Memorial Day Is A Hoax — Paul Craig Roberts
May 21, 2015 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Memorial Day Is A Hoax
Paul Craig Roberts
Memorial Day commemorates soldiers killed in war. We are told that
the war dead died for us and our freedom. US Marine General Smedley
Butler challenged this view. He said that our soldiers died for the
profits of the bankers, Wall Street, Standard Oil, and the United Fruit
Company. Here is an excerpt from a speech that he gave in 1933:
War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as
something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a
small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the
benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses.
I believe in adequate defense at the coastline and nothing else. If a
nation comes over here to fight, then we’ll fight. The trouble with
America is that when the dollar only earns 6 percent over here, then it
gets restless and goes overseas to get 100 percent. Then the flag
follows the dollar and the soldiers follow the flag.
I wouldn’t go to war again as I have done to protect some lousy
investment of the bankers. There are only two things we should fight
for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of
Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket.
There isn’t a trick in the racketeering bag that the military gang is
blind to. It has its “finger men” to point out enemies, its “muscle
men” to destroy enemies, its “brain men” to plan war preparations, and a
“Big Boss” Super-Nationalistic-Capitalism.
It may seem odd for me, a military man to adopt such a comparison.
Truthfulness compels me to. I spent thirty-three years and four months
in active military service as a member of this country’s most agile
military force, the Marine Corps. I served in all commissioned ranks
from Second Lieutenant to Major-General. And during that period, I spent
most of my time being a high class muscle- man for Big Business, for
Wall Street and for the Bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster
for capitalism.
I suspected I was just part of a racket at the time. Now I am sure of
it. Like all the members of the military profession, I never had a
thought of my own until I left the service. My mental faculties remained
in suspended animation while I obeyed the orders of higher-ups. This is
typical with everyone in the military service.
I helped make Mexico, especially Tampico, safe for American oil
interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the
National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping
of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefits of Wall
Street. The record of racketeering is long. I helped purify Nicaragua
for the international banking house of Brown Brothers in 1909-1912
(where have I heard that name before?). I brought light to the Dominican
Republic for American sugar interests in 1916. In China I helped to see
to it that Standard Oil went its way unmolested.
During those years, I had, as the boys in the back room would say, a
swell racket. Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given Al
Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in
three districts. I operated on three continents.
Most American soldiers died fighting foes who posed no threat to the
United States. Our soldiers died for secret agendas of which they knew
nothing. Capitalists hid their self-interests behind the flag, and our
boys died for the One Percent’s bottom line.
Jade Helm, an exercise that pits the US military against the US
public, is scheduled to run July 15 through September 15. What is the
secret agenda behind Jade Helm?
The Soviet Union was a partial check on capitalist looting in the
1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. However, with the Soviet collapse
capitalist looting intensified during the Clinton, Bush, and Obama
regimes.
Neoliberal Globalization is now looting its own constituent parts and
the planet itself. Americans, Greeks, Irish, British, Italians,
Ukrainians, Iraqis, Libyans, Argentinians, the Spanish and Portuguese
are being looted of their savings, pensions, social services, and job
opportunities, and the planet is being turned into a wasteland by
capitalists sucking the last penny out of the environment. As Claudia
von Werlhof writes, predatory capitalism is consuming the globe. http://www.globalresearch.ca/neoliberal-globalization-is-there-an-alternative-to-plundering-the-earth/24403
We need a memorial day to commemorate the victims of neoliberal
globalization. All of us are its victims, and in the end the
capitalists also.
Why War Is Inevitable — Paul Craig Roberts
May 25, 2014 | Original Here Go here to sign up to receive email notice of this news letter
Why War Is Inevitable
Paul Craig Roberts
Memorial Day is when we commemorate our war dead. Like the Fourth of
July, Memorial Day is being turned into a celebration of war.
Those who lose family members and dear friends to war don’t want the
deaths to have been in vain. Consequently, wars become glorious deeds
performed by noble soldiers fighting for truth, justice, and the
American way. Patriotic speeches tell us how much we owe to those who
gave their lives so that America could remain free.
