The Comment Factory

NewSaxon.org member who claims to be a Marine

I touched down in Tampa, Fl, on a bleak day in early March on a quest to meet Forrest Fogarty, a neo-Nazi who had served the U.S. Army for two years in Iraq. I’d been speaking to him intermittently on the phone for a couple of months but getting inside the neo-Nazi network in the United States is not easy and takes reams of arduous appeals to penetrate the walls of resistance. I’d been uniquely successful with Fogarty, a loquacious character with a compelling story, so I took a flight from New York City down to Tampa to meet him.

I checked into the nearest hotel I could find after the bus dropped me off in downtown Tampa. It was early afternoon so I went for a walk along the deserted walkway next to the roiling Hillsborough River that runs through the heart of the city, dividing the picturesque University of Tampa from the banking skyscrapers on my side. It was about 5 pm before I eventually plucked up the courage to call Forrest on his cell. He picked up after a few rings. “Oh hey, I didn’t think you’d come!” he said in his croaky voice, sounding happy to hear from me. “I usually go get a beer after work, why don’t you come?”

Later that evening I got in a taxi and headed for his favorite hangout, The Winghouse Bar & Grill. I had assumed the place was near downtown, but it turned out to be much further. The taxi sped down endless miles of pitch-black highway as the moon barely illumined the forests and thickets on either side. Various scenarios played out in my mind as it all whizzed past: would I be jumped by a group of his mates, or maybe even decapitated in the woods. Before long we pulled up at the sparkling lights of the Winghouse located on a plain at the side of the highway. It was open-plan restaurant with no walls, just a heavily stocked bar in the middle and a harem of Tampa belles taking orders from the assorted customers.

Forrest Fogarty

In our brief phone call I asked Forrest how I would recognize him. “Just look for the skinhead with the tattoos,” he said, laughing. And he is right. Sitting straight to my right as I walk in is a youngish looking man, plastered in tattoos, with tightly cropped hair, wife-beater vest and bulging muscles. He is a poster-boy skinhead, the definition of the American Nazi. “Good to meet you,” I say, not bothering to get confirmation. “Hey Matt,” he replies. “Sit down.” He is bright and alert, his keen eyes darting around as he speaks. We order some chicken wings with buffalo sauce, and a pitcher of beer. “You’re British, right,” he says. “I remember seeing black guys with British accents in Iraq, shit was so crazy.”

Forrest seems in his element in Tampa as he slouches in his local, beer in one hand, chicken-wing in the other. He tells me he grew up in Los Angeles and moved to Tampa at 15 with some serious baggage. In high school in L.A he was bullied by Mexican and African-American children and he was only 14 when he decided he wanted to be a Nazi. By the time his family moved and he had switched to Leto High in Tampa he was a full-on Hitler-worshipping racist. As an introduction, his story is hard to beat for shock value.

“I eventually got kicked out of Leto High, for being a racialist,” he says with disdain. “I was getting in a few fights. What they do in desegregation is bus blacks into the neighbourhood. On the first day, a bunch of niggers, they said ‘Are you in the KKK?’ to me, and I said, ‘Yeah’. It was on. After this, I kept getting in fights, eventually they expelled me.”

Despite his openness, it’s nerve-wracking being in a bar with Forrest, he has no qualms about flaunting his Nazism. “I get into fights myself twice a month because I’m a Nazi,” he says, pouring a pint of beer and smiling. “I’m completely open about it.” When black people come into the bar he emits a hiss of disapproval and although he has two kids to look after, nine and thirteen, he has the mannerisms of a child himself. He talks about “chasing pussy” and getting into fights an inordinate amount of time and bloviates about Jews and Arabs in between.

But there’s more to Forrest than just bravado. As he drinks down our pitcher of Bud he becomes freer and talks about his other great passion in life: music. As a young man he was obsessed with Ian Stuart Donaldson, the lead singer of Skrewdriver, who, in the neo-Nazi music scene, is hero-worshipped with a fervour akin to a 13-year-old Goth’s veneration of Marilyn Manson.
This adulation was so strong that at sixteen Forrest got a Skrewdriver album cover – a Viking carrying a staff – tattooed all the way up his left forearm. A few years later started his own Nazi band, Attack, now one of the biggest Nazi bands in the U.S, playing all over the country to crowds of white power fans. But it was never his day job.

