PRAGOTI

“I find it very disconcerting that there are high-level military officials that are unaware of this growing problem. This is a serious issue that deserves serious attention from the Pentagon brass.”

Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Littleton) asking General David Petraeus about the infiltration of American gangs into the United States military during a hearing on U.S. progress in Iraq on April 9th 2008.

Forrest Fogarty (pictured below, showing off a stab wound that he claims was inflicted by 'communist' SHARP member) was 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi.

After bullying at the hands of black and Mexican children at high school in Los Angeles, his adolescent rage needed an outlet. He turned to the three passions that would sustain him to the present day: the skinhead movement, hardcore violence and neo-Nazi punk music.

At 15 he moved from LA to downtown Tampa, Fl, with his father, a celebrated Vietnam veteran, and started at Leto Public High in the sunny climes of Hillsborough County. Within a year he had been kicked out. His incessant fighting and penchant for spouting his Hitler-inspired racism was too much for the school authorities to permit.

He never went back to education and forged an identity through immersion in the hate-filled music of the neo-Nazi movement. He became obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of the British skinhead band Screwdriver and at 16 got the their album cover – a Viking carrying a staff – tattooed all the way up his left forearm. Soon after he had started his own Nazi band, Attack.

For the next eight years he drifted through dead-end jobs in construction and landscaping. He began hanging out with the National Alliance, one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the U.S. at the time, and became a member.

But construction wasn’t what he wanted to do; Fogarty had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior. In 1997 he decided to act on it. He resolved to do what two generations of Fogarty’s had done before him: join the military.

Letting everybody in

The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the U.S. military reported back as far as the Korean and Vietnam wars, possibly before. The leaders in the movement have often encouraged members to sign up in an effort to receive combat and weapons training to bring to the Race War domestically.

The U.S. military command in turn has periodically introduced legislation and guidelines in an effort to stifle the infiltration of white supremacists and neo-Nazis into their ranks.

Since September 11th 2001 and the two-front war in Afghanistan and Iraq, this fraught relationship has taken a new turn. In January 2008, there were 158,000 U.S. military personnel in Iraq, with 17,000 in Afghanistan. In all, nearly a million individuals have served in both wars.

In 2005 the army missed their enlistment targets by the largest margin since 1979. This strain on the army in terms of maintaining these huge troop levels has caused their enlistment standards to slip. From educational attainment to criminal records, less is now asked. According to every white supremacist and neo-Nazi organization I talked to in the U.S. – which has included over a dozen different groups – this new laxness has included the military attitude to far-right extremists as well.

Tom Metzger is one of the Godfathers of the neo-Nazi movement in the U.S. The former Grand Wizard of the KKK and the current leader of the White Aryan Resistance (W.A.R), he has seen the ebbing and flowing of the military attitude to far-right extremists over the past forty years.

“Now they are letting everybody in,” he says. “All the gang-bangers, all the blacks, Mexicans, and white supremacists. I would say that 10% of army and marines –they are not in the Navy and Air force so much – are racist extremists of some variety.”

Erich Gliebe, the chairman of one of the most important neo-Nazi groups in the United States, the National Alliance, agrees. “I've heard the military have relaxed the regulations from a couple of members that are in there,” he says. “I think if a person wants to get into the military with just saying that they are in the National Alliance now that they can. In 2008, with the declining number of troops, I don't think they are as picky as they used to be.”

Securing a future for white children

And these same extremist groups are taking advantage. The National Socialist Movement (NSM) is explicitly interested in using the military to gain training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military,” says Lt. Charles Wilson, spokesman for the NSM. “We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government.”

Lt. Wilson says the party has 190 members currently serving in the military. “Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy,” he says. “Our military doesn’t agree with our political beliefs, they are not supposed to be in the military, but they’re there, in ever greater numbers.”

Billy Roper, who used to be part of National Alliance, runs White Revolution which has close to 500 members. “A number of skinheads have gone into armed forces for education, college, tuition, and the military training provided,” he says. “They are using it to secure the future for white children. Anyone in the movement overseas knows they are getting training and financial help. America began in bloody revolution and it might end that way.”

