{"id":156,"date":"2003-08-05T06:14:35","date_gmt":"2003-08-05T06:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2008-12-10T22:12:39","modified_gmt":"2008-12-10T22:12:39","slug":"hasan_akbars_peculiar_military_career","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=156","title":{"rendered":"Hasan Akbar’s Peculiar Military Career"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw this<\/a> in the L.A. Times Sunday magazine (intrusive registration etc. etc. use ‘laexaminer’\/’laexaminer’) and assumed other bloggers would pick it up; I’m surprised that no one’s blogged this up until now, so I’ll toss it out there. The subtitle was:<\/p>\n

His Behavior Was Bizarre. His Peers Insulted His Muslim Faith. He Was Shipped Off to Fight in Iraq. Then He Allegedly Murdered Two Army Officers.<\/i><\/p>\n

And a sympathetic look at the Iraqi fragger follows. It opens:<\/p>\n

Once a month Quran Bilal drives north out of Baton Rouge, La., in her black Nissan, a car so old she cannot remember its year, only that she paid $700 for it used and that the odometer has now turned 148,000 clicks. A side window is broken and the air-conditioning blows hot. <\/p>\n

Bilal endures it because this is the only way she can visit her son, Sgt. Hasan Akbar, her eldest, who is confined to a military brig at Ft. Knox, Ky. <\/p>\n

…<\/b><\/p>\n

As disturbing as the attack was, Akbar’s defense is equally troubling. His mother and his military lawyers say he snapped in the face of relentless ridicule, of him and of Muslims in general. He had complained before his arrest that soldiers and officers harassed him and scared him and trampled on his religion. Moments after his arrest, according to fellow soldiers, he blurted out that he feared ”American soldiers were going to kill and rape Muslims” once Iraq was taken. <\/p>\n

If we expect that the U.S. military is a microcosm of society, then such harassment isn’t terribly surprising, especially after Sept. 11. But if we expect the military, with its rigorous oversight and strong need for cohesive fighting units, to have less tolerance for religious harassment and other divisive forces, then Akbar’s case may provide a painful lesson of the kind the nation has wrestled with since the shootings at Columbine High School in Colorado and elsewhere where the killers felt they had been hazed or shunned by their peers.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s more…<\/p>\n

Articles like this tend to make me want to gnaw my way through the newspaper.<\/p>\n

The good defense attorneys – the $450\/hour ones and the ones who take the high-profile pro-bono cases – have become masters of publicity, and I tend to look at articles like this as a salvo in the upcoming legal battle.<\/p>\n

Even if not explicitly placed by the defense, they say a lot about our attitude toward crime and criminals.<\/p>\n

The hazing is real<\/b>, the murders alleged<\/b>. The article stakes out a broad social critique, and then spirals down to focus on one obviously disturbed young man.<\/p>\n

In Akbar’s case, it should be noted, harassment might have been just part of the problem. Soldiers testified at his preliminary military court proceedings this summer that he was known for strange behavior, a flaw he does not deny. At his Ft. Campbell, Ky., Army base and in the Kuwaiti desert awaiting combat in Iraq, he often seemed aloof and confused. Soldiers recalled him pacing aimlessly, talking to himself, laughing and smiling at nothing. Army superiors said he was passed over for promotions, given second and third chances to shape up and then reassigned to more mundane duties.<\/p>\n

…<\/b><\/p>\n

But despite these advances, his performance began to falter and his superiors began noticing odd behavior. His conduct mystified them, leaving them at a loss to explain his sudden changes. It ultimately led to his being frozen out of future promotions. <\/p>\n

Several superiors testified at Akbar’s preliminary military court proceedings that he was late for assignments. On a training exercise to Louisiana, where he was in charge of making sure other soldiers brought their gear, officers said he forgot his duffel bag. He misplaced his dogtags. On the day of the Sept. 11 attacks, when the base was on high alert, he showed up at the gate without his ID badge, the supervisors said. <\/p>\n

Army officers said they found him asleep in training classes. They watched him sneak into Army vehicles and try to sleep away the afternoon. He could not keep up with physical exercise, they said, a failing for any sergeant expected to lead troops. He walked aimlessly, sometimes talking or laughing to himself. <\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There’s an interesting story to be done…about how an Army with a substantial number of Muslim soldiers – at war with a Muslim nation – manages the obvious conflicts of fellowship and anger. There is a story about the tragic intersection of events in the Kuwait desert that cost two lives – un-named, unremarked except as “It was kind of an ugly scene there,” said Capt. Terence Bacon, one of the wounded. “A lot of noise. A lot of screaming. A lot of blood.<\/i>” A good story might have balanced the lives of the dead and the accused and made us wonder how their lives diverged.<\/p>\n

Instead we’re treated to a story which does two things. It humanizes a man who we trained to be a killer and who may well instead have become a murderer, breaking the ground for a sympathetic defense. And it lays the blame for the incident fully on the institution, not the individual.<\/p>\n

Actually, it does a third, which is to remind me once again how the internal bias and contradictions in the modern corporate media are so damn maddening.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw this in the L.A. Times Sunday magazine (intrusive registration etc. etc. use ‘laexaminer’\/’laexaminer’) and assumed other bloggers would pick it up; I’m surprised that no one’s blogged this up until now, so I’ll toss it out there. The subtitle was: His Behavior Was Bizarre. His Peers Insulted His Muslim Faith. He Was Shipped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}