The Political Assassination of LaVoy Finicum. Revised and Enlarged, Jan 30, 2016
By
Anthony Hall on January 27, 2016
Professor Hall brings his original article, written within hours of the assassination of LaVoy Finicum, into conformity with more recent developments. He refutes those such as Gordon Duff who have misrepresented Finicum's assassination as "suicide by cop." The author concludes that the Finicum family are justified in their conclusion that "the FBI chose to escalate the situation to force a confrontation, and violent ending."
Hall’s Update: The Duff/Dean version to confuse my essay’s introduction is not consistent with Victoria Sharp’s eyewitness testimony given to North West Liberty News
http://hwcdn.libsyn.com/p/0/c/4/0c4...53944039&hwt=6478f9ba39fcaf39a394360fe027fad1
[ Editor’s update: A witness that was stopped and arrested in the first car refutes the allegations made in this early reporting of an execution with his hands up in the air. Finicum had run the first road block, and was not fired upon, and crashed into a snowbank while trying to run the backup road block.
He exited the car and charged the officers and was shot then. This witness was at a distance himself but I suspect we will have video camera evidence of both stops as that is routine now in these situations where both parties want proof of what happened.
The rest of everyone stopped are alive. Those with warrants were arrested and the released. I am sure we will be hearing more about this in the next few days. For my two cents these folks should have been aware that some sort of arrest could be expected and should have had a game plan to move the dispute into the courts, as will happen now. Any kind of shooting served neither the government’s position nor those arrested, injured or killed. The legal process will not churn on it what will be a high profile case
…Jim W. Dean ]
Hands up or charging? Conflicting reports on shooting of Oregon militia spokesman — RT USA
by Professor Anthony Hall
Co-Host with Kevin Barett, False Flag Weekly News
LaVoy Finicum was reported killed on the evening of January 26, 2016 by a special forces unit including Oregon State Troopers and FBI Officers.
First reports were that Finicum had been shot three “three times” in an episode that also included the arrest on Highway 395 in Oregon of some of the leadership, including Ammon Bundy, of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. Here is the initial tweet of Nevada Assemblywoman Michele Fiore describing the tragedy.
The precise circumstances LaVoy Finicum’s death, together with the state violence and arrests attending it, have very quickly become the subject of a media war. Those indicating that LaVoy Finicum was somehow the author of his own demise have constructed a narrative that the downed man died “charging police,” pistol in hand. At the extreme end of this narrative is the writing of former Michigan State Trooper Gordon Duff on this
Veteran’s Today site.
The VT founder and Senior Editor goes far as to indicate that LaVoy’s killing “suicide by cop.”
The alternative interpretation advanced here is that LaVoy Finicum is a patriotic martyr assassinated in a preconceived federal plan concocted during this election year ultimately under the authority of US President Barack Obama. So far the controversy involves conflicting testimony from Mark McConnell and Victoria Sharp, both of whom were reportedly arrested and then released in the episode in question. Each witnessed to the killing of Finicum viewed the event from separate locations in one of the two cars headed from Burns to John Day Oregon where a community meeting was to have taken place. Each recorded his and her observations of the events attending Finicum’s death in recordings easily available on the Internet.
McConnell’s perspective is from the car containing Ammon Bundy. This vehicle was pulled over at the onset of the a very elaborate police ambush amidst the snow-covered and thickly-treed terrain surrounding an isolated section of Highway 395. Victoria Sharp is reported to have been in the second vehicle, the white van that LaVoy Finicum drove into a snowbank in the face of a very elaborate road block manned by dozens of heavily armed officials. The ambush crew blocking the highway where LaVoy Finicum took a barrage of government bullets could best be collectively characterized as a federal assassination squad.
Since Jan. 28 the eyewitness accounts need to be understood in the context of a possibly-doctored video released by the FBI. The video was delivered to the media by Greg Bretzing, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI in Oregon. He indicates that the ariel footage of the episode was filmed from a airplane. As I see it, however, only a helicopter could have provided the relatively stationary platform from which the footage was taken depicting what happened after the white vehicle said to have been driven by LaVoy Finicum went into the snowbank.
Without a sound track to indicate the timing, frequency and magnitude of gun fire, which Victoria Sharp says was massive, the video lends itself to many interpretations of who did what when. Why was a soundtrack from either the ariel vehicle or some position position on the ground, withheld from the public? How many cameras did record the event? Probably many.
