According to a report on his own You Tube channel, LaVoy Finicum was killed on the evening of January 26, 2016 by a US special forces unit while the deceased Arizona rancher “was on his knees with his hands up.”

Finicum is said to have been shot “three times” in an episode that also included the arrest on Highway 395 in Oregon of some of the leadership of the Citizens for Constitutional Freedom. Nevada Assembly woman Michele Fiore also reported in a tweet that Finicum was shot by federal authorities with his hands up.

In a more recent report, North West Liberty News published an interview with Victoria Sharp who was in the “ambushed” car carrying the targeted entourage with LaVoy Finicum at the wheel. She said that Finicum was shot six extra times by special forces police after he was already downed by police gunfire.

Sharp confirmed that Finicum was initially shot outside the car with his hands in the air. She dismissed the story of three bullets being shot as bunk and indicated that at least 120 shots were fired at the car. She spoke of about 4o police vehicles being involved in the ambush with “FBI snipers” posted everywhere, including on perches in surrounding trees.

The group had left the camp of the armed protestors that took control of the federal building overseeing the Federal Malheur Wildlife Reservation. The entourage, including Ammon Bundy and Ryan Bundy who was wounded in the episode, was on their way to address a meeting in the Oregon community of John Day. Police reportedly apprehended a second group in an episode that at this moment remains ill defined.

Inevitably Finicum’s death will be viewed by many as a political assassination by a US federal government that has become accustomed to extrajudicial killing all over the world. A veteran of the controversial standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch in Nevada in 2014, Finicum was emerging as a compelling voice of a movement that some see as a patriotic defense of the rule of law in the United States. Where some see freedom fighters, others see as drove of coddled terrorists cut way too much slack by the federal authorities.

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. Again and again Finicum threw out sound bites addressing in an usually 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 state’s quickly expanding apparatus for “Total Information Awareness.”

Confounding the “Progressive” Left’s Stereotypes of Militia Members as Ignorant Red Neck Bigots

Most interesting to me was Finicum’s success in confounding the “progressive” left’s stereotypes of 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 the 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.

From these comments Finicum demonstrated his 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 imperiled 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 the imposition of various forms of 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 of 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 liberties finest patriots is fallen… We’ve got one killed and I can say he was sacrificed for a good purpose.”

The killing is throwing up huge controversies for the USA’s Utah-headquartered Mormon Church that has many of 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 and 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 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 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 You Tube-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 You Tube 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 advise, Santilli declares his intent to go to the camp and clear out its 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.”

https://alethonews.wordpress.com/2016/01/28/the-political-assassination-of-lavoy-finicum/