The Southern Poverty Law Center has picked up my friend Matt Kennard's Columbia J-School graduate thesis, an investigative report on racist extremists infiltrating the Armed Forces and the absence of any real effort to prevent them from joining. Two years ago, members of Congress urged former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to do more to prevent such people from gaining access to military training, but according to the SPLC, neither he nor replacement Robert Gates has given much attention to the matter. Kennard notes that extremist groups have been taking advantage of relaxed recruiting standards to gain the kind of training they believe they need to bring about a "race war."
The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is explicitly interested in using the military to gain training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military,” says Lt. Charles Wilson, spokesman for the NSM. “We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government.”
Lt. Wilson says the party has 190 members currently serving in the military. “Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy,” he says. “Our military doesn't agree with our political beliefs, they are not supposed to be in the military, but they're there, in ever greater numbers.”
The frightening thing is that it isn't being an extremist that disqualifies one from serving in the military but rather "public display[s] of allegiance" that are barred, such as tattoos. And extremists should be excluded, not out of political correctness, but because they have in the past used military training to devastating effect. As David Holthouse of the SPLC points out, years ago Alabama Republican Senator Richard Shelby noted in an open letter to Rumsfeld that “[w]e witnessed with Timothy McVeigh that today’s racist extremist may become tomorrow’s domestic terrorist.”
--A. Serwer
