Ruby Ridge, 30 years later

This month marks the 30th anniversary of the U.S. government siege of the Randy Weaver family cabin on Ruby Ridge, near the city of Bonners Ferry in the Idaho panhandle. Starting on August 21, 1992, a small army of government agents surrounded the mountain for 11 days. Two exchanges of gunfire resulted in the deaths of one U.S. Marshal, Weaver's wife and son, and a family dog.

Randy Weaver, who died this May at the age of 74, was a slight man from Iowa who had joined the Army during the Vietnam War, though he wasn't sent overseas, and dropped out of college to marry his sweetheart, Vicki Jordison. Vicki, a deeply religious woman, forged a family religion out of the syncretism of her childhood Mormonism, Hal Lindsey-style prophecy, and the racist Christian Identity movement. Convinced that the government was the Beast of Revelation and out to get the faithful, Weaver became convinced that the only way to keep his family safe from a corrupt world was to move into the wilderness and live in isolation. So in 1982, the Weaver family bought property on top of a mountain in northern Idaho, where Randy built a ramshackle cabin for them to live in.

In Idaho, Weaver became loosely associated with the neo-Nazi Aryan Nations organization. He wasn't a member, but he attended their annual conferences, and shared some of their beliefs about interracial marriage and racial separatism. At a 1989 meeting, he met a man named Gus Magisano who persuaded Weaver to sell two illegal sawed-off shotguns. However, “Gus" was really a federal informant named Kenneth Fadeley, who was working for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF). The Aryan Nations, as it turns out, was so saturated with undercover operatives from multiple agencies, they often didn't know who was a real neo-Nazi, and who was a fed.

A year later, the ATF ambushed Weaver on the road and placed him under arrest for the illegal gun sale. They offered to drop the charges if he would become an informant for them within the white-supremacist movement. He refused. In early 1991, Weaver was arrested again and released on bail. A court date was set for February, but he received a letter mistakenly giving a date in March. When he failed to appear, he was declared a fugitive. In March 1992, a team of U.S. Marshals arrived at Ruby Ridge to arrest Randy, but he warned them away at gunpoint. The U.S. Marshals Service began active surveillance of the Weaver property.

On August 21, three marshals reconnoitering the property encountered Randy Weaver's son Sam, 14, his yellow Labrador retriever Striker, and family friend Kevin Harris. The two parties surprised each other. It's unclear what happened next, but in the resulting gunfight, Sam, Striker, and USMS agent William Degan were shot dead. By nightfall, the Weaver property was surrounded with agents from the USMS, FBI, state police, and other government law-enforcement agencies. The siege of Ruby Ridge had begun.

The next day, while Weaver and Harris were cleaning Sam's body in the "birthing shed" (a wooden shed where Vicki stayed while on her period or giving birth to their newborn daughter, due to the Weavers' religious belief that menstruation was unclean), FBI sniper Lon Horiuchi shot Randy in the arm. As Weaver and Harris ran back inside the cabin, Horiuchi's second shot, through the front door, hit Vicki in the head and Harris in the chest. Vicki was killed, and Harris was seriously injured.

The standoff ended on August 31, 1992, after the intervention of former Special Forces colonel "Bo" Gritz, a well-known far-right activist, then a fringe presidential candidate. The day before, he had persuaded Kevin Harris to surrender to get the medical attention he needed. Gritz then convinced Weaver that the only sensible outcome was for himself and his three daughters to surrender, promising to find him good representation for his trial.

Weaver's and Harris's criminal trial began on April 14, 1993. True to his word, Gritz had retained Gerry Spence, a celebrity lawyer who had never lost a criminal case either as prosecutor or defender, to head Weaver's defense team. The defence side never called any witnesses; Spence simply dismantled the inconsistencies in the prosecution's case. After about three weeks of deliberation, the jury acquitted Harris and Weaver on all charges related to the death of agent Degan, and convicted Weaver only of his original charge of failure to appear.

What happened at Ruby Ridge? Neither side of the standoff came across as saints.

Randy Weaver, for his part, alienated his neighbours in Idaho, and was indeed connected, loosely, to the white-supremacist movement. Through the influence of his wife, he had bought into a paranoid, racist, apocalyptic pseudo-Christianity in which the imminent end of the world would culminate, more or less, in a race war on his front doorstep. Weaver apparently had no attention of appearing in court either in February 1991 or the mistaken March date. Instead, Vicki Weaver sent threatening letters to the government—the "Queen of Babylon." To the Weavers, the government was the Beast of Revelation, out to destroy the faithful. Randy believed his family was the target of a government conspiracy—and, in his case, the Beast was indeed out to get him, which only fed back into his paranoia.

Meanwhile, the U.S. government, particularly the FBI, badly overestimated how dangerous Weaver and his family actually were. Rumours circulated that Weaver had used the Special Forces explosives training he received in the Army to booby-trap the entire mountain with explosives, or that he and his family were going to commit mass suicide rather than be taken alive. As a result, the FBI's rules of engagement effectively allowed FBI snipers to shoot Randy Weaver or Kevin Harris on sight, regardless of whether they were armed or posed a threat to anyone. The siege involved over 200 government agents, armored vehicles, Humvees, and helicopters—all for a slight racial separatist who wanted to be left alone and had committed a relatively minor offence. The ATF had arguably entrapped Weaver into selling Kenneth Fadeley the illegal shotguns. Weaver, who initially resisted Fadeley's urging, had no criminal record or propensity to break the law, as Spence noted during the trial.

It's easy to armchair quarterback in hindsight, but I can't imagine it would have been too difficult to keep an eye on Ruby Ridge and arrest Weaver when he was alone. The family stayed on their land for months while Randy was a fugitive. They would have needed supplies eventually.

If you want to read a detailed, balanced account of the Ruby Ridge siege and the events leading to it, I recommend Jess Walters' book Ruby Ridge: The Truth and Tragedy of the Randy Weaver Family (Harper, 2002), originally published in 1995 as Every Knee Shall Bow.

On April 19, 1993—while the Weaver trial was in progress—a fire broke out during an FBI assault of the Branch Davidian sect's compound in Waco, Texas—bringing another, 51-day-long government siege, to an end. 76 Branch Davidians, including women and children, died (in addition to the six Branch Davidians and four federal agents killed in the initial February 28 raid on the compound). Many of the same federal agencies and personnel involved in the Ruby Ridge siege were involved at Waco as well: and like Ruby Ridge, the assault involved hundreds of agents, helicopters, Humvees, and armoured personnel carriers—and, in this case, even tanks. The Ruby Ridge and Waco events gave the Clinton-era FBI a very poor reputation (though Ruby Ridge actually took place in 1992, during the George H. W. Bush administration), and public perception was that the government had engaged in severe misconduct during both standoffs.

Then, on April 19, 1995, a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people in the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. The bomber, Timothy McVeigh, deliberately chose the second anniversary of the Waco fire to commit what he described as an act of revenge for the events at Waco and Ruby Ridge. McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols were associated with the Michigan Militia, one of the more prominent organizations within the right-wing "militia movement." This paramilitary movement has, as one of its aims, armed resistance against the imminent rise of a tyrannical government in the United States. Events such as Ruby Ridge and Waco were catalysts for the growth of the militia movement, which at its peak included hundreds of organizations and thousands of members.

So if you want to see the root of anti-government ideology amongst the American hard right, look to the mountains of Boundary County, Idaho.