It is clear that the individual that was gunned down, presumably LaVoy Finicum, exited the vehicle with his hands up. He did not charge one way or the other as government sharp shooters moved into their kill positions. Contradicting Duff’s theory of what happened, the FBI does not say that at any point in the episode immediately before his death Finicum had a gun in his hand.
Here is how Ricardo Montelbon responded to responded to Steve Wolf’s account of the “Oregon Amush” on the website,
Caravansary Posts.
“The vehicle was fired upon before Finicum drove off from the first stop. That was the planned manuver by the FBI to panic him to accelerate out of danger. They left the road wide open for him to leave all of the witnesses at the first stop out of view for what was a planned execution without witnesses at the second stop. LaVoy was first deliberately shot in the lower intestine to cause a reaction that would appear he went for his gun. Of course he reached for the area of excruciating pain. After the final shot murdered him they riddled the truck with bullets and shot flashbangs that’s when Ryan Bundy was struck in the shoulder FROM A BULLET not a toy pellet. To the FBI’s amazement the Bonney and Clyde style shooting victims were not killed. Now they are witnesses to attempted murder, conspiracy to commit murder and murder in the first degree. Why doesn’t the FBI release pictures of the vehicle? That will prove the criminal acts as will the autopsy of Finicum.”
LaVoy Finicum shortly before his assassination. A member in good standing of the Mormon Church, Mr. Finicum and his wife Jeanette had eleven natural children and fostered 50 children over the last decade.
Confounding the “Progressive Left’s Stereotypes of Militia Members as Ignorant Red Neck Bigots
A member of the Church of Jesus of Latter-day Saints who grew up on the Navajo Reservation in the Four Corners area of the American West, Finicum was fast acquiring prominence as a go-to person by journalists covering the evolving standoff at the Malheur Wildlife Reservation outside Burns Oregon.
Again and again Finicum threw out sound bites addressing in a very clear way major issues whose scope goes far beyond the immediate issues of federal regulation of ranchers on federal lands in the American West. Finicum made history, for instance, when he commented eloquently on his own filmed removal of a spy camera from a lamp post in the vicinity of the protest camp.
After coming down from the ladder with the spy camera in hand, Finicum fended off pressures from his fellow protesters to destroy the expensive spy device. He made a point of letting it be known the spy ware would be sent back to the appropriate authorities in Washington DC. The symbolic importance of this ritual on contested federal lands is obvious during an era when Edward Snowden must live in exile in Russia, ruthlessly criminalized for exposing the pervasive, permeating, privacy-obliterating illegality of the national security states quickly expanding apparatus for “Total Information Awareness.
Most interesting to me was Finicum’s success in confounding the “progressive” left’s stereotypes of militia members as ignorant Red Neck bigots. Citing his experiences growing up on the Navajo Reservation, Finicum made it very clear he well understood that the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs applies to America’s Indian reservations many of the same repressive indignities visited on many non-Indian citizens by the Interior Department’s deeply corrupt and politicized Bureau of Land Management. The image cannot be easily brushed aside of LaVoy Finicum declaring days before his death, “The Native American People Need to Be Free…. The Tribes Need to Be Free.”
The symbolic sinew of Finicum’s outreach to the First Nations was his inspection of the deplorable conditions of the First Nations “artifacts” being held in the dank basement in federal headquarters of the Malheur Wildlife Reservation. Finicum made it clear that the artifacts should be “returned to their rightful owners.” Why should this collection of First Nations material culture be “locked away” apart from the communities whose properties they most genuinely are.
These comments show Finicum’s familiarity with the “repatriation” discourse among First Nations people. As this discourse has unfolded, museums around the world have been returning to their true owners material items such as ceremonial pipes, implements and regalia. The giving back of these embodiments of distinct heritages and cultures of Indigenous peoples signifies respect for living societies trying to secure places in the future by claiming for their posterity the material evidence of their own histories.
Finicum repeatedly called for representatives of Native Americans to come forward to begin a dialogue transcending the Hollywoodized mythology of cowboys and Indians. Finicum’s apparent sensitivity to the need for dialogue with Native Americans was part of a plea to find common ground in order to host and support a rainbow confederacy of constituencies all imperilled by an out-of-control federal juggernaut menacing the entire global community in this era of never-ending 9/11 wars.
