COUNTERING MILITARY RECRUITMENT
Articles: Military Service: General
Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts
JOHN KIFNER, New York Times
July 7, 2006
A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy forracist hate groups, recruiting shortfalls caused by the war in Iraq
have allowed "large numbers of neo-Nazis and skinhead extremists" to
infiltrate the military, according to a watchdog organization.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks racist and right-wing
militia groups, estimated that the numbers could run into the
thousands, citing interviews with Defense Department investigators
and reports and postings on racist Web sites and magazines.
"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," the group quoted a
Defense Department investigator as saying in a report to be posted
today on its Web site, www.splcenter.org. "That's a problem."
A Defense Department spokeswoman said officials there could not
comment on the report because they had not yet seen it.
The center called on Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to appoint
a task force to study the problem, declare a new zero tolerance
policy and strictly enforce it.
The report said that neo-Nazi groups like the National Alliance,
whose founder, William Pierce, wrote "The Turner Diaries," the novel
that was the inspiration and blueprint for Timothy J. McVeigh's
bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, sought to enroll
followers in the Army to get training for a race war.
The groups are being abetted, the report said, by pressure on
recruiters, particularly for the Army, to meet quotas that are more
difficult to reach because of the growing unpopularity of the war in
Iraq.
The report quotes Scott Barfield, a Defense Department investigator,
saying, "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."
Mr. Barfield said Army recruiters struggled last year to meet
goals. "They don't want to make a big deal again about neo-Nazis in
the military," he said, "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."
The 1996 crackdown on extremists came after revelations that Mr.
McVeigh had espoused far-right ideas when he was in the Army and
recruited two fellow soldiers to aid his bomb plot. Those
revelations were followed by a furor that developed when three white
paratroopers were convicted of the random slaying of a black couple
in order to win tattoos and 19 others were discharged for
participating in neo-Nazi activities.
The defense secretary at the time, William Perry, said the rules
were meant to leave no room for racist and extremist activities
within the military. But the report said Mr. Barfield, who is based
at Fort Lewis, Wash., had said that he had provided evidence on 320
extremists there in the past year, but that only two had been
discharged. He also said there was an online network of neo-Nazis.
"They're communicating with each other about weapons, about
recruiting, about keeping their identities secret, about organizing
within the military," he said. "Several of these individuals have
since been deployed to combat missions in Iraq."
The report cited accounts by neo-Nazis of their infiltration of the
military, including a discussion on the white supremacist Web site
Stormfront. "There are others among you in the forces," one
participant wrote. "You are never alone."
An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged
skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light
infantry units.
The Southern Poverty Law Center identified the author as Steven
Barry, who it said was a former Special Forces officer who was the
alliance's "military unit coordinator."
"Light infantry is your branch of choice because the coming race war
and the ethnic cleansing to follow will be very much an
infantryman's war," he wrote. "It will be house-to-house,
neighborhood-by-neighborhood until your town or city is cleared and
the alien races are driven into the countryside where they can be
hunted down and 'cleansed.' "
He concluded: "As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the
ranks of the United States Army with skinheads. As street brawlers,
you will be useless in the coming race war. As trained infantrymen,
you will join the ranks of the Aryan warrior brotherhood."
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