Aryan Nations graffitti in Iraq

“I was a landscaper when I left school,” he says, leaning back in his chair. “I kind of fell into it, I was a kid back then. I didn’t give a shit what I was doing, I was drinking and fighting.” For the next eight years he drifted through dead-end jobs in construction and landscaping and began hanging out with the National Alliance, at the time one of the biggest neo-Nazi organizations in the U.S, and soon became a member. The group’s founder was the late William Pierce who wrote ‘The Turner Diaries’, which is believed to have inspired Timothy McVeigh to carry out the 1995 terrorist attack in Oklahoma. The group is one of the few durable fixtures in the American extremist firmament, where groups often spark up and die within a very short timescale.

With his music and friends sorted, Forrest turned to work. Construction was never what he had wanted to do; he had always seen himself as a fighter and warrior. So in 1997, Forrest decided to act on it, resolving to do what two generations of Fogarty’s had done before him and join the military. “I wanted to serve my country,” he says as he chews on the last remnants of chicken. “Every male part of family has served in combat; my father was in Vietnam for two tours as part of the Marine Corps, and my grandfather was in World War II, Korea and Vietnam.”

NOT ALONE

Dennis Ross, former US soldier

Fogarty’s trajectory – from neo-Nazi to U.S. soldier – is not as idiosyncratic as it may sound. The neo-Nazi movement has had a long and tense relationship with the U.S. military, documented for decades. In 1976, in perhaps the most infamous case, a KKK chapter was uncovered at Camp Pendle, California after a cross was burned near the base. Soldiers with Klan insignia then attacked two black Marines and in the resulting court-martial the black Marines testified that their superiors had allowed the Klan to operate freely.

Since its inception, the leaders of white supremacist movement have encouraged their members to enlist. They see it as a way for their followers to receive combat and weapons training, courtesy of the U.S. government, and to bring what they learn home to the undertake domestic ‘Race War’. The concept of a racial ‘holy war’, often called ‘Rahowa’ is adhered to by a host of extremist groups – from Nation of Islam to neo-Nazis – and advocates a dystopic eruption of all-against-all racial violence that brings races together against each other and the government. Not all far-right groups subscribe to this method – some, like the KKK prefer democratic methods. But a large portion see themselves as an insurrectionary forces challenging the moral bankruptcy of a government which is unreformable and for this purpose professional training in warfare is a must.

For this reason, the U.S military has long been alive to these groups attempts at infiltration. Even so, the first military directive pertaining to ‘extremism’ didn’t appear until during the Vietnam War and the target of the new guidelines wasn’t racist extremists, but rather anti-war elements. The 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 dissidents within the military by prohibiting 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 legislation was the extent of provisions until 1986 when reports again surfaced of 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 further in 1996 when language was added to DOD Directive 1325.6 that dealt specifically for the first time with racial extremism – i.e. white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups. It explicitly “prohibited activities” by these groups in the military. This change 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.

Fogarty was recruited the year after.

CHANGING RULES:

As we finish up our drinks at the Winghouse, I ask if I can meet Forrest again while I’m in the city, which is another three days. “I’m working tomorrow, and with the kids on Saturday.” Thinking quickly I suggest taking them all to the local zoo, the first attraction I can remember from my hotel tourist pack. “Yeah, why not,” he replies and we set a date for Saturday afternoon.

