The Big Black Eyes of the #GovernmentSupremacist FBI
Ruby Ridge, Waco and other bad days for the FBI
Ruby Ridge, Waco and other bad days for the FBI
On this day in 1992, Federal Marshals in the Idaho panhandle attempted to serve a warrant on Randy Weaver, touching off a deadly confrontation and standoff that soon involved the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team.
The InfluenceWatch profile of the Federal Bureau of Investigation provides this description of the violent controversy:
Ruby Ridge
Agents of the FBI and its Hostage Rescue Team were confronted with internal rebukes, professional reprimands, criminal prosecutions, and extensive external criticism for conduct during and after an August 1992 armed siege at a remote property in northern Idaho colloquially identified as “Ruby Ridge.”
Origins
In October 1989, Kenneth Fadeley, an informant working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) on a case targeting the white-supremacist group Aryan Nations, persuaded an Idaho man named Randy Weaver to sell him two shotguns with barrels cut one-quarter inch shorter than the legal limit. A jury later acquitted Weaver of the weapons charge after the defense argued at trial that the defendant had been entrapped by the BATF.
Fadelely later testified at a U.S. Senate hearing that an FBI informer also working within the Aryan Nations deliberately blew Fadeley’s cover and ruined his position within the racist group. Asked by one senator if this had been done so the FBI infiltrator could “get the full glory” in the case…