Wisconsin police have identified the shooter who killed six worshipers at the Oak Creek Sikh temple and critically wounded three others before being shot dead. The gunman, Wade Michael Page, died in the attack. He’s a white 40-year-old U.S. Army veteran. Authorities are now investigating Page’s links to white supremacist groups and his membership in skinhead rock bands. According to military sources , Page served as a soldier in the Army from 1992 to 1998, when he was discharged for patterns of misconduct. Page worked in psychological operations and was stationed at Ford Bliss and Fort Bragg in North Carolina. On Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center revealed Page was connected to the white supremacist movement and a member of two white power bands named End [Apathy] and Definite Hate. The Southern Poverty Law Center described Page as a “…frustrated Neo-Nazi who had been the leader of a racist white power band.” According to a profile in The Milwaukee Journal Centinal, Page used the “dirt people” to describe people who were not white. Page reportedly worked as a truck driver for five years but lost his job in 2010. Last year he lost his home in North Carolina after it was foreclosed by Wells Fargo. Well, Wade Michael Page had been on the radar of the Southern Poverty Law Center for several years. FBI Special Agent Teresa Carlson said he not present an obvious threat.
Mark Potok talking:
he describes in the year 2000, essentially entering the white supremacist scene, he talks about leaving native state of Colorado on his motorcycle with just what he could carry on tat bike, and essentially, heading out into the world of these white power rock-and-roll bands. He played in some very well-known bands over the years, a band called Blue Eyed Devils, another one called Intimidation One. These are really very well known on the racist scene. And then in 2005, he went on to form his own band, which was called End Apathy. I think that’s significant because he gave an interview a couple of years ago in which he talked about the name of that band, and essentially said what he was really saying was the white supremacist scene was, a lot of people who talked a lot and did not do anything at all. This is a very common complaint you hear from people in that world. I think, essentially what it did was predict what ultimately he did. The mass murder he carried out.
The National Alliance, back then in the year 2000, was by far the most important hate group in the United States. It was an organization of about 1400 people led by a former University physics professor, of all things, named William Pierce. I think some of our listeners will recall him because Pierce is the author of the race war novel called “The Turner Diaries” which has often been described as the bible of the extreme rights. We don’t know what page was trying to buy, but what is certainly true, and I think suggests what he did buy, is that The National Alliance owned something called Resistance Records. At the time, this was the premier distributor of white power music in U.S. So, our best guess is that he was buying music. He was buying CDs from Resistance Records. But, merely the fact he had contact with the National Alliance suggests once again that he was very much in the center of this world.
We tried listening to several of his song tracks yesterday and were able to distinguish very little in terms of what he was actually saying, and that’s fairly typical of music in the white supremacist world. It’s kind of shouted music. This world, the musical scene is a very large underworld that the public basically knows nothing about. That is the world he operated in. The music is terribly important to the white supremacist scene in a couple of ways. First of all, it’s the number one earner. These groups have very few ways of bringing money in and are typically, essentially, destitute. The National Alliance, back in the year 2000, was bringing in $600,000–$700,000 a year through its music, which is extraordinary. The other aspect of the music is that it has turned out to be the most effective recruiting tool for bringing young people into the movement. People will start listening to this music, typically on the Internet. When they’re 16 or 17 years old the music they listen to it hundreds and hundreds of times and essentially, the message kind of seeps into their brain. At that point, at least some percentage of those kids walk out of their parents’ houses and walk into a real skinhead concert, and that is typically where we see real recruitment happen.
We don’t work with law enforcement in the sense of exchanging a great deal of information. We do train law enforcement officials, maybe 6 or 7, 8 thousand people a year in domestic terrorism. We give presentations in very particular things. For instance, we might go to the Utah gang investigators group and give a presentation about the groups in Utah. That kind of thing. What it means that we track these groups is that we essentially do a whole lot open-source kind of data collection. So, that ranges from the very simple — collecting newspaper articles, that sort of thing, monitoring the Internet — to the somewhat more complicated — getting into email groups, sometimes private groups, listening to short-wave radio broadcasts. And of course we act like any investigative newspaper would in the sense that very typically, the leader of a group will start sleeping with someone other than his girlfriend and the next thing you know, the girlfriend angrily is coming to us with all kinds of information. So there are a whole lot of different kinds of streams that we bring together as we monitor these groups. Sometimes we will even come across business records or perhaps they will be provided to us by someone leaving the movement.