Driving out from downtown Tampa it takes twenty minutes to arrive at 56-acre Lowry Park Zoo, tucked away behind the tree-lined highway, home to a daunting 1,600 animals. The place is overrun with kids and tired looking parents even as the inclement weather beats rain and hail interminably. Forrest turns up with his two kids, 13 and 9, and we set off around the zoo. Before the rain gets too much we take in the seals, the camels – “God damn camels,” says Forrest, looking peaked, “I hate them things.” – and some tigers. We talk candidly about his racism and violence in front of his kids, who are smart pair, not yet decided on their dads politics. “There’s nothing they don’t know. I just tell them it’s OK to be white,” says Forrest. “In school they teach about slavery and the Holocaust, they teach them about indiscriminately murdering Jews. I say there’s two sides to every story, you’re hearing from the people who won the war. I don’t care if they have non-white friends, but they will become gangbangers and not like you when they are older.” The younger kid is “hardcore” according to Forrest, but his wife doesn’t want him joining the military. The older one is obviously very intelligent, outlining the evolutionary reasons for various animal quirks to me effortlessly. After a good period these discussions the rain sends us all under an umbrella-covered table by a restaurant. While Forrest’s sons play by themselves, he delves deeper into how he joined the military in the first place, with his five-star neo-Nazi credentials.

Fogarty’s tattoo

He knew back in 1997 that the tattoo he had riding up his forearm could be a problem for enlistment. In a neo-Nazi underworld obsessed with secrecy, racist tattoos remain one of the biggest indicators 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 not being allowed to enlist should be taken.

Despite all these regulations, Fogarty wasn’t worried about being rejected. Military protocol stipulates that each new recruit with suspicious tattoos must write an explanation about the meaning of their body art. Fogarty’s are quite clearly the kind written about in the manual – a Nordic warrior, and a Celtic cross, neither explicitly screaming “Nazi,” but red flags nonetheless. 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, chuckling.

After his Fogarty was approved and stationed in the 3rd Infantry Division based at Fort Stewart, GA, the largest Army installation east of the Mississippi River. And his story is not unique. In the neo-Nazi movement, leaders attest that Forrest’s journey has become even more common as the military needs fighters in the War on Terror. One of those leaders is Tom Metzger, the 70-year-old Godfather of contemporary National Socialism in the United States. “Ah, Metzger!” says Forrest, when I mention him at the Zoo. “I know him pretty well, hung out a couple of times.” On the phone Metzger is quick to crack a joke, talk about his idiosyncratic political philosophy, and work out how he can help me with anything I want to know. Metzger’s journey around the white supremacist movements started in the 1970s with the Ku Klux Klan, for whom he served as Grand Dragon in California. He twice ran for the Senate as a Democrat, against the Party’s wishes, and, when that failed, began his own organization: White Aryan Resistance, or W.A.R. He has been in prison, declared bankrupt, and the subject of a BBC documentary.

“Now they are letting everybody in,” he says of the U.S. military. “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.”

Metzger’s organization is not your typical white power outfit. “I run an association of independent people who work in cells to the best of their talents,” he says. “I would encourage them to join the military, if they have a scratch they can’t seem to itch. Then go in to bring some training back to the U.S. to make the federal government aware of our existence.” Metzger’s philosophy is a strange mish-mash of the far left, far right and, in fact, everything in between. When he starts dilating it sends the unsuspecting listener into an ideological daze. One minute he’s praising Noam Chomsky – “we disagree radically on race but his opinions on transnational corporations and how we are destroying the environment are spot on” – while the next he’s on to Adolf Hitler.

“I used to call it White Aryan Resistance. Now I call it The Insurgents,” he says. “We are now a non-violent insurgency, but we are prepared to turn violent if the need be. It’s up to the government. There are moves to suppress free speech and it won’t be too long before they get their hands slapped … I’m no military general, I meet military people; there are no plans, just an insurgency that could become hot I would say by any means. Like any unconventional warfare it would involve whatever we would be capable of using. The white working class don’t have jet planes and atomic bombs, we would work along other lines.”

Despite Metzger’s inflammatory rhetoric, the War on Terror has produced no official recognition by Pentagon brass that regulations have been loosened on neo-Nazis. Individually, however, officials seem to accept it has happened by stealth. One is Douglas Smith, the public affairs officer at the Recruitment Command who spoke openly to me about the policy on extremists. “We don’t exclude people from the army based on their thoughts,” he explained. “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 … The tattoo is a relatively subjective decision,” he continued. “We try to educate recruiters about extremist tattoos, but it’s going to depend on their general knowledge of tattoos.”