A subjective decision

Fogarty knew back in 1997 the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy racist tattoos remained the biggest indicator of extremism for a recruiter.

Army Regulation Pamphlet 600-15, published in 2000, notes that, “Extremist groups frequently use tattoos to show group association.” It continues: “Skinheads frequently use tattoos and symbols of lightning bolts, skulls, Nazi swastikas, eagles, and Nordic warriors.”

It instructs recruiters that if a soldier refuses to be rehabilitated – which they state as removing the tattoo – disciplinary actions including discharge should be taken.

I met with Fogarty twice in his hometown of Tampa, Fl. On one evening we chatted at his favourite dive on the side of a highway. On another occasion, we spent a rainy day trudging around Tampa’s Lowry Zoo with his two children, 13 and 9.

On the telephone before we meet at the Winghouse Bar & Grill, he tells me I will recognize him, even though I’ve never seen a picture. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he says, laughing. And he is right.

With his tightly cropped hair, ‘Wife beater’ vest, and muscular arms covered with tattoos – ranging from the Screwdriver album piece to the Celtic cross – he is a poster-boy skinhead. “Everyone around here knows I’m a skinhead,” he reassures me.

“I’m completely public about being a racist and Nazi,” he says. “I get into fights maybe twice a month, because some n*****s will get pissed off with it.” Every time a black person enters the bar, he emits a hiss of disapproval.

“I just don’t want to be around them,” he tells me. “I don’t want to look at them, I don’t want them near me, I don’t want to smell them. And people say, ‘Oh people who are racialist you’ve never hung around black people’… bullshit, I’ve showered with them, I’ve lived with them, I don’t like them… they’re fucking savages, they’re tribal motherfuckers, they are different to us, how they think, how they conduct themselves.”

Despite his vitriolic racism, Fogarty wasn’t worried about not being allowed into the army. Military protocol stipulates that each new recruit with suspicious tattoos must write an explanation about the divinity and meaning of their body art. Fogarty’s are quite clearly the kind written about in ARP 600-15 – a Nordic warrior, and a Celtic cross. But this didn’t hinder him. ““They just told me to write an explanation of each tattoo and I made up some stuff and that was that,” he says. Fogarty was enlisted and stationed in the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, GA, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River.

This happened in 1997 even before the new military attitude to tattoos really took hold as troops were needed ever more desperately. It shows that regulations were loose before and have got even looser. There is reason to believe that now more Fogarty’s are getting through, as the commanders in the army hierarchy admit to a liberalism that wasn’t in place previously.

S. Douglas Smith is the Public Affairs Officer at the Department of the Army. “We don't exclude people from the army based on their thoughts,” he says. “We exclude based on behavior. But a tattoo of an offensive nature, racial, sexual, or extremist might be a reason for them not to be in the military.” [Italics added].

“The tattoo is a relatively subjective decision,” he continued. “We try to educate recruiters on what extremist tattoos, but it's going to depend on the recruiters’ knowledge of tattoos.”

As evidenced by a random pool of recruitment centers I contacted, the level of awareness is low to minimal now. I spoke to five randomly selected stations around the U.S pretending to be a prospective soldier, with the caveat I had a pair of ‘SS bolts’ on my arm. Despite being outlined in AR 600-15 as a tattoo to watch all the recruiters did not even know what it was.

The recruiter at Houston Alief station hadn’t heard of them. “I don’t know what they are; you’ll have to come in. They might be OK, might not be OK,” she said.

At Waldo in Kansas City the recruiter was ambiguous. “I’m not saying it means you can’t get in,” he said.

In March 2006 regulations on tattoos were changed. But they were loosened on non-extremist tattoos so that now body art covering the hands, neck and face would be permitted. There was no official acknowledgement of a relaxation of the regulation on extremist tattoos, although, according to extremist groups and the anti-racist organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, this has been implicitly applied.

Smith now says that a racist tattoo in itself shouldn’t bar enlistment. “A [racist] tattoo in and of itself is not bar to enlistment, it's behavior that would prohibit someone serving or enlisting. There are 1st amendment rights… The concept seems to be if the tattoo is so patently offensive that it would cause disruption it could require action.”

