MP3 (One 30-minute seg­ment)
NB: This stream con­tains FTRs 681 and 682 in sequence. Each is a 30-minute segment.

Intro­duc­tion: Not­ing recent devel­op­ments with regard to Ger­man Nazi lawyer Jur­gen Rieger (who coined (pic­tured at right) the term “spe­cial­ized knowl­edge and abil­i­ties”), the pro­gram begins with his recent appoint­ment to become Vice-President of the NPD, the top Ger­man neo-Nazi party. Rieger advo­cated that Nazis and fas­cists world­wide adopt the tac­tic of infil­trat­ing mil­i­tary and law-enforcement estab­lish­ments in order to acquire “spe­cial­ized knowl­edge and abil­i­ties” which they can apply to over­throw­ing their respec­tive gov­ern­ments. (This broad­cast is a follow-up to FTR #27.)

The bulk of the pro­gram is devoted to an arti­cle from Salon.com. Due to the over-extension of the mil­i­tary result­ing from U.S. involve­ment in two wars, the armed ser­vices have been forced to lower recruit­ing stan­dards, per­mit­ting white suprema­cists and neo-Nazis to suc­cess­fully enlist and remain in the ranks.

Among the out­growths of this is a grow­ing pres­ence of mem­bers of the National Alliance, the orga­ni­za­tion whose pub­lish­ing arm issued Serpent’s Walk. In that book (con­sid­ered by Mr. Emory to be a man­i­festo for the future, rather than the “novel” it pur­ports to be), the descen­dants of the SS infil­trate the U.S. mil­i­tary and, after much of the coun­try is destroyed by weapons of mass destruc­tion result­ing in the dec­la­ra­tion of mar­tial law, the Nazis take over.

A num­ber of the white suprema­cist and Nazi infil­tra­tors in the mil­i­tary are quite explicit about their enlist­ment being for the explicit pur­pose of apply­ing their skills later, to kill their self-perceived ene­mies and over­throw the gov­ern­ment that they see as con­trolled by those self-same “enemies.”

Of sig­nif­i­cance, also, are the attempts described below to pro­cure arms for their move­ment. Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments who have exited the mil­i­tary net­work­ing with com­rades still in the ranks could gen­er­ate a truly pow­er­ful Under­ground Reich Fifth Col­umn in this country.

In that con­text, it is impor­tant to remem­ber that the National Alliance asso­ciate Bob Whitaker held a key posi­tion within the Rea­gan White House, in which he assisted with staffing and secu­rity clear­ances. Imag­ine the impli­ca­tions of peo­ple like Whitaker net­work­ing with like-minded peo­ple in the mil­i­tary and lawenforcement!

Pro­gram High­lights Include: The open advo­cacy by Nazi and white-supremacist lead­ers of the tac­tic of mil­i­tary infil­tra­tion by their mem­bers; review of Jur­gen Rieger’s par­tic­i­pa­tion in the Holo­caust Denial con­fer­ence in Iran in Decem­ber 2006.

NB: This analy­sis should in no size, shape, form or man­ner be con­strued as a blan­ket con­dem­na­tion or char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the mil­i­tary as a whole. Mr. Emory views our men and women in uni­form as the finest ele­ment in America.

1. Not­ing recent devel­op­ments with regard to Ger­man Nazi lawyer Jur­gen Rieger (who coined the term “spe­cial­ized knowl­edge and abil­i­ties”), the pro­gram high­lights his recent appoint­ment to become Vice-President of the NPD, the top Ger­man neo-Nazi party. Rieger advo­cated that Nazis and fas­cists world­wide adopt the tac­tic of infil­trat­ing mil­i­tary and law-enforcement estab­lish­ments in order to acquire “spe­cial­ized knowl­edge and abil­i­ties” which they can apply to over­throw­ing their respec­tive gov­ern­ments. (This broad­cast is a follow-up to FTR #27.)

Germany’s main far-right group, the National Demo­c­ra­tic Party (NPD), embraced a lead­ing extrem­ist Sun­day, May 25 but avoided explicit expres­sions of neo-Nazi opin­ion which are pro­hib­ited under Ger­man law.

Juer­gen Rieger, a lawyer who has advised and defended neo-Nazis, was appointed one of the group’s three vice-presidents. Rieger has con­vic­tions for Holo­caust denial and assault.

