[Editor’s Note: On Sunday afternoon, for the 169th consecutive week, from 1 o’clock until 4, Veterans will assemble in front of the West Los Angeles VA to protest their policies.]
Everyone who serves in the U.S. military takes an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Rarely does our military have a problem finding the foreign enemy. It’s the domestic enemy that‘s hard to track down because too often they are “one of us.” The bigger problem is that the domestic enemy is searching for us more than we are searching for it. That needs to change, posthaste.
War is Hell
Whether America’s military men and women are fighting a war or trying to heal from fighting a war, it’s always hell because the war never ends.
When our military troops go to war, they serve under the Dept. of Defense as highly trained professional warriors equipped with the finest defense weapons in the world to defeat the toughest enemies in the world.
After returning from war, they are to be served by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs (DVA) with the finest healthcare facilities in the world. But instead of healing from war, America’s military Veterans are fighting some of life’s toughest battles, day-by-day, just to survive in the country they defended.
Unfortunately, these battles are not fought as a collective and supportive military unit but as a lonely Veteran against the fatted bureaucrats of the DVA, the second largest bureaucracy in federal government.
To make matters worse, Veterans are not trained to fight a personal “David vs. Goliath” war with our own government. They have no weapons of defense in these endless and tiring battles.
As time goes on, their warrior and survivor skills diminsh. Their outlook becomes bleak as their opponent just grows bigger and more powerful.
Tragically, every year more than 6,500 Veterans voluntarily surrender their lives; victims of bureaucratic battle fatigue.
Their solace is found in Plato’s prophetic claim more than 2,500 years ago: “Only the dead have seen the end of war.”
Hell Is in the Mind of the Beholder
For those Veterans who battle on, many are homeless and disabled, physically, mentally or both.
The mentally wounded are diagnosed by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs as suffering from military “Post Trauma Stress Disorder” (PTSD), which is psychological trauma from experiencing the horrendous carnage and devastation of war.
The department refers to PTSD as an “invisible” wound.
Invisible? Would anyone who has been spared the bloodshed of a war zone care to journey inside the innocent minds of these brave men and women and “see” for one second the torturous and painful hell they see 24/7 from defending our freedom? Didn’t think so.
Whereabouts Unknown
The acronym MIA stands for “Missing in Action,” a status assigned to United States military personnel who reported missing during active duty service.
While it’s a terrifying thought that any of our men and women in the military would remain missing while faithfully serving our country, there’s another classification of MIA’s equally terrifying. It is respectfully called “Veterans — Missing In Action.”
They represent approximately 200,000 Veterans nationwide whose whereabouts are unknown as they are lost, are on inactive duty, and remain missing as productive citizens within our society.
In Los Angeles, there are 20,000 homeless Veterans even though it has the largest Veterans Home in the nation. Eleven buildings are designated as “vacant.” Veterans’ land is leased out for a public dog park, a wealthy kids’ playground and other purposes. As a result, Los Angeles has become our nation’s capital for homeless Veterans.
Brute Force
When elderly members of the Old Veterans Guard protested the mismanagement, malfeasance and misappropriation of Veterans’ land at the Los Angeles National Veterans Home, the VA bureaucrats ordered armed VA police to intervene. They issued six trumped-up citations that included “unauthorized demonstration or service in a national cemetery or on other VA property.” The Old Veterans Guard was protesting “outside” the VA property. Moreover, these Veterans in their 60s, 70s and 80s were incredulously ordered to remove a “We Support Our Troops” banner while America was engaged in two brutal wars with thug terrorists.
The VA bureaucrats also ordered armed federal police to forcefully remove the American flag when it was hanging Union down … a symbol of distress that life and property are in extreme danger … and in full compliance with the U.S. Flag Code … while the VA police had already approved the Veterans to hang this same American Flag with the Union up for nearly a year-and-a-half without incident.
The VA bureaucracy didn’t just forcefully remove the American flag. No, they forcefully removed our free speech when they removed our distress message that the lives of our fellow Veterans and their legal property are in extreme danger.
When the VA bureaucrats forcefully removed the American flag from our peaceful demonstration, they also forcefully removed the U.S. Constitution from our citizenship. This reprehensible harm and damage inflicted by the VA is irreparable.