Label 56. hey issued a statement saying, “We have worked hard over the years to promote a positive image, and have posted many articles encouraging people to take a positive path in life.”
Let me say, briefly, that is utter hogwash. It is a straight ahead Neo-Nazi website.. They did put up that statement. They did, yesterday take down pages, materials, the interview with Page that we found very early yesterday. But the fact is the website is still thick with white supremacist material. Label 56, we believe the 56 stands for e-f, the 5th and 6th letters of the alphabet. E-f, we have determined stands for eastern front, and the idea essentially, was that the racist skinhead movement needed to move more heavily into the eastern part of the United States. It had been quite heavily concentrated in the Midwest and the West Coast. So, beyond that I can’t really say. It is a relatively small label, certainly compared to groups like Resistance Records.
we saw nothing that particularly distinguished page from thousands of other people who live in the same world that he did. I don’t really find any fault with law enforcement. I just don’t see how this could have been predicted in any real sense by law enforcement officials. I suppose it is different if you were close to the guy and really talked to him on a regular basis. All that said, what the reporter who is on with us said, I think is very important. The idea that he was in the military and specifically at Fort Bragg at a time when there was a real scandal about Neo-Nazis in Fort Bragg playing this music, openly indoctrinating other soldiers. There was a black couple — a man and a woman — who were murdered right outside of Fort Bragg by Neo-Nazi skinheads who in fact were in the military. So, we’ve spent a lot of time over the last three or four years doing investigative work and then lobbying the Pentagon to essentially impose a zero tolerance rule on extremists in the military. What was going on a few years ago in 2006, specifically, when we wrote a very big investigative piece was they were allowing the recruiting of these people; not as policy, but as factual matter. Simply because they were having real difficulties meeting quotas, recruitment quotas for Afghanistan and Iraq. The Bush administration and then the Obama administration very much resisted taking this change initially, but finally, in response to our stories and lobbying and letters to the Department of Homeland Security and so on, in fact the Pentagon did change the rules and impose a zero tolerance policy in late 2009. So, the hope is that at least this guy would have been found and probably kicked out of the military earlier. I’m not sure that would have prevented anything in terms of this attack, but I think it is important to try to keep these people out of our military as well.
What has happened is an absolutely explosive growth of groups on the radical right in general. As a matter of fact, we have never seen this kind of growth. The white supremacist groups have grown — them not so spectacularly — but, other kinds of groups, what we used to call militias in the 1990’s, have grown at an absolutely unbelievable pace from 149 of these groups in 2008 to 1,274 last year, or last count. As the voice-over in the documentary you just played suggested, the reasons really are the changing the racial demographics of this country as represented in the person of Barack Obama, and of course the economy. These people all realize that the Census Bureau has predicted that white people in the United States will lose their majority by about the Year 2050, they’ll fall under 50% of the population, and they are essentially having meltdowns. They’re at the end of their rope. The world, they feel, is closing in around them, and the way they talk about the situation right now is a genocide is being carried out against white people in this country, and in general, in the world. Many of the groups talk about whites is the most endangered species on the planet, of all things. So, we see this quite commonly, this sense that they are sinking, this is the last possible moment, the country’s going down, and so on and so forth. So, the bottom line is, we are living in a very scary time, a very scary moment. I have to say, this attack — certainly we knew nothing about the particulars of this attack before it happened — but I do not think it was much of a surprise to many who do the kind of work we do. This is our Anders Breivik. Anders Breivik, of course, being the man who murdered 77 Norwegians last July, July of 2011, because he thought they were enabling Muslim immigration into Norway. So, this looks very similar. Of course, we’ve now see a mosque burn down, and there’s an immense amount of anti-Muslim propaganda in the political mainstream as well as among fringe groups like this. Sad to say, I just don’t think this attack was all that surprising.
– source democracynow.org