08/05/10 – Matt Kennard – The Scott Horton Show

Alright y'all, welcome back to the show, it's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm joined on the phone by Matt Kennard, and now I'm sorry I wasn't able to find a good bio for you Matt, but I got a couple of good articles here from The Guardian and from Salon.com, so I guess why don't you, well first of all, welcome to the show, thank you for joining us and maybe if you can introduce yourself to the audience a little bit here.
Sure, I'm from London, I work for the Financial Times now in London, but I spent a bit of time in the States at graduate school at Columbia and then lived there afterwards doing a few projects, one of which I think we're going to talk about today.
I'm looking at, first of all, here from June of 2009, neo-Nazis are in the army now at Salon.com and then at The Guardian, one of them is the US Army's enemy within, and I think if people just Google your name and Nazis, they'll find all kinds of work that you've done on this story and so, well geez, tell us the story.
Okay, well it started a couple of years ago when I was looking for something to do for my master's thesis at Columbia and I knew about the problem the US military were having with getting enough troops to stop the army for both occupations.
So the reported groups that were being allowed in was from felons to overweight people to people with low IQ, this was all public, but I got a few tips that they'd quietly dropped regulations against white supremacists and neo-Nazis as well, and I mean a bit of cursory research initially into it by talking to leaders of the neo-Nazi movement in the US, pretty much straight away threw up this horrible trend that's happening now and has been happening all through the war on terror, and I mean it's not just neo-Nazis, there's a massive problem with gang members as well who have been allowed to serve throughout the war on terror, so that's how it really started.
It was a long, long and arduous process to get the information that I needed, I had to filter through endless amounts of Department of Defense reports, etc.
I had to file FOIA requests to the Criminal Investigative Command, which investigates abuses within the army.
In the end, I produced the article for Salem, which had quite an effect, although the army made no comment in the end.
So the US army, which only a few years ago had a standard that you're not allowed in if you have a tattoo at all, has not only dropped that, but now you can get in if your tattoo is of a Nazi swastika.
Yeah, well I mean that was the quote from one of the guys in the neo-Nazi movement, he said he knew of a friend who went in with a swastika and they said, okay, that might be a bit too much, you're going to have to change it into a sun wheel, so he went away and did that and then they let him in.
But I mean, there's other people swastikas allowed to be in there.
I went down to Florida for a week, a lovely week it was, not to view this guy Forrest Fogarty, who was a veteran from Iraq.
I mean, he showed me his tattoos and these were quite patently white supremacist tattoos and he flew through the recruitment process because the recruitment process basically says to the recruit, you have to explain this and then they can make up anything they want and if the recruiter is credulous enough, they'll let them in.
And I mean, recruiters have an incentive to be credulous because they have targets they have to meet, so it's an ugly, ugly trend.
Well now, there's been very little coverage of this, I guess besides your work.
I remember hearing or reading headlines a few years back about gang graffiti and I think swastikas, Nazi graffiti in Iraq and people were saying, whoa, you know, who's doing this and maybe there were a couple of little news stories about it, but not too much coverage.
Can you describe how widespread this problem was?
Because certainly it was a problem if they let a bunch of Nazis into the army.
It's not like they were a bunch of great, trustworthy soldiers or anything like that.
Sure, well, I'll address your point about the media coverage, which is true.
It hasn't been covered nearly enough as it should have, but that's for a number of reasons.
Firstly, the military is really quiet about it for obvious reasons.
It's not good PR to, I mean, it contradicts the rhetoric about the war on terror completely.
I mean, we're sending these soldiers to spread all these wonderful things to the Middle East, but we're doing it with people that actually hate any race that's not white, has a visceral dislike of homosexuals and it just completely contradicts the rhetoric.
So, I mean, the military is maintaining a silence about it, but also the media was so supportive of the war initially and has been, I mean, it's more critical now, but it makes them look stupid because it contradicts what they've been saying about the war.
So, I think that's the reason for the media blackout.
There was a reaction to my article.
I mean, it was on the front page of the Huffington Post.
It was covered on CNN.
Even Fox News had a little bit on it.
So, it wasn't a complete blackout, but it's hard to get information on it.
And I mean, there's more stuff at the moment on gangs because it's easier, the U.S. military has produced reports into the gang problem, which it says itself is chronic.
And I mean, they're really worried about what's going to happen when these people come back to the streets of America with this training.
So, it's a real mess at the moment.
Well, you know, and it seems to me, too, from, you know, what little I know about the neo-Nazi type movement, that this would probably be for them sort of, you know, two birds with one stone sort of a thing.
First of all, they get to go overseas and murder people, which they consider fun, and the people they consider less than human.
And then they also get good training for the real war they're preparing for that's in our future here, they think, or hope.
Right.
That's exactly right.
And I mean, you see that when you stalk the internet chat boards of these people.
Most of the talk is about, oh, I killed a few whatever today.