SS Bolts

In April, I tried an informal survey of recruiters’ knowledge in this area. I contacted a random pool of recruitment centers and the level of awareness was low to minimal. I spoke to five different stations around the country pretending to be a prospective soldier, with the caveat that I had a pair of ‘SS bolts’ tattooed on my arm. Despite being outlined in AR 600-15 as a tattoo to look out for, none of the recruiters reacted negatively and, when pressed directly about the tattoo, not one of them said it would be an outright problem.

The conversations began in the usual fashion, I told them I want to join the military, and covered up for my British accent by saying I was just married to an American. The recruiter at Houston Alief station hadn’t heard of SS bolts. “I don’t know what they are; you’ll have to come in. They might be OK, might not be OK,” she said. At the Houston Willowbrook office I was told, “I don’t know, will have to crack the regulation open.” At Waldo in Kansas City the recruiter was again ambiguous. “I’m not saying it means you can’t get in,” he said.

Recruiters like these have it in their interests to keep recruiting standards at a minimum – they get rewards for the number of soldiers they enlist. And to complicate matters further, in March 2006 an attempt to re-enfranchise another set of prospective soldiers saw regulations relaxed on non-extremist tattoos so now body art covering the hands, neck and face would be permitted where it hadn’t before. There was no official acknowledgement of a relaxation of the regulation on extremist tattoos, although, according to extremist groups this has been the implicit stance applied.

Even Recruiting Command spokesman, Douglas Smith, now says that a racist tattoo shouldn’t automatically bar enlistment: “A [racist] tattoo in and of itself is not a bar to enlistment. It is behaviour that would prohibit someone serving or enlisting. There are First 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, he continues. “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.”

One veteran neo-Nazi who agrees is Billy Roper, who left the National Alliance after a power struggle in 2002 to start his own outfit, White Revolution. While I am in Tampa meeting Forrest I decide to call Roper. I’m sitting on my bed in my hotel room when I get through to him on the internal phone. “We have some members in the military,” he tells me in his nerdy voice (afterwards I see he looks more like a geek than a neo-Nazi in real life). “There are 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 tells me he knew two members who had swastikas and were barred but had them re-tattooed into sun wheels and the military allowed them back in.

One group who don’t shy away from swastikas is the NSM, or National Socialist Movement. It claims to be the biggest Nazi organization in the U.S but activists like Forrest and Roper call them “clowns” because of their propensity to dress up in World War 2 fatigues. Willem Herring, their spokesman, 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.”

THE FISSURES

The NSM are undoubtedly the most media-savvy group, in terms of their showiness and their accessibility. Through their media spokesman I am put in contact with Mark Connelly, the head of the SS division in New York, who I’m told is a college student and a “genius.” I’m not given a number but rather told I will be called. “You limey bastard,” is the first I hear from Mark. He suspects me of being part of the Jewish Defense Force, a radical Jewish organization. I call up the spokesman who pledges to sort it out for me. A few weeks after I get another call from Mark, this time less truculent. “Sorry about that,” he says. “We just had a problem with the JDF, they were trying to mess us up.” I assure Mark that I just want to find out what’s going with the NSM, and he seems to have the arrogance of youth, so I play to that. “I do the job pro-bono,” he says of his role in the NSM. “It’s something that you have to have a love for, it’s hard, it takes character for people who want to learn about history. This is about the reality of World War 2 and the demonized German society, and being in support of National Socialism.” What bought him in? “I got into the movement when in high-school, when I was learning things about certain events. They only tell you the victors side of the war, I found many discrepancies… I used to be Republican, but it comes to the point where you can’t trust the system.”

