John Walker Lindh's parents step up pressure for son's release

[struggle4progress]

Source: Los Angeles Times

By Richard A. Serrano, Times Staff Writer
12:20 PM PDT, April 4, 2007

~snip~

"John has been in prison for more than five years," said his mother, Marilyn Walker. "It's time for him to come home."

~snip~

Lindh, a Northern California youth, left the United States when he was 18 to study Islam and eventually found himself serving as a soldier in the Taliban army fighting against the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan. Soon after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he was taken into custody by U.S. military forces and returned to his country.

He was immediately branded the "American Taliban" at a time when many angry Americans wanted instant revenge for the terrorist attacks. But then, in a settlement arrangement with federal prosecutors in 2002, all terrorism charges were dropped from his case and he pleaded guilty to being a soldier for the Taliban and carrying a rifle and hand grenades.

~snip~

Hicks was captured around the same time as Lindh in Afghanistan; yet unlike Lindh, Hicks was convicted of proving material support to terrorists.

~snip~



Read more: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-ex-lindh5apr05,1,5599678.story?coll=la-headlines-world

[barb162]

1. This story is written like the guy was clueless or sleepwalking

"...eventually found himself serving as a soldier in the Taliban army..."

Did he willfully join the Taliban? DId someone blindfold him? Force him?

[slowry]

3. Yes, yes, and no. (warning: GRAPHIC)

[barb162]

13. So it seems he willfully joined the Taliban.....

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

19. He may have willfully joined the Taliban.

But it was before the Taliban was ever at war with the United States.

[barb162]

24. I wish he would have stuck with the religious studies

I bet his parents think the same

[struggle4progress]

4. The Real Story of John Walker Lindh

By Frank Lindh, AlterNet.
Posted January 24, 2006.

~snip~ In simple terms, this is the story of a decent and honorable young man, embarked on a spiritual quest, who became the focus of the grief and anger of an entire nation over an event in which he had no part. I refer to the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. The reason I think this story is important is because our system broke down in the case of John Lindh. My goals today are first, just to tell you the story of John Lindh. Second, to ask you to reflect, based on the fact of John's case, on the importance and the fragility of the rights we enjoy under our Constitution. And my third point is to suggest that the so-called war on terrorism lacks a hearts and minds component. ~snip~

His first trip to Yemen lasted from July of 1998 to May of 1999, and then his visa expired, so he came home for a few months. Then, in February of 2000, just before his 19th birthday, John returned to Yemen to continue his study of classical Arabic and Islam at a school in Sanaa, Yemen. Again, he had visa trouble, so in November of 2000, John made a decision to go to Pakistan and to continue his Islamic study, memorizing the Koran. It's the goal of every scholarly Muslim to memorize the entire Koran verbatim, and John's goal was to become both fluent in Arabic and to memorize the Koran so that he could then go on and become a Muslim scholar. His goal was to attend the Islamic university at Medina in Saudi Arabia or a comparable world-class Islamic university. ~snip~

When he did go into Afghanistan, John received infantry training at a government-run military training camp. But the training camp was funded by Osama bin Laden. Osama bin Laden really had two operations going on. One was to finance the Afghan army operations -- these training camps for infantry. But he also, as we all know now, had a terrorist organization under way, a highly secretive terrorist organization that we call al Qaeda. ~snip~

Gunaratna has been employed by the U.N., but also by the government of the United States as an expert in al Qaeda, and he interviewed John extensively. After all these interviews, he made this following conclusion: "Those who, like Mr. Lindh, merely fought the Northern Alliance, cannot be deemed terrorists. Their motivation was to serve and to protect suffering Muslims in Afghanistan, not to kill civilians." ~snip~

http://www.alternet.org/story/31211/

[barb162]

12. This has what to do with teaching Islam?

"When he did go into Afghanistan, John received infantry training at a government-run military training camp."

Maybe a typical person would have left at that point , saying something along the lines that he wanted religious instruction?