I mean, I'm not going to say it on the radio, it's horrible stuff.
But they say that.
But the most important thing they say is, I can't wait to come back to the United States and use this training that I have to start the race war, which they believe is going to erupt in the U.S.
And I mean, apart from just the rhetoric, I mean, there's been specific cases of neo-Nazis committing atrocities in Iraq.
There was a guy called Kenneth Eastridge, who's now in prison in Bates, who came back to America.
And with a couple of friends, they killed one of their colleagues from the U.S.
Army.
And in the ensuing trial, it came out that one of them accused Eastridge of going around Baghdad with a gun, just taking potshots at random innocent Iraqis.
And after he was actually arrested, his MySpace profile came out with him with SS tattoos on his arm on his MySpace profile.
I mean, it's that explicit and nothing was done about it.
And I mean, that should have caused a massive scandal at the time, but it didn't.
It barely registered in the mainstream media.
And I mean, I mean, there's another case that I was looking at recently.
I read an article in Newsweek, which had a profile of the guy that converted to Islam while he was working at Guantanamo Bay.
And he said nonchalantly, he was the reporter said, oh, he showed me his tattoos, one of which was was an SS bolt.
And the reporter didn't ask, how did he get in the military with that?
He was just sort of it was just a sort of a side in his profiles.
And I mean, I don't know if that's just to do with people not being aware that you shouldn't be allowed in the military with SS bolts or they're just turning a blind eye.
I'm not sure.
Well, so help me out with some numbers here.
I mean, I have to assume the worst when you talk about, you know, these neo-Nazis committing war crimes.
I mean, the whole freaking Iraq war is one big war crime beginning.
And you ask me, but you have guys going around taking pot shots, doing things like that, going on their own missions or being used even worse, you know, as special forces or as, you know, private contractor mercenary types to go do the real, you know, covert death squad missions and that kind of thing.
How many neo-Nazis were over there in Iraq are over there in Iraq?
How many war crimes are we talking about here?
I don't know, because obviously the US military don't keep a record of people who are neo-Nazis because it makes them look bad.
So in their internal investigations, they coupled them together with gang members.
I mean, there was one FBI investigation that said that they thought there were 203 operating, but I think the level is much higher.
And also you have to differentiate between neo-Nazis, white supremacists, other because not all of them are going to go in with SS bolts tattooed on their arm.
There's a lot of white supremacists that are just going to be you're not going to be able to detect because there's going to be no outward signal that they're neo-Nazis or white supremacists.
So it's really difficult to say.
But in turn, I agree with your point about the atrocities in Iraq, because it's not just the neo-Nazis.
The neo-Nazis is a very useful or it's a very it's a very eye opening example, because it shows how little regard the US military does actually have for the occupation population.
I'm sorry.
Hold it right there, Matt.
We'll be right back with Matt from the Financial Times about neo-Nazis, et cetera, in the military right after this.
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All right, welcome back to the show.
It's anti-war radio.
Scott Horton on the line is Matt Kinnard from the Financial Times.
And we're talking about neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
And I guess we'll get into some gang membership type stuff here, too, in the U.S.
Army at war for for the U.S.
Army from his salon dot com article.
Neo-Nazis are in the army now is this paragraph.
Tom Metzger is the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and current leader of the white Aryan resistance.
He tells me the military has never been more tolerant of racial extremists.
Quote, now they are letting everybody in, he says.
You know what I wonder, Matt, are these recruiters who, as you said, are under pressure to get their quotas done and what have you, are they going to the leaders of white supremacist groups and saying, you know, give me some of your boys?
No, I mean, I didn't hear that.
I haven't heard any of that.
But what I did hear was that from Forrest Fogarty, who is the character that I went to interview in Florida, he said that while he was on his base in Fort Stewart, he was getting sort of high fives and stuff from the commanders who knew about his neo-Nazi background, saying like Fogarty's hardcore will put Fogarty on the hardcore missions, that sort of thing.
So I don't think they're actively recruiting these people.
But once they're in, I'm sure they're seen as an asset because they're obviously they have a warlike mentality.
They're prepared to go on the most serious mission.
So there's that element of it.
I wouldn't, I can't say that I've heard anything about them actively recruiting white supremacist neo-Nazis.
It's funny, you know, people talk about things like, well, I say we go and get Saddam and get out and all these things as though all this is just supposed to take place in a vacuum and no consequences.
And here we see, you know, well, this kind of thing, but also the mirror image of this is the building up of white supremacy in the minds of soldiers who were not racist before they joined up.
And this is something we've seen for years and years that, well, I guess we've always known from the history of all the wars, you've got to call the Germans, the Krauts and the Japanese become become the Nips and the people of Iraq become the Haji's and it's to deny them their humanity so that it's okay to murder them.
And so you end up having white supremacy that these people who were not Nazi types at all, when they joined the army, they come home with these attitudes.
And this is going to pollute our society from here forward, whether there's ever the big race war, these kooks won or not.