Reporters sug­gested that the overtly neo-Nazi fac­tion within the NPD was gain­ing a greater voice in the anti-foreigner party, which has seats in two of Germany’s 16 state assem­blies but has never won par­lia­men­tary rep­re­sen­ta­tion at fed­eral level.

A party spokesman later wel­comed Rieger’s appoint­ment, say­ing he would ener­gize the NPD.

Under party leader Udo Voigt, the NPD has sought the sup­port of mil­i­tants who praise Adolf Hitler’s National-Socialist or Nazi doc­trines, though Voigt insists that the NPD’s nation­al­ist views com­ply with Germany’s demo­c­ra­tic constitution.

In a speech to del­e­gates, leader Voigt won applause as he said the party’s pol­icy was both nation­al­ist and social­ist, but used Ger­man gram­mar to care­fully sep­a­rate them into two words. He said this had no con­nec­tion what­ever to the Nazi era.

More than 2,000 peo­ple demon­strated Sat­ur­day against the annual con­ven­tion of the NPD in the Bavar­ian city of Bamberg.

Kurt Beck, leader of Germany’s co-ruling Social Demo­c­ra­tic Party SPD, called in Leipzig for the NPD to be com­pul­so­rily dissolved.

“It ought not to be allowed,” he said. “A robust democ­racy ought not to give state sup­port to peo­ple who want to abol­ish democracy.”

“Far-Right NPD Appoints Holo­cause Denier as Vice-President” [Deutsche Welle]; rickross.com; 5/25/2009.

2. The bulk of the pro­gram is devoted to an arti­cle from Salon.com. Due to the over-extension of the mil­i­tary result­ing from U.S. involve­ment in two wars, the armed ser­vices have been forced to lower recruit­ing stan­dards, per­mit­ting white suprema­cists and neo-Nazis to suc­cess­fully enlist and remain in the ranks.

Among the out­growths of this is a grow­ing pres­ence of mem­bers of the National Alliance, the orga­ni­za­tion whose pub­lish­ing arm issued Serpent’s Walk. In that book (con­sid­ered by Mr. Emory to be a man­i­festo for the future, rather than the “novel” it pur­ports to be), the descen­dants of the SS infil­trate the U.S. mil­i­tary and, after much of the coun­try is destroyed by weapons of mass destruc­tion result­ing in the dec­la­ra­tion of mar­tial law, the Nazis take over.

A num­ber of the white suprema­cist and Nazi infil­tra­tors in the mil­i­tary are quite explicit about their enlist­ment being for the explicit pur­pose of apply­ing their skills later, to kill their self-perceived ene­mies and over­throw the gov­ern­ment that they see as con­trolled by those self-same “enemies.”

Of sig­nif­i­cance, also, are the attempts described below to pro­cure arms for their move­ment. Nazi and fas­cist ele­ments who have exited the mil­i­tary net­work­ing with com­rades still in the ranks could gen­er­ate a truly pow­er­ful Under­ground Reich Fifth Col­umn in this country.

On a muggy Florida evening in 2008, I meet Iraq War vet­eran For­rest Fog­a­rty in the Wing­house, a lit­tle bar-restaurant on the out­skirts of Tampa, his favorite hang­out. He told me on the phone I would rec­og­nize him by his skin­head. Sure enough, when I spot a white guy at a table by the door with a shaved head, white tank top and bulging mus­cles, I know it can only be him.

Over a plate of chicken wings, he tells me about his path into the white-power move­ment. “I was 14 when I decided I wanted to be a Nazi,” he says. At his first high school, near Los Ange­les, he was bul­lied by black and Latino kids. That’s when he first heard Skrew­driver, a band he calls “the god­fa­ther of the white power move­ment.” “I became obsessed,” he says. He had an image from one of Skrewdriver’s album cov­ers — a Viking car­ry­ing a staff, an icon among white nation­al­ists — tat­tooed on his left fore­arm. Soon after he had a Celtic cross, an Irish sym­bol appro­pri­ated by neo-Nazis, embla­zoned on his stomach.

At 15, Fog­a­rty moved with his dad to Tampa, where he started pick­ing fights with groups of black kids at his new high school. “On the first day, this bunch of nig­gers, they thought I was a racist, so they asked, ‘Are you in the KKK?’” he tells me. “I said, ‘Yeah,’ and it was on.” Soon enough, he was expelled.