Tattoos on US soldier

Connelly won’t give his age but by the sound of his voice he’s young and his sentences are suffused with certitude typical of his age. He lives in upstate New York, around the capital Albany. “I’ve been disowned by my mother,” he says, matter-of-factly, and it’s not hard to imagine why. The NSM are the most explicit Nazis in the U.S. They unashamedly worship Hitler, and dress up in Nazi 1940s regalia at their events. I attended their “historic” march on Congress in April 2008, billed as the biggest in decades. As the hundreds of cops and large numbers of anti-fascist protesters lined the streets there was a feeling of great foreboding. Until the NSM contingent turned up in a beat-up old van, containing perhaps thirty people, all waving swastikas, and dressed in jackboots. Scary it wasn’t. In the far-right movement many see them as nothing more than “clowns”. Metzger, the founder of White Aryan Resistance, calls them, without irony, “right-wing reactionaries”: “They try to get in to the military covered in tattoos; my kind of people are taught to keep their mouth shut, to pretend they are race-mixing liberals; they don’t join any racial organization, and don’t call people that are in.”

“They are all nerds to me,” adds Forrest. “I fit in more with the Hammerskin agenda: they are more political, we are more for street activism. We’re skinheads, we’re not politicians, we’re street soldiers.”

Away from the NSM’s ostentatious pagents are the real dangerous underground operators. One such is Dennis Mahon who has also been on the extremist scene for decades and had links with the Oklahoma bomber, Timothy McVeigh, although he remains coy with me as to what they were. “It drives you crazy,” he once said. “Thousands think I was involved. I’ve started to believe it myself. Maybe I was there. Maybe they brainwashed me and I forgot about it. Maybe I can get hypnotised and remember it. Everybody said I was there. Everybody said I drove the truck. They saw me.”

Tom Metzger, an old friend of Mahon’s, puts me in contact and when I get hold of Mahon he picks up the phone panting like someone who has been doing strenuous exercise. He’s at home and its 2 p.m. “Now’s not a good time,” he says. What are you doing? I ask. “Oh, I really can’t say,” he replies.

When I finally get him for the interview he talks about how he started out in the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan before joining the National Alliance in 1980. “I thought they were too conservative,” he says initially. “I read a lot of books, like the Turner diaries, but then I was in Miami when we had the Haitian invasion.” Mahon is alluding to the “Mariel boatlift”, which saw an influx of asylum seekers during a seven-month period in 1980 when approximately 125,000 Cubans and 25,000 Haitians arrived by boat to South Florida.” At the time Mahon was in the National Guard and was drafted in to help out. “I had to take them from federal prison, they were defecating and urinating in the back of the bus.” His ideas started to change. “I thought the National Alliance wasn’t radical enough, I went back to join the KKK in Columbia, Alabama.”

Now, Mahon acts as a ‘lone warrior’, much like Metzger, not bogged down by the politics of petty rivalries which distract from his central mission: causing carnage in his race war against the government.

“I guarantee something will happen – we’ve all got our targets. The Weathermen is a book about how to destroy America. The Achilles heel is the grid system, when energy is needed the most you blast the stations, and once the power goes out the cities goes out. I know of a lot of vulnerable areas. I’m not going to say I’m going to do this, but there are some lone wolves. Chicago will be out for a week.”

Mahon received basic training while in the National Guard and, he says, put it to good use at the time. “I was in National Guard and I was doing some real serious shit,” he continues. “No one was ever the wiser – shootings and bombings.” He pauses. “No I can’t say, they can get you on civil rights violations, believe you me; the Klan can see what the results are, but you don’t see them.”

He talks about a mythical ‘lone wolf’ in Arizona, who goes by the code name Tom E. Gunn, a former Marine. “He does a lot of damage to peoples business and harasses people; he’s kind of nuts, I hear he’s a master of unconventional warfare, he does some damages to people and he was in the Marines. I’ve tried to talk to him,” he continues. “I talked to him one time, he is above ground; the underground guys, they are not supposed to contact me, but they send me newspaper clippings, there’s so many organization getting busted.” Tom E. Gunn can be found in a thread discussion with Tom Metzger under a Phoenix New Times article about an Arizonian neo-Nazi icon named Elton Hall being hit by vehicle while taking part in a protest, but that’s about the extent of the evidence of his existence. Because his goes by an alias tracking him down is impossible.

Although joining the armed forces has been a frequently successful mission in the past, Mahon says now it’s even easier. “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.”