The speeches are well-intentioned, but the speeches create a false
reality that supports ever more wars. None of America’s wars had
anything to do with keeping America free. To the contrary, the wars
swept away our civil liberties, making us unfree.
President Lincoln issued an executive order for the arrest and
imprisonment of northern newspaper reporters and editors. He shut down
300 northern newspapers and held 14,000 political prisoners. Lincoln
arrested war critic US Representative Clement Vallandigham from Ohio and
exiled him to the Confederacy. President Woodrow Wilson used WWI to
suppress free speech, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt used WWII to
intern 120,000 US citizens of Japanese descent on the grounds that race
made them suspect. Professor Samuel Walker concluded that President
George W. Bush used the “war on terror” for an across the board assault
on US civil liberty, making the Bush regime the greatest danger American
liberty has ever faced.
Lincoln forever destroyed states’ rights, but the suspension of
habeas corpus and free speech that went hand in hand with America’s
three largest wars was lifted at war’s end. However, President George W.
Bush’s repeal of the Constitution has been expanded by President Obama
and codified by Congress and executive orders into law. Far from
defending our liberties, our soldiers who died in “the war on terror”
died so that the president can indefinitely detain US citizens without
due process of law and murder US citizens on suspicion alone without any
accountability to law or the Constitution.
The conclusion is unavoidable that America’s wars have not protected
our liberty but, instead, destroyed liberty. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn
said, “A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
Southern secession did pose a threat to Washington’s empire, but not to the American people.
Neither the Germans of WWI vintage nor the Germans and Japanese of
WWII vintage posed any threat to the US. As historians have made
completely clear, Germany did not start WWI and did not go to war for
the purpose of territorial expansion. Japan’s ambitions were in Asia.
Hitler did not want war with England and France. Hitler’s territorial
ambitions were mainly to restore German provinces stripped from Germany
as WWI booty in violation of President Wilson’s guarantees. Any other
German ambitions were to the East. Neither country had any plans to
invade the US. Japan attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor hoping to
remove an obstacle to its activities in Asia, not as a precursor to an
invasion of America.
Certainly the countries ravaged by Bush and Obama in the 21st
century–Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Somalia, Syria, Pakistan, and Yemen
posed no military threat to the US. Indeed, these were wars used by a
tyrannical executive branch to establish the basis of the Stasi State
that now exists in the US.
The truth is hard to bear, but the facts are clear. America’s wars
have been fought in order to advance Washington’s power, the profits of
bankers and armaments industries, and the fortunes of US companies.
Marine General Smedley Butler said, “ I served in all commissioned ranks
from a second Lieutenant to a Major General. And during that time, I
spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for Big Business,
for Wall Street, and for the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer for
capitalism.”
It is more or less impossible to commemorate the war dead without
glorifying them, and it is impossible to glorify them without glorifying
their wars.
For the entirety of the 21st century the US has been at war, not war
against massed armies or threats to American freedom, but wars against
civilians, against women, children, and village elders, and wars against
our own liberty. Elites with a vested interest in these wars tell us
that the wars will have to go on for another 20 to 30 years before we
defeat “the terrorist threat.”
This, of course, is nonsense. There was no terrorist threat until
Washington began trying to create terrorists by military attacks,
justified by lies, on Muslim populations.
Washington succeeded with its war lies to the point that Washington’s audacity and hubris have outgrown Washington’s judgment.
By overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine,
Washington has brought the United States into confrontation with Russia.
This is a confrontation that could end badly, perhaps for Washington
and perhaps for the entire world.
If Gaddafi and Assad would not roll over for Washington, why does
Washington think Russia will? Russia is not Libya or Syria. Washington
is the bully who having beat up the kindergarden kid, now thinks he can
take on the college linebacker.
The Bush and Obama regimes have destroyed America’s reputation with
their incessant lies and violence against other peoples. The world sees
Washington as the prime threat.