For the next six years, Fog­a­rty flit­ted from land­scap­ing job to con­struc­tion job, nei­ther of which he’d ever wanted to do. “I was just drink­ing and fight­ing,” he says. He started his own Nazi rock group, Attack, and made friends in the National Alliance, at the time the biggest neo-Nazi group in the coun­try. It has called for a “a long-term eugen­ics pro­gram involv­ing at least the entire pop­u­la­tions of Europe and America.”

But the mil­i­tary ran in Fogarty’s fam­ily. His grand­fa­ther had served dur­ing World War II, Korea and Viet­nam, and his dad had been a Marine in Viet­nam. At 22, Fog­a­rty resolved to fol­low in their foot­steps. “I wanted to serve my coun­try,” he says.

Army reg­u­la­tions pro­hibit sol­diers from par­tic­i­pat­ing in racist groups, and recruiters are instructed to keep an eye out for sus­pi­cious tat­toos. Before sign­ing on the dot­ted line, enlis­tees are required to explain any tat­toos. At a Tampa recruit­ment office, though, Fog­a­rty sailed right through the signup process. “They just told me to write an expla­na­tion of each tat­too, and I made up some stuff, and that was that,” he says. Soon he was posted to Fort Stew­art in Geor­gia, where he became part of the 3rd Infantry Division.

Fogarty’s ex-girlfriend, intent on destroy­ing his new mil­i­tary career, sent a dossier of pho­tographs to Fort Stew­art. The pho­tos showed Fog­a­rty attend­ing white suprema­cist ral­lies and per­form­ing with his band, Attack. “They hauled me before some sort of com­mit­tee and showed me the pic­tures,” Fog­a­rty says. “I just denied them and said my girl­friend was a spite­ful bitch.” He adds: “They knew what I was about. But they let it go because I’m a great soldier.”

In 2003, Fog­a­rty was sent to Iraq. For two years he served in the mil­i­tary police, escort­ing offi­cers, includ­ing gen­er­als, around the hos­tile coun­try. He says he was granted top-secret clear­ance and access to bat­tle plans. Fog­a­rty speaks with regret that he “never had any kill counts.” But he says his time in Iraq increased his racist resolve.

“I hate Arabs more than any­body, for the sim­ple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live,” he tells me. “They’re just a back­ward peo­ple. Them and the Jews are just dis­gust­ing peo­ple as far as I’m con­cerned. Their cus­toms, every­thing to do with the Mid­dle East, is just repug­nant to me.”

Because of his tat­toos and his racist com­ments, most of his bud­dies and his com­mand­ing offi­cers were aware of his Nazism. “They all knew in my unit,” he says. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skin­head!’” But no one sounded an alarm to higher-ups. “I would vol­un­teer for all the hard­est mis­sions, and they were like, ‘Let Fog­a­rty go.’ They didn’t want to get rid of me.”

Fog­a­rty left the Army in 2005 with an hon­or­able dis­charge. He says he was asked to reen­list. He declined. He was sick of the system.

Since the launch of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. mil­i­tary has strug­gled to recruit and reen­list troops. As the con­flicts have dragged on, the mil­i­tary has loos­ened reg­u­la­tions, issu­ing “moral waivers” in many cases, allow­ing even those with crim­i­nal records to join up. Vet­er­ans suf­fer­ing post-traumatic stress dis­or­der have been ordered back to the Mid­dle East for sec­ond and third tours of duty.

The lax reg­u­la­tions have also opened the military’s doors to neo-Nazis, white suprema­cists and gang mem­bers — with dras­tic con­se­quences. Some neo-Nazis have been charged with crimes inside the mil­i­tary, and oth­ers have been linked to recruit­ment efforts for the white right. A recent Depart­ment of Home­land Secu­rity report, “Rightwing Extrem­ism: Cur­rent Eco­nomic and Polit­i­cal Cli­mate Fuel­ing Resur­gence in Rad­i­cal­iza­tion and Recruit­ment,” stated: “The will­ing­ness of a small per­cent­age of mil­i­tary per­son­nel to join extrem­ist groups dur­ing the 1990s because they were dis­grun­tled, dis­il­lu­sioned, or suf­fer­ing from the psy­cho­log­i­cal effects of war is being repli­cated today.” Many white suprema­cists join the Army to secure train­ing for, as they see it, a future domes­tic race war. Oth­ers claim to be shoot­ing Iraqis not to pur­sue the military’s strate­gic goals but because killing “hajjis” is their duty as white militants.

