"We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad"

Is the next Timothy McVeigh now in uniform honing his skills to kill? Apparently many white supremacists and neo-Nazis are infiltrating the U.S. military for weapons and explosives training according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. According to the story in yesterday’s New York Times quoting the report,

Department of Defense investigators estimate thousands of soldiers in the
Army alone are involved in extremist or gang activity. "We've got Aryan Nations
graffiti in Baghdad," said one investigator. "That's a problem."

Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfield, has been asked by the group to appoint a commission to review the possibilities that recruiters and commanders are relaxing standards on neo-Nazis and white supremacists due to manpower shortages and to adopt a zero tolerance policy regarding extremist activities in the U.S. armed services.

According to a Southern Poverty Law Center timeline, the American military has had a history of right wing kooks trying to use it to promote their own agendas. Probably the best known and most notorious was Timothy McVeigh who supposedly, while serving in the Army, had urged fellow soldiers to read the Turner Diaries – a fictionalized blueprint for a race war in the United States – and recruited a soldier he met, Terry Nichols, to assist him in bombing the Murrah federal office building in Oklahoma City killing 168 people. (See my previous post on Home Grown Terrorists.)

The following are excerpts from a 1999 article in Resistance, a magazine of the neo-Nazi National Alliance. The article was written by a Green Beret stationed at Fort Bragg.

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. 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." Operations will consist
primarily of patrolling, ambush, raids, cordon and search, search and
destroy, assault on fortified positions and point and area defense of White
enclaves -- all light infantry missions.

At some point in the [recruitment] process you will be asked if you
belong to any "extremist" organizations or espouse any "supremacist" causes.
Lie. The only acceptable answer to any question like that is "no."... During
Basic Training you will be ordered to strip to be inspected for "Bad Tattoos."
However, having made it this far it is unlikely you'll simply be kicked out.

Do not -- I repeat, do not -- seek out other skinheads. Do not
listen to skinhead "music." Do not keep "racist" or "White supremacist tracts"
where you live.

If you are a leader in the skinhead "movement" advise your
newly recruited members to not get tattoos and tell them their first duty as
a skinhead is to join the Army and become a trained infantryman.

As a professional soldier, my goal is to fill the ranks of the
United States Army infantry 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.

While it would be wrong to blow this problem out of proportion it would also be wrong to ignore it. It is real and serious. We must not allow the lowering of standards to fill military recruitment shortages in the near future to jeopardize our safety and security in the long run.