Worldwide polls consistently show that people around the world regard
the US and Israel as the two countries that pose the greatest threat to
peace. http://www.ibtimes.com/gallup-poll-biggest-threat-world-peace-america-1525008 and
http://www.jewishfederations.org/european-poll-israel-biggest-threat-to-world-peace.aspx
The countries that Washington’s propaganda declares to be “rogue
states” and the “axis of evil,” such as Iran and North Korea, are far
down the list when the peoples in the world are consulted. It could not
be more clear that the world does not believe Washington’s self-serving
propaganda. The world sees the US and Israel as the rogue states.
The US and Israel are the only two countries in the world that are in
the grip of ideologies. The US is in the grip of the Neoconservative
ideology which has declared the US to be the “exceptional, indispensable
country” chosen by history to exercise hegemony over all others. This
ideology is buttressed by the Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines that
are the basis of US foreign policy.
The Israeli government is in the grip of the Zionist ideology that
declares a “greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates. Many
Israelis themselves do not accept this ideology, but it is the ideology
of the “settlers” and those who control the Israeli government.
Ideologies are important causes of war. Just as the Hitlerian
ideology of German superiority is mirrored in the Neoconservative
ideology of US superiority, the Communist ideology that the working
class is superior to the capitalist class is mirrored in the Zionist
ideology that Israelis are superior to Palestinians. Zionists have never
heard of squatters’ rights and claim that recent Jewish immigrants into
Palestine–invaders really–have the right to land occupied by others for
millenniums.
Washington’s and Israel’s doctrines of superiority over others do not
sit very well with the ”others.” When Obama declared in a speech that
Americans are the exceptional people, Russia’s President Putin
responded, “God created us all equal.”
To the detriment of its population, the Israeli government has made
endless enemies. Israel has effectively isolated itself in the world.
Israel’s continued existence depends entirely on the willingness and
ability of Washington to protect Israel. This means that Israel’s power
is derivative of Washington’s power.
Washington’s power is a different story. As the only economy
standing after WWII, the US dollar became the world money. This role
for the dollar has given Washington financial hegemony over the world,
the main source of Washington’s power. As other countries rise,
Washington’s hegemony is imperiled.
To prevent other countries from rising, Washington invokes the
Brzezinski and Wolfowitz doctrines. To be brief, the Brzezinski doctrine
says that in order to remain the only superpower, Washington must
control the Eurasian land mass. Brzezinski is willing for this to occur
peacefully by suborning the Russian government into Washington’s empire.
”A loosely confederated Russia . . . a decentralized Russia would be
less susceptible to imperial mobilization.” In other words, break up
Russia into associations of semi-autonomous states whose politicians can
be suborned by Washington’s money.
Brzezinski propounded “a geo-strategy for Eurasia.” In Brzezinski’s
strategy, China and “a confederated Russia” are part of a
“transcontinental security framework,” managed by Washington in order to
perpetuate the role of the US as the world’s only superpower.
I once asked my colleague, Brzezinski, that if everyone was allied
with us, who were we organized against? My question surprised him,
because I think that Brzezinski remains caught up in Cold War strategy
even after the demise of the Soviet Union. In Cold War thinking it was
important to have the upper hand or else be at risk of being eliminated
as a player. The importance of prevailing became all consuming, and this
consuming drive survived the Soviet collapse. Prevailing over others is the only foreign policy that Washington knows.
The mindset that America must prevail set the stage for the
Neoconservatives and their 21st century wars, which, with Washington’s
overthrow of the democratically elected government of Ukraine, has
resulted in a crisis that has brought Washington into direct conflict
with Russia.
I know the strategic institutes that serve Washington. I was the
occupant of the William E.Simon Chair in Political Economy, Center for
Strategic and International Studies, for a dozen years. The idea is
prevalent that Washington must prevail over Russia in Ukraine or
Washington will lose prestige and its superpower status.
The idea of prevailing always leads to war once one power thinks it has prevailed.
The path to war is reinforced by the Wolfowitz Doctrine. Paul
Wolfowitz, the neoconservative intellectual who formulated US military
and foreign policy doctrine, wrote among many similar passages:
“Our first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival,
either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere [China],
that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet
Union. This is a dominant consideration underlying the new regional
defense strategy and requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile
power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated
control, be sufficient to generate global power.”