Sol­diers’ asso­ci­a­tions with extrem­ist groups, and their racist actions, con­tra­vene a host of mil­i­tary statutes insti­tuted in the past three decades. But dur­ing the “war on ter­ror,” U.S. armed forces have turned a blind eye on their own reg­u­la­tions. A 2005 Depart­ment of Defense report states, “Effec­tively, the mil­i­tary has a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ pol­icy per­tain­ing to extrem­ism. If indi­vid­u­als can per­form sat­is­fac­to­rily, with­out mak­ing their extrem­ist opin­ions overt … they are likely to be able to com­plete their contracts.”

Carter F. Smith is a for­mer mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tor who worked with the U.S. Army Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mand from 2004 to 2006, when he helped to root out gang vio­lence in troops. “When you need more sol­diers, you lower the stan­dards, whether you say so or not,” he says. “The increase in gangs and extrem­ists is an indi­ca­tor of this.” Mil­i­tary inves­ti­ga­tors may be con­cerned about white suprema­cists, he says. “But they have a war to fight, and they don’t have incen­tive to slow down.”

Tom Met­zger is the for­mer grand wiz­ard of the Ku Klux Klan and cur­rent leader of the White Aryan Resis­tance. He tells me the mil­i­tary has never been more tol­er­ant of racial extrem­ists. “Now they are let­ting every­body in,” he says.

The pres­ence of white suprema­cists in the mil­i­tary first trig­gered con­cern in 1976. At Camp Pendle­ton in Cal­i­for­nia, a group of black Marines attacked white Marines they mis­tak­enly believed to be in the KKK. The result­ing inves­ti­ga­tion uncov­ered a KKK chap­ter at the base and led to the jail­ing or trans­fer of 16 Klans­men. Reports of Klan activ­ity among sol­diers and Marines sur­faced again in the 1980s, spurring Pres­i­dent Reagan’s Defense Sec­re­tary, Cas­par Wein­berger, to con­demn mil­i­tary par­tic­i­pa­tion in white suprema­cist organizations.

Then, in 1995, a black cou­ple was mur­dered by two neo-Nazi para­troop­ers around Fort Bragg in North Car­olina. The mur­der inves­ti­ga­tion turned up evi­dence that 22 sol­diers at Fort Bragg were known to be extrem­ists. That year, lan­guage was added to a Depart­ment of Defense direc­tive, explic­itly pro­hibit­ing par­tic­i­pa­tion in “orga­ni­za­tions that espouse suprema­cist causes” or “advo­cate the use of force or violence.”

Today a com­plete ban on mem­ber­ship in racist orga­ni­za­tions appears to have been lifted — though the pro­lif­er­a­tion of white suprema­cists in the mil­i­tary is dif­fi­cult to gauge. The mil­i­tary does not track them as a dis­crete cat­e­gory, cou­pling them with gang mem­bers. But one indi­ca­tion of the scope comes from the FBI.

Fol­low­ing an inves­ti­ga­tion of white suprema­cist groups, a 2008 FBI report declared: “Mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence — rang­ing from fail­ure at basic train­ing to suc­cess in spe­cial oper­a­tions forces — is found through­out the white suprema­cist extrem­ist move­ment.” In white suprema­cist inci­dents from 2001 to 2008, the FBI iden­ti­fied 203 vet­er­ans. Most of them were asso­ci­ated with the National Alliance and the National Social­ist Move­ment, which pro­mote anti-Semitism and the over­throw of the U.S. gov­ern­ment, and assorted skin­head groups.

Because the FBI focused only on reported cases, its num­bers don’t include the many extrem­ist sol­diers who have man­aged to stay off the radar. But its report does pin­point why the white suprema­cist move­ments seek to recruit vet­er­ans — they “may exploit their accesses to restricted areas and intel­li­gence or apply spe­cial­ized train­ing in weapons, tac­tics, and orga­ni­za­tional skills to ben­e­fit the extrem­ist movement.”