But, he believes, this new liberalism will come back to haunt the authorities. “They are hard to stop,” he 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. I tell people to learn as much as you can to improve munitions capabilities, patrolling; I want them to learn sniping and explosives, the Green Berets. Once they go in they are not supposed to tell anyone who they are.”

NO OVERSIGHT

Back in the zoo, Forrest plays around with his boys, throwing them about as the rain subsides and we start off again around the enclosures again. The zoo is divided into different themes: we hang out with the cats some then we head over to the elephants under duress from the youngest. According to Mahon’s rhetoric the U.S. will erupt in flames when soldiers like Forrest return from Iraq, but looking at him languidly walking around with his kids, talking about his girl troubles and boredom at work, I find it hard to imagine. He laughs a lot when I mention the grandstanding rhetoric of his fellow-thinkers. “Talking about race war right now, we’d be wiped off the planet!” he cries. Despite this Forrest says a lot of his friends in the Hammerskins are under constant surveillance by the authorities. “All my friends have been to prison. The FBI paid $30,000 to infiltrate the NSM … They learn that, guess what, we drink a lot beer and chase pussy!” He continues, “I know my name has been bought up a lot of time for the FBI, they are out for my mates Cobi and Richie, they are trying put something together, it’s totally crazy. They are on Terrorist Watch List. The FBI contacted them, came to their house, the cops came to my house when I bust up the anti-war protest.”

In the military there seems less of an effort to keep tabs on extremists than on the outside. The Army tome that deals with the obligations that a soldier must uphold in the military is called AR 600-20, or “Army Command Policy”. It only 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 or 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.

Once Forrest was at Fort Stewart the army had many of these avenues open to them to rectify their mistake in letting Forrest through the recruitment process. And they got a helping hand from an unlikely source not long after. As we stroll, Forrest recounts the story of how his wife and mother of his eldest child was livid when he joined the military and tried to scupper his plans when he was positioned in Georgia, away from the family. “She hated that I was in the military,” he says as he looks at his kids. 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.” Although he talks a lot about chasing all sorts of women, Forrest claims he doesn’t go for women who are like him, which might explain her exasperation. He is currently single but says, “I try to keep some chicks, but I don’t like skinhead girls, I don’t like girls with tattoos.”

“They knew what I was about, but they let it go because I’m a great soldier, and they knew that,” he says of the investigation. The person heading it was Command Sgt. Maj. Tommy Dunn. Now retired, I contact him at his home. He sounded shocked when I mention Sgt. Fogarty, but then claimed to not know was when I mention the investigation. “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. I ask him whether that’s because of his fighting prowess? “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.” A roadside bomb in Iraq killed Col Wood in October 2005.

The efforts of Fogarty’s girlfriend went unheeded despite her brave efforts, 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 as we take in a new enclosure, this time seals who interrupt him with their loud squeals. At the time the Tampa local newspaper, St. Petersburg Times, interviewed him at Fort Stewart. 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.” He was a probate for the Hammerskin Nation while in Iraq, a process that guards against infiltration, and on his return to the United States, he was made a fully-fledged Hammerskin.

IN THE WARZONE

As the afternoon wears on the animals start to blend into each other and the only thing that keeps sparking Forrest up is his time in Iraq. He returns again and again to the period he spent there from 2004 to 2005, it seems his most cherished life experience. While there he was mostly guarding convoys as part of the military police. “I was always on the move,” he says with the cadence of nostalgia. “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.”

“It’s a big rush,” he tells me. “It changes a human being. I never had any kill counts, some soldiers do … To tell you the truth I hate Arabs more than anybody,” he continues. “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 … 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? I ask, stunned at his warmongering. “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,” he sighs. When he was at Camp Victory in Baghdad, Forrest even says 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.”

He starts getting really misty-eyed recollecting some of his close shaves in the warzone. “One time, I was pulling out of Camp Anaconda, which is about fifteen miles west of Baghdad. Some convoy had blocked lanes of traffic, so we had come out with a Humvee at 5am. We were chilling, but there was this truck hauling at us and not stopping. I’m looking at my driver, he can’t see, but my gunner is up there; he said, ‘This guy’s not stopping’, and I said, ‘You know what to do,’ and right when I said that, he was just hitting him up with a 50 cal, cha cha cha! Just shooting him up, and it was coming towards at us and it was getting all blown to pieces dude, and as we’re pulling out it missed us by like two foot and just fell into the ditch… My gunner let him have it with a 50 cal; the gunner was a cool guy. Once you papped him up, I didn’t get out vehicle but I looked in, and there were nobody living.”