[HiFructosePronSyrup]

20. He went to madrassas in Northern Pakistan.

Wherein they were fighting a low level war with India. He wanted to help his comrades, and he ended up training in Afghanistan.

[struggle4progress]

23. We probably agree about Lindh's views and choices but there's still ...

... the question of whether he has been treated fairly and whether his punishment reflects anything other than national rage about 9/11 or whether it is appropriate for any crime he actually committed.

I think it requires substantial insensitivity to support a group like the Taliban, which has the most barbaric views about women, about executions and amputations, and about culture and cultural treasures. And most of us probably do not have any high regard for the judgment of a person who willingly inserts himself into a civil conflict that historically has been a proxy war between more powerful outsiders, whether it were the US and the USSR or whether it were (as in the more recent case of Lindh) Pakistan (through the Taliban) and Iran (through the Northern Alliance).

The question remains whether Lindh himself actually did anything to justify a 20 year sentence with gag order and extraordinary limitations on visitors. The history here is quite murky: our sole source for most of it is an Administration that has generally misrepresented the facts in similar cases and that has resorted to exceptional threats and abuses in efforts to win conviction.

Lindh seems to have agreed to fight the Northern Alliance. Being strongly inclined towards pacifism myself, for religious reasons, and having no sympathy whatsoever for the Taliban, I would nevertheless say that the Northern Alliance has also been a gang of brutal predators and that Lindh's willingness to carry arms against them doesn't imply he is some sort of sociopathic monster: it seems likely he made this a decision with the best of motives -- although I would guess ignorance was involved too. Lindh did this at a time when the Administration regarded the Taliban as an ally, having recently given them millions of dollars and having brought their representative to meet W at the White House.

In the aftermath of 9/11, Lindh was in the field against the Northern Alliance, was captured by them, and escaped after the Northern Alliance massacred the majority of those with whom he was captured, in the course of which at least one CIA agent also died (Lindh apparently having nothing to do with that). Lindh was then recaptured by the Northern Alliance and turned over to Americans, who kept him in isolation for some weeks and provided no medical attention for the bullet in his leg until he "confessed." An accurate and complete account of these events is unlikely to come from the Administration.

The subsequent history of the case is somewhat strange. Charges such as "material aid to terrorists" and claims that he had been involved in the death of the CIA agent were dropped. Lindh pled guilty to carrying a gun and two grenades for the Taliban. The twenty year sentence is for that. As far as I can tell, it is ten years for the gun and another ten for the grenades, which qualify as explosives. The punishment far exceeds what anyone else comparably compromised has received. Beyond the gag order and the restrictions on visitors, the plea bargain apparently enables the US at any time to identify him as an unlawful enemy combatant and haul him before a military tribunal. This suggests that the pleas was motivated by a threat to drag him from the civilian court system back into some limbo like Guantanamo.

It seems quite possible to me that Lindh is a bright and motivated and sincere young man (whose social and political views I really do not like) who happened -- through a singular combination of good intentions and lack of common sense and bad luck -- to find himself at the wrong place at the wrong time. It also seems clear to me that he has been a national scapegoat for events in which he played no role.

[Bridget Burke]

33. A "typical person" would have stayed home in California....

Sampling various spiritual paths & posting on the internet.

When he was in Afghanistan--did he have a round-trip ticket in his pocket? Was he able to say--"Hey, guys, it's been great. But I gotta go now!"

[struggle4progress]

