Hatred Clad in Khaki : Army may need new rules to root out violence-prone extremists

The Army is preparing to launch a servicewide investigation to try to determine how many of its soldiers might be associated with extremist political movements and what can be done about it. Before the inquiry’s findings and recommendations are reported on March 1, it’s probable that one or more congressional committees will also go looking for some answers.

Prompting these investigations are the shooting deaths of a man and woman on a street in Fayetteville, N.C., one week ago and the arrest of two soldiers from nearby Ft. Bragg on charges of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder. A third soldier, charged with driving the car in which the suspects were riding, is also being held on the conspiracy count. The victims were apparently strangers to their attackers. They seem to have been targeted solely because they were black. At least one of the soldiers charged with the crime was known for his white supremacist views.

His expression of those warped views apparently included the display of a Nazi flag above his bunk while he lived on base. Is such a thing now tolerated under Army regulations? Some officers at Ft. Bragg presumably thought so. Members of the military are banned from “active participation” in hate groups, like the neo-Nazi skinhead groups to which the arrested soldiers have been tied. But Army guidelines apparently don’t ban “passive” involvement; that, apparently, is seen as protected by the 1st Amendment’s guarantees of free association and speech.

If that’s the case, then some serious rethinking of the regulations clearly is demanded. The Nazi flag symbolizes the greatest political evil the world has known. The issue isn’t simply whether its display in a barracks might offend fellow soldiers and so undercut unit morale. The larger question is whether there is any place in a democratic army for those whose beliefs are so openly subversive of democratic political values and hostile to American principles.

Soldiers have rights. They have also taken an oath to defend the Constitution. The Army had better decide swiftly just what its regulations in fact permit.