In fact, since the movement’s incep­tion, its lead­ers have encour­aged mem­bers to enlist in the U.S. mil­i­tary as a way to receive state-of-the-art com­bat train­ing, cour­tesy of the U.S. tax­payer, in prepa­ra­tion for a domes­tic race war. The con­cept of a race war is cen­tral to extrem­ist groups, whose adher­ents imag­ine an erup­tion of vio­lence that pits races against each other and the government.

That goal comes up often in the chat­ter on white suprema­cist Web sites. On the neo-Nazi Web site Blood and Hon­our, a user called 88Soldier88, wrote in 2008 that he is an active duty sol­dier work­ing in a detainee hold­ing area in Iraq. He com­plained about “how ‘nice’ we have to treat these fuck­ing peo­ple … bet­ter than our own troops.” Then he added, “Hope­fully the train­ing will pre­pare me for what I hope is to come.” Another poster, AMERICANARYAN.88Soldier88, wrote, “I have the train­ing I need and will pass it on to oth­ers when I get out.”

On NewSaxon.org, a social net­work­ing group for neo-Nazis, a group called White Mil­i­tary Men hosts numer­ous con­trib­u­tors. It was begun by “Fight­ing­for­Whites,” who iden­ti­fied him­self at one point as Lance Cpl. Bur­ton of the 2nd Bat­tal­ion Fox Com­pany, but then removed the infor­ma­tion. The group calls for “All men with mil­i­tary expe­ri­ence, retired or active/reserve” to “join this group to see how many men have expe­ri­ence to build an army. We want to win a war, we need sol­diers.” Fight­ing­for­Whites — whose tagline is “White Supremacy will pre­vail! US Mil­i­tary lead­ing the way!” — goes on to write, “I am with an infantry bat­tal­ion in the Marine Corps, I have had the plea­sure of killing four ene­mies that tried to kill me. I have the best train­ing to kill peo­ple.” On his wall, a friend wrote: “THANKS BROTHER!!!! kill a cou­ple towel heads for me ok!”

Such atti­tudes come straight from the movement’s lead­ers. “We do encour­age them to sign up for the mil­i­tary,” says Charles Wil­son, spokesman for the National Social­ist Move­ment. “We can use the train­ing to secure the resis­tance to our gov­ern­ment.” Billy Roper, of White Rev­o­lu­tion, says skin­heads join the mil­i­tary for the usual rea­sons, such as access to higher edu­ca­tion, but also “to secure the future for white chil­dren.” “Amer­ica began in bloody rev­o­lu­tion,” he reminds me, “and it might end that way.”

When it comes to screen­ing out racists at recruit­ment cen­ters, mil­i­tary reg­u­la­tions appear to have col­lapsed. “We don’t exclude peo­ple from the army based on their thoughts,” says S. Dou­glas Smith, an Army pub­lic affairs offi­cer. “We exclude based on behav­ior.” He says an “offen­sive” or “extrem­ist” tat­too “might be a rea­son for them not to be in the mil­i­tary.” Or it might not. “We try to edu­cate recruiters on extrem­ist tat­toos,” he says, but “the tat­too is a rel­a­tively sub­jec­tive deci­sion” and shouldn’t in itself bar enlistment.

What about some­thing as obvi­ous as a swastika? “A swastika would trig­ger ques­tions,” Smith says. “But again, if the gen­tle­men said, ‘I like the way the swastika looked,’ and had clean crim­i­nal record, it’s pos­si­ble we would allow that per­son in.” “There are First Amend­ment rights,” he adds.

In the spring, I tele­phoned at ran­dom five Army recruit­ment cen­ters across the coun­try. I said I was inter­ested in join­ing up and men­tioned that I had a pair of “SS bolts” tat­tooed on my arm. A 2000 mil­i­tary brochure stated that SS bolts were a tat­too image that should raise sus­pi­cions. But none of the recruiters reacted neg­a­tively, and when pressed directly about the tat­too, not one said it would be an out­right prob­lem. A recruiter in Hous­ton was typ­i­cal; he said he’d never heard of SS bolts and just encour­aged me to come on in.