5. Innocent (Esquire / July 06)

~snip~ He was in chains, after all, when he returned from Afghanistan to America on January 23, 2002. He faced spending the rest of his life in prison after a federal grand jury returned charges two weeks later that he had conspired to kill Americans and had lent "material support" to Al Qaeda. Even after the Justice Department offered a plea bargain in July 2002 and dropped eight of the ten charges against him, even after prosecutors finally admitted that there was no evidence that he had joined Al Qaeda or threatened to kill Americans, even after he wound up pleading guilty only to carrying a rifle and grenades for the Taliban, the government and its negotiator, Michael Chertoff, made his silence a condition of the plea. And so, although it dropped all charges against the defendant relating to terrorism, the administration would continue to treat the defendant as a terrorist through the course of his incarceration by imposing what is known by statute as special administrative measures and by common parlance simply as a gag order. He would not spend his life in jail. He would spend, instead, twenty years in jail, and during that time not only would he be unable to have any visitors but his attorneys and his father and his mother and his brother and his sister and his grandmother; not only would his visitors be forbidden to relate to the public anything he said or thought; not only would the FBI have to read and clear any letter he sent or received and the government reserve the right to bug his conversations with his cellmates and monitor his phone calls. No, he would also have to abide by the following provision of the SAM: "All communications with others will be in English." ~snip~

The first American to get Abu-Ghraibed, long before Americans knew they were capable of such an exotic verb. The first to inspire Donald Rumsfeld to issue the order "Take the gloves off," and the first to be on the order's receiving end. The first to be denied medical treatment, the first photographed naked and bound, the first taunted while blindfolded, the first--certainly the first--to have SHITHEAD scrawled on his blindfold, the first whose digital photos made their way round the world as souvenirs, the first denied access to the Red Cross, the first to be ushered into a legal limbo created ex nihilo by the administration's notions of executive power. He served as a test case for an administration eager to see what it could get away with, and what it tried to get away with was, well, this: His father hired him a lawyer as soon as he saw his son on MSNBC. The lawyer immediately wrote to John Ashcroft, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and George Tenet and informed them that John Walker Lindh had counsel, and counsel was ready to fly to Afghanistan to meet him. They did not write him back, but John Ashcroft did not believe he was obliged to. He operated on the theory that John Walker Lindh had a lawyer only if he, not his father, hired one, even though at the time John Walker Lindh was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher in Afghanistan. He was being held in a shipping container, and he had a bullet in his thigh, and by the time an FBI agent interrogated him, the bullet had been in his thigh for nearly two weeks and the wound was starting to stink. "Of course, there are no lawyers here," the agent told him, and two days after he gave his statement, he was moved to a ship in the Arabian Sea and the bullet was finally extracted. ~snip~

http://www.esquire.com/features/the-state-of-the-american-man/ESQ0706JLINDH_106

[struggle4progress]

6. Trial By Fury (Mother Jones / NovDec04)

~snip~ Soon after this setback, word came that the Justice Department was willing to release Yaser Hamdi, a high-profile combatant whose case bears striking parallels to Lindh’s. Hamdi is also an American citizen captured in Afghanistan after allegedly taking up arms with the Taliban. While many details of the two cases remain classified, the seeming disparities in their outcomes are hard to ignore. Suddenly, Lindh’s sentence seems more draconian, belonging to a period when the prosecutorial zeal of John Ashcroft’s Justice Department went unchallenged.

After news broke of Hamdi’s pending release, Lindh’s lawyer, noted San Francisco attorney James Brosnahan, called on the government to revisit his plea agreement. Brosnahan won’t discuss any formal steps he might take, and his chances of ever getting Lindh’s sentence reduced are slim. Yet a fresh look at Lindh’s case says a lot about the administration of justice during times of intense national fear. "What’s interesting is being in the middle of a war psychology," Brosnahan says. "The reason I think that’s interesting is we’ll be there again." ~snip~

It's hard to separate Lindh’s prosecution from the times. ~snip~

Brosnahan is clearly bothered by his client's long sentence, even if it was the best he thought he could achieve under the circumstances. He’s been keeping a list of other terrorism cases, and claims no one else has gotten as harsh a sentence as Lindh. He's careful not to overstate the odds of getting the case reviewed. "It's possible," he says. "We're never going to let it go."

http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2004/11/11_402.html

[RaleighNCDUer]

9. Thank you for those posts, S4P.

I'm amazed at the number of people, even or especially on DU, who bought the government's line.

[roody]

25. The Taliban. That would be the government to whom

the US gave aid. Was that before or after they destroyed the ancient Buddha statues?

