damages against him. The Weavers reached an out-of-court settlement in which Randy Weaver received $100,000 and the three Weaver daughters received $1 million each. The federal government settled with Harris for $380,000.

Less than a year after Ruby Ridge, the Clinton ATF and FBI attacked the Branch Davidians under equally dubious claims.