It’s in the inter­est of recruiters to inter­pret recruit­ing stan­dards loosely. If they fail to meet tar­gets, based on the num­ber of sol­diers they enlist, they may have to attend a puni­tive coun­sel­ing ses­sion, and it could hurt any chance for pro­mo­tion. When, in 2005, the Army relaxed reg­u­la­tions on non-extremist tat­toos, such as body art cov­er­ing the hands, neck and face, this cut recruiters even more slack.

Even the edu­ca­tion of recruiters about how to iden­tify extrem­ists seems to have fallen by the way­side. The 2005 Depart­ment of Defense report con­cluded that recruit­ing per­son­nel “were not aware of hav­ing received sys­tem­atic train­ing on rec­og­niz­ing and respond­ing to pos­si­ble ter­ror­ists” — a des­ig­na­tion that includes white suprema­cists — “who try to enlist.” Par­tic­i­pa­tion on white suprema­cist Web sites would be an easy way to screen out extrem­ist recruits, but the report found that the mil­i­tary had not clar­i­fied which Web forums were gath­er­ing places for extremists.

Once white suprema­cists are in the mil­i­tary, it is easy to stay there. An Army Com­mand Pol­icy man­ual devotes more than 100 pages to root­ing them out. But no offi­cer appears to be read­ing it.

Hunter Glass was a para­trooper in the 1980s and became a gang cop in 1999 in Fayet­teville, North Car­olina, near Fort Bragg. “In the early 1990s, the mil­i­tary was hard on them. They could pick and choose,” he recalls. “They were look­ing for swastikas. They were look­ing for any­thing.” But the reg­u­la­tions on racist extrem­ists got jet­ti­soned with the war on terror.

Glass says white suprema­cists now enjoy an open cul­ture of impunity in the armed forces. “We’re see­ing guys with tat­toos all the time,” he says. “As far as hunt­ing them down, I don’t see it. I’m see­ing the oppo­site, where if a white suprema­cist has com­mit­ted a crime, the mil­i­tary stance will be, ‘He didn’t com­mit a race-related crime.’”

In fact, a 2006 report by the Army’s Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mand shows that mil­i­tary brass con­sis­tently ignored evi­dence of extrem­ism. One case, at Fort Hood, reveals that a sol­dier was mak­ing Inter­net post­ings on the white suprema­cist site Stormfront.org. But the inves­ti­ga­tor was unable to locate the sol­dier in ques­tion. In a brief sum­mary of the case, an inves­ti­ga­tor writes that due to “poor doc­u­men­ta­tion,” “attempts to locate with min­i­mal infor­ma­tion met with neg­a­tive results.” “I’m not doing my job here,” the inves­ti­ga­tor notes. “Needs to get fixed.”

In another case, inves­ti­ga­tors found that a Fort Hood sol­dier belonged to the neo-Nazi group Ham­mer­skins and was “closely asso­ci­ated with” the Celtic Knights of Austin, Texas, another extrem­ist orga­ni­za­tion, a sit­u­a­tion bad enough to merit a joint inves­ti­ga­tion by the FBI and the Army’s Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mand. The Army sum­mary states that there was “prob­a­ble cause” to believe the sol­dier had par­tic­i­pated in at least one white extrem­ist meet­ing and had “pro­vided a mil­i­tary tech­ni­cal man­ual … to the leader of a white extrem­ist group in order to assist in the plan­ning and exe­cu­tion of future attacks on var­i­ous targets.”

Our of four pre­lim­i­nary probes into white suprema­cists, the Crim­i­nal Inves­ti­ga­tion Com­mand car­ried through on only this one. The probe revealed that “a larger sin­gle attack was planned for the San Anto­nio, TX after a con­sid­er­able amount of media atten­tion was given to ille­gal immi­grants. The attack was not com­pleted due to the inabil­ity of the orga­ni­za­tion to obtain explo­sives.” Despite these threats, the sub­ject was inter­viewed only once, in 2006, and the inves­ti­ga­tion was ter­mi­nated the fol­low­ing year.

