[...] I had been willing to chalk the incident at Ruby Ridge [1] up to a "glitch" along the lines of "no system is perfect, human existence is tragic, the rain falls on the just and the unjust, and sometimes, shit happens and things just fall between the cracks".
[...]
[1] Ironically, the Waco fiasco was initially motivated as an attempt to "rehabilitate" the feds' image after the eye-blacking they had given themselves at Ruby Ridge. That's why they had a press pool ready and waiting to go just a few miles away right before the raid, so their glorious return to form could be well-documented for public consumption. Then, when their zero-dark-thirty hut-hutting blew up in their faces, they could only try to save what face they had left by doubling down on their brutal viciousness, out of fear of otherwise appearing to be weak and/or incompetent. IOW: The slaughtered victims of Waco were martyrs to an ill-conceived and badly botched publicity stunt - a goddam fucking publicity stunt - and every asshole who was responsible got off scot-free. (At least for Ruby Ridge, Louis Freeh, who would go on to become director of the FBI, got a letter of reprimand placed in his personnel file. It went right alongside the letter of reprimand he got for losing one of the agency's wireless phones.)