What is the straight dope on Ruby Ridge and Waco-were law enforcement’s actions there justified and/or legal or not?
That’s too much question for one thread. They’re two separate and very different events.
It’s difficult to argue that the Ruby Ridge confrontation was not a colossal fiasco. A number of people died for no particularly good reason, but you can’t compress the fiasco to one decision; it was a series of idiotic decisions made over months and months.
It is worth noting that the courts awarded the Weaver family millions of dollars in damages, and a Senate committee that investigated the incident found tha tthe federal agencies involved had seriously screwed up. The sniper who killed Vicki Weaver got away from prison only because the government invoked sovereign immunity; he murdered Vicki Weaver by any reasonable examination of the evidence, though he did so in part because FBI personnel had been ordered to act in a manner that could constitute murder.
The real question, though, is why so much energy was being put into beseiging a guy who, while admittedly a bit of a nutball, was hardly worth a military-scale operation, or for that matter much legal attention at all.
Without looking anything up…
Ruby Ridge was entrapment. The government wanted Randy Weaver to spy on a White Supremacist group. They got him to reluctantly sell them a sawed-off shotgun, even showing him where to cut it, and used that as leverage. Weaver did not receive a letter informing him of a change in his trial date (one government agency didn’t know that the other was using him as an informant, and was pursuing charges), so he missed his trial. In all, it sounds like a governmental Charlie-Foxtrot. It wouldn’t have happened if the government didn’t entrap Weaver. (Not that i support Weaver’s ideas, of course.)
It appears that there really were illegal weapons at Waco, and there apparently was abuse going on. Going after Koresh was justified, but was poorly executed. They should have nabbed him away from the compound.
My memory of these events is hazy, so apologies in advance for errors.
As to Waco, I’ll leave the full discussion of what the ATF and the FBI did for someone else. However, there are three basic charges leveled against David Koresh: that he and the other adults were physically abusing children, that many of the weapons stockpiled were illegal, and that David Koresh was systematically committing statutory rape with many of the underage girls (between age 13 and 17) in the compound. The first charge seems to be complete crap-- no one was being beaten or abused in a non-sexual way. The second charge is technically true, although it’s worth noting that few or none of the weapons stockpiled were illegal for civilians to own, but few or none were registered as legally required. The final charge is entirely true, and has been confirmed by many of the survivors of the fire that ended the siege. David Koresh was most certainly having sex with many underage girls.
Koresh wandered around then town as i remember. There was plenty of opportunity to grab him if that’s what they wanted to do. My memory says Koresh was set up by ATF to sell illegal weapons.
I think the government acted terribly in the whole episode.
I’ll also note that the Wikipedia pages on these events are really terrible. They’re pretty thoroughly hijacked by the anti-government conspiracists who want to paint the government in as poor a light as possible. While I am not defending the government’s actions in these events (honestly, I know next to nothing about Ruby Ridge and only somewhat more about Koresh), you won’t get anything resembling an unbiased account from Wikipedia. I discovered this while writing a paper about the Branch Davidians in college; if you want a better picture, you might read A Place Called Waco, an account of the siege by one of the Branch Davidian survivors. He paints as favorable a picture of Koresh as a reasonable person could. In contrast, there’s Inside the Cult by Marc Breault, a former Branch Davidian who (if I recall correctly) advised the FBI during the siege and was at the time and still is a vocal critic of David Koresh. I don’t find Breault very credible, but it’s worth reading his perspective.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/waco-a-new-revelation/ here is a Waco documentary made some years after the event. QIN will love the end because of who is implicated.
I’m not sure he had any ideas. I read Jon Ronson’s (a Guardian columnist) book “Them”, in which he interviews Randy Weaver and Weaver’s side of the story is that they moved to the hills because his wife thought banks were evil and the NWO was taking over, which by reckoning is exactly 50% correct, and he was pretty much just willing to go where she did. As for the Aryan Nations thing, he claims he was just trying to get away from his family for a bit and find somewhere to drink, the most convenient place for his alcoholic sojourns being the local encampment of crazy drunken racists. He comes across as just a normal man whose neighbours were friendly racists and whose government murdered his wife, son and dog.
