Army faces contemporary warmth over safety briefing that labeled pro-life teams as ‘terrorists’

Army officials were on the hot seat again Thursday as lawmakers on Capitol Hill pressed for answers over training materials meant to warn soldiers about potential threats while on guard duty. The program, which the Army has since repudiated, lumped in prominent pro-life organizations with other “terror groups.”

The episode that broke this summer caused a furor and fueled conservative complaints that the Biden administration’s campaign to root out “extremism” in the ranks after the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol was masking an effort to target and blackball conservative and Christian service personnel for their political and religious opinions.

Rep. Jim Banks, the Indiana Republican who chairs the House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee, said the Army under President Biden is using an overly broad ideological approach to police the speech of conservative service members, effectively forcing them to hide their beliefs for fear of retaliation from their superiors in the chain of command.

“At any time, the administration could weaponize this policy against any Army soldier with values different from the administration,” he said. “The First Amendment is broad for a reason. Once speech is limited — no matter how offensive or vulgar — individual freedoms are dangerously infringed upon. That is a real threat to our democracy.”

Despite a campaign initiated by Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin in early 2021 to target extremists in the ranks, a study commissioned by the Pentagon itself concluded early this year that there was no evidence that the military harbors a disproportionate number of radicals of any political persuasion. A team of researchers from the Institute for Defense Analyses found “fewer than 100 substantiated cases per year of extremist activity by members of the military in recent years.”

Since 2017, thousands of Army troops at Fort Liberty, North Carolina — formerly Fort Bragg — have sat through slideshows intended to highlight the threat posed by foreign and domestic terrorist organizations such as the Islamic State and the Ku Klux Klan. Included in the list of “threatening” organizations were legitimate advocacy groups such as the National Right to Life, the largest and oldest pro-life group in the country.

“The training accused the members of these organizations of being threats to the safety of military installations and designated symbols of pro-life groups, including state-issued pro-life license plates, as indicators of terrorism,” Mr Banks said.

The slides included a list of suspect organizations across the political spectrum, including People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, known as PETA, and the Animal Liberation Front.

Military officials, who have clashed repeatedly with congressional Republicans over “woke” personnel and disciplinary policies and their effect on military readiness, said the Fort Liberty incident was an outlier and a mistake.

Army officials told lawmakers that the slides were created and displayed exclusively at Fort Liberty. Senior officials at the post, home of the Army’s storied 82nd Airborne Division, did not approve them because there was no policy for reviewing training slides.

“There is no evidence indicating that the individual who developed and presented the training attempted to deliberately subvert [Department of Defense] or Army policy, nor is there any evidence to suggest the individual attempted to further a personal viewpoint through the presentation,” said Agnes Schaefer, assistant secretary of the Army for manpower and reserve affairs.

She said the slide show was created by a “junior employee” who used open-source research that inaccurately claimed the highlighted organizations were potential security threats.

She acknowledged to lawmakers that the mistaken training materials had “revealed a gap in our processes at the command level since these slides were first developed in 2017. We need to alleviate the potential for individuals to develop training materials without appropriate supervisory review.”

Some of the affected groups are pressing for more information on how the incident was allowed to occur.

“It is stunning that training tools used by the U.S. Army vilified a well-recognized, peaceful pro-life group such as National Right to Life,” Carol Tobias, the organization’s president, said last month. “The U.S. Army needs to answer why its training materials lied about the nature of pro-life work in general and specifically about National Right to Life.”

Lt. Gen. Patrick Matlock, the Army’s deputy chief of staff, acknowledged that the Fort Liberty incident shouldn’t have happened but said it didn’t reflect how the Army operates. He said the Army prefers that such training be standardized throughout the service.

“These training materials were improperly developed and should never have been made,” he said.

Gen. Matlock said there was no excuse for senior leaders at Fort Liberty to be unaware of the slide show for seven years. Lawmakers asked Army officials whether anyone on the post was disciplined over the botched security briefing.

“The chain of command is the responsible agent for adverse actions or personnel actions, and I’m not going to comment on what they’ve done or not done. That resides with the chain of command,” Gen. Matlock said.

Rep. Matt Gaetz, Florida Republican, accused Gen. Matlock of “playing games.”

“Congress deserves to know — after you all screwed up with 10,000 soldiers — whether you fired anyone, whether anyone got a demotion in rank, or what the consequences were,” Mr. Gaetz said. “You don’t get to just say, ‘It’s our chain of command, and it’s not Congress’ business’ when you screw up to this magnitude.”

Rep. Michael Waltz, Florida Republican, is a former Army Green Beret who served multiple combat tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East. Although senior leaders take responsibility for unfairly characterizing members of legitimate organizations, they don’t seem to hold anyone accountable for the failure, he said.

“I’m not asking for names. I don’t want to violate anyone’s privacy. But our constituents and taxpayers in a public forum deserve to know: Was there any level of accountability?” Mr. Waltz said. “That’s not good for unit cohesion and unit morale.”

Gen. Matlock again said he wouldn’t comment on specific actions taken by the chain of command at Fort Liberty.

“The chain of command concluded the investigation and followed through with actions,” he said.