In 2018 marine lance corporal Vasillios Pistolis was imprisoned after assaulting people at the 2017 Charlottesville “Unite The Right” rally. The federal indictment states that Melzer confessed to sharing sensitive information about his soon-to-deploy unit with members of a neo-Nazi group in order to facilitate an attack that would “result in the deaths of as many of his fellow service members as possible”. Last year army private Ethan Phelan Melzer confessed to prosecutors in the southern district of New York to plotting an attack on fellow soldiers in his unit. The appeal of extremism among active duty and veterans is a longstanding issue with a track record of violent incidents. A 35-year-old woman, air force veteran Ashli Babbitt, was fatally shot while attempting to break the doors into the House chamber. The 727 defendants charged in the 6 January Capitol riot include 81 with ties to the military, while five were active-duty service members. In many ways the aftermath of the attack on the Capitol in Washington DC laid bare the vulnerability of US service members to extremism. The Proud Boys and Oath Keepers are definitely recruiting.” “The infection of extremism into our state and local police and our armed forces is a very serious concern that needs to be monitored,” said Eaton.Įaton added: “There’s a recruiting effort going on locally, they’re going to school boards, like missionaries sent to the islands to convert people. ‘The McVeighs of the world are still there, we had about 4,500 of them crawling all over the nation’s capitol.’ Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images “The McVeighs of the world are still there, we had about 4,500 of them crawling all over the nation’s Capitol ,” said Eaton, who added that the increased power of the internet and rise of social media had boosted the threat massively since McVeigh’s attack. The two men harbored anti-government and racist beliefs. It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in US history. The 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people and injured over 650 when one morning ex-army soldiers Timothy McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols parked a rental truck filled with homemade explosives outside a federal building and detonated it. “It’s the Timothy McVeigh problem: what did we know about McVeigh and what were we doing about it?” said Eaton. They contemplated the possibility of a breakdown of the chain of command, along partisan lines, in the aftermath of a contested election with “rogue units organizing among themselves to support the ‘rightful’ commander in chief”.Įaton said in an interview that the American military and law enforcement have a history of underestimating the threat from the far right. The generals warned that it could succeed with the aid of rogue military elements. “We’re behind the ball on what we know about domestic terrorists in the United States,” Paul Eaton, a retired US army major general and senior adviser to the non-profit VoteVets, said.Įaton and two other retired army generals recently wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post last month warning of the threat of a coup in the 2024 election.
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