NYT: White supremacists enlisting in military, watchdog report says

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2006/07/07/MNG6TJRC1G1.DTL

White supremacists enlisting in military,
watchdog report says
Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad

John Kifner, New York Times

Friday, July 7, 2006

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 from 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 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 McVeigh's bombing of the Oklahoma
City federal building, had sought to enroll followers
in the Army to get training for a race war.

<more>

Weren't we just discussing something very much like
this in GD several days ago? The pitfalls of the
"all volunteer" Army?

Tesha