MESSAGE FROM STEWART RHODES, FOUNDER OF OATH KEEPERS:

Oath Keepers is coming to the aid of this young Marine veteran and our rallying cry will be “CHARGE HIM, OR RELEASE HIM.”  We cannot allow  “mental illness” designations to be used as a weapon against political dissidents in America.    See the below article by Brandon Smith for the disturbing facts regarding the use of mental health detention against Virginia Marine veteran Brandon Raub because of his constitutionally protected free speech on his Facebook page.  As Brandon Smith illustrates, this is exactly what the Soviet Union did to dissidents who dared to criticize the communist regime – they were labeled “insane” and carted off to mental wards.  Now it has begun here in America.  This is a blatant circumvention of constitutional criminal due process which is every bit as dangerous as being designated an “unlawful combatant” under the NDAA and taken away to a military brig for detention without charges.  How is this any different?  Mental health detention can be used in exactly the same way. This is an incredibly dangerous crossing of a critical line in the sand – the politicization of the mental health system, using it as a weapon against dissidents to punish them for their constitutionally protected political speech.   This case is the camel’s nose under the tent, and we need to stomp on it HARD, right now. And we will.

Brandon Raub has very competent local legal counsel provided by the Rutherford Institute. If you would like to donate to his legal defense, go to https://www.rutherford.org/donate/ and be sure to add a note that your donation is for the Raub case. Oath Keepers has offered to write an amicus brief if the Rutherford attorneys think it will help, but our primary goal is to compliment their legal efforts with as many boots on the ground as we can muster to go there in person and rally in outspoken support of this brother veteran. While the case is being tried in the legal courts, we will try it in the court of public opinion and bring as much public pressure to bear as possible. Last night, Oath Keepers leadership, including both national and Virginia Oath Keepers leaders, spoke with Attorney John Whitehead of the Rutherford Institute and also with Brandon Raub’s Mother, Cathleen Thomas. We will be coordinating closely both with his legal team and with his family to support Brandon in any way possible.

Last night I interviewed Cathleen Thomas about her son’s ordeal.   Also on the interview was Oath Keepers Eastern U.S. Vice President Rand Cardwell (a Marine Scout-sniper veteran).   You can listen to that interview here:

To download it, click on this link:

http://oathkeepers.org/oath/aud/Stewart%20Interview%20with%20Cathle...

Cathleen also asked us to post this statement from her, about her son:

He’s a good-to-go Marine who understands he is in a situation where he is watched at all times and he knows they are looking for anything to use as a justification for what they are doing to him.  He is disciplined, but please pray for his patience, and his stalwart faith.  He knew that when he spoke up something like this could happen.  He sensed it was coming, and yet he knew he had not just a First Amendment protected right, but also a DUTY to speak out.

We had conversations about what is going on in our country and then decided to do something about it.  We formed the Richmond Liberty movement and held a rally November 15, 2011 and have been very active in the community since.   We were always speaking out against legislation threatening rights, such as SOPA, and writing our legislators.

We thank every single man and woman in Oath Keepers for honoring the Constitution and we appreciate your support. – Cathleen Thomas.

[ turns out Cathleen is a subscriber to our email alert list, and has been a fan of Oath Keepers for some time].

As a dangerous assault on our Constitution, this is very similar to the New Hampshire “baby snatching” case, where a newborn baby was taken from her parents by child protective services only hours after birth, and one of the reasons listed in the affidavit was that the father, Jonathan Irish, was a “member of the militia group, Oath Keepers” (he was not actually a member, but he had been signed up on our free Ning page, and no, we are not a militia, but regardless, we could not let them get away with that use of the father’s constitutionally protected free speech and political associations to take his child).    That too was a camel’s nose under the tent, and if allowed to stand would have been a very chilling precedent of using child protective services as a weapon against unpopular dissidents, to punish them for their speech and association by taking their children.   That would have resulted in people chilling their own speech, sitting down and shutting up, for fear of losing their children.   We called for a rally of Oath Keepers outside the courthouse, and Oath Keepers from around the country responded with boots on the ground   The family had very competent local legal counsel, but there is no doubt that by holding a rally there we helped to put serious public pressure on the officials in New Hampshire to do the right thing. And they did, returning the baby to her parents.