Even a swastika might get through. “A swastika would trigger questions, but again if the gentlemen said, “I like the way swastika looked,” and had clean criminal record, it's possible we would allow that person in.”

Billy Roper, of White Revolution, which has close to 500 members, agrees. “We have some members in the military. There’s a few in the 101st Airborne, some at Fort Campbell, and some marines in Iraq.”

“There’s about 12 in there, some of them have tattoos, because anyone can walk in and get in the military now.” Roper says he knew two members who had swastikas and were barred but turned them into sun wheels and the military allowed them back in.

Willem Herring, of the National Socialist Movement, which proudly displays swastikas on all their merchandise, says that he doesn’t believe swastikas are a problem at all. “I do believe you can join the service with tattoos,” he says. “I'm sure you can join with a swastika, there's a big gang problem in the armed forces right now, if you went to a recruitment station with a swastika I don't think they would stop you, it would be noted in your record.”

Dennis Mahon has also been on the extremist scene for decades and had links with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh. He served in the National Guard for a number of years, and is now in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. “I know two people in the military – one in Marines and one in the army. One has done two tours of Iraq,” he says. “They are so desperate at the moment; they are going to let you in with a small swastika. If you are an obvious racist and shoot niggers and queers you might find it difficult, but generally you are fine.”

“I’ve got reports from some of my sources in the military,” he continues. “They say they are getting a lot more skinhead types, quasi-racists, more tattoos; essentially they want guys that want to kill. In Iraq you don’t know who your enemies are, there’s no frontline.”

Army rules

As with all rules, there are ways to bend them, and it is conceivable that some neo-Nazis and white supremacists might have got through as Mahon attests. For this reason, once inside the army, there is a set of rules that govern behavior to help root them out.

The initial Department of Defense Directive 1325.6 “Guidelines for Handling Dissent and Protest Activities Among Members of the Armed Forces” was aimed at curbing the influence of anti-Vietnam dissidents within the military. It prohibited the publishing of “underground” newspapers, the formation of military unions, and other actions that could be used by anti-war protestors to further their agenda.

This confusing mishmash legislation was the extent of provisions until 1986 when reports surfaced of the Army and Marine Corps members participating in Ku Klux Klan activities. This forced the Secretary of Defense at the time, Caspar Weinberger, to make a statement stipulating that “Military personnel… must reject participation in [supremacist] organizations.

The 1986 policy change was modified again in 1996 when a paragraph was added to DOD Directive 1325.6 that dealt specifically for the first time with extremist – i.e. white supremacist and neo-Nazi – groups. It explicitly “prohibited activities” by these groups in the military. This ruling came after the murder in 1996 of two African American soldiers by racists at Fort Bragg, NC. The murders led to an investigation that ultimately revealed 22 soldiers at Fort Bragg with known extremist tendencies. Ironically, Fogarty was enlisted the year after.

The Army tome which deals with all the multifarious obligations that a soldier must uphold in the military is called AR 600-20, or “Army Command Policy”. It devotes one of 125 pages to the problem of extremism, and states the policy generally as: “Participation in extremist organizations and activities by Army personnel is inconsistent with the responsibilities of military service”.

Specifically, soldiers are prohibited from:

-Participating in public demonstrations or rallies
-Attending meetings or activities
-Fund-raising
-Recruitment or training
-Taking a visible leadership role
-Distributing literature

There is no mention that membership itself is prohibited; it is the public display of allegiance that is barred. The options available to a Commander should these rules be transgressed are involuntary separation, reclassification action or bar to reenlistment actions, or other administrative or disciplinary action ‘deemed appropriate’ by the Commander.

I’m a great soldier, they knew that

Once Fogarty was at Fort Stewart the army clearly had many avenues to rectify their mistake in letting him through the recruitment process. And they got a helping hand from an unlikely source not long after. Fogarty was dragged away from his girlfriend when he was positioned in Georgia. And the woman, who would later be the mother of Fogarty’s first child, born in 1999, grew angry. “She hated that I was in the military,” he says. Her anger became so acute that, according to Fogarty, she sent a dossier of pictures to his military command that showed him at white supremacist and neo-Nazi rallies, as well as performing his racist rock for Attack.