Koresh’s first action was to phone the police, the local police, to say armed men were breaking in. Apparently the sheriff had been there before.
Ruby Ridge is pretty unambiguously a government fuck up. Randy Weaver has some really terrible political philosophies (including association with racist organizations), but it’s very telling that in a siege that resulted in the death of a U.S. Marshal Weaver was acquitted of every charge stemming from the siege itself. The only things he was convicted of were the original charges that he had failed to make a court appearance on, and even after all that he was given time served after the trial.
Weaver’s surviving children all received $1m settlement agreements from the government.
The government went in with rules of engagement that would be appropriate in a war zone but which are entirely inappropriate for Federal law enforcement, and those ROE definitely lead to the sniper killing Vicki Weaver (which is the only reason that guy didn’t go to prison.)
The WACO documentary I cited above, says the sniper who shot Weavers wife, was also at WACO, in a snipers nest.
Lon Horiuchi, for anyone interested.
Is the Nuremberg Defense actually valid for civilian law enforcement agencies? I know it won’t help a soldier tried for war crimes (they have a positive obligation to reject illegal orders); are the two cases differentiated?
I think it’s more to the point that the Nuremberg Defense is IMHO applicable when the order isn’t unreasonable–“Sniper, shoot that person if they appear to be armed, as they are a clear and present danger” wasn’t an entirely unreasonable/unconscionable order for a HRT sniper (even if it was rather irregular and was idiotically applied in the Ruby Ridge fiasco).
In any case, the sniper was actually exonerated under an interpretation of the Supremacy Clause; essentially, the judge ruled that he couldn’t be separately prosecuted because the FBI orders were legal in the first place and you can’t prosecute a federal agent for doing his legal job. Had the orders been illegal, or had the sniper broken the rules to take the shot, he would have been subject to prosecution.
The problem is police agencies have generally adopted a policy of zero risk. They design procedures that will supposedly reduce any danger to its officers to zero.
In theory, this sounds like a good idea - nobody wants to risk a police officer’s life. But in practice, it creates serious problems. Procedures that eliminate any risk to officers require them to use force in situations where the danger is hypothetical. In other words, a reasonable risk policy would be telling an officer to shoot a suspect if he pulls a gun out of his pocket. A zero risk policy would be telling an officer to shoot a suspect if he’s reaching into his pocket for something that might be a gun.
Just for the record, Ruby Ridge isn’t a real place. The Weavers’ cabin is located between geographical features called Ruby Creek and Caribou Ridge, and a reporter conflated the two.
Jon Ronson’s Them, mentioned above, includes a very even-handed discussion of the siege based on interviews with Randy Weaver and his eldest daughter.
The ATF was forced to move against the compound well before they were ready and prepared because the Waco Tribune Herald was going to release a feature story the next day about the Branch Davidians. It was imperative they act before sightseers and gawkers soon overran the place. They would have been well served to to have contacted the local sheriff who indeed had been out there a number of times before and was on good terms with Koresh. Who knows what could have been avoided if the Trib hadn’t been so hellbent on a sensational story. They’d done this before, I would not call them responsible journalists at the time.
Because the sightseers and gawkers would have stayed there from that day to this had the ATF not rushed in. :rolleyes:
Why would the story have changed anything? I would assume there were endless stories about them during the 2 month encircling.
No, there really weren’t. That was the first we’d heard of it and I was in school there at the time. I assume the ATF figured their chance to apprehend him away from the compound was gone. Plus the Davidians would assume a more defensive posture after that. A stockpile of guns plus a compound plus a certain to be curious public led someone in charge to grasp at their last chance at a surprise. Obviously, they weren’t ready and their forced hand led to disaster.
That’s pretty ignorant. Want to back up and try another leap? You think a front page story in the local paper is conducive to a surprise tactical operation?
Are you saying the original raid was rushed? Or that the raid during the siege was rushed? I can assure you that everyone knew about the siege. I knew and I was 12 years old and in England.