We intend to do much the same here. There are already local liberty activists protesting outside of the Veterans Administration hospital in Salem, Virginia (where Brandon Raub was transferred last night, after a local magistrate rubber stamped his “preventive detention” and extended it for 30 more days).

Salem VA Medical Center

1970 Roanoke Blvd.
Salem, VA 24153
540-982-2463 | 888-982-2463

We urge you to participate in those ongoing protests, and we will also announce a date in the next week or so (likely over Labor Day weekend) when we will hold a special Oath Keepers muster there, to put as many active duty and veteran boots on the ground, on one day, to demand his release. The intent will be to compliment the already ongoing protests/rallies. Stay tuned for details.  But don’t wait for that one event – get out there now, if you can, and urge others to do likewise.

We urge you to spread the word about this cases to everyone – every veteran, every concerned American, every website, every group – especially veterans groups and organizations – and also to put pressure on all public officials involved to do the right thing, and put pressure on federal officials and members of Congress, as well as the Obama Administration, to set this Marine free. Demand that they charge him or release him!  And if you have contacts among current serving Marines at Camp Lejeune, give them a heads up and urge them to be in Salem over the Labor Day Weekend to stand for a brother.

This use of mental health services as a weapon is straight out of the DHS/SPLC playbook.  Recall that Richard Cohen, the Chairman of the Southern Poverty Law Center, sat on the DHS Working Group on Countering Violent Extremism – making SPLC essentially part of DHS.  In the published recommendations of that working group in 2010, addressed to the Secretary of Homeland Security, they specifically recommend that DHS use local social services, including mental health services to counter “violent extremism.”  This case, just as with the Irish baby snatching case, is precisely what SPLC wants to see done to all of us pesky constitutionalists and liberty lovers on the political right in this country.  They want, more than anything, to turn all of the apparatus of the state into a weapon against their political opponents, and above all, they want local police to be their tools of oppression, with their power coming out of the barrels of police guns.

We must defend this brother Marine, brother veteran, and fellow American. If we don’t, then we will be next, and once the “mental health” raids begin in earnest, we will be at the “Solzhenitsyn moment” when we will have no choice but to resist. Don’t wait till then. The time to stand is now. Sweat now, or bleed later. Stand up, step up, and show up now, right there in the streets of Salem, Virginia, by the hundreds or thousands, or you will have to step out onto battlefield America later. The choice is yours.

Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito (Do not give in to evil but proceed ever more boldly against it) -Virgil.

For the Republic,

Stewart Rhodes

ARTICLE BY BRANDON SMITH:

Veteran Marine Sergeant Victim Of Pre-Crime Authoritarianism

By Brandon Smith, Associate Editor

During the height of communist power in the former Soviet Union, the corrupt establishment bureaucracy often sought out ways in which they could deal with or silence dissident movements and outspoken individuals while avoiding public exposure and minimize blowback from the Russian populace.  A very effective method they devised was the use of the ‘Psikhushka’, or psychiatric prisons where activists against the state could be held indefinitely, isolated from other prisoners and the rest of the world.  By housing dissidents in mental hospitals, the Soviet government hoped that the public would assume that the prisoners were “psychologically unstable or deranged” and that if the activist ever did get word to others about his political incarceration, no one would believe his claims anyway.

The strategy allowed the Soviets to severely stifle anti-government speech for quite some time, feeding terror into the citizenry who now carefully censored themselves for fear of authoritarian retribution, not to mention the possible betrayal of friends and neighbors who might turn them in for a pat on the head from the state.  In fact, the widespread propaganda that the communists promoted amongst the public was that anyone who actually did speak out against the government “had to be mentally ill”, creating entirely new clinical designations to categorize those who refused to comply.  Professors operating in the Soviet run Moscow Serbsky Institute claimed that:

“Most frequently, ideas about a struggle for truth and justice are formed by personalities with a paranoid structure…”

Now, compare this abuse of psychiatry to the DSM-IV-TR manual used by doctors today in the diagnosing of mental illness.  In it, you will find the term “oppositional defiance disorder”, a supposed illness which encompasses anybody who is disobedient, defiant, a free thinker, or even considered hostile toward authority.