Another time he was at Camp Victory North at Baghdad airport. “I was in the chall hall, 120 m mortar round came in and blew up a bunch of guys, cut some chicks legs off. Me and my gunner, I was drinking non-alcoholic beer for 4th July, we were like “Welcome to Baghdad!”

On another occasion he came across the soldiers who had leaked the pictures of torture at Abu Ghraib. “Abu Ghraib was a torture center before the Americans, Saddam will cut your tongue out. Those guys lives are ruined for harassing a bunch of dirty scumbags, I guarantee when an Iraqi captures us it’s ten times worse,” he says. “I met them in Camp Arifjan in Kuwait. We were in the chall hall, we were talking, I forget how it came up, one guy was like, ‘I was pulled out of mission because I told someone about the pictures’. I said, ‘You punk motherfucker’… pussy faggots, I cussed them out.”

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”. In fact, he has so much antipathy for people who denigrate the military 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. “They tried to say I had PST whenever I got arrested. The VA said I had PST, but because I bust up the anti-war thing doesn’t mean I’m suffering from PST.” Despite all his pro-military rhetoric, Forrest is characteristically contradictory when he waxes lyrical about the hell of war. “You are rained to accept you are going to see dead people,” he says. “War is not pretty, there’s nothing good about war.” He adds, “The niggarabs are human beings.”

After a three hours trucking around we all resolve to head out of the zoo. We walk to the gate and I say goodbye. “I’ve got to get you the CD!” Forrest remembers. And before long he has run to his car and come back with his latest album, “Survival”. The jacket is a picture of him in military fatigues in Iraq. Back at the hotel I cast an eye on the lyrics, which are written in Gothic type inside the sleeve. “Eye For An Eye” opens with the lines: A slow painful death I strive/ Why are you still alive? The chorus goes: 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” opens with 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!

GROUP PHILOSOPHY

Perhaps ironically considering the general warmongering, the U.S. neo-Nazi movement is actually generally virulently against the war in Iraq. Most of the groups believe in an updated conspiracy theory about Jewish power, which they call ZOG, or Zionist Occupation Government. The belief is they use to describe Western governments supposed supplication to Jewish and Israeli power. On their internet forums, U.S. soldiers are often greeted with rude comments about the soldiers in the War on Terror being ‘Jewish warriors’ and ‘Zionist crusaders’. This should not be surprising. The white supremacist movement across America has ebbed and flowed since the heyday of the KuKluxKlan in the 1950s South. It is plagued by fissures and rivalries and ideological nitpicking that has always damaged its ability to form a large-scale and coherent movement. In 2008, there are over 150 different far-right groups – ranging from the Hitler worshippers to Christian nationalists – that are nestled all over the country.

Charles Wilson, spokesman for the National Socialist Movement, tells me the group is, “150% against the war in Iraq. It was a total mistake to invade Iraq; we can’t even secure our own borders. By 2010 will white people will be a minority in America?”

The IKA, or Imperial Klans of America, is based on the original KKK. “I am, as many of us are, a vet,” Truitt Lilly, the spokesman, writes in an email because he wants to remain faceless (and voiceless). “I do not encourage any one to join any part of Z.O.G. However, military training is good training for anyone: tactics and physical and self defense and discipline are key to any Christian’s way of life and should be taken into one’s consideration.”

The original KKK is against it too. “We have opposed the war in Iraq since day one.” National director, Pastor Thomas Robb: “If we are going to have a war then it needs to be done constitutionally.”

But none of this anti-war sentiment has stopped them taking advantage of the opportunities for training. “We do encourage them to sign up for the military. We can use the training to secure the resistance to our government,” says Wilson. “Every one of them takes a pact of secrecy,” with the NSM. “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.” He claims to have 190 members serving.
Billy Roper, founder of White Revolution, is another advocate. “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.”

