#irregular army

[mattkennard]

An Irregular Army

Published: Nation Institute (8 August 2012)

US army veteran Wade Michael Page shot and killed six people at a gurudwara, a Sikh temple, in Wisconsin on August 5, 2012.

Since the War on Terror was declared more than a decade ago, the US military has done all it can to train and arm its troops to fight — but among its ranks lurk some of the most violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists in America. Thanks to lax recruitment policies and pressure to maintain troop numbers, extremists are slipping into the military to be trained to fight the "race war" they believe is coming when they return home.

We saw one tragic example of the consequences of these policies this past Sunday, as a US veteran and white supremacist, Wade Michael Page, took the lives of six people and seriously injured three more at a gurudwara, a Sikh temple, in Milwaukee, WI before dying of an apparently self-inflicted gunshot wound to his head. It is likely to be only the opening salvo in a growing trend of domestic mass murders as extremist veterans — some afflicted with untreated PTSD and other conditions — return home.

The US Army was put on notice about the dangers of training extremists almost two decades ago. In 1995, military authorities received a rude shock that should have ensured they pay closer attention to supremacist sympathies among its recruits — when neo-Nazi and active duty paratrooper James Burmeister murdered two African-Americans near Fort Bragg — and prevent far-right radicals from gaining access to the highest-grade weaponry (and attendant training) in the world. Indeed, some claim the military was successful in rooting out neo-Nazi elements from its ranks.

But Page served in the military for six years as part of the highly respected psychological ops department — three of those years after the Fort Bragg shooting, even though he was open about his white supremacist views. And during the War on Terror, the already-loose regulations on recruitment and retention of extremists were jettisoned as the military struggled to keep up troop numbers. In 2005, the US Army missed its recruitment targets by the largest margin since 1979, when the nation was still afflicted with "Vietnam Syndrome" and recruited twice as many soldiers. By 2008, 1.6 million Americans had been recruited to serve. Testimony from far-right leaders and veterans as well as internal reports by the Criminal Investigative Command (CID), the military's investigative branch, show that during the War on Terror nothing was done to either stop the recruitment, or the retention of, neo-Nazis. The concerns of investigators and troops themselves was ignored all the way up to Congress.

In addition, the US military ostensibly has a ban on its soldiers having racist tattoos or taking active roles within white supremacist groups, but the regulations are vague and rarely enforced. Neo-Nazis are known to often join the military to gain weapons training in order to come back and start the domestic "race war" they believe is coming. Struggling to readjust to life back home after traumatic tours of Iraq and Afghanistan, some veterans are radicalized upon their return, finding solace in extremist organizations; this problem was highlighted by the Department of Homeland Security in a 2009 report (though Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued an apology after veterans' groups took offense.)

Page himself was given an other than honorable discharge, which made reenlistment impossible, but since the September 11, 2001 attacks, this means of rooting out extremists fell by the wayside. Troop needs meant that the military could no longer afford to kick out extremist veterans or any other misbehaving soldiers. They had two occupations to populate, after all.

As I write in my book, Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members and Criminal to Fight the War on Terror, which is out in September:

The [statistics] show that the avenues the army guidelines stipulate for dealing with extremists already serving in the military have been drastically reduced since 1998, and increasingly so since the War on Terror was initially announced. One such avenue is the denial of reenlistment, which fell from a high of 4,000 soldiers rejected in 1994 to a low of 81 in 2006. Another is a soldier receiving misconduct charges resulting in discharge from the army. In the five-year period from 1998 to 2003 the number of discharges for misconduct teetered from a high of 2,560 to a low of 2,307. But by 2006 this number had fallen off to 1,435.

Page was the leader of a white power punk and metal band, End Apathy, that he started, according to a 2010 interview he gave to the white supremacist music website Label 56, because he wanted to "figure out how to end people's apathetic ways;" the band was meant to "be the start towards moving forward." The Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremist groups, says that End Apathy was linked to the Hammerskins skinhead organization, which is "the most violent skinhead group in the US," according to the Anti-Defamation League. One of its members, Forrest Fogarty, played a lead role in my 2009 Salon/Investigative Fund article, "Neo-Nazis Are in the Army Now." Fogarty, who served in the military police in Iraq from 2003 to 2004, also has his own neo-Nazi band called Attack. When I interviewed Fogarty in Tampa, FL, he gave me one of his albums. One of the songs on the album, "Eye For An Eye," opens with these ominous lines: "A slow painful death I strive / Why are you still alive?" Disturbingly, Fogarty, who said that his time in Iraq only increased his racist resolve, left the army with an honorable discharge and says he was even asked to reinlist. He declined.

