Pundit Country

The story, which was first reported in the LA Times in 2006, stated that due to recruting shortages, the Army was offering waivers to those who would not ordinarily qualify for service.

Last year, almost 1 in 6 Army recruits had a problem in their background that would have disqualified them from military service. In order to accept them, the Army granted special exceptions, known as recruiting waivers.

Recruits with medical problems made up the largest category of those given waivers. But the largest increase was among recruits with a history of either criminal conduct or drug and alcohol problems, according to data provided by the Army.

In all, the Army granted waivers to 11,018 recruits in the 12-month period ending Sept. 30, 2005, or 15% of those accepted into the service that year. Those figures are up from 2004, when 9,300 waivers were granted, or 12% of those joining the Army.

…There was a significant increase in the number of recruits with what the Army terms “serious criminal misconduct” in their background.

That category includes aggravated assault, robbery, vehicular manslaughter, receiving stolen property and making terrorist threats, said Douglas Smith, a spokesman for the Army Recruiting Command at Ft. Knox, Ky.

Sadly, it shouldn’t be a surprise as to where this trend was going as now the Southern Poverty Law Center now indicates that Neo-Nazis are beginning to organize from within the Army, realizing a threat that many groups who track hate groups have feared. The SPLC released a letter to the committee chair over homeland security urging them to take action on the members of a social networking site called NewSaxon which is now serving as a kind of Facebook for racists. Currently the Army has prohibitions on members actively participating in hate groups, but not on simply being members of them. The most recent letter served as a follow-up to one written in 2006 in part due to the LA Times story about the potential rise of hate group recruitment taking from inside the armed services. The assertion was backed up by the FBI which said that by their estimation hundreds of soldiers may have already been targeted for membership into such groups.

Star and Stripes, the official paper of the military also reported on the SPLC letter further stating that officers had given conflicting statements as to the exact nature of the problem, claiming that enforcement of the regulation had been spotty and uneven. This was due to the fact that it isn’t being dealt with comprehensively, but rather in an individual basis.

However, this may change due to a controversial report released by the Department of Homeland Security, which highlighted the exact concerned expressed by the SPLC and the FBI. The report, which was highly criticized by conservatives as being anti-military, was pulled from publication, but was brought back into the news with the release of the SPLC letter, which largely reaffirmed the facts in the report. It has led Alcee Hastings (D-FL) to propose an amendment to the 2010 defense authorization bill that would effective ban “recruitment, enlistment or retention” of soldiers into hate groups.

Related articles

• Dozens of US Military personnel spotted on Nazi networking site (boingboing.net)
• In the line of hate’s fire (timesunion.com)
• Rise of Right-Wing Extremism Linked to Recession (shininglight.us)