On May 22nd in a posting on my “Gorilla’s Guides” site entitled “It’s All Right Baby’s Coming Home” I wrote about the infiltration
of gang members who view there time there in the US army as training for when they’re back on the streets. Yesterday a reader kindly sent me a link to a report from The Southern Poverty Law Centre about how members of extremist racist groups are joining the army for the same reason and that as with gang members the US army is winking at the practice. She asked not to be identified but gave me permission to say that she lives close to a large military facility and has close family connections with the US forces. She also sent me this graphic in this and explained that she had received it embedded in an an e-mail urging support for Private Steven Green now awaiting trial for rape and murder in Mahmoudiya as “good men like him” would be needed “when the struggle to preserve the white race comes.” I need hardly remind my American readers that Timothy McVeigh the terrorist responsible for the Oklahoma bombing was both a veteran and an extreme right-winger who declared that his motive for the bombing was revenge for the deaths of Branch Davidian cult members when their compound at Waco Texas was stormed by Federal Agents. Can anyone doubt that sooner or later similar “incidents” to Waco and Oklahoma will occur? No matter how hard-pressed the US forces are knowingly enrolling racist extremists and gang members will inevitably lead to civilian deaths in the very country they claim to be protecting.
markfromireland
A Few Bad Men
Ten years after a scandal over neo-Nazis in the armed forces, extremists are once again worming their way into a recruit-starved military.
July 7, 2006 — Before the U.S. military made Matt Buschbacher a Navy SEAL, he made himself a soldier of the Fourth Reich.
Before Forrest Fogarty attended Military Police counter-insurgency training school, he attended Nazi skinhead festivals as lead singer for the hate rock band Attack.
And before Army engineer Jon Fain joined the invasion of Iraq to fight the War on Terror, the neo-Nazi National Alliance member fantasized about fighting a war on Jews.
“Ever since my youth — when I watched WWII footage and saw how well-disciplined and sharply dressed the German forces were — I have wanted to be a soldier,” Fain said in a Winter 2004 interview with the National Alliance magazine Resistance. “Joining the American military was as close as I could get.”
Ten years after Pentagon leaders toughened policies on extremist activities by active duty personnel — a move that came in the wake of the Oklahoma City bombing by decorated Gulf War combat veteran Timothy McVeigh and the murder of a black couple by members of a skinhead gang in the elite 82nd Airborne Division — large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists continue to infiltrate the ranks of the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force. Military recruiters and base commanders, under intense pressure from the war in Iraq to fill the ranks, often look the other way.
Neo-Nazis “stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they’re inside, and they are hard-core,” Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Intelligence Report. “We’ve got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad,” he added. “That’s a problem.”
The armed forces are supposed to be a model of racial equality. American soldiers are supposed to be defenders of democracy. Neo-Nazis represent the opposite of these ideals. They dream of race war and revolution, and their motivations for enlisting are often quite different than serving their country.
“Join only for the training, and to better defend yourself, our people, and our culture,” Fain said. “We must have people to open doors from the inside when the time comes.”
Soldier Shortage
In 1996, following a decade-long rash of cases where extremists in the military were caught diverting huge arsenals of stolen firearms and explosives to neo-Nazi and white supremacist organizations, conducting guerilla training for paramilitary racist militias, and murdering non-white civilians (see timeline), the Pentagon finally launched a massive investigation and crackdown. One general ordered all 19,000 soldiers at Fort Lewis, Wash., strip-searched for extremist tattoos.
But that was peacetime. Now, with the country at war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the military under increasingly intense pressure to maintain enlistment numbers, weeding out extremists is less of a priority. “Recruiters are knowingly allowing neo-Nazis and white supremacists to join the armed forces, and commanders don’t remove them from the military even after we positively identify them as extremists or gang members,” said Department of Defense investigator Barfield.
“Last year, for the first time, they didn’t make their recruiting goals. They don’t want to start making a big deal again about neo-Nazis in the military, because then parents who are already worried about their kids signing up and dying in Iraq are going to be even more reluctant about their kids enlisting if they feel they’ll be exposed to gangs and white supremacists.”
Barfield, who is based at Fort Lewis, said he has identified and submitted evidence on 320 extremists there in the past year. “Only two have been discharged,” he said. Barfield and other Department of Defense investigators said they recently uncovered an online network of 57 neo-Nazis who are active duty Army and Marines personnel spread across five military installations in five states — Fort Lewis; Fort Bragg, N.C.; Fort Hood, Texas; Fort Stewart, Ga.; and Camp Pendleton, Calif. “They’re communicating with each other about weapons, about recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing within the military,” Barfield said. “Several of these individuals have since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq.”
… … …
Resources and links for the SPLC article
Full text of report from Southern Poverty Law Center here
Printer friendly (single page version) can be found here