Some neo-Nazis are linked to crimes within the military and others to recruitment efforts for the far-right. Wade brought his war stateside, though he wasn't the first to commit murder in the United States, and it is unlikely he'll be the last. There have been countless such cases over the past decade. In 2005, neo-Nazi James Douglas Ross wascaught trying to mail a submachine gun back from Iraq to his father in Spokane, Washington. In 2007, neo-Nazi Kenneth Eastridge was part of a team of three whichkilled a fellow soldier in Colorado Springs. In March 2011, the FBI arrested Kevin William Harpham, a 36-year-old member of the neo-Nazi National Alliance, also in Spokane, Washington, on suspicion of planting a bomb, which if detonated would have killed hundreds of people, at a Martin Luther King Day celebration. Harpham had served in the army for two years in the mid-1990s.

There are undoubtedly many other Wade's out there, battle-hardened and, thanks to the US military, trained in using the most sophisticated weaponry known to man. The Okalama City bombing, the deadliest case of domestic terrorism prior to September 11, was carried out by decorated Gulf War veteran Timothy McVeigh in 1995. More recently, Nidal Malik Hasan, the alleged Fort Hood shooter who killed 13 fellow soldiers, comes to mind, as does Jared Loughner, who shot dead six people in Arizona and grievously wounded Rep. Gabrielle Giffords. Loughner, who tried to enter the military not long before his shooting spree, was only disallowed after telling them that he had used marijuana — something he could have easily lied about, as many others surely have. When the barriers to entry to the US military are so flimsy, it's only a matter of time before we hear about the next tragedy.

[mattkennard]

In the Army Now: Gangs, Nazis & the Mentally Ill: Irregular Army review

Published: American Conservative (8 April 2013)

  Since the Vietnam War, America’s more successful interventions have been brief. That war engendered a legitimacy crisis in the United States military. Domestically, large numbers of young men resisted the draft or took advantage of deferments, but conscription still kept the armed forces supplied with men. In Vietnam, the military was riven by drug use, racial strife, and “fragging”—the assassination of unpopular officers by their troops. Operation Desert Storm in 1991 may be a model for a successful large-scale intervention post-Vietnam: the coalition allied with the United States dropped some bombs and sent an overwhelming ground force; Saddam capitulated while Lee Greenwood provided the soundtrack. If one ignores pesky issues such as the fate of Iraqi Kurds who were encouraged to rebel and the blowback from stationing U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia, the first Gulf War was a big success.

The United States fares worse when our goals are more ambitious and the enemy doesn’t quickly fold. When a volunteer army becomes bogged down in an unpopular war, protesters don’t fill the streets the way they did in 1969, and soldiers don’t “frag” their officers—people simply stop joining the military. The quest to fill that enlistment gap is where the investigative work of English journalist Matt Kennard comes in. In Irregular Army, Kennard documents a series of disturbing trends in the military: lowered standards, inadequately treated mental-health and substance-abuse problems, and the enlistment and retention of white supremacists, Nazis, and gang members.

Irregular Army begins with an investigation of undesirable elements who in years past would have had difficulty entering and staying in the military, such as racists and Nazi skinheads. Such extremists have made it into the military before—I briefly served in the Marine Corps in 1986 with someone who described himself as a racist skinhead—but Kennard provides background on how today the military often looks the other way to keep the ranks filled. He interviewed one neo-Nazi who had tattoos (a Celtic Cross and a Nordic warrior) that recruiters are supposed to flag. Forrest Fogarty’s story somewhat undercuts Kennard’s thesis, however, since he actually joined the Army prior to the War on Terror. He is something of a celebrity as the leader of the skinhead band Attack; he took leave in 2004 to play two concerts in Dresden, Germany. A bitter former girlfriend alerted the military to his leanings by sending pictures of him at neo-Nazi events, but that didn’t derail his military career. After his discharge the Southern Poverty Law Center intervened to keep him out of a job with a private military contractor.

