In his latest "This Week in Washington" e-mail, Rep. Jerry Moran claims he was deeply offended by a recent Department of Homeland Security report that returning military veterans are joining right-wing, domestic terrorist groups. He implies that DHS and Secretary Napolitano are unfairly accusing all our veterans and attempts to relate this report to the poor treatment that Vietnam veterans received years ago. Talk about unfair accusations.

As a matter of fact, there is a problem with extremists infiltrating the military, both for recruitment purposes and for training in such things as weapons use (after all, if you can be trained to dismantle an IED you will certainly be ready to construct one). Rep. Moran should know this.

In July 2006, the Southern Poverty Law Center issued a report, "A Few Bad Men," outlining this problem. Shortly afterwards, 40 members of Congress asked then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to investigate, and Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., wrote a separate letter to Rumsfeld asking him to weed racist extremists out of the military. Rep. Moran should know this.

In November, the SPLC president wrote to Secretary of Defense Gates, reminding him of earlier reports and adding: "Because the evidence that right-wing extremists are infiltrating the military continues to mount, we urge you to revisit the issue." Let's hope that Secretary Gates will indeed revisit the issue, since the previous administration apparently ignored it. The many good men and women of our military do not need to be contaminated by the "few bad men," and we also should not be using our military to train a potential future Timothy McVeigh.

This seems to me to be a serious problem, and it has been reported in the public media for years, as well as in the publications and on the Web site of the Southern Poverty Law Center. If Rep. Moran was truly not aware of this problem, then he was not doing his job. If he was aware of it, then the commentary in his latest newsletter was a deliberate attempt to distort the DHS report and smear the administration. This is a tactic that the remnants of the national Republican Party are using a lot these days, and I am disappointed that Mr. Moran has lowered himself to that level.

Rather than berating Secretary Napolitano, he should be thanking her for being on top of a situation that could some day potentially threaten our homeland security. I'm hoping to see a retraction in his next newsletter.

Claire Matthews

965 Catherine Road