In the Wolfowitz Doctrine, any other strong country is defined as a threat and a power hostile to the US regardless of how willing that country is to get along with the US for mutual benefit.
The difference between Brzezinski and the Neoconservatives is that
Brzezinski wants to suborn Russia and China by including them in the
empire as important elements whose voices would be heard, If only for
diplomatic reasons, whereas the Neoconservatives are prepared to rely on
military force combined with internal subversion orchestrated with US
financed NGOs and even terrorist organizations.
Neither the US nor Israel is embarrassed by their worldwide
reputations as the two countries that pose the greatest threat. In
fact, both countries are proud to be recognized as the greatest threats.
The foreign policy of both countries is devoid of any diplomacy. US
and Israeli foreign policy rests on violence alone. Washington tells
countries to do as Washington says or be “bombed into the stone age.”
Israel declares all Palestinians, even women and children, to be
“terrorists,” and proceeds to shoot them down in the streets, claiming
that Israel is merely protecting itself against terrorists. Israel,
which does not recognize the existence of Palestine as a country, covers
up its crimes with the claim that Palestinians do not accept the
existence of Israel.
“We don’t need no stinking diplomacy. We got power.”
This is the attitude that guarantees war, and that is where the US is
taking the world. The prime minister of Britain, the chancellor of
Germany, and the president of France are Washington’s enablers. They
provide the cover for Washington. Instead of war crimes, Washington has
“coalitions of the willing” and military invasions that bring
“democracy and women’s rights” to non-compliant countries.
China gets much the same treatment. A country with four times the US
population but a smaller prison population, China is constantly
criticized by Washington as an “authoritarian state.” China is accused
of human rights abuses while US police brutalize the US population.
The problem for humanity is that Russia and China are not Libya and
Iraq. These two countries possess strategic nuclear weapons. Their land
mass greatly exceeds that of the US. The US, which was unable to
successfully occupy Baghdad or Afghanistan, has no prospect of
prevailing against Russia and China in conventional warfare. Washington
will push the nuclear button. What else can we expect from a government
devoid of morality?
The world has never experienced rogue states comparable to Washington
and Israel. Both governments are prepared to murder anyone and
everyone. Look at the crisis that Washington has created in Ukraine and
the dangers thereof. On May 23, 2014, Russia’s President Putin spoke to
the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum, a three-day gathering
of delegations from 62 countries and CEOs from 146 of the largest
Western corporations.
Putin did not speak of the billions of dollars in trade deals that
were being formalized. Instead Putin spoke of the crisis that Washington
had brought to Russia, and he criticized Europe for being Washington’s
vassals for supporting Washington’s propaganda against Russia and
Washington’s interference in vital Russian interests.
Putin was diplomatic in his language, but the message that powerful
economic interests from the US and Europe received is that it will lead
to trouble if Washington and European governments continue to ignore
Russia’s concerns and continue to act as if they can interfere in
Russia’s vital interests as if Russia did not exist.
The heads of these large corporations will carry this message back to
Washington and European capitals. Putin made it clear that the lack of
dialogue with Russia could lead to the West making the mistake of
putting Ukraine in NATO and establishing missile bases on Russia’s
border with Ukraine. Putin has learned that Russia cannot rely on good
will from the West, and Putin made it clear, short of issuing a threat,
that Western military bases in Ukraine are unacceptable.
Washington will continue to ignore Russia. However, European capitals will
have to decide whether Washington is pushing them into conflict with
Russia that is against European interests. Thus, Putin is testing
European politicians to determine if there is sufficient intelligence
and independence in Europe for a rapprochement.
If Washington in its overbearing arrogance and hubris forces Putin to
write off the West, the Russian/Chinese strategic alliance, which is
forming to counteract Washington’s hostile policy of surrounding both
countries with military bases, will harden into preparation for the
inevitable war.
The survivors, if any, can thank the Neoconservatives, the Wolfowitz
doctrine, and the Brzezinski strategy for the destruction of life on
earth.