The pigeonholing of political activists and anti-authoritarians is a process that is alive and well in the U.S. today.  This fact has been made even more apparent by the abrupt detainment or (non-arrest-arrest) of Marine Sergeant Brandon Raub of Chesterfield County, Virginia for posts he made to his Facebook page:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=YaE5zCh...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nLpChd1-8Q4&feature=player_embe...

Early reports on the event were sparse, and so far the mainstream media has stayed away from the issue entirely.  However, new information is slowly surfacing, and here is what we know so far…

The FBI, the Chesterfield County Police, and apparently the Secret Service were videotaped by Raub’s family hauling him away in handcuffs.  These agencies claim that Brandon is “not under arrest”.

Dee Rybiski, a spokeswoman for the Richmond FBI office, would not comment on the matter except to reiterate that no arrest had been made.

“We don’t comment on mental-health issues or anything like that,” she said. “We simply went to speak with him about the many complaints that we had gotten about his posts.”

http://www2.insidenova.com/news/2012/aug/20/tdmet01-veteran-has-hea...

The local police reiterated that “there is no criminal matter” and that they were only present to help the FBI transport Raub.

This is a rather strange stance on the part of law enforcement officials, considering they claimed during the incident that Raub was taken away for “resisting arrest”.  I would love to hear the FBI’s explanation on how a man can resist arrest without officially being arrested…?

According to Raub’s family, he was never read his Miranda Rights.  And, Raub himself stated:

“I talked to a Secret Service gentleman for 20, 30 minutes,” Raub said. “I was very cooperative and answered everything honestly…”

Raub is currently being held at the Salem VA Medical Center, where he is to be “detained” after a hearing before a judge who has enforced a 96 hour “observation period”:

http://www2.timesdispatch.com/news/news/2012/aug/19/tdmet02-chester...

The comments which allegedly sparked his persecution included references on Facebook to the government’s complicity in 9/11, his belief that there will be a revolution in America, and suggestions that the Bush family is populated with “child rapists”.

Whether or not you agree with any of Raub’s assertions, the bottom line is that under the First Amendment he is perfectly within his rights to publicly uphold them.  There is no law against “conspiracy theory”, at least, not yet…

Raub’s family has also stated that the FBI believes some of his comments to be “terroristic” and threatening in nature.  The only comment that I could find that could be even remotely interpreted as threatening is this post from August 13:

“Sharpen up my axe; I’m here to sever heads…”

This is NOT a statement that could be upheld in any respectable courtroom as being a specific threat and is not prosecutable.  Also as it turns out, the line is a lyric from a song by the band ‘Swollen Members’ entitled “Bring Me Down”:

http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/swollenmembers/bringmedown.html

So, apparently if the FBI does not like your taste in tunes you can be whisked away to a mental hospital.  Take note music fans…

Raub’s other comments include:

“If you are unaware of the great amount of evil perpetrated by the American Government I suggest you take … your head out of the sand. The day of reckoning is almost at hand.”

“I am standing against a great evil. I will do it all by myself if I have to.”

This is obviously not a mentally ill person, but a political activist and dissident being subjected to a new standard of “Pre-Crime” on the part of our government.  This action is, in my view, meant to set a precedent by which many other veterans and common citizens who oppose the criminality of the establishment will be subjected, detained, and who knows what could happen after.  The sky is truly the limit.

Pre-Crime arrests also cause self-censorship in the public, as well as encourage a tattle-tale culture of simpering slaves.  I believe Brandon Raub’s “detainment” is a test case for the demonization and prosecution of the Liberty Movement as a whole, and a primary step in the destruction of free speech in America.  If we do not take this event seriously, and attack it with every effort, we cannot expect to be saved when the pre-crime police are one day sent to our own doorsteps.

UPDATE, August 22, 2012:

Chesterfield Police Department Statement

Rutherford Institute Attorneys’ Statement About Case

Local News Article: Chesterfield Marine Veteran to Remain Detained ...