Sleeping With The Enemy

A military jury sentenced [Hassan Akbar] to death Thursday for a grenade and rifle attack on his own comrades during the opening days of the Iraq invasion, a barrage that killed two officers and... also wounded 14 fellow members of the Army's 101st Airborne Division at Camp Pennsylvania in Kuwait...

The sentence will be reviewed by a commanding officer and automatically appealed. If Akbar is executed, it would be by lethal injection.

"I want to apologize for the attack that occurred. I felt that my life was in jeopardy, and I had no other options. I also want to ask you for forgiveness," Akbar told the jury before it deliberated in the sentencing phase.

Akbar, 34, spoke for less than a minute, delivering an unsworn statement that could not be cross-examined. He spoke in such a low voice that even prosecutors sitting nearby had trouble hearing, with one lawyer even cupping his ear.

While the defense contends Akbar was too mentally ill to plan the attack, they have never disputed that he threw grenades into troop tents in the early morning darkness and then fired on soldiers in the ensuing chaos. Army Capt. Chris Seifert, 27, and Air Force Maj. Gregory Stone, 40, were killed.

Prosecutors say Akbar launched the attack at his camp days before the soldiers were to move into Iraq because he was concerned about U.S. troops killing fellow Muslims in the Iraq war.

...Akbar wrote in his diary in 1997, "My life will not be complete unless America is destroyed."

Akbar is the first American since the Vietnam era to be prosecuted on charges of murdering a fellow soldier during wartime...

A defense psychiatrist testified that although Akbar was legally sane and understood the consequences of his attack, he suffered from forms of paranoia and schizophrenia.

Akbar's father, John Akbar, has said his son complained in vain to his superiors about religious and racial harassment before the attack. The defense never introduced any witnesses to testify about any such harassment.

John Akbar was not in the courtroom for the verdict. He emerged from a meeting with his son in tears and declined to comment.

If given a death sentence, Hasan Akbar would join five others on the military's death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. The last U.S. military execution was in 1961.

If Akbar is indeed sane, "forms of paranoia and schizophrenia" notwithstanding, he is still an enormous threat to America. Period. Could the aforementioned "mental illness" be confused interchangeably with Muslim zealotry? Hmmm? The thoughts and actions of a religious zealot of any stripe tend toward the mentally unstable (David Koresh? Eric Rudolph? Timothy McVeigh? Anyone? Anyone?). What this man did is incontrovertible. Why he did it, is as well. We do America a disservice when we let these acts go unpunished.