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Ex-Marine Detained Under Operation Vigilant Eagle For His Political Views Sues
stry_cat writes "You may remember the story of Brandon Raub, who was detained without due process over some Facebook posts he made. Now with the help of the Rutherford Institute, he is suing his captors. According to his complaint [PDF], his detention was part of a federal government program code-named 'Operation Vigilant Eagle,' which monitors military veterans with certain political views."
If you read the article it does indeed sound like that, but you must also keep in mind the article has already re-contextualized his speech acts as threatening. For example the article says:
On August 13, he wrote, "Sharpen up my axe; I'm here to sever heads."
But previous Slashdotter comments pointed out this is part of a lyrics to a song:
Sharpen up my axe and I am back, I'm here to sever heads / Compulsive obsessive, I'm also aggressive / My mouth is the message, my life is a lesson, my pulse is a blessing
Apart from this, he could have been writing fiction, writing in character, writing metaphorically, etc. That said, perhaps talking to him more would have been reasonable, but breaking down his door and arresting him for speech which has no specific, credible threats is not. He just sounds like half the people on Doomsday Preppers.
Big apple, new Yorik, undig it, something's unrotting in Edenmark.
This is where the "Do something" crowd falls down a pit of bias. We've seen similar rhetoric from politicians and tv 'personalities'. As rhetoric it's protected speech, as straight statements of non metaphorical intent, it's an imminent threat. The metaphoric rhetoric almost certainly far out masses the straight statements of non metaphorical intent, so just seeing the above is not a proper signal of a threat, though if sufficient resources exist, it may warrant some spot checks to see if there are other signals, on it's own, it shouldn't be sufficient to detain anyone. If, on it's own, that is sufficient to detain someone, then large swaths of society are arbitrarily detainable; not necessarily for those specific views, but for rhetoric of that style. At that point, certain Jefferson quotes may in fact, need to come into play. I hope that point is not imminent, that the trial turns up proper non rhetorical, non protected, signals that fully justify the detention and aren't nigh universally and arbitrarily applicable to most citizens.
Realities just a bunch of bits.
It's a mental health issue, man. I for one think it's a good thing if the mental health of our vets is taken care of.
I for one would think it was a good thing if the mental health of our vets were taken care of, but the fact is that mentally disturbed vets are a fast-growing and major segment of our nation's homeless. We don't give one tenth of one fuck about our veterans unless they are inconvenient, like this guy. This is not repeat not a sign that we take care of our veterans, unless you mean "take care of" euphemistically.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
In a democracy, being critical of the government is a DUTY. It doesn't make you an enemy of the government. It means you care enough about the government to offer feedback that people can hope will result in positive change.
Granted, there are limits. For example, advocating violence as a means to accomplish change in a government that is already democratic isn't the right way to do it. You state your views publicly, talk to your representatives, vote, try to influence other people to vote sensibly, get organized politically, that kind of thing. That's what you're *supposed* to be doing. But the moment people start getting "questioned", charged, put in jail, etc.by the government for simply stating views that might be unpopular (again, short of advocating violence), then that is a sign of a serious problem. It's the people doing the charging that are being anti-democratic and anti-government, because they're obstructing free expression.
Then there's this guy. He clearly has some mental health problems or is just plain stupid (Illuminati? Please). But he still has rights. And if people are mentally ill they deserve proper treatment, not incarceration. It's a fine line, but the first response shouldn't be to send the FBI or (as in this case) be detained without due process. There's a process whether it's a normal, non-health-related situation or someone really is mentally ill. In a democracy, you don't infringe on people's rights without some pretty damn careful consideration of whether people have stepped over the line into criminality or they need medical treatment for their own and other's safety. This is a guy that needs help. It's a challenge to assess the situation and deal with it properly, but it sounds like the process was bungled. That question will be sorted out in court.
That would be nice, but we wouldn't hear the end of it from the southern states.
What are you talking about? They've been itching to break away for over 150 years. They'd be happy to be allowed to go out on their own finally. Yes, they do absorb the most Federal money, but that's irrelevant: go ask all the Southern pride folks if they want to secede or not, and they'll tell you "yes". They think they'll do just fine without a Federal government (or at least, with only a Federal government that encompasses the Southern states and is independent from the north and west).
and would quickly erupt into anarchy once the shit hit the fan. I honestly wouldn't be surprised if they killed themselves in the span of a month.
That may be, but again, the Southerners don't see it that way. And if they do self-destruct, how's that our problem? The conservatives (who are strong in the South) are constantly talking about "letting the free market work"; well, let's give them their freedom and leave them to their own devices. They're all adults; it's their own responsibility to take care of themselves. If they can do better on their own, great. If not, oh well. Either way, the rest of us would be better off without their representatives being part of our government.
And it's not just that I think the South should be kicked out, it's the whole union: the northwest, the midwest, the southwest, the southeast should all be separate countries. They'd probably all (or at least most of them) do better without having to be part of a single union where none of them can agree on anything, and the federal government of which has entirely too much power and no longer represents the will of the people (for example: marijuana laws), and thrives on the endless infighting between the different regional interests.
I definitely agree that we'd be better off with a number of smaller countries. I'd love to see the US split into 5 or more independent republics.
At least then the national government of each would be much more representative of the population.
That was sort of the point of state governments in the first place.... until people like Abraham Lincoln screwed it up and turned America from a confederation into a strong centralized government. That is sort of the grinding axe on the part of the south-eastern states in America, where they were supposed to be independent republics with only a loose confederation that addressed very narrow and specific "national" needs on the "federal" level.
It has been misuse of things like the "interstate commerce clause" and even more blatant stamping out of individual state identities which has caused the bloat that we know today as the U.S. federal government. It is so bad that most people I've ever met seem to even forget there are state governments at all.
The big change happened when people stopped talking about "the United States are" and began saying "the United States is". That happened about 1860.
Anybody who talks about what constitutional authority Abraham Lincoln had to force at gunpoint the states of the south-east USA to remain part of the union can pervert that same logic to do pretty much anything they want including building concentration camps for specific ethnic minorities, religious groups, and conduct wholesale genocide of any group that those in power deem as unfit for whatever reason. BTW, all of that has been done in America by the U.S. federal government in the past, and is only inferior to Mao and Stalin (much less Hitler) simply because the scale of the genocide wasn't usually as massive. Supposedly that is something that happened in our distant past, but do you want to stick your neck out and find out if it is still being done?