Yeah, no, that's undoubtedly true.
And at the end of the article, I talked to some non-extremist veterans who had served in Iraq and they said basically what you're saying, they said the war is a brutalizing thing and they couldn't believe how they had acted while they were there.
They saw Iraqis as subhuman.
They called them Haji's and sand niggers and disgusting things like that.
So that's undoubtedly true.
But I mean, there's also a much bigger thing happening here, which I'm currently writing about, which is that it's not just neo-Nazis that they let in during the war on terror, they let in felons.
This was more explicit.
They changed the rules on moral waivers.
So you get people like Stephen Green, who raped the 14-year-old girl in Mahmoudiyah, who got into the US military on a moral waiver.
There's people who, there's gang members, there's another massive issue is the foreign citizens.
The first guy to die in Iraq wasn't actually American, he was Guatemalan.
I mean, the US military changed profoundly during the war on terror in a way I don't think it ever has before because the Bush administration needed vast amounts of troops and it was too unpopular to institute conscription.
So it had to change the regulations on pretty much every part of the US military, which had a horrible effect.
I mean, the neo-Nazi case is obviously very shocking, but there's a lot where that came from.
Right.
Well, I was going to ask about whether you found the influence of whether criminal, outright felon, ex-con, criminal elements like you're referring to there, white supremacists involved with the mercenary armies of Blackwater and the triple canopy torturers and that kind of thing.
Well, you know what?
This is a really scary point because it's definitely, what we have about the US military is at least tenuously something approaching the truth.
I can't tell you how many numbers there are there because the US military are too closed and they wouldn't divulge stuff like that.
But Blackwater and the other mercenary organizations are even more private and more secretive.
So what's happening now, I just have no idea.
I mean, you hear about them getting mercenaries from all over the place.
I mean, there's people from the time of General Pinochet in Chile, over in Iraq, there's people, there's Colombian paramilitaries being signed up by Blackwater, which is now Z.
So yeah, I mean, that is a huge issue and I don't know too much about it because no one does.
Because we don't know, these institutions don't have to tell us what they're doing, which is very scary.
They're even less accountable than the US military.
But undoubtedly, I mean, Forrest Fogarty, the main character in the piece, he said to me when he was in Iraq, he was looking around and he sort of said, look, I was looking at Blackwater, they get paid three times as much as me.
They're much more hardcore.
They don't have to write a report every time they kill someone like we do.
You know, for him, that was the pinnacle.
So if he was saying that, he wasn't actually allowed in because it became embarrassing for the military and he was discharged in the end.
But other people like him will definitely have been in Iraq, looked at places like Blackwater, looked at the, basically, there's no regulations for signing up to Blackwater and gone home and gone back to Iraq as a private military contractor and what they've done out there, we all know about.
Right.
You know, this is something that Jeremy Scahill likes to point out a lot is that it's why they use the mercenaries is because the UCMJ doesn't apply to them.
And the Justice Department back here will always defer to the military.
And so they go around and around in a circle like the Waco evidence saying it's somebody else's responsibility to show it or to do anything about it.
And nothing gets done about it.
So they're the perfect people to use for covert missions and death squads and so forth.
Exactly.
So it's very scary.
And I'm sure, I mean, I can say I can say with certainty that the people like Forrest and other neo-Nazis have looked at the private military contractors and they're a very tantalizing option for them.
Yeah.
Well, I guess this is that whole thing.
Nietzsche or whoever said, stare into the abyss, it stares back into you.
This is, you know, these are Americans who are going to be coming home.
Many of them are going to become our local sheriffs, deputies and worse.
You know, this is, you know, it's part of our society that we're going to have to deal with from now on.
All the neo-Nazis who got training in the Iraq war over there, you know, like all the training they get in prison isn't good enough.
I know.
And I mean, the gang members issue is linked to what's happening in Mexico now, where hundreds, thousands of people are dying on the border because of these massive drug cartels.
I mean, a lot of the gangs in the military are using the protection they have in the military to move drugs around.
That's been documented already.
So, I mean, there's the whole manifold range of problems that this is going to throw up in America from a whole range of different groups that have been allowed to serve from neo-Nazis to gang members.
Then there's the damaged young people that have not received the treatment they should have.
I mean, being sent on multiple tours of PTSD.
I mean, this is going to be a generation which is actually which is traumatized by this war.
And I mean, it's not I mean, it should be should be on the newspapers every day, but it's not because now the war in Iraq is winding down or it's picking up in Afghanistan.
The issue is off the agenda.
So we'll see what happens.
Right.
Yeah.
Hey, didn't you hear the surge worked?
General Petraeus is Jesus and everything's fine.
All right.
Listen, I can't tell you how much I appreciate your work on this issue and your time on the show today.
I really do.
Okay.
Thanks a lot.
Everybody, that is Matt Kinnard from the Financial Times.
And we'll be back after this.