Finigan made a point of telling the cameras that he and those for whom he was speaking are not “anti-government.” Rather it has been the failure of the federal authority to adhere to even its own laws that has made it necessary for the creation of a mass movement of citizens opposed to tyranny from above. As Finicum declared in the hours before his death, “This is not just a little occupation. This is a mass movement involving tens of millions of people.”
In my estimation Finicum was way too conservative in assessing the true extent of those who have lost all confidence that the federal authority in the USA, or in my own country of Canada for that matter, has any chance of redemption under current conditions. Like some of the leading activists of the Occupy movement, Finicum seemed well aware of the reality that the federal government of the United States has been taken over by a tiny cabal perfectly prepared to advance its interests through fascism, genocide, eugenics, forced migrations, geoengineering and banking frauds.
This list of federal malevolence and malfeasance is far from complete. Under our current conditions only a popular mobilization on a massive scale capable of transcending many different types of divide has even a chance of holding back the onslaught.
This onslaught of debt enslavement, militarization and environmental holocaust is being forced upon us by an extremely elaborate, old and well organized criminal gang that has rendered the federal authority of the world’s ailing superpower as a blunt weapon exclusively available for its own disposal.
Assassination or Suicide?
Finicum’s death is already raising bitter controversies even before his body is buried. Senior
Veterans Today Editor, Gordon Duff, has already suggested Finicum’s killing by federal bullets amounted to
“suicide by cop.” This characterization of Finicum’s death introduces a meme that will probably reverberate across media venues of the controlled opposition. It is true that Finicum spoke openly about his unwillingness to be incarcerated in “a concrete box.” Going from there to making Finicum the author of his own death, however, is a huge leap for the veteran special forces expert to make. Such a judgement while the body is literally still warm raises the ante of interpretation concerning the death of a person who will almost certainly be regarded as a martyr taken down in defence of a higher ideal.
Cliven Bundy, the Nevada-based patriarch of the US movement of which Finicum was a part, left no doubt of where he stands on the federal killing. The owner of the Nevada ranch at the eye of the conflict with the Bureau of Land Management in 2014 asserted, “It appears that America was fired upon by our government. One of liberty’s finest patriots is fallen… We’ve got one killed and I can say he was sacrificed for a good purpose.”
The Position of LaVoy Finicum’s Family and the Debate With the Mormon Church
A Jan. 29 statement from the family of LaVoyFinicum deplored “the needless death of our husband, father, grandfather, brother and son. After seeing the FBI video the family is adamant that
“LaVoy was not ‘charging’ anyone. He appears to have been shot in the back, with his hands in the air. They add,
“It has been gutwrenching for our family to view the video of LaVoy being shot, and then left to lie in the snow while a whole army of so-called “public servants” terrorized the others. We can only hope their families never have to watch such a thing.”
The family go on to quote LaVoy’s oft’stated concern for the safety of all involved, that no one should be hurt in the course of a stand he considered essential to restore America to its decent heritage. The targeted man declared,
“We want to clarify that we share any and all concerns about safety for everyone involved, including ourselves, our families, the public, and law enforcement officers. All lives are important to us. Ultimately, we want everyone involved to be able to return safely to their homes and families. We are deeply troubled and saddened that our governments do not share the same concern for human life. We are deeply troubled that our governments would view whatever was happening at the Malheur Wildlife Refuge to be worth spilling blood over. We are deeply troubled and saddened that our governments have come to place so little value on life, liberty, property and pursuit of happiness.”
The killing is throwing up huge controversies for the USA’s Utah-headquartered Mormon Church that has many its members involved in various capacities with the libertarian militia movement. How will this rich and successful religious denomination respond? In this election year, how will many right-wing politicians including Donald Trump respond to the death of such an iconographic family man, the natural and foster patriarch of a large extended mormon clan? Is Mitt Romney or LaVoy Finicum a better embodiment of Mormon family values, of idealized patriotism growing out of love of country?
Mormon broadcaster Jake Morphonios has already disagreed with the Church establishment’s ruling that the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom are operating outside acceptable Mormon behaviour. For Morphonios, the CCF was engaged in the Nevada and Oregon standoffs in “a legitimate self-defence against an aggressive and abusive bureaucracy that is far outside the rule of law.”