“They hauled me before some sort of committee, and showed me the pictures and asked me what they were. I just denied it and said my girlfriend was a spiteful bitch, which is true.

“They knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier, and they knew that.”

The person heading the investigation was Command Sgt. Maj. Tommy Dunn. I contacted him and he claimed he couldn’t remember who Sgt. Fogarty was. “It’s funny,” says Fogarty when I tell him, “he gave me medals and everything.”

“He [Command Sgt. Maj. Dunn] used to say to me, ‘The only reason I like you is you’re racist!’” says Fogarty. Even Colonel Todd Wood, the highest authority at the military installation, doted on him, according to Fogarty. Was it because they wanted to retain good fighters? “Yes exactly,” says Fogarty. “Colonel Wood didn’t know [about his racism], but they didn’t want me to get out, they were taking me to dinner, taking me and my wife out.” Col Wood was killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq in October 2005.

The efforts of Fogarty’s girlfriend went unheeded despite her efforts to alert the military, and Fogarty continued in the reserve system, until finally, in 2004, he was sent where he had always wanted to go: Iraq. “I’m a fighter, I love combat, I wanted to be in the action,” he says. At the time he was interviewed at Fort Stewart by the St. Petersburg Times. There was no mention of his Nazism. “[W]e didn't come over here to hang out at Fort Stewart,” Forrest told them.

His wish was granted in 2004 when he was handed a gun and became part of the military police contingent in Iraq. Before he left, Forrest joined the Hammerskin Nation – described by the Anti-Defamation League as the “the most violent and best-organized neo-Nazi skinhead group in the United States.” Forrest spent his two years in Iraq as a probate for the Hammerskin Nation, this period of probation being a method the group use to protect against infiltration. On his return to the United States, he was made a fully-fledged Hammerskin.

I pulled the trigger and watched you die

Fogarty was in Iraq from 2004 to 2005. He was mostly guarding convoys as part of the military police. “I was always on the move,” he says. “Some of my actions led to the deaths of Arabs.” Fogarty says he shot at people but he can’t know how many he killed because he was moving, they never stopped. “If you stopped you’d get hit back,” he says.

“It’s a big rush,” he says. “It changes a human being. I never had any kill counts, some soldiers do.”

Fogarty gives me the latest Attack album, “Survival”. The jacket is a picture of him in military fatigues while in Iraq and his songs give a clear indication of his thoughts on his time there. “Eye For An Eye” opens with the lines: “A slow painful death I strive/ Why are you still alive?” The chorus includes the lines: “It’s our turn to watch you bleed/ It’s our turn to tear you limb from limb… We will leave no survivors of this bloody war.”

“In Battle” includes the lines “In battle there are no laws… Its kill or be killed, die with the rest… Relief came when I pulled the trigger and watched you die/ I can’t stop laughing everytime I remember you start to cry/ Watch you cry!”

“To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody,” he says at Lowry Zoo. “For the simple fact I’ve served over there and seen how they live. They’re just a backward people… them and the Jews are just disgusting people as far as I’m concerned, their customs, everything to do with the Middle East is just repugnant to me.”

But he believes the war can be won. “You have to break these people’s will to fight, the only reason they are fighting is that there is some sort of profit to it, or its not that bad, that the Americans are not going to do what they did in World War Two and kill everybody.”

Would he nuke Baghdad? “Fuck yeah! ... If we had occupying force cracking down on spitting on sidewalk would you spit on sidewalk if they shot you in the head for it? Go in with iron-fist, this is how you will live, if you don’t we’ll kill you… Quit pussy footing around, listen to us or die.”

Fogarty maintains that a good portion of those around him were aware of his neo-Nazism. “They all knew in my unit, to a point,” he says. “They only knew when I let them know, they would always kid around and say, “Hey, you’re that skinhead!”

