Brandon Raub A Victim Of “Pre-crime Detention”?
Interrogated by FBI and Secret Service agents, thrown to the ground, handcuffed, and driven off by local police who maintain he was never really “under arrest”, Marine Sergeant Brandon Raub was finally freed from a psychiatric hospital on Thursday after Circuit Court Judge Allan Sharrett dismissed a petition of involuntary commitment on the grounds that it was “…so devoid of any factual allegations that it could not be reasonably expected to give rise to a case or controversy.”
In fact, that petition, filed by the Chesterfield Police for the purpose of holding Raub in the John Randolph mental facility, was BLANK!
On Thursday the 17th, Raub’s Chesterfield County, Virginia home was invaded by minions of federal law enforcement and his hometown police department as a result of entries on the Marine’s Facebook page that the government deemed “…ominous posts talking of a coming revolution.”
An attorney from the Rutherford Institute, a Charlottesville civil liberties group, went to the mental facility to which Raub had been committed by a local judge acting in accord with the wishes of federal law enforcement authorities. “For government officials to not only arrest Brandon Raub for doing nothing more than exercising his First Amendment rights but to actually force him to undergo psychological evaluations and detain him against his will goes against every constitutional principle this country was founded upon,” said Rutherford Executive Director John Whitehead after interviewing the Marine.
Raub’s “crime” is in stating that the government is not telling the truth about the 9/11 attacks; that the nation is being run by an evil, anti-American group of political and financial insiders; and that a revolution must soon take place in order to re-establish the constitutional rights of the American public. These beliefs led Raub to post opinions on his Facebook page that federal agents contend were “terrorist in nature.”
But as Whitehead sees it, “ Raub was targeted for doing nothing more than speaking out against the government.” In fact, the American people should be far more concerned about the fact that “…government officials are apparently monitoring citizens’ private Facebook pages and arresting people with whom they disagree.” For although an FBI spokesman said the agency did not do any Facebook snooping, many of the Raub posts about which the Bureau claimed to have received numerous “complaints” had been entered on a “closed Facebook page” which Raub had “…just created and that had only three members,” one being Raub’s sister.
In 2009, the Department of Homeland Security announced the beginning of a “Media Monitoring Initiative.” Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Electronic Information Privacy Center (EPIC), it was discovered the DHS had hired General Dynamics to monitor everything from major media to Twitter and Facebook for “…reports that reflect adversely on the US Government [or] DHS.” At the time, Janet Napolitano lied about the true purpose of this Department program, but information gathered by EPIC in the lawsuit made it clear Obama’s minions were scanning public websites for evidence of disloyalty to and criticism of the Obama Administration.
With neither charge nor warrant, Brandon Raub was handcuffed and removed to a mental facility for “…doing nothing more than speaking out against the government.” Clearly, such cases are designed to intimidate future critics of Barack Obama or any would-be federal dictator. And the “pre-crime detention” suffered by Raub is a stark warning to each American that self-censorship must be considered preferable to imprisonment. Nice folks in Washington, DC.
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