[struggle4progress]

30. The Bamiyan statues were destroyed in March 2001. That month,

after the destruction of the statues, the Taliban's ambassador-at-large, Sayed Rahmatullah Hashemi, toured the US and delivered a letter for Bush. W gave the Taliban $43 million in May 2001.


http://archaeology.about.com/od/heritagemanagement/a/buddha.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayed_Rahmatullah_Hashemi
http://www.robertscheer.com/1_natcolumn/01_columns/052201.htm

[bamacrat]

2. Wow, been a while since Ive heard that name

[Supersedeas]

32. one of John Ashcrofts pet propoganda projects

[Pastiche423]

7. He should have never been sent to prison

When he 1st went to Afghanistan, they were our friends. He had nothing to do w/9/11. He did nothing wrong.

The neocons were creaming in their pants to punish someone. Idiots.

[MDTXpolitics]

26. Hold on a second...

Was this the same guy who was found in Afghanistan fighting with a terrorist organization against our soldiers? And who in their right mind thinks that this is a guy who should get some sort of "free pass" home. He made a choice and he needs to live with the consequences...hopefully in jail cell for the remainder of his life. This issue should not even be up for debate.

[htuttle]

27. He never fired a shot against US troops

He ended up with the Taliban (in an almost accidental way) well before 9/11.

[MDTXpolitics]

28. Sorry Charley...

Who just "ends up" with the Taliban? That is the most absurd thing I have heard in quite some time. And please elaborate regarding the terms in which he just "ended up" with those terrorists. I do not claim to know the answer to my own question, but are you willing to give him that "free pass" home because it was an accident that he was associated with them?

[htuttle]

29. Sure. He went to a school in Pakistan because his visa couldn't get renewed in Yemen

Once in Pakistan -- our 'ally' -- he went to Afghanistan to fight the likes of Rashid Dostum, an especially despicable warlord who didn't become our ally until AFTER September 11th.

Did he go of his own free will? I would say "Yes, but". The 'but' is that there would have been a huge amount of pressure upon all of our ally Pakistan's madrasa students to fight the later-named 'Northern Alliance' (who at that point were mostly a bunch of unconnected warlords who weren't called 'The Northern Alliance'). We did not back the Northern Alliance before September 11th, and did NOT back the one hope for Afghanistan at the time in my opinion, Ahmad Shah Masood, until he was dead and it was too late for Afghanistan.

In any case, the US government was not only meeting with the Taliban before September 11th -- the Bush administration was apparently pleased enough with their poppy-growing interdiction programs to grant 40+ million to the effort.

Walker-Lindh was issued a weapon, but never fired it, least of all at US troops. In fact, by the time our troops got to Northern Afghanistan, Walker had already been captured by Dostum's forces.

Personally, I think the Taliban come from straight out of the dark ages and were ultimately a doomed movement from the day they formed. But I don't have to agree with Walker-Lindh's religious beliefs to see that he got railroaded under what passes for US justice under the Bush administration.

Do I agree with his actions? Hell no -- but justice isn't supposed to do an opinion poll to determine whether someone is guilty.

[coalition_unwilling]

34. The Taliban were fighting a civil war against various war lords

of the Northern Alliance before the U.S. got involved after 9/11. You really need to do some studying of your history.

[soothsayer]

8. I was just wondering about Johnny Jihad the other day!

[coalition_unwilling]

35. Oh, you mean, the political prisoner who, although tortured, did

receive some semblance of due process, as opposed to the political prisoners at Gitmo?

[alcibiades_mystery]

10. That guy's still locked up?

Tortured and threatened into confessing to some imaginary crime, having had the bad luck of being press-ganged into service for a collapsing Taliban, and the further bad luck of being thrown into Dostrum's death camp prison, and the further bad luck of having the tortured prisoners stage an uprising, and the further bad luck of having one of the CIA - ahem - interrogators eat a bullet, and the further bad luck of getting on Karl Rove and Fox News' radar? And, on top of that, they want him to spend 20 years in federal prison? Let the guy out. He never committed a crime in the first fucking place.