Did anyone rat on him? “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 was confident enough of carte blanche from the military that during his break from service in January 2004, he flew not back to see his family in the U.S but to Dresden, Germany to give a concert to 2,500 skinheads, on the army’s budget. “What happens is you get to choose whether you want to go to Europe or America, and I put down Germany. The military didn’t care. My friends picked me up from Frankfurt airport and I played two shows.” What about getting caught? “Ah fuck it,” says Fogarty.

When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad a sergeant came up to him and said plainly, “You’re one of those racist motherfuckers aren’t you!” Fogarty’s diver in Iraq was black and he rebutted, “Only I can call him racist!” How did the sergeant know about his racism? I ask. “The tattoo I suppose. I can’t hide everything – people knew – even the chain of command.”

Although Fogarty gets excited about talking about various operations in Iraq, he says he would never say anything “that would put the military in a bad light,” which indicates that his descriptions of conduct in Iraq could be sanitized and incomplete. In fact, he has so much antipathy for people who denigrate the military that he was arrested by police for breaking up an anti-war protest in 2006. “They threw shit at my dad when he came back from Vietnam, I mean who are these left-wing scumbags?” he asks.

Mentally and physically sick

The only clues we can get to Fogarty’s conduct in Iraq are his song lyrics, but there has been a high-profile case of murder which has involved a soldier in Iraq who had SS bolts – signature Nazi insignia – on his arm.

Kevin Shields was murdered on December 1st 2007 and three of his fellow soldiers, Louis Bressler, 24, Kenneth Eastridge, 24 and Bruce Bastien, Jr., 21, were all arrested on suspicion of murder. The murdered solider and the suspected murderers all served in Iraq as part of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 2nd Infantry Division. The soldiers were in the same platoon of C Company, 2nd Battalion of the 12th Infantry Regiment.

Two of them also now face charges for the August 4th 2007 murder of another soldier Robert James.

In the aftermath of the arrests, National Public Radio publicized the Myspace page of Kenneth Eastridge. It showed him proudly displaying the SS bolts tattoo. It’s a sure sign of being a neo-Nazi: they symbolize the Nazi military organization, the SS, which terrorized Jews and other minorities during Hitler’s reign.

He had a picture of him holding a cat in Iraq with the caption, “Killed another Iraqi pussy.” There is a picture of a gun and a cache of ammo. “Ready for Whatever!!!!” says the caption. He has another tattoo which reads: “Killing is what I do.”

The army in now looking at possible war crimes after Bastien Jr told investigators that he and Eastridge had randomly fired at civilians in Iraq. Bastien said that when they drove on patrol through the streets of Baghdad Eastridge would use a stolen AK-47 to fire indiscriminately at random Iraqi civilians. At least one was hit, according to Bastien. When he returned from combat Eastridge received a Purple Heart and Army achievement medals

Of course there is no direct causal link between the SS bolts and murder, but Eastridge’s lawyer Sheilagh Mcateer asserts that the military are now sending mentally unstable young men to Afghanistan and Iraq. “The military is to some extent desperate to get people to go to fight, soldiers who are not fit, mentally and physically sick, but they continue to send them,” she said. “Having a tattoo was the least of his concerns.”

Killing 'towel heads'

The magnitude of the problem within the army and other branches of the military is hard to quantify. People in the neo-Nazi movement claim different numbers. The National Socialist Movement claims 190 of its members are inside. White Revolution claims 12. Tom Metzger claims that 10% in the army and Marines are extremists of some sorts.

Tom Leyden was in the movement for 15 years before he managed to extricate himself in 1996. “The military says maybe 1% is gang members,” he says, “well that’s 14,000 people: they don’t do training exercises that big! 90% of the gangs in the U.S. are gangs but 9% are white supremacists. That’s 1,400 people are being trained by the armed forces who are extremist racists.”

The U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command is set-up to investigate criminal behavior by army personnel and their reports have often touched on extremist soldiers. Its 2006 report, “Gang-related activity in the armed forces increasing,” notes that “various white supremacist groups, have been documented on military installations both domestically and internationally.”

