Terrorist Training Fields

I meant to discuss this yesterday but our friend Bill in DC jogged my memory this morning.
Hate Groups Are Infiltrating the Military, Group Asserts

A decade after the Pentagon declared a zero-tolerance policy for racist 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."

That certainly is a problem on several fronts. We already knew that the Bush/Cheney administration's invasion and occupation of Iraq had created an ideal training ground for Islamic terrorists. Now it turns out that the Army is becoming the ideal training ground for domestic Nazi terrorists.

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."

Be all that you can be.

An article in the National Alliance magazine Resistance urged skinheads to join the Army and insist on being assigned to light infantry units.

[.....]

"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."

Is this related to the many revelations that US troops have committed atrocities against Iraqi citizens and even if it isn't does it indicate future problems? Sending people to Iraq who go over there hating "ragheads" does not sound like a good idea. And what about having a well trained army of Nazi terrorists here at home. If you are not scared yet you should be. I guess the only question remaining is if there is anything the Rumsfeld Pentagon can't screw up. It doesn't look like it.