By John & Nisha Whitehead
“For
soldiers … coming home is more lethal than
being in combat.” ― Brené Brown,
research professor at the University of
Houston
November 11, 2022:
Information Clearing House
-- The U.S. government is still waging war on
America’s military veterans.
Especially veterans who exercise their First
Amendment right to speak out against government
wrongdoing.
Consider: we raise our young people on a
steady diet of militarism and war, sell them on
the idea that defending freedom abroad by
serving in the military is their patriotic duty,
then when they return home, bruised and
battle-scarred and committed to defending their
freedoms at home, we often treat them like
criminals merely for exercising those rights
they risked their lives to defend.
As first reported by the Wall Street
Journal, the government even has a name for
its war on America’s veterans:
Operation Vigilant Eagle.
This Department of Homeland Security (DHS)
program 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.”
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
bode ill for anyone seen as opposing the
government.
Yet the government is not merely targeting
individuals who are voicing their discontent so
much as it is taking aim at individuals
trained in military warfare.
Don’t be fooled by the fact that the DHS has
gone extremely quiet about Operation Vigilant
Eagle.
Where there’s smoke, there’s bound to be
fire.
And the government’s efforts to target
military veterans whose views may be perceived
as “anti-government” make clear that something
is afoot.
In recent years, military servicemen and
women 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.
In light of the government’s efforts to lay
the groundwork to weaponize the public’s
biomedical data and
predict who might pose a threat to public safety
based on mental health sensor data (a
convenient means by which to penalize certain
“unacceptable” social behaviors), encounters
with the police could get even more deadly,
especially if those involved have a mental
illness or disability coupled with a military
background.
Incredibly, as part of a proposal introduced
under the Trump Administration, a new government
agency HARPA (a healthcare counterpart to the
Pentagon’s research and development arm DARPA)
will take the lead in
identifying and targeting “signs” of mental
illness or violent inclinations among the
populace by using artificial intelligence to
collect data from Apple Watches, Fitbits, Amazon
Echo and Google Home.
These tactics are not really new.
Many times throughout history in totalitarian
regimes, such governments have declared
dissidents mentally ill and unfit for society as
a means of rendering them disempowering them.
For example, government officials in the Cold
War-era Soviet Union often used psychiatric
hospitals as prisons in order to isolate
political prisoners from the rest of society,
discredit their ideas, and break them physically
and mentally through the use of electric shocks,
drugs and various medical procedures.
This age-old practice by which despotic
regimes eliminate their critics or potential
adversaries by declaring them mentally ill and
locking them up in psychiatric wards for
extended periods of time is a common practice in
present-day China.
What is particularly unnerving, however, is
how this practice of eliminating or undermining
potential critics, including military veterans,
is happening with increasing frequency in the
United States.
Remember, the National Defense Authorization
Act (NDAA) opened the door for the government to
detain as a threat to national security anyone
viewed as a troublemaker. According to
government guidelines for identifying domestic
extremists—a word used interchangeably with
terrorists—technically, anyone exercising their
First Amendment rights in order to criticize the
government qualifies.
It doesn’t take much anymore to be flagged as
potentially anti-government in a government
database somewhere—Main
Core, for example—that identifies and tracks
individuals who aren’t inclined to march in
lockstep to the government’s dictates.
In fact, as the Washington Post reports,
communities are being mapped and residents
assigned a color-coded
threat score—green, yellow or red—so police
are forewarned about a person’s potential
inclination to be a troublemaker depending on
whether they’ve had a career in the military,
posted a comment perceived as threatening on
Facebook, suffer from a particular medical
condition, or know someone who knows someone who
might have committed a crime.
The case of
Brandon Raub is a prime example of Operation
Vigilant Eagle in action.
Raub, a 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. Within days of
Raub being seized and forcibly held in a VA
psych ward, news reports started surfacing of
other veterans having similar experiences.
“Oppositional defiance disorder” (ODD) is
another diagnosis being used against veterans
who challenge the status quo. As journalist
Anthony Martin explains, an ODD diagnosis
“denotes that the person exhibits
‘symptoms’ such as the questioning of
authority, the refusal to follow directions,
stubbornness, the unwillingness to go along
with the crowd, and the practice of
disobeying or ignoring orders.
Persons may also receive such a label if
they are considered free thinkers,
nonconformists, or individuals who are
suspicious of large, centralized government…
At one time the accepted protocol among
mental health professionals was to reserve
the diagnosis of oppositional defiance
disorder for children or adolescents who
exhibited uncontrollable defiance toward
their parents and teachers.”
That the government is using the charge of
mental illness as the means by which to
immobilize (and disarm) these veterans is
diabolical. With one stroke of a magistrate’s
pen, these veterans are being declared mentally
ill, locked away against their will, and
stripped of their constitutional rights.
If it were just being classified as
“anti-government,” that would be one thing.
Unfortunately, anyone with a military
background and training is also now being viewed
as a heightened security threat by police who
are trained to shoot first and ask questions
later.
Feeding this perception of veterans
as ticking time bombs in need of
intervention, the Justice Department launched
a pilot program in 2012 aimed at training SWAT
teams to deal with confrontations involving
highly trained and often heavily armed combat
veterans.
The result?
Police encounters with military veterans
often escalate very quickly into an explosive
and deadly situation, especially when SWAT teams
are involved.
For example, Jose Guerena, a Marine who
served in two tours in Iraq, was
killed 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 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.”
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.”
Given the government’s increasing view of
veterans as potential domestic terrorists, it
makes one think twice about
government programs encouraging veterans to
include a veterans designation on their drivers’
licenses and ID cards.
Hailed by politicians as a way to “make
it easier for military veterans to access
discounts from retailers, restaurants, hotels
and vendors across the state,” it will also
make it that much easier for the government to
identify and target veterans who dare to
challenge the status quo.
Remember: no one is spared in a police state.
Eventually, as I make clear in
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People and in its fictional counterpart
The Erik Blair Diaries, we all
suffer the same fate.
It stands to reason that if the government
can’t be bothered to abide by its constitutional
mandate to respect the citizenry’s
rights—whether it’s the right to be free from
government surveillance and censorship, the
right to due process and fair hearings, the
right to be free from roadside strip searches
and militarized police, or the right to
peacefully assemble and protest and exercise our
right to free speech—then why should anyone
expect the government to treat our nation’s
veterans with respect and dignity?
Certainly, veterans have enough physical and
psychological war wounds to overcome without
adding the government to the mix. Although the
U.S. boasts
more than 20 million veterans who have
served in World War II through the present day,
large numbers of veterans are impoverished,
unemployed, traumatized mentally and physically,
struggling with depression,
suicide, and marital stress, homeless,
subjected to sub-par treatment at clinics and
hospitals, and left to molder while their
paperwork piles up within Veterans
Administration offices.
At least 60,000 veterans died by suicide
between 2008 and 2017.
On average,
6,000 veterans kill themselves every year.
However, a recent study suggests that the rate
of suicide among veterans may be more than
double what federal officials report annually.
The plight of veterans today—and their
treatment at the hands of the U.S.
government—remains America’s badge of shame.
Constitutional attorney and author John W.
Whitehead is founder and president of
The
Rutherford Institute. His most recent books
are the best-selling
Battlefield America: The War on the American
People, the award-winning
A Government of Wolves: The Emerging American
Police State, and a debut dystopian fiction
novel,
The Erik Blair Diaries. Whitehead can be
contacted at
staff@rutherford.org. Nisha Whitehead is the
Executive Director of The Rutherford Institute.
Information about The Rutherford Institute is
available at
www.rutherford.org.
Views expressed in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
in this article are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing House.
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