Neo-Nazis "stretch across all branches of service, they are linking up across the branches once they're inside, and they are hard-core," Department of Defense gang detective Scott Barfield told the Southern Poverty Law Center. "We've got Aryan Nations graffiti in Baghdad," he added. "That's a problem."

Harold Cloverdell served in the army in Afghanistan for a year and Iraq for 16 years. “You can go in any restaurant you can find graffiti, maybe a swastika,” he says. “Or ‘I hate hajjis’ – what they call someone with Middle Eastern heritage.

“It pisses you off that you see it,” he continues, “as it effects someone’s performance, most guys are white in the infantry, a lot of them tend to be of European descent, it may have made someone else uncomfortable.”

Aaron Lukefahr is now a member of the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group in the U.S., but served two years as part of the Marine Corp in Okinawa in Japan. “I know of at least one other racialist,” he says. “Once I saw some swastikas in our barracks, stationed in Japan, I don't know who that was, they never found out who it was, but there wasn't much investigation into it as an extremist act rather than an act vandalism.”

A perusal of the social networking websites and forums of the neo-Nazi movement would seem to confirm Scott Barfield’s assertions. The sites are replete with bravado and machismo from people who claim to be soldiers serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. They boast of killing “hajjis” and “sand niggas” indiscriminately.

The website newsaxon.com is a social networking website for “people of European descent.” One of the possible professions when someone is making a profile is the military. There are currently 46 members who claim to be serving.

There is even a group – populated by six professed soldiers – called “White Military Men” started by a young man with the page headline, “FightingforWhites”. “All men with military experience, retired or active/reserve should join this group to see how many men have experience to build an army. We want to win a war, we need soldiers,” it reads.

“FightingforWhites” is actually Lance Corporal Burton of the 2nd Battalion Fox Company Pit 2097, from Florida. Under his About Me section he writes: “Love to shoot my M16A2 service rifle effectively at the Hachies (Iraqis)”, and among his passions is: “Love to watch things blow up (Hachies House)”.

His turn-offs include: “Overweight, lazy, illegals, *WIGGERS*, rape crimes, soldiers that died in Iraq, the Air Force( I called in an airstrike and they were apparently had "tea time" when it was called in).”

On his wall his friend writes: “THANKS BROTHER!!!! kill a couple towel heads for me ok!”

There are other examples of the same ostentatious advertising of military credentials on neo-Nazi websites.

On the forum of the Web site Blood and Honour, neo-Nazis encourage their serving comrades to commit indiscriminate murder, and allude to the training they are getting.

“I am in the ARMY right now,” write 88Soldier88. “You have no idea how "nice" we have to treat these fucking people. I work in the Detainee Holding Area so I see these fuckers every day(Terrorists) and we have to treat them better than our own troops. Its sick. I am in this until 2013. I am in the Infantry but want to go SF. Hopefully the training will prepare me for what I hope is to come.”

“I get out in 2009. I have the training I need and will pass it on to others when I get out,” writes AMERICANARYAN.

88Soldier88 says he is leaving for Iraq in 3 days. “aye bro stay safe!!” says “AngryAryanHitman”, “try get a few notches on ya rifflebutt from the filthy sand nigger cunts.”

“Good Luck Mate, Stay safe, Get a few Kills, and come Home,” says “Paul”.

“[G]ood luck and i hope everything goes well stay safe keep your head down and try to bag a few sand niggers,” says “14 callum 88”.

I wrote to a soldier, Jacob Berg, who claimed to be serving in Iraq. “There are actually alot more "skinheads" "nazis" White supremacists now then there has been in a very long time,” he wrote back. “Us racists are actually getting into the millatary alot now because If we dont every one who already is will take pitty on killing sand niggers. yes I have killed women, yes I have killed children, and yes I have killed Older people. But the biggest reson Im so proud of my kills Is because by killing a brown many white people will live to see a new dawn.”

Begging to re-enlist
De-enlistment
Another indication of the scale of the problem comes from the discharge statistics obtained from the army through the Freedom of Information Act. These show a huge drop in the number of soldiers being denied reenlistment and being discharged for misconduct – two of the main avenues for dealing with white supremacists and neo-Nazis.