[ProudDad]

11. The bastards have even got him locked up in a Supermax

A supermax makes Abu Graib look like a five star hotel.

All "supermax" prisons should IMMEDIATELY be depopulated and blown to hell where they belong.

As for JWL -- he should be immediately released. He did nothing wrong.

Like Sacco and Vanzetti, he's the innocent victim of right-wing fascist shits.

[robcon]

14. Convicted of being a traitor, not a terrorist.

20 years seems right.

[happyslug]

15. Lindh was NEVER accused of Treason, nor convicted of it

Remember the two crimes he admitted to in his plea bargain was the following:
1. providing material support and resources to terrorist organizations A
2. Carry a weapon while committing a violent crime.

Thus the two ten years sentences, he was NOT guilty of treason for he bore no arms against the US AT ANY TIME (In addition to the lack of two wittinesses to the same overt act you need to get a conviction for Treason).

Anyway, the last person convicted of treason that I know of was Tokyo Rose, and she only served six years of a ten years sentence.

For more on Tokyo Rose see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo_Rose

For more on Lindh See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_Lindh

List of people convicted of Treason:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_convicted_of_treason

This list includes four from WWII (Out of Seven total). The list includes people convicted of treason against a State as opposed to the United States (For example John Brown was Convicted of Treason against the State of Virginia NOT the United States). Whether such state conviction is included in the Seven is unclear (Through I suspect they are for the US has a long history of NOT convicting people of Treason given the two wittinesses to the same overt act of Treason test).

[ProudDad]

17. May I respectully ask

why are you so bloodthirsty? :shrug:

[htuttle]

31. Wilhelm Reich would blame it on a lack of satisfying sex

Just saying...

:shrug:

[coalition_unwilling]

36. You're so wrong that one doesn't even know where to begin. He was

not convicted of being a "traitor". Have you conveniently forgotten that the U.S. Constitution explicitly proscribes any "ex post facto" law? Meaning you cannot be convicted of something if it wasn't a crime when you committed it. Lindh joined the Taliban before they were officially designated a terrorist organization. So the fact that he pled guilty (after being repeatedly tortured by U.S. and Aghan puppet forces) to providing "material support" would be laughable in anything remotely resembling a society governed by the rule of law and due process.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

16. was he a patsie?

who they had to keep locked up?

[ProudDad]

18. He was the first

U.S. Citizen the bushies were able to scoop up at the beginning of their phony "war on terror" or, as I call it, "war on a tactic" or "war on a noun".

They made an "example" of JWL to make sure no other hippies from Marin County ever get out of line again...

[Rosa Luxemburg]

21. but

don't you think the people that they have been rounding up maybe part of their scheme and they don't want the info to slip out?

[coalition_unwilling]

37. More like "war on an abstact noun," because war on Nazi Germany

was "war on a noun" (a proper noun).

[happyslug]

22. No, he had to be kept silent to over up the level of Torture the US is using.

If you read up on his case that is becoming more and more clear, the Federal Government is more worried about having a court see how they treat people in Iraq and Afghanistan and ruling it torture than about anything else.

[EFerrari]

38. You bet. Just like at al Jazeera cameraman who has been

locked up in Gimo for FIVE YEARS. He's now joined the hunger strike and is being abusively force fed.

From Democracynow.org, this morning:

"Over A Dozen Guantanamo Detainees on Hunger Strike
More than a dozen detainees at Guantanamo are engaged in a long-term hunger strike and are now being force fed. The prisoners are being strapped into restraint chairs while they are fed by plastic tubes inserted through their nostrils. One of the hunger strikers is Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who has been held at Guantanamo for nearly five years. Lawyers say as many as 40 detainees are refusing to eat to protest the harsh conditions at the new maximum security section of Guantanamo known as Camp 6. One hunger striker told his attorney, "My wish is to die. We are living in a dying situation."

/oops