Veterans are being targeted in aftermath of Homeland Security smear campaign.
The lawyer who helped secure the release of Brendon Raub, a former Marine forcibly incarcerated in a psychiatric ward by authorities in Virginia for political posts on Facebook, told the Alex Jones Show today that there are currently a further 20 cases in his county alone that are similar in nature to Raub’s detention.
John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute also said that he had been contacted by numerous veterans in the aftermath of Raub’s release who had encountered similar problems with authorities attempting to have them declared mentally ill.
Whitehead attributed the high number of cases involving veterans as a consequence of the Department of Homeland Security’s aggressive campaign to demonize former servicemembers as domestic extremists.
Despite controversy at the time, DHS chief Janet Napolitano said she stood by an April 2009 DHS intelligence assessment that listed returning vets as likely domestic terrorists.
Just a month later, the New York Times reported on how Boy Scout Explorers were being trained by the DHS to kill “disgruntled Iraq war veterans” in terrorist drills.
The FBI has also gone out of its way to characterize returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan as a major domestic terrorist threat.
Whitehead pointed to efforts on behalf of health authorities in the United States to characterize distrust of authority as a mental illness under the label “oppositional defiant disorder” or ODD.
As we highlighted earlier today, veterans in particular are being targeted in police raids to confiscate their firearms based on the manufactured pretext that they are “mentally defective.”
Earlier this year, we also reported on a similar case involving David Sarti, one of the participants in the National Geographic Channel’s Doomsday Prepper show. Sarti visited his doctor complaining of chest pains, only to have the doctor later commit him to a psychiatric ward and alert authorities, before Sarti was declared “mentally defective” and put on an FBI list that stripped him of his second amendment rights.
During an interview with Alex Jones last night, Whitehead also revealed that shortly before his release, psychiatrists had threatened to forcibly medicate Raub in order to “brainwash” him.
Critics have made comparisons to the infamous psikhushka psychiatric prisons in the former Soviet Union where dissidents were sent to be isolated, brainwashed, and have their political ideas discredited amongst the general public.
Whitehead added that Brandon Raub is currently at home recovering from his ordeal and that he plans to file a civil lawsuit against the government for damages. Whitehead hopes that the shocking nature of the case will force Congress to begin investigations that could strip the state’s power to carry out civil commitments, under which victims are declared mentally ill with little due process and detained in psychiatric wards.