Fogarty left Iraq in June 2006 and was later honourably discharged from the army and asked to reenlist. “They were begging me to reenlist, they didn’t want me to get out, my whole military career they didn’t want me to get out,” he says. Fogarty wanted to join Blackwater and become a private contractor and go back to Iraq.

“You make a lot of money at Blackwater, $100,000 a year, I was getting $30,000 when I was in the army,” he says. What about the immunity granted to them, was that an incentive? “Exactly, I would think so… they are hardcore, they’re doing cool stuff, the army is fighting with boxing gloves on, Blackwater is gloves off.”

Unfortunately for Forrest the anti-racist organization, the Southern Poverty Law Center, would intervene to stop his dream of going back to Iraq with immunity.

In between honorable discharge from the civilian army and application for Blackwater, the SPLC had publicized his neo-Nazi connections in a report. After putting his application to Blackwater, he was told by them that they “couldn’t touch” him because he had been put on the Terrorist Watch List, the list kept by the FBI’s Terrorist Screening Center of all potential terrorist threats to the U.S.

“They defamed me,” says Fogarty. “It was slanderous, they painted me as a dumbass, I’d like to meet them in a parking lot.

“I would have been able to stay in without the SPL,” adds Fogarty. “They [the army] wouldn’t care unless I made an incident at work, but now the SPL comes out it looks bad.”

Fogarty is right that he was unlucky. Despite his girlfriends dossier, his tattoos and his impromptu trip to Germany, he was allowed to stay in, and would seemingly have been fine without the SPLC intervening. After their report, the President of the SPLC, J. Richard Cohen, wrote a letter to the Undersecretary of Defence, David S.C. Chu, “[A] combination of manpower shortages and poorly written inconsistently enforced regulations,” he wrote, “has resulted in the recent reappearance of significant numbers of extremists in the armed forces.”

John Fain is another. His neo-Nazi affiliations did nothing to stop the military trying to reenlist him. Fain claims he has never been a member of National Alliance, but considers himself a “patriot, which liberals in the military deem as extremist,” and admits that he “support[s] the National Alliance” and “agrees with most of what they say”. Erich Gliebe, the leader of the National Alliance, seems surprised when I tell him Fain wasn’t a member. “He isn’t?” he asks.

“I’m concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of white Americans,” he says. “But the main thing with me is not so much that people look, but there’s a particular interest that there is on the media, most of the people are Jewish, they’ll admit it. It’s not good when you have a population of 3% brainwashing the rest of the populace. People should be made free to have information, because the masses are stupid.”

Fain joined the military in 1999 when he was 18-years old, but did not have any tattoos or criminal convictions, so passed through recruitment easily. “I was kind of at a cross roads in my life, doing a dead end job,” he says. “I wanted to try to better myself, and I thought about joining the military. I was going to join the Navy but when I was there the army recruiter said, ‘Can I talk to you in a sec?’” Within a week Fain had signed up.

From 2003-2004 Fain served two tours in Iraq, going all over the country, from Baghdad to Basra. “Most people keep their opinions to themselves,” he says of fellow extremists. “But I’ve met quite a few of them actually. Last year I ran across a lot of people. I was sitting in the barracks in the U.S,” he says. “There were some guys I overheard on their laptop and they were playing music from Resistance Records [a neo-Nazi music label]. I never noticed people causing a raucous; the unit I was with was what would be considered good ol’ boys from the country.”

When Fain returned from Iraq in 2004 he started to work for Vanguard Books, the literary arm of the National Alliance. It sells U.S. Army books. $9.95 will get you “EXPLOSIVES AND DEMOLITIONS, FM 5-25”. And when Fain left the army, this spell working for the National Alliance came back to haunt him. The army refused him security clearance which is a privilege conferred on soldiers and other civil servants after service that gives them access to classified information of a certain sensitivity.