Kennard’s confused timeline indicates that the seeds of the extremist infiltration problem existed before the Iraq War descended into a quagmire, although figures he received from the Department of Defense indicate that the military almost stopped the policy of denying reenlistment to undesirables at the height of the Iraq occupation, with the number of rejections falling from 4,000 in 1994 to a mere 81 in 2006.

Neo-Nazis have been joined in the military by members of African-American and Latino gangs. This came to light in an ugly and frightening fashion in 2005, when soldiers who were also members of the Chicago-based Gangster Disciples beat an Army sergeant to death in an initiation gone awry while stationed in Germany. Tracking gang membership in the military is difficult, as there is no specific prohibition against belonging to a gang, and according to Kennard the FBI “cannot gauge the problem of criminal gangs in the country’s fighting forces because the military [has] refused to report gang activity.” While the killing is the most disturbing gang-related incident reported in Irregular Army, Kennard reproduces numerous photos of gang graffiti in Iraq and military personnel flashing gang symbols, indicating that the 2005 incident was not simply a fluke.

One disturbing commonality between gang members and neo-Nazis is the possibility that they look upon the military as a training ground for their own private wars. Kennard quotes Dennis Mahon, a National Guard veteran with ties to various extremist organizations, who says, “the soldiers learn from unconventional warfare in Iraq and they realize that they can use that type of warfare in America and it’s impossible to stop.” Mahon is now serving time for a bombing in Arizona. Similarly, Kennard quotes an anonymous FBI agent suggesting that gangs may use the military for training purposes, noting that they would “get great weapons training… and access to weapons and arms, and be able to use that knowledge.”

Although the idea of the government training violent extremists and criminal gangs in the art of war is disturbing, it is only one upshot of the personnel crisis that has plagued the military in recent years. The tragic story of Specialist Travis Virgadamo illustrates another. Virgadamo displayed disturbing signs while on leave from Iraq in 2007. Instead of going AWOL as he contemplated, he returned to service,

But his superiors obviously knew something was wrong as they placed him on suicide watch and removed the bolt from his rifle, rendering it useless. He was given more pedestrian desk jobs as he tried to sort out his head. But, inexplicably, Virgadamo was cleared for combat the following month, and on the night of August 30, 2007, was given his bolt back. Three hours later he walked out of his barracks and shot himself in the head.

Suicides among soldiers and veterans reached epidemic proportions in the later years of the War on Terror. Viragadamo was one of 115 troops to commit suicide in 2007, a number that would increase to 245 in 2009. Irregular Army features several stories of soldiers who should have been routed into treatment but were instead sent back to battle, often with a prescription for Prozac or other antidepressants. The problem is severe enough that it would be inaccurate to describe troops with mental health issues as slipping through the cracks—they are plummeting through a chasm. Suicide isn’t the only concern when troops are pushed beyond the breaking point; they also commit crimes at home and atrocities abroad.

One rogue soldier who caused the Army and the government a great deal of stress in the last few years would likely have been rejected had the military not been desperate for warm bodies. Bradley Manning had a very troubled entry into the service. Kennard writes that Manning “was in such a disturbed mental state before his deployment that he wet himself, threw furniture around, shouted at his commanding officer, and underwent regular psychiatric evaluations.” He made it through, in spite of his problems, as Kennard quotes American Conservativecontributor Chase Madar, because of the Army’s “desperation for soldiers with IT and analytic skills during its historic low in recruitment.”

“Desperation” is the key word, and Kennard documents a variety of other ways in which the military’s desperation has led to declining standards of recruitment. Overweight, less intelligent, or older recruits are not as extreme risks as Nazis, but they still present challenges. Perhaps the most disturbing large-scale change has been the rise in age limits. Young people are a better fit for military service because they both possess more physical endurance and are more malleable than older people, but in 2006 the Pentagon raised the maximum age for new recruits from 35 to 40 and shortly thereafter to 42. Kennard quotes one solider saying that “the type of training they receive is pretty much geared in one direction and focused on 18- and 20-year-olds just coming in.” The Army has compensated by lowering physical standards for older recruits, but as Kennard notes, war doesn’t discriminate: “older recruits… were at much greater risk of death and injury. In June 2010 it was reported that 566, or 12.1 percent, of the deaths in the War on Terror had been suffered by over-thirty-fives, a figure which dwarfed their representation in the fighting force.”