White suprema­cists may be doing more than avoid­ing expul­sion. They may be using their mil­i­tary sta­tus to help build the white right. The FBI found that two Army pri­vates in the 82nd Air­borne Divi­sion at Fort Bragg had attempted in 2007 to sell stolen prop­erty from the mil­i­tary — includ­ing bal­lis­tic vests, a com­bat hel­met and pain med­ica­tions such as mor­phine — to an under­cover FBI agent they believed was involved with the white suprema­cist move­ment. (They were con­victed and sen­tenced to six years.) It found mul­ti­ple exam­ples of white suprema­cist recruit­ment among active mil­i­tary, includ­ing a period in 2003 when six active duty sol­diers at Fort Riley, mem­bers of the Aryan Nation, were recruit­ing their Army col­leagues and even serv­ing as the Aryan Nation’s point of con­tact for the state of Kansas.

One white suprema­cist sol­dier, James Dou­glas Ross, a mil­i­tary intel­li­gence offi­cer sta­tioned at Fort Bragg, was given a bad con­duct dis­charge from the Army when he was caught try­ing to mail a sub­ma­chine gun from Iraq to his father’s home in Spokane, Wash. Mil­i­tary police found a cache of white suprema­cist para­pher­na­lia and sev­eral weapons hid­den behind ceil­ing tiles in Ross’ mil­i­tary quar­ters. After his dis­charge, a Spokane County deputy sher­iff saw Ross pass­ing out fliers for the neo-Nazi National Alliance.

Root­ing out extrem­ists is dif­fi­cult because racism per­vades the mil­i­tary, accord­ing to sol­diers. They say troops through­out the Mid­dle East use deroga­tory terms like “hajji” or “sand nig­ger” to define Arab insur­gents and often the Arab pop­u­la­tion itself.

“Racism was ram­pant,” recalls vet Michael Prys­ner, who served in Iraq in 2003 and 2004 as part of the 173rd Air­borne Brigade. “All of com­mand, every­where, it was com­pletely ingrained in the con­scious­ness of every sol­dier. I’ve heard top gen­er­als refer to the Iraq peo­ple as ‘hajjis.’ The anti-Arab racism came from the brass. It came from the top. And every­thing was jus­ti­fied because they weren’t con­sid­ered people.”

Another vet, Michael Tot­ten, who served in Iraq with the 101st Air­borne in 2003 and 2004, says, “It wouldn’t stand out if you said ‘sand nig­gers,’ even if you aren’t a neo-Nazi.” Tot­ten says his per­spec­tive has changed in the inter­ven­ing years, but “at the time, I used the words ‘sand nig­ger.’ I didn’t con­sider ‘hajji’ to be derogatory.”

Geof­frey Mil­lard, an orga­nizer for Iraq Vet­er­ans Against the War, served in Iraq for 13 months, begin­ning in 2004, as part of the 42nd Infantry Divi­sion. He recalls Gen. George Casey, who served as the com­man­der in Iraq from 2004 to 2007, address­ing a brief­ing he attended in the sum­mer of 2005 at For­ward Oper­at­ing Base, out­side Tikrit. “As he walked past, he was talk­ing about some inci­dent that had just hap­pened, and he was talk­ing about how ‘these stu­pid fuck­ing hajjis couldn’t fig­ure shit out.’ And I’m just like, Are you kid­ding me? This is Gen. Casey, the highest-ranking guy in Iraq, refer­ring to the Iraqi peo­ple as ‘fuck­ing hajjis.’” (A spokesper­son for Casey, now the Army Chief of Staff, said the gen­eral “did not make this statement.”)

“The mil­i­tary is attrac­tive to white suprema­cists,” Mil­lard says, “because the war itself is racist.”

The U.S. Sen­ate Com­mit­tee on the Armed Forces has long been con­sid­ered one of Con­gress’ most pow­er­ful groups. It gov­erns leg­is­la­tion affect­ing the Pen­ta­gon, defense bud­get, mil­i­tary strate­gies and oper­a­tions. Today it is led by the influ­en­tial Sens. Carl Levin and John McCain. An inves­ti­ga­tion by the com­mit­tee into how white suprema­cists per­me­ate the mil­i­tary in plain vio­la­tion of U.S. law could result in sub­stan­tive changes. I con­tacted the com­mit­tee but staffers would not agree to be inter­viewed. Instead, a spokesper­son responded that white supremacy in the mil­i­tary has never arisen as a con­cern. In an e-mail, the spokesper­son said, “The Com­mit­tee doesn’t have any infor­ma­tion that would indi­cate this is a par­tic­u­lar problem.”

“Neo-Nazis are in the Army Now” by Matt Kenard; Salon.com; 6/15/2009.