“They had found out information about me,” says Fain. “I had worked for National Vanguard books, and they were like, ‘Who owns it?’ and I said, ‘It’s owned by a corporation.’ So they said, ‘Isn’t it owned by the National Alliance?’ I said, ‘I don’t know’, ‘Are you member?’ ‘No, I don’t hold membership but I work for them.”

The army had procured information on his employment through tax returns, and pursued their investigations on Vanguard Books. Despite this, Fain claims he was asked to reenlist. “I’m not going to do it, I’ve had enough now,” he says.

The experiences of Fogarty and Fain are buttressed by the discharge figures. They show that the avenues stipulated in AR 600-20 to deal with extremists already in the military have fallen in drastic numbers since 1998, and further since the 'war on terror' was initially announced. One of those is the denial of reenlistment, which fell from a high of 4,000 soldiers denied reenlistment in 1994 to a low of 81 in 2006 (see fig 1). There are many reasons for being denied reenlistment, but the factor has come drastically down.
Another avenue is a soldier receiving a pattern of misconduct resulting in discharge from the army. In the five-year period from 1998 to 2003 the level teetered from a high of 2,560 to a low of 2,307. By 2006 this number had fallen off to 1,435. (see fig 2). Again, misconduct is a broad category but the trend would indicate that standards have loosened in keeping with the testimony of Fogarty and Fain.

Investigations terminated

This refusal to act on intelligence is also evidenced by the Criminal Investigative Command in their 2006 summary report on the gang activity threat. They document four different investigations into white supremacist and extremists on camps in the U.S. Through the Freedom of Information Act the summary of each report has been seen. Three of them give a clear window into the lack of organization and will to implement the anti-extremist policy with any force.

One report looks into a soldier at Ft Hood base in Texas who had made Internet posting on the White extremist website Stormfront.org. The summary includes complaints from the investigator at the process in place to deal with extremists. “We need to discuss the review process,” writes the investigator. “I’m not doing my job here,” it continued. “Needs to get fixed.” The investigator asks that “Coordinations are made with local agencies at least once a month.” He adds that previously this has been “Poorly documented.” They also complain that: “An attempt to locate with minimal information provided met with negative results.”

Another report at the same base documented the investigation of a soldier who was reportedly a member of the Hammerskins, the same group as Fogarty is now a member. The summary shows that there was “probable cause” to believe that the soldier had “participated in a white extremist meeting and also provided a military technical manual 31-210, Improvised Munitions Handbook, to the leader of a white extremist group in order to assist in the planning and execution of future attacks on various targets.”

The end of the summary notes that the investigation has been stopped despite this revelatory finding. “This investigation is being terminated… action commander or prosecutor indicated intent either to no action or action amounting to less than a court proceeding and no further investigative assistance of CID is required by the commander or prosecutor.”

A report into a soldier at Ft Richardson in Arkansas documented the investigation of an Army National Guard member who was reportedly the leader and recruiter for the Alaska Front, a white supremacist group. “No further investigation has occurred by the FBI”, says the report, “since the Soldier has been mobilized to Camp Shelby, MS in preparation for deployment to Iraq”.

According to the SPLC, “The failure of the current policy is best illustrated by the case of Robert Lee West.” West is an active-duty airman stationed at Warner Robins Air Force Base in Georgia and has posted a photograph of himself with a shotgun in front of a Nazi banner. But the Air Force Office of Special Investigations has thus far failed to discharge West because “regulations apply only to those who are active members of hate groups.”

In his letter to Under Secretary of Defense David S. C. Chu, the President of the SPLC, J Richard Cohen, takes issue with this explanation. "We think it makes perfect sense for the military to end this problem once and for all,” he writes, “by issuing and enforcing regulations that make it clear that anyone who espouses extremist ideology or who publicly identifies himself as a neo-Nazi or white supremacist is not fit to serve in this nation's armed forces.”

So far this hasn’t happened, and as the troop-hungry ‘war on terror’ continues there is no reason to believe it will.

Courtesy: Lenin's Tomb

Average:

1

Average: 1 (1 vote)

Your rating: Select ratingCancel ratingPoorOkayGoodGreatAwesome

Your rating: None