Kennard examines attempts to ameliorate the recruitment crisis, including the opening of a “Patriot Academy” on a National Guard base for the purpose of educating and giving diplomas to would-be soldiers who are short of credits for high-school graduation. The No Child Left Behind law, passed before the War on Terror, gave a gift to military recruiters in the form of access to contact information for high school students from institutions receiving aid under the bill.

The recruiting crisis has abated in recent years due to the weak economy and the drawdown in Iraq, but military needs still cannot be met without the now necessary aid of mercenaries, lately euphemized as “private military contractors.” Kennard notes that “it was impossible to do without them: the broken military could not long stand on its own two feet.”

Irregular Army goes into great narrative detail to illustrate an unfolding disaster that has engulfed the U.S. military, particularly the Army and Marine Corps. My biggest criticism of Kennard’s book is that it desperately needs charts, graphs, and timelines. For a book whose thesis has to establish that something went horribly wrong circa 2005-2006, it is often difficult to tell when particular events occurred. Neo-Nazi Forest Fogarty is Kennard’s star witness, but it is difficult to figure out that Fogarty actually joined the Army well before the War on Terror, which is also true of some of the others that Kennard profiles. Yet even if one concedes that some of these problems have antecedents before 9/11, Kennard still demonstrates a serious weakness in America’s ability to recruit a long- or even medium-term occupying force. He makes an obvious point that should be chiseled into the walls of the Pentagon: American culture is not conducive to maintaining a force to occupy another country. Policymakers should take heed—it is preferable that America’s next occupying force not be brought into existence at all, but if it must be, it shouldn’t come draped in Nazi regalia.

Clark Stooksbury writes from Knoxville, Tennessee.

[mattkennard]

Irregular Army: War Criminals

Published: Morning Star (16 October 2012)

In 2005, when the US Army Recruiting Command missed recruitment numbers by the largest margin since 1979, the army took in 21,880 new soldiers - 17 per cent of recruits - on a waiver. That's more than an entire infantry division.

The situation had become so bad by 2007 that nearly one in five recruits entered the army courtesy of a waiver for a felony or misdemeanour, representing a 42 per cent increase in the use of waivers since 2000.

The Department of Justice cites losing your "right" to serve in the military as one consequence of a felony conviction. "Exceptions to the prohibition on military enlistment ... may be authorized by the Secretary of the affected branch of the service in meritorious cases," says the guidance.

In military jargon these "meritorious cases" warrant what are called "moral waivers."

In 2007 it published information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act which led it to call the proliferation of ex-cons in the military a "major recruitment trend" which it said was "a cause, effect, or even correction of the military's apparent recruitment problem."

It found the number of convicted felons enlisting in the US military nearly doubled in two years, from 824 in 2004 to 1,605 in 2006.

In that period a total of 4,230 convicted felons were enlisted in the military, including people guilty of rape and murder.

On top of this, 43,977 soldiers signed up who had been found guilty of a serious misdemeanour, which includes assault.

Another 58,561 had drug-related convictions, but all were handed a gun and sent off to the Middle East. "The fact that the military has allowed more than 100,000 people with such troubled pasts to join its ranks over the past three years illustrates the problem we're having meeting our military needs in this time of war," said Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Centre at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Concerned veterans' groups picked up on the waiver system and urged the military to offer different incentives to recruits to end the necessity for the practice - such as an updated version of the GI Bill, which had provided education training to WWII veterans or better health care for reservists.

"These are safer strategies for attracting a solid core of defenders for our country," said Perry Jefferies, the veterans' outreach director for Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America.

"The phrase 'moral waivers' euphemises the real problem," he added, "which is that some of these new soldiers are dangerous criminals.

"It is hard to capture the true effect of a violent criminal mixed into a unit with no warning and then put under tremendous stress."

Worried veterans were gaining support within Congress but as usual it was left to one courageous lawmaker to blaze a trail.

On this issue it was Representative Henry A Waxman, who in his position as chairman of the house oversight and government reform committee requested details from the Pentagon on the number of service members with felony convictions, information previously withheld from the public.

The data showed that army waivers for felony convictions had more than doubled in a year, from 249 waivers in 2006 to 511 in 2007, while the marines' waivers increased from 208 to 350 in the same period.