Paul Craig Roberts versus Russia Today
Another emerging controversy over the meaning of Finicum’s death was foreshadowed in the disagreement between conservative American pundit, Paul Craig Roberts, and
Russia Today. Emphasizing, for instance, the huge implications of the 9/11 false flag event, Israeli domination of US foreign policy, and the undermining of America’s worldwide interests by a kleptocratic banking cabal based on Wall Street and the City of London, Roberts welcomed the militia stand in Oregon as a part of a necessary resistance to the grotesque neocon abuse of federal power.
Roberts criticized
Russia Today for looking away from this larger picture and emphasizing instead the disparity of police treatment between the public demonstration by the protestors at the Black Lives Matter demonstration in Ferguson Missouri and the arms bearing “ranchers” who have gathered at the Malheur Wildlife Reservation. While the racism of the US police state was certainly a factor in the contrast, Roberts pointed out how this slant in coverage plays right into the divide-and-conquer agenda of the likes of American plutocrat George Soros.
It is well known that Soros funds the completely compromised and ineffective so-called peace movement. Multi-billionaire Soros also funded the so-called colour revolutions that laid the foundations for the Ukranian-Russian divisions presently pushed and exploited by NATO. It is less well known that Soros is also busily funding the Black Lives Matter movement. It seems that all is well with the dominant global cabal of organized crime as long as potential opponents of their bought-and-paid-for devices of pseudo-democratic government are sliced and diced into as many isolated fragments as possible.
Militia Fanatics or Average Americans Standing Up to Fascism?
Gordon Duff is utterly contemptuous of the “Bundy/Oregon militia,” alleging that its members are subject to a plague of “race hatred, religious extremism and tasteless ignorance.” No doubt the group Duff thus dismisses does have some factions and members that display some of these symptoms of extremism in varying degrees. How could it be otherwise in an American failed state permeated with racism, religious extremism, and forms of ignorance that are aggressively and insidiously promoted by a media culture that profits hugely from the dissemination of disinformation and round-the-clock PR bullshit.
But who of us is without sin? What religious extremist was it that said something like, “let he who is without sin cast the
Gordon Duff Being Interviewed on Kevin Barrett’s Truthjihad
first stone?” Are we only qualified to work for revolutionary transformation of our present intolerable conditions when we follow Gordon Duff’s lead in rising above all the foibles and weaknesses inherent in the societies around us?
Part of Duff’s criticism is based on probably-true accusations that the group in and around the Wildlife Reservation protest camp is riddled with undercover federal agents. This observation itself, however, should speak to the covert thuggery of a federal authority that has removed from the vast majority of citizens the protections of social security and the rule of law including due process for the redress of grievances. The domestic and international versions of the national security state are all in place, at huge expense to us, so that no true movement for genuine redress can even get off the ground before the instruments of Full Spectrum Dominance kick in.
The name Pete Santilli seems to come up often when possible undercover agents are mentioned in this context. Santilli is the YouTube-making blogger of the protest camp who was apparently among those arrested. One could observe the great gulf between the positions of Santilli and of LaVoy Finicum. Shortly before his death Finicum vowed that the federal building on the Wildlife Reservation will never be returned to Washington. He spoke of it being handed over instead to the local Harney County government
This statement of intent contrasts dramatically with a YouTube of Santilli at the height of the crisis driving along somewhere in Oregon looking from time to time into the camera. He speaks into the recording device advising the FBI to hold back from attacking the protest camp said to be full of women and children. A female voice in the car echoes this caution. As justification for this advice, Santilli declares his intent to go to the camp and clear it out of inhabitants.
Finicum himself described the build up of spy planes and spy drones over the camp in the hours before the mobilization of federal actions that led to his death. He anticipated “kinetic action” on the part of the feds stating, “I have no intention of spending my days in a concrete box. There are things more important than your life and freedom is one of them.”
“Helpingmind,” the nom de plume of one the commentators on Duff’s Veterans Today article observed, “Militia my ***. They are mostly average Americans who know we are very close to fascism via false flag reaction psychosis around the world… The core group is mirrored by 10s of millions in America alone and their take on the entity in DC is that it is a fascist immoral ‘criminal mob’—- Your words Mr. Duff”
LaVoy’s funeral will be held in Kanab, Utah on Friday, February 5, 2016.