Criminals Running the Largest VA
Responding to a federal lawsuit filed by the ACLU of Southern California, a U.S. District Judge has ruled that defendants Donna Beiter, executive director of the West Los Angeles VA, along with her Chief of Police, Ronald Mathis, violated the free speech rights of a Veteran who protested the VA’s failure to use part of its property for the benefit and care of Veterans, particularly those who are homeless.
The Judge ruled that as the plaintiff, my “First Amendment right was violated as a matter of law when defendants committed impermissible viewpoint discrimination. Therefore, defendants' selective enforcement was an effort to suppress the plaintiff's activity due to disagreement with his view.”
Said Peter Eliasberg, managing attorney and Manheim Family Attorney for First Amendment Rights at the ACLU/SC:
”The VA has shown a basic misunderstanding of the meaning of the First Amendment of the Constitution, the very document that Mr. Rosebrock and other veterans have served in the military to protect”
In summary, top-level federal VA employees engaged in deliberate censorship that seriously violated a citizen’s Constitutional right to legally protest. This is a federal crime. It’s also an attempt to cover up the very criminal malfeasance that Veterans were protesting against.
Full Investigation Is Needed
The United States Federal Bureau of Investigation, the FBI, firmly declares: “It’s a federal crime for anyone acting under ‘color of law’ willfully to deprive or conspire to deprive a person of a right protected by the Constitution or U.S. law. ‘Color of law’ simply means that the person is using authority given to him or her by a local, state, or federal government agency.”
The FBI is the lead federal agency for investigating color-of-law abuses, which include acts carried out by government officials operating both within and beyond the limits of their lawful authority.
Accordingly, the FBI needs to fully investigate the criminal activities of the aforementioned defendants as well as the mismanagement of the VA Greater West Los Angeles Healthcare System, including actions and dealings of manipulative and coercive neighborhood leaders and the politicians who have aided and abetted in the misappropriation of Veterans’ sacred land that has forced thousands of disabled and disadvantaged Veterans to be exiled from their rightful Home and thereby become homeless.
These are serious crimes. They must be thoroughly investigated by the FBI, and the culprits need to be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
Justice Needs to Probe Its Own
It’s important to note that the VA bureaucrats who criminally violated a Veteran’s right to free speech are federal employees. Therefore, they were defended by the Dept. of Justice’s U.S. Attorney’s Office in Los Angeles.
Thus, federal employees paid with your tax dollars committed a crime against a citizen of the United States, and they were defended with your tax dollars.
In a featured article in the Los Angeles Times on June 12, 2010, headlined “U.S. Attorney to Target Corruption,” it declared: “U.S. Attorney Andrew Birotte, Jr., announced that he was creating a specialized unit to prosecute public corruption, such as those involving politicians or police officers accused of crimes. Its mission will be ‘to bring to justice those public officials and public employees who violate the public trust.”
Well, Mr. Birotte’s clients violated the public trust and committed a serious crime under the color of law as federal employees.
Mr. Birotte needs to “walk his talk” and fully prosecute defendants and VA employees Donna Beiter and Ronald Mathis.
‘All Others’
Because of the crimes, malfeasance and land misappropriation by VA bureaucrats, thousands of innocent Veterans have become homeless in their lonely battles for survival. Sadly, they are missing within the very nation they pledged their lives to defend on behalf of all others.
Unfortunately, the “all others,” are not stepping forward to defend America’s disabled and disadvantaged Veterans against the Dept. of Veterans Affairs’ authoritarian bureaucracy that is hell-bent on systematically eliminating them from society.
Day afterday, an average of 18 Veterans commit suicide. Many more mysteriously die from an “accidental” drug overdose from medications prescribed the DVA.
Disabled homeless Veterans live in back-alley squalor less than three blocks from the National Veterans Home. Some have nearly 20 different kinds of mood-altering drugs given to them by the VA Greater Los Angeles Healthcare system to “survive.”
We Have Found the Enemy …
Fellow Americans, this is a call to action to join the Veterans Revolution and become a citizen soldier to stop the crime against America’s military Veterans.
The time has come to unify and step forward to defend our nation’s disabled and disadvantaged Veterans from human rights violations and genocide …. and then prosecute the bad guys.
We have found the enemy … and it is the Dept. of Veterans Affairs.
“War is when the government tells you who the bad guy is.
“Revolution is when you decide that for yourself.”
Mr. Rosebrock, a Veteran of the Vietnam War Era, may be contacted at rrosebrock1@aol.com