In a letter to David Chu, the Under Secretary of Defence for Personnel and Readiness, Waxman wrote: "The data you provided the Committee shows that there was a rapid rise in 2007 in the number of waivers the Army and Marine Corps granted to recruits convicted of serious felonies, such as aggravated assault and burglary. Some recruits were even granted waivers for felony convictions involving sexual assault and terrorist threats." Two involved planned domestic bomb attacks.

These convictions also included 87 waivers for those convicted of assault and maiming, sometimes with a dangerous weapon.

The marines also gave a number of waivers to those convicted of rape, sexual assault, incest and other sex crimes.

Another lawmaker with his finger on the pulse was Representative Marty Meehan who, along with Representative Waxman was trying to get more information from the Pentagon.

"The data is crystal clear," he said. "Our armed forces are under incredible strain and the only way that they can fill their recruiting quotas is by lowering their standards. By lowering standards, we are endangering the rest of our armed forces and sending the wrong message to potential recruits across the country."

This unraveling of the US military's moral fibre was a large factor in the rise in criminal acts within the military. During the "war on terror," for example, one in three female soldiers reported being victims of some form of sexual assault while in service, dwarfing the one in six women in the civilian world.

The military was on the back foot trying to explain this one away. Army Lieutenant Colonel Jonathan Withington, a Pentagon spokesman, retaliated by saying that waivers "are used judiciously and granted only after a thorough review," adding, "The department strives to maintain high standards ensuring that military recruits surpass the overall qualifications of the contemporary American youth population."

Others spun it as a civil rights issue. "The thing is, you've got to give people an opportunity to serve," said Lieutenant General James D Thurman, the army's operations chief. "We are growing the army fast, there are some waivers ... it hasn't alarmed us yet."

For some recruiters and commanders it seems soldiers with criminal records were also viewed kindly because as proven "risk-takers" they were more likely to succeed in combat.

"Gang members, ex-cons, extremists, they are all more 'war-like' than your average soldier - there's no doubt that's attractive to the military, it's definitely a factor," Hunter Glass told me.

Douglas Smith of Army Recruiting Command also put forward the thesis that because there "are more and more young people getting caught up in the criminal justice system than in the past," the US military has had to become more lenient to compensate. This explanation should not be dismissed. The growing numbers of Americans put behind bars was a scandal in itself.

In 2008, it was found that one in 100 adult Americans was actually behind bars as the prison population ballooned to 1.6 million, the highest in the country's history.

It was particularly acute among those segments of the population which have traditionally proven the trustiest military fodder.

One in every 36 Hispanics was behind bars while one in nine black men between 20 and 34 was also locked up.

To the military brass, disenfranchising vast swathes of individuals from ethnic minorities didn't make any sense - now, the government wouldn't just lock you up, it would send you to war afterward.

It was a straight path, made even smoother by the fact that a felony conviction in itself makes finding work very hard - a "death sentence" according to DC Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton.

A newly open military became the best option for a generation of disenfranchised and desperate Americans for advancement, educational opportunities and vocational training.

[mattkennard]

Irregular Army on Russia Today (14 June 2012)

[mattkennard]

America's military: a far-right threat

Published: Open Democracy (25 September 2012)