The American public contains a large number of misinformed people who
think they know everything. These people have been programmed by US
and Israeli propaganda to equate Islam with political ideology. They
believe that Islam, a religion, is instead a militarist doctrine that
calls for the overthrow of Western civilization, as if anything remains
of Western civilization.
Many believe this propaganda even in the face of complete proof that
the Sunnis and Shi’ites hate one another far more than they hate their
Western oppressors and occupiers. The US has departed Iraq, but the
carnage today is as high or higher than during the US invasion and
occupation. The daily death tolls from the Sunni/Shi’ite conflict are
extraordinary. A religion this disunited poses no threat to anyone
except Islamists themselves. Washington successfully used Islamist
disunity to overthrow Gaddafi, and is currently using Islamist disunity
in an effort to overthrow the government of Syria. Islamists cannot even
unite to defend themselves against Western aggression. There is no
prospect of Islamists uniting in order to overthrow the West.
Even if Islam could do so, it would be pointless for Islam to
overthrow the West. The West has overthrown itself. In the US the
Constitution has been murdered by the Bush and Obama regimes. Nothing
remains. As the US is the Constitution, what was once the United States no longer exists. A different entity has taken its place.
Europe died with the European Union, which requires the termination
of sovereignty of all member countries. A few unaccountable bureaucrats
in Brussels have become superior to the wills of the French, German,
British, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Greek, and Portuguese peoples.
Western civilization is a skeleton. It still stands, barely, but
there is no life in it. The blood of liberty has departed. Western
peoples look at their governments and see nothing but enemies. Why else
has Washington militarized local police forces, equipping them as if
they were occupying armies? Why else has Homeland Security, the
Department of Agriculture, and even the Postal Service and Social
Security Administration ordered billions of rounds of ammunition and
even submachine guns? What is this taxpayer-paid-for arsenal for if not
to suppress US citizens?
As the prominent trends forecaster Gerald Celente spells out in the current Trends Journal,
“uprisings span four corners of the globe.” Throughout Europe angry,
desperate and outraged peoples march against EU financial policies that
are driving the peoples into the ground. Despite all of Washington’s
efforts with its well funded fifth columns known as NGOs to destabilize
Russia and China, both the Russian and Chinese governments have far more
support from their people than do the US and Europe.
In the 20th century Russia and China learned what tyranny is, and they have rejected it.
In the US tyranny has entered under the guise of the “war on terror,”
a hoax used to scare the sheeple into abandoning their civil liberties,
thus freeing Washington from accountability to law and permitting
Washington to erect a militarist police state. Ever since WWII
Washington has used its financial hegemony and the “Soviet threat,” now
converted into the “Russian threat,” to absorb Europe into Washington’s
empire.
Putin is hoping that the interests of European countries will prevail
over subservience to Washington. This is Putin’s current bet. This is
the reason Putin remains unprovoked by Washington’s provocations in
Ukraine.
If Europe fails Russia, Putin and China will prepare for the war that Washington’s drive for hegemony makes inevitable.
The War on America’s Military
Veterans, Waged with SWAT Teams, Surveillance and
Neglect
“As we
express our gratitude, we must never forget that the
highest appreciation is not to utter words, but to
live by them.”—John F. Kennedy
Just in
time for Memorial Day, we’re once again being
treated to a generous serving of praise and
grandstanding by politicians and corporations eager
to go on record as being supportive of our veterans.
Patriotic platitudes aside, however, America has
done a deplorable job of caring for her veterans. We
erect monuments for those who die while serving in
the military, yet for those who return home, there’s
little honor to be found.
Despite the
fact that the U.S. boasts more than 23 million
veterans who have served in World War II through
Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War, Iraq and Afghanistan,
the plight of veterans today is deplorable, with
large numbers of them impoverished, unemployed,
traumatized mentally and physically, struggling with
depression, thoughts of suicide, and marital stress,
homeless (a third of all homeless Americans are
veterans), subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics
and hospitals, and left to molder while their
paperwork piles up within Veterans Administration
(VA) offices.
