Akbar & the generals

Two important verdicts announced within one day of each other in mid-April expose the class injustice of the Pentagon’s legal machinery regarding the horrific war and occupation of Iraq.

A military jury found Army Sgt. Hasan Akbar guilty of premeditated and attemp ted murder at Fort Bragg, N.C. An African-American Muslim, Akbar attacked his army camp in Kuwait on March 23, 2003, as his unit was preparing to invade Iraq. Two officers were killed and over a dozen wounded.

Meanwhile, in Washington, D.C., a secret high-level Army investigation exonerated four top Pentagon officers from responsibility for the racist, heinous abuse and torture of Iraqi detainees during the infamous Abu Ghraib prison scandal in 2004. One was Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the senior commanding officer in Iraq from June 2003 to June 2004.

Sgt. Akbar said he carried out the attack because he feared that U.S. troops would kill Muslims. His fears were prophetic. Defense attorneys claimed that Akbar was mentally ill when he carried out the attack, while the prosecution stated that Akbar consciously wanted to create “maximum carnage” with his actions.

Akbar could now receive the death penalty. This is the first trial of a soldier accused of killing his “superior” officers since the end of the Vietnam War. As that war dragged on for many years, there were countless incidences of “fragging”—that is, GIs rolling fragmentation grenades into their officers’ tents during that unjust imperialist aggression, which took the lives of over 50,000 GIs and millions of Vietnamese and ended in a U.S. military defeat 30 years ago.

Regarding Abu Ghraib, who could ever forget the sickening images of Iraqi detain ees being forced to pose naked and piled on top of each other while their U.S. torturers stood nearby smiling for the cameras? Or the photo of a hooded Iraqi prisoner standing on a chair with his wired arms hoisted?

It’s true that courts-martial found several low-ranking U.S. guards guilty of this inhumane treatment. Some are in prison or have been dishonorably discharged. As the verdict shows, however, far from taking responsibility for their command, those in charge let these guards be scapegoats for the tone the command set while ordering the criminal occupation of a sovereign country. In cold blood, those top officers encouraged the tortures that the U.S. military carries out with the same sadistic gusto not just in Iraq but also in Afghanistan and Guantanamo.

Akbar’s action, however impulsive, was a reaction against an illegal war for empire. He knew from the beginning that he was sent not to liberate Iraqis but to conquer and kill them, and he rebelled.

It is now two years later. Over 1,500 GIs and 100,000 Iraqis are dead. The Iraqi resistance is more determined than ever to kick the imperialists out of their homeland. Akbar’s action, which his military attorneys tried to explain as “insanity,” now seems much more in tune with reality, more connec ted to the massive resistance of Iraqis, to the resistance of numerous young people here who no longer enlist and to that of war-weary GIs who refuse to return to duty in Iraq.

To a majority of the world’s people, the Bush administration that plotted the war and lied to carry it out, the top Pentagon generals who plan ned it, and those Army officers who were cleared are the real criminals, not Hasan Akbar.