A tragic incident in August 2012 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin left six innocent worshippers murdered in cold blood. The killings were hideous and mindless acts of murder motivated by hate and racism. Unfortunately, for those of us who have been watching and investigating the rise of the far-right in the United States, particularly the mushrooming problem within its armed forces, there was nothing random about it. Many have been predicting for years that something like this would happen. The recent unearthing of a violent militia operating at Fort Stewart in Georgia, which was allegedly planning to assassinate the US president, has emphasised the threat. The Wisconsin shooter, neo-Nazi army veteran Wade Michael Page, was merely one of many far-right radicals who have used the US military over the past two decades to gain access to the highest-grade weaponry in the world, alongside attendant training. The Springfield semi-automatic 9mm handgun used by Page in Oak Creek is very similar to the Beretta M9 which is the civilian version of the pistol issued by the US military. And neo-Nazi veterans, like Page, are explicit about wanting to use their new military skills in the coming race war - often called “Rahowa” in extremist circles - which they believe (and hope) will ignite in the US in the near future. Page’s heavy-metal white-power band, called End Apathy, was itself a call to arms. The most shocking part of Page’s story is that he was completely open about his neo-Nazi views while serving in the army during the 1990s. Page was no rookie army private either - he was assigned to the esteemed psychological operations (“psych-ops”) branch, a kind of offensive intelligence service.  But despite this senior status, the independent American military newspaper Stars & Stripes, writes that Page was “steeped in white supremacy during his army days and spouted his racist views on the job as a soldier.”  This is especially worrying considering Page served from 1992-98. The latter part of this period putatively witnessed the US military taking a strong stand against white supremacism within the ranks after neo-Nazi and active-duty paratrooper James Burmeister murdered an African-American couple near Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in 1995. It is doubtful that much changed in reality. What is certain, however, is that the impunity afforded to violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists by the US military hit a new high during the “war on terror”. My new book Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror (Verso, 2012) includes extensive interviews with neo-Nazi veterans as well and leaders of the far-right movement, all of whom reported to me that the US military was basically running an open-door policy on far-right radicals during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. An internal Pentagon report I dug up noted that by 2005, “The military [had] a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy pertaining to extremism.” In reality there was not even any need for secrecy: it could be more accurately described as an “ask, tell” policy. The same report said screening for racist tattoos - ostensibly banned by the US military - was basically non-existent in the same period. Wade himself was covered in white-supremacist tattoos. The crystal rule  In March 2008, I went to Tampa, Florida, to interview Forrest Fogarty. Like Page, he is a neo-Nazi; like Page, he is part of the Hammerskins, probably the most violent skinhead group in the US; like Page, he served in the US military (in Fogarty’s case in Iraq from 2004-05); and like Page, he is the lead singer in a neo-Nazi rock band (Fogarty’s is called Attack). Fogarty had in fact signed up to the US army, complete with racist tattoos, in 1997, around the same time Page was denied re-enlistment. Fogarty told me bluntly how his command as well as his fellow soldiers had been fully aware of his neo-Nazi ideology before and during their deployment in Iraq. while stationed in Iraq. They had done nothing about it. In fact, Fogarty was feted because of his “war-like” attitude. “They all knew in my unit”, he told me. “They would always kid around and say, ‘Hey, you’re that skinhead!’” Did anyone rat on you, I asked. “No, I was hardcore, I would volunteer for all the hardest missions, and they were like: ‘Let Fogarty go’. You know what I mean, they didn’t want to get rid of me.” Fogarty’s story is not singular. The US military have, in fact, always been ambiguous in their regulation concerning enlisted neo-Nazis and white supremacists, precisely so that in times of chronic troops needs, as was the case during the “war on terror” they would have enough leeway to allow these radicals to keep fighting for the flag.  For example, in Army Command Policy (the rulebook for the army revised in May 2002), the guideline for commanders is that: "Participation in extremist organisations and activities by army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service." But a word such as "inconsistent" is ambiguous enough to be interpreted in any way a commander chooses. Why not “prohibited”? On the back of this tragedy, the US military must make its regulations very clear: racist extremists are not accepted in any form within the armed forces. If connections with or membership of far-right groups is found, that should constitute a lifetime ban from service for that individual.  If a racist tattoo is found, that also must unambiguously be a bar to enlistment; there must no longer be an option to have it removed or modified. (I heard of one recruit turning a swastika into a sun-wheel and being sent off to Iraq.) Any individual with a racist tattoo must also have a lifetime ban on service. These are easy regulatory changes to make - if the will is there. In terms of futureattacks, it could already be too late. The ticking bomb During the “war on terror” even the extant regulatory structure, thin at best, was completely scorched. When the war in Iraq was peaking in the period around 2005, the US military had to all intents and purposes broken. It could no longer recruit the soldiers it needed to populate the war’s frontlines; in fact, in 2005 it missed its recruitment targets by the largest margin since 1979, when the US was still afflicted with so-called “Vietnam syndrome”, which had turned many Americans off military service.  In the same period, the US military was also finding it hard to retain the soldiers it serving in the middle east. At a Senate hearing in March 2005, General Richard A Cody expressed his concerns publicly: “What keeps me awake at night is what will this all-volunteer force look like in 2007.” His insomnia, as it turned out, was more than warranted. In reality, the US military needed conscription - but it was too unpopular. Instead, the George W Bush administration turned the country’s fighting force into a social experiment. To cope with the massive shortfall in troops, the US military (with the express approval of defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld) explicitly loosened requirements for enlistment age (pushed up to 42 years-old by 2006), body-weight, high-school diplomas, as well as for other groups that were deemed not too shocking for the American public. More quietly, however, groups which would have caused much more controversy amongst the domestic population (as well as the people occupied by the US military) were granted easier entrance - people convicted of felonies, including assault, rape and other serious crimes; members of some of the most violent and powerful gangs in the US, like the Gangster Disciples out of Chicago; and, yes, violent neo-Nazis and white supremacists.  Even Islamic fundamentalists like Nidal Malik Hasan, who is alleged to have killed thirteen  of his fellow soldiers at Fort Bragg in November 2009, was allowed to continue serving, even though the FBI and the military’s investigative branch discovered he had sent more than a dozen solicitous emails to the extremist Islamist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki (who was eventually assassinated on orders of the Barack Obama administration in 2011). A resulting Senate reportfound that Hasan had been a “ticking time-bomb” and senator Joe Lieberman said the massacre at Fort Bragg “could have, and should have, been prevented”. Many more ticking time-bombs - unlike Hasan and Wade not yet detonated - are now settling back home after a decade of hard combat-training courtesy of the US military. The open-door cost  A number of groups and individuals implored the US military and politicians in Congress to take this problem seriously during the “war on terror” They included the anti-racist group the Southern Poverty Law Center, which constantly warned(in ways that now look prophetic) of what could happen if these radicals were allowed to stay in the military; military investigators themselves, such as defence-department gang detective Scott Barfield, who warned of neo-Nazis flourishing in Baghdad; and active duty personnel like Sgt Jeffrey Stoleson, who raised the issue of rampant gang activity in Iraq.  Both these men - and many other whistleblowers - were shunned, then forced out of their jobs, after they sounded the alarm. The Pentagon brass, down to the non-commissioned officers on the ground, did not want to be exposed, and protected itself by targeting the messengers every time. I myself contacted the US Senate committee on the armed forces (when it was headed by senators John McCain and Carl Levin) to ask what they were doing about this burgeoning problem. I was refused an interview and merely told: “The Committee doesn’t have any information that would indicate this is a particular problem.” But the US military over the past twenty years - and particularly so during the “war on terror” when it turned into a free-for-all - has been incubating a monster which is now threatening to grievously harm the domestic population. What has been done to the peoples of Iraq and Afghanistan since the wars there were launched because of this open-door policy on all sorts of unsavoury groups is also painful to contemplate.  Many of the worst reported atrocities committed by American troops during the “war on terror” - from the Mahmudiyah massacre to the Abu Ghraib torture scandal - can be linked directly to loosening regulations on extremists, gangs, and the mentally ill. This is a military that was once the envy of the world, but thanks to the recklessness of the Pentagon - and particularly its implacable ideologue Donald Rumsfeld - it is now a tinderbox waiting to blow.

