CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

How I Busted the Ruby Ridge Coverup

Illustration for James Bovard’s Playboy story “Overkill”, on the Ruby Ridge shooting, by Amy Crehore. (June 1995)

On June 30 1995, I helped shatter the coverup of federal killings at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.  For millions of Americans, those brazen killings epitomized how the U.S. government had become a deadly peril to their rights and liberties.

In 1991, an ATF informant entrapped Randy Weaver into selling him two sawed-off shotguns. After ATF officials lied to a federal prosecutor, Weaver was indicted and sent the wrong court date. On August 21, 1992, after numerous illegal intrusions onto Weaver’s Ruby Ridge mountaintop property near the Canadian border, three U.S. marshals dressed in Ninja outfits and carrying submachine guns ambushed Weaver’s 14-year old son and family friend Kevin Harris. One marshal shot the boy’s dog and a firefight erupted in which another marshal was killed. As Sammy Weaver ran from the scene towards the family’s ramshackle cabin, a marshal shot him in the back and killed him.

The next day, the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team arrived. Within an hour of its snipers taking position, every adult in the cabin was either dead or severely wounded – even though they had not fired a shot at the FBI. FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy Weaver in the back as he stood outside his home, and then killed Vicki Weaver as she stood by the cabin doorway holding their 10-month-old baby. The bullet that passed through Vicki Weaver’s skull then badly wounded Kevin Harris.

The FBI proclaimed its Ruby Ridge operation a great success, but a federal jury found Randy Weaver and Kevin Harris not guilty on almost all charges. Federal Judge Edward Lodge condemned the FBI’s misconduct and fabrication of evidence.

I wrote about Ruby Ridge in my 1994 book, Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty. But I knew I was missing so much key dirt on the case.

The debacle in federal court in Idaho spurred an investigation by a Justice Department task force investigation. On December 9, 1994, Deval Patrick, the assistant attorney general for civil rights, announced that he was rejecting the task force’s recommendations to punish federal agents. Patrick announced that the FBI had not used excessive force, whitewashing the entire operation. But Patrick kept secret the hefty report by the task force.

The following month, FBI chief Louis Freeh announced that the FBI had completed its self-investigation and confirmed that its agents performed wonderfully at Ruby Ridge, aside from a few minor technical infractions.

Freeh’s........

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