FBI Director Louis J. Freeh has ordered more and better training for the bureau's hostage rescue team in an effort to prevent the kind of mistakes made at the deadly 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho.
In a statement issued late Tuesday, Freeh said he has ordered all members of the FBI's hostage rescue team to receive training in hostage negotiations, behavioral science and crisis management. Coordinators of the FBI's regional SWAT teams also will be trained in those skills, he added."I believe this will ensure that every member of the team fully understands the importance and priority I place in negotiated solutions," Freeh said. The team "should only be used sparingly and only in situations that, I am convinced, warrant their deployment," he added.
Freeh has previously acknowledged that the FBI made serious mistakes at Ruby Ridge and said he had made changes after the failed siege, including the revamping and expansion of the bureau's crisis management teams.
In October, amid stinging criticism in Senate hearings of the role played by law enforcement agencies in the debacle, the Clinton administration laid down new rules of engagement for federal agents. Under those rules, agents should shoot only in cases of "imminent danger" - and then only to kill.
The FBI was sharply admonished for its use of special orders at Ruby Ridge that said snipers "could and should" fire at any armed adult male spotted outside white separatist Randy Weaver's mountaintop cabin. The customary FBI shooting rule, by contrast, restricted the use of lethal force to protecting oneself or others from imminent harm.
The rescue team, which originally operated only abroad, is a particular sore point for critics, who assert it's too militarized, duplicates functions of SWAT teams and works at cross-purposes with FBI negotiators.
A rescue team sniper shot Weaver's wife, Vicki, as she stood behind the cabin door holding her infant daughter, on Aug. 22, 1992. A day earlier, the Weavers' 14-year-old son, Sam, and Deputy U.S. Marshal William Degan died in a gunfight as federal agents scouted Weaver's property in anticipation of arresting him on a weapons charge.
A draft report by the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on terrorism was highly critical of the shot by the sniper, Lon Horiuchi, who killed Vicki Weaver, but did not address whether to prosecute him.
The report criticized both the FBI and the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which also was involved in the standoff but also praised some of the corrective actions taken by the FBI.
A final version of the report is expected to be released this week.