According
to the National Veterans Foundation, the VA has had
a backlog of as many as 1.2 million unprocessed
claims in recent years, in addition to the fraud and
mismanagement within the VA and its network of
offices across the country, and secret lists
containing thousands of names of veterans who were
forced to wait months just to see a doctor.
While
President Obama has now declared that he “will not
stand” for the mistreatment of veterans under his
watch, the time for words is long past. As Slate
political correspondent John Dickerson
observed, these inexcusable delays represent “a
failure of one of the most basic transactions
government is supposed to perform: keeping a promise
to those who were asked to protect our very form of
government.”
Then again,
as I detail in my book
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American
Police State, the government has been
breaking its promises to the American people for a
long time now, starting with its most sacred
covenant to uphold and defend the Constitution. Yet
if the government won’t abide by its commitment to
respect our constitutional rights to be free from
government surveillance and censorship, if it
completely tramples on our right to due process and
fair hearings, and routinely denies us protection
from roadside strip searches and militarized police,
why should anyone expect the government to treat our
nation’s veterans with respect and dignity?
Indeed, in
recent years, military servicemen and women—many of
whom are decorated—have found themselves
increasingly targeted for surveillance, censorship,
threatened with incarceration or involuntary
commitment, labeled as extremists and/or mentally
ill, and stripped of their Second Amendment rights,
all for daring to voice their concerns about the
alarming state of our union and the erosion of our
freedoms.
For
example, a Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
program dubbed Operation Vigilant Eagle tracks
military veterans returning from Iraq and
Afghanistan, and characterizes them as extremists
and potential domestic terrorist threats because
they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering
from the psychological effects of war.” Since
launching Operation Vigilant Eagle, the government
has steadily ramped up its campaign to “silence”
dissidents, especially those with military
backgrounds. Coupled with the DHS’ dual reports on
Rightwing and Leftwing “Extremism,” which broadly
define extremists as individuals, military veterans
and groups “that are mainly antigovernment,
rejecting federal authority in favor of state or
local authority, or rejecting government authority
entirely,” these tactics have boded ill for anyone
seen as opposing the government.
An
important point to consider, however, is that the
government is not merely targeting individuals who
are voicing their discontent so much as it is
locking up individuals trained in military
warfare who are voicing feelings of discontent.
Under the guise of mental health treatment and with
the complicity of government psychiatrists and law
enforcement officials, these veterans are
increasingly being portrayed as ticking time bombs
in need of intervention. In 2012, for instance, the
Justice Department launched a pilot program aimed at
training SWAT teams to deal with confrontations
involving highly trained and often heavily armed
combat veterans.
Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in recent years, the
problem with depicting veterans as potential enemy
combatants is that any encounter with a military
veteran can escalate very quickly into an explosive
and deadly situation—at least, on the part of law
enforcement.
For
example, Jose Guerena, a Marine who served in two
tours in Iraq, was killed in 2011 after an Arizona
SWAT team kicked open the door of his home during a
mistaken drug raid and opened fire. Thinking his
home was being invaded by criminals, Guerena told
his wife and child to hide in a closet, grabbed a
gun and waited in the hallway to confront the
intruders. He never fired his weapon. In fact, the
safety was still on his gun when he was killed. The
SWAT officers, however, not as restrained, fired 70
rounds of ammunition at Guerena—23 of those bullets
made contact. Apart from his military background,
Guerena had had no prior criminal record, and the
police found nothing illegal in his home.
John Edward
Chesney, a 62-year-old Vietnam veteran, was killed
earlier this year by a SWAT team allegedly
responding to a call that the Army veteran was
standing in his San Diego apartment window waving
what looked like a semi-automatic rifle. SWAT
officers locked down Chesney’s street, took up
positions around his home, and fired 12 rounds into
Chesney’s apartment window. It turned out that the
gun Chesney reportedly pointed at police from three
stories up was a “realistic-looking mock assault
rifle.”