[mattkennard]

Military Ignores the Hate in Its Ranks

Published: New York Times (12 August 2012)

Neo-Nazi elements have been on the rise in the United States over the past decade, and law enforcement has yet to take the threat seriously. When individuals have raised the issue they have often been accused of over-hyping or inventing a threat and distracting from America’s central mission: fighting Islamic fundamentalism.

Most worryingly, the U.S. military, and particularly its investigative branch, hasaverted its gaze from the growing problem within its ranks.

The military ripped up the thin regulations it had on far-right radicals as it struggled to stock its fighting force with sufficient numbers of soldiers for the war on terrorism.

When a Department of Homeland Security report warned in 2009 of the threat posed by far-right extremism, Secretary Janet Napolitano apologized to veterans for the report’s imputation that those with military experience were especially susceptible to solicitations from far-right groups.

Daryl Johnson, the analyst who wrote the report, was put out to pasture after a ferocious backlash from department officials, the military and some politicians on Capitol Hill. Johnson’s clarion call now looks increasingly prescient.

The military ripped up the thin regulations it had on far-right radicals as it struggledto stock its fighting force with sufficient numbers of soldiers for the war on terrorism.

The armed forces should have known better after terrorist attacks like the Oklahoma City bombing, which was carried out by its extremist veterans. The significant number of white supremacist veterans now back in the United States, battle hardened and with weapons training gained in Iraq and Afghanistan, should scare every American.

[mattkennard]

Irregular Army on Democracy Now! (August 9 2012)

[mattkennard]

Irregular Army on Al Jazeera (25 August 2012)