U.S. drops lawsuit against protesting veterans

Federal officials seem to have waved the white flag in their battle with a group of elderly former servicemen who fly the American flag upside down as a “distress symbol” to protest commercial activities at the VA’s Brentwood medical center.

The Department of Veterans Affairs last week dropped charges against Robert Rosebrock alleging that he and other former military men desecrated the U.S. flag by hanging it upside down on a fence outside the agency’s Wilshire Boulevard property.

The VA requested the dismissal days after the American Civil Liberties Union agreed to help fight the charges.

Rosebrock and others have demonstrated outside the VA grounds for 90 consecutive Sundays to protest the proposed conversion of a chunk of VA land in Brentwood to a public park.

“For the first 65 Sundays we displayed the flag right-side up,” Rosebrock, a 67-year-old U.S. Army veteran, said Friday.

“Then in June a film studio had an AIDS fundraising carnival on VA land and we started displaying it upside down as a signal of distress,” he said. “Our property was being threatened -- it’s in danger.”

The parkland plan is the latest in a series of development schemes for the Brentwood VA property that are unrelated to veterans’ welfare, said Rosebrock, a West Los Angeles resident.

The 388-acre site is used by several outside groups, including a private school, a bus company and a car-rental agency.

“We want to get everything back for veterans’ use,” Rosebrock said.

VA officials were quick to condemn the protesting veterans’ “distress symbol.” A warrant was issued for Rosebrock’s arrest, and he was cited for violating VA regulations and prohibited from leaving the jurisdiction of the U.S. District Court’s central district.

“It was an inappropriate display on VA property,” Lynn Carrier, the VA’s associate medical center director, said in June.

Attempts to reach Carrier for comment on the dismissal Friday were unsuccessful.

ACLU lawyer Peter Elias- berg, an expert on 1st Amendment rights, suggested that the VA retreated to avoid the unfavorable publicity that might come from a trial.

“I don’t think they really want a lot of sunshine on what they’re doing to a bunch of veterans who are expressing their disapproval of how the VA is acting,” Eliasberg said.

When half a dozen veterans resumed their protest Sunday, VA police again ordered them to remove their upside-down flags from the federally owned fence or they would be seized. They did not arrest or cite Rosebrock, however.

“We’ve won a battle victory,” he said, “but we still have the war to fight.”

bob.pool@latimes.com