Even Forrest, who talks with a glint in eyes about his time in Iraq, is actually against the war in essence. “I don’t believe in War on Terror,” he says. “It’s a war to protect Israel; I don’t think we need to be over there, I just went. I get in this conversation a lot, but I don’t like it when people call me a warrior for Israel.”

I stalked neo-Nazi forums for a period and they are still 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,” writes 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.”

MENTALLY SICK

The internet bravado is hard to vet for truth, but there has been a real-life high profile case of murder that involved a soldier in Iraq who had SS bolts – signature Nazi insignia – on his arm. The victim, Kevin Shields, was murdered on December 1st 2007 in Colorado Springs, CO, 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 also 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.

Eastridge’s lawyer, Sheilagh Mcateer, has a palpable anger when I talk to her on the phone. She asserts that the military are now knowingly 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 told me. “Having a tattoo was the least of his concerns.”

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. “I had to get out mostly because of my kids,” he says on the phone. “I realized that the reason the movement wasn’t after me but my children. I was an organizer and recruiter, and I realized it wasn’t me they wanted but my children, my boys would be the next generation and militants are much more hardcore than their predecessors.” Forrest knows about Leyden and isn’t impressed. “That guy is a punk – I’ll eat him for lunch,” he says. “He’s milking the Jews – he had a couple of tattoos, said he was leader of Hammerskins, there’s no rank structure in the skins like he says. He has everything to gain by doing this – he has to stay employed, so he says, “Skinheads are back!”
Leyden provided me with photographs of current servicemen with racist tattoos riding up their arms. “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, “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 two 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.”

DISCHARGES AND REENLISTMENT

The only time I see Forrest angry the whole time I spend with him, aside from when his kids are messing around, is when he talks about he was treated after his tour of Iraq. He left in June 2006 and was later honorably 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. He 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. “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 called “A Few Bad Men”. 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 with real emotion. “It was slanderous, they painted me as a dumbass… 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.” Forrest is particularly upset considering the other people allowed in the military. “What about the Bloods and Crips?” he asks. “I seen a million Bloods and Crips. As long as you don’t bring personal beliefs to the military it’s not a problem. If I was goose-stepping maybe, but I served my country honorably. I’m a soldier who is trying to come home, I have got two children, I’m not gonna be preaching politics while my drivers a nigger.”

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. A soft-spoke and more thoughtful character, he spent two years fighting in the War on Terror, but has none of the bravado of other military extremists. He says he joined up at 18, “Not to learn combat, but to make myself a better person. I wanted a better work ethic, not just the training to be a soldier. It wasn’t so much for a political thing when I joined the military”.

“I’m concerned with the welfare and wellbeing of white Americans,” he continues, “but the main thing with me is not so much that people look, but there’s a particular interest that there is in 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.”

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 a separatist,” says Fain. “I’d be willing to state it out in the street. I’ve worked with a black guy who had been member of the Black Panthers; he said, ‘I don’t have problem with white people but I don’t want my daughter bringing home white men’. I feel the same, we’re both racists. We had an understanding.”

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, in a story similar to Forrest. “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.” Fain is actually relatively pro-Arab, for good racist reasons. “It’s more what’s in someone’s heard than colour of their skin. Arabs aren’t European, but they are governing themselves. They are not coming over to mingle with us. And they are against Zionist control of governments; they just want to have own country and own lands.”

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. Does he think they relaxed standards? I ask him. “It’s quite possible. I can’t say that it is, I don’t know what the government has issued, but I would say it’s quite possible. Before they could be picky, now that they need to keep troop numbers high they are accepting no high school diploma, which is more detrimental. I’d rather see swastika than an idiot with no tattoos.”

The experiences of Fogarty and Fain are buttressed by the discharge figures. They show that the avenues stipulated in the Army guildelines 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. 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. Again, misconduct is a broad category but the trend shows standards have loosened in keeping with the testimony of Fogarty and Fain.

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, “Coordination’s 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 Alaska 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.”