Considering the source, this is one of the funniest posts in a while.
It sounds like you have a short fuse.
Certainly, if the the situation involves actions obviously political in motive.
How are you defining “collateral”? What distinguishes collateral damage from intended damage, in your view?
Where did you get that from? The bullet that killed Vicki Weaver passed through her and then hit Kevin Harris, along with fragments of her cranium.
Collateral damage may be unintended damage or damage that accompanies intended damage. Sometimes, particularly in terrorist attacks, the intended damage would be greatly diminished without collateral damage.
Intended damage is what the party doing the damage feels it will accomplish with its action.
Sorry, misread the Wikipedia articlea bit - it actually says “*Horiuchi fired a second bullet, which passed through Vicki Weaver’s head, killing her, and wounded Harris in the chest. Vicki Weaver was **standing behind the door *through which Harris was entering the house”. I frequently read comments that the agents “shot Weaver’s unarmed wife” as if was a deliberate murder when the critical point is that he couldn’t even see her through the door (and shouldn’t have fired when he couldn’t see what was in the line of fire, but that was incompetence, not malice).
If Harris was entering the house and Vicki was standing behind the door, how is it possible for the bullet go through her head before hitting him in the chest?
McVeigh was pretty much nuts, but if anyone has collateral responsibility, it’s the right wing media for ludicrously demagoging those incidents as being emblematic of a police state government and making morons think they were being oppressed.
The Branch Davidians killed themselves, by the way. They killed their children too. They were garbage.
I don’t know or care too much about Ruby Ridge, but even if there was misconduct in that raid, it’s still beyond asinine to say that federal workers in Oklahoma City were “responsible” for it.
There is misconduct, and there are questionable or unlawful killings all the time by cops in city police departments. That doesn’t mean the water department or fucking Parks and Recreation is responsible.
Accounts of the early part of the siege are somewhat garbled because the only witnesses were Horiuchi, another sniper, the Weavers and Kevin Harris. Reconstruction after the fact was difficult because Vicki Weaver’s body was moved (for obvious reasons) and Kevin Harris moved (not being dead). The only certain aspect is that the round passed through Vicki’s head first and then entered Harris’ body, because pathologists were able to match the skull fragments that entered Harris along with the bullet.
The Weavers believe Vicki was deliberately murdered to induce them to give themselves up (being the true “head” of the household). Obviously their testimony is hardly going to be objective.
On the other hand, Horiuchi never testified in open court (since manslaughter charges against him were dismissed).
Well naturally – I didn’t say otherwise. Just that Sammy was obviously armed, well, dangerous. Vicki didn’t deserve what happened to her.
The whole thing was a huge fuck-up.
This has never been proven. It has, however, been proven that the FBI used pyrotechnic CS gas delivery systems and concealed all documentation of their use in 1994, even though they were specifically ordered not to use pyrotechnic devices in the first place. Of course, the use of Flite-Rite grenades was not revealed until after the government first decided that Davidians started those fires (based solely on “ominous warnings” given by Davidians, if you believe Wikipedia).
What is this in response to? No one in this thread or in carnivorousplant’s has indicated that federal employees in Oklahoma City were responsible for Waco or Ruby Ridge.
Yes it has. You are misinformed. All of the fires started from inside the compound. The BD’s had been practicing suicide drills for months. They had barrels of fuel ready to go for just that purpose. The bullets found in the kids’ heads came from their own guns.
The Feds’ only mistake was in not listening to the cult experts who warned them that the BD’s would kill themselves if the feds didn’t back off a little bit. By pressing in on them, they were playing right into Koresh’s Armageddon fantasies. By backing off they would have proven him wrong, and had a better chance.
Koresh was a child molester too, by the way. He liked to forcibly rape 10-year-old girls. A bullet in the head was too good for him, and too good for the parents who knowingly provided him with his child “brides.” Why anybody wants to make romantic heroes out of these anti-social, suicidal, child beating, child raping, child murdering lunatics is a mystery to me.
“Being held accountable for their actions.”
No shit. CS gas was shot inside the compound; it doesn’t do much go to aim gas grenades at the outside of buildings.
Yes, Davidians did shoot some of their own people when it became clear that they weren’t able to leave the compound. This does not excuse the actions of the feds.
No one is making a hero out of Koresh. He was a child molester, no question. Did he and his followers deserve what happened to them? No; they deserved be to tried legally under the law. If each personally violently resisted arrest, only then could the government preempt trial and legally kill them.
Being “held accountable” is very different from actually being responsible. For instance, if Person A and Person B commit an armed robbery and Person A is shot and killed by police during the robbery, Person B can be charged with the murder of Person A, thus held accountable for murder - even though no murder was ever committed.
The victims of Murrah were no more “accountable” than they were “responsible.”
The Branch Davidians couldn’t be tried, because they fucking killed themselves.
Ah, taking out the most important word - that word is “held,” by the way - makes you right.
Once again, not proven and a very dubious interpretation of the events in question to boot.
It’s a fact. They practiced it for months.
Cite?
If you are given a proper cite, will you promise to never to bring the subject again, here or elsewhere?
L oh fucking L.
The atomic bombings weren’t terrorism, you nitwit, they were the ultimate expression of the strategy of “total war”, which was universally applied by all sides in the Second World War and held that there was little distinction between direct engagement between armed forces and attacks on civilian targets that were seen as contributing to an enemy’s military machine.
Not that I expect you could possibly understand this since your babble about the Murrah Building (the smoking ruins of which I saw with my own fucking eyes as a twelve year old) comes straight from the type of dangerous rightwing freakshows that were the definition of domestic terrorism before 9/11.