The Dangerous Consequences of Recruiting Nazis to Serve in Iraq

via AlterNet:



The Dangerous Consequences of Recruiting Nazis to Serve in Iraq

By David Holthouse, Hate Watch. Posted August 29, 2008.

The U.S. military appears to be teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind how to become a tactical bomb maker.



The racist skinhead logged on with exciting news: He'd just enlisted in the United States Army.

"Sieg Heil, I will do us proud," he wrote. It was a June 3 post to AryanWear Forum 14, a neo-Nazi online forum to which "Sobibor's SS," who identified himself as a skinhead living in Plantersville, Ala., had belonged since early 2004. (Sobibor was a Nazi death camp in Poland during World War II).

About a month after he announced his enlistment, Sobibor's SS bragged in another post to Forum 14 that he'd specifically requested and been assigned to MOS, or Military Occupational Specialty, 98D. MOS98D soldiers are in high demand right now. That's because they're specially trained in disarming Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs) like the infamous roadside bombs that are killing and maiming so many U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Presumably, a part of learning how to disarm an IED is learning how to make one.

"I have my own reasons for wanting this training but in fear of the government tracing me and me loosing my clearance I can't share them here," Sobibor's SS informed his fellow neo-Nazis.

One of his earlier posts indicated his reasons serve a darker purpose than defending America: "Once all the Jews are gone the world will start fixing itself."

Sobibor's SS included enough biographical details in his various posts to Forum 14 over the years, including that he's a single father from the small town in southern Alabama, that a military investigator with access to enlistment records for recent months should have little trouble discerning whether the Army is actually teaching a skinhead with genocide on his mind how to be a tactical bomb maker.

But there's little reason to expect that will happen.

Two years ago, the Intelligence Report revealed that alarming numbers of neo-Nazi skinheads and other white supremacist extremists were taking advantage of lowered armed services recruiting standards and lax enforcement of anti-extremist military regulations by infiltrating the U.S. armed forces in order to receive combat training and gain access to weapons and explosives. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.alternet.org/waroniraq/96959/the_dangerous_consequences_of_recruiting_nazis_to_serve_in_iraq/

It's a matter of historical record that many veterans of some of the elite Nazi fighting units -- having survived the eastern front, Russia, the fall of Berlin, and all that -- enlisted, en masse, as mercenaries in the French Foreign Legion. They served in French Indochina and in Algeria.

After DeGaulle marshalled them out of the Legion, with an "under 40" age requirement, quite a few continued fighting-for-pay in assorted third world backwaters, in places like the Congo, after the overthrow of Patrice Lamumba.

That's not counting any of those "cold warriors," with an "intelligence" pedigree, who were able to apply experience working against the K.G.B. (or N.G.U., or whatever the acronym was in 1945) for western intelligence services, or assorted Latin American militaries.

...The flip side of all that is you wonder how much those sorts of connections (and the mission assignments that followed) have contributed over the years to Post-Tramautic Stress Disorder rates among Americans serving in Special Forces, as Navy Seals, etc.