Wade Michael Page, who officials say shot and killed six people at a Sikh temple Sunday in Wisconsin, was a decorated Army veteran psychological warfare specialist and white supremacist who has been watched with concern by anti-hate groups for more than 10 years, reports the Christian Science Monitor. A member of a racist skinhead punk band, Page, who was killed in a shootout with police, had tried to make purchases from the National Alliance, a neo-Nazi organization, said Heidi Beirich of the Southern Poverty Law Center, who added, “We’ve been tracking him for more than a decade.”
The problem of white supremacists in the military was a source of particular concern for the center in the mid-2000s, when it warned the U.S. military about a spate of extremist activity among U.S. forces in 2006. In 2009, the military changed its policy to specify that service members “must not actively advocate supremacist doctrine, ideology or causes” or “otherwise advance efforts to deprive individuals of their civil rights.”