Thankfully,
Ramon Hooks’ encounter with a Houston SWAT team did
not end as tragically, but it very easily could
have. Hooks, a 25-year-old Iraq war veteran, was
using an air rifle gun for target practice outside
when a Homeland Security Agent, allegedly house
shopping in the area, reported him as an active
shooter. It wasn’t long before the quiet
neighborhood was transformed into a war zone, with
dozens of cop cars, an armored vehicle and heavily
armed police. Hooks was arrested, his air rifle
pellets and toy gun confiscated, and charges filed
against him for “criminal mischief.”
Although no
toy guns were involved in Brandon Raub’s case, his
fact scenario is even more chilling, given that he
was targeted for exercising his First Amendment
rights on Facebook. The 26-year-old decorated Marine
actually found himself interrogated by government
agents about his views on government corruption,
arrested with no warning, labeled mentally ill for
subscribing to so-called “conspiratorial” views
about the government, detained against his will in a
psych ward for standing by his views, and isolated
from his family, friends and attorneys.
On August
16, 2012, a swarm of local police, Secret Service
and FBI agents arrived at Raub’s Virginia home,
asking to speak with him about posts he had made on
his Facebook page made up of song lyrics, political
opinions and dialogue used in a political thriller
virtual card game. Among the posts cited as
troublesome were lyrics to a song by a rap group and
Raub’s views, shared increasingly by a number of
Americans, that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an
inside job.
After a
brief conversation and without providing any
explanation, levying any charges against Raub or
reading him his rights, Raub was then handcuffed and
transported to police headquarters, then to a
medical center, where he was held against his will
due to alleged concerns that his Facebook posts were
“terrorist in nature.” Outraged onlookers filmed the
arrest and posted the footage to YouTube, where it
quickly went viral. Meanwhile, in a kangaroo court
hearing that turned a deaf ear to Raub’s
explanations about the fact that his Facebook posts
were being read out of context, Raub was sentenced
to up to 30 days’ further confinement in a
psychiatric ward.
Thankfully,
The Rutherford Institute came to Raub’s assistance,
which combined with heightened media attention,
brought about his release and may have helped
prevent Raub from being successfully “disappeared”
by the government. Even so, within days of Raub
being seized and forcibly held in a VA psych ward,
news reports started surfacing of other veterans
having similar experiences.
That the
government is using the charge of mental illness as
the means by which to immobilize (and disarm) these
veterans is diabolically brilliant. With one stroke
of a magistrate’s pen, these service men are being
declared mentally ill, locked away against their
will, and stripped of their constitutional rights.
Make no mistake, these returning veterans are being
positioned as enemy number one.
Indeed,
Raub’s case, a prime example of the government’s war
on veterans, exposes the seedy underbelly of a
governmental system that is targeting
Americans—especially military veterans—for
expressing their discontent over America’s rapid
transition to a police state.
A federal
judge actually dismissed Raub’s lawsuit challenging
the government’s “Operation Vigilant Eagle” campaign
and its increasing view of veterans as potential
domestic terrorists as “far-fetched.” Yet what may
sound far-fetched to the courts is a grim reality to
Americans who are daily being targeted for daring to
exercise their constitutional rights to speak their
minds, criticize the government, and defend
themselves and their families against over-reaching
government surveillance and heavy-handed police
tactics.
It’s
ironic, isn’t it, that we raise our young people to
believe that it is their patriotic duty to defend
freedom abroad by serving in the military, then when
they return home, bruised and battle-scarred and
suddenly serious about defending their freedoms at
home, we treat them like terrorists. Then again,
perhaps it’s not so much ironic as it is tragic and
pathetic—a sad tribute, indeed, to those willing to
put their lives on the line.
John W.
Whitehead is an attorney and author who has written,
debated and practiced widely in the area of
constitutional law and human rights. Whitehead's
concern for the persecuted and oppressed led him, in
1982, to establish The Rutherford Institute, a
nonprofit civil liberties and human rights
organization whose international headquarters are
located in Charlottesville, Virginia. Whitehead
serves as the Institute’s president and
spokesperson, in addition to writing a weekly
commentary that is posted on The Rutherford
Institute’s website (
www.rutherford.org )
