Reflect on the following and how it sounded in 2002 versus how it sounds now, so many exposed lies, torture sessions and needless innocent deaths later:
JUAN GONZALEZ: When he returned to the United States in January 2002, John Walker Lindh was being held as a prisoner accused of conspiring to kill Americans. Newspapers around the world published photos of him naked, blindfolded and strapped to a gurney. On January 15, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft announced charges were being filed against him.
JOHN ASHCROFT: In a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the United States is charging Walker with the following crimes: one, conspiracy to kill nationals of the United States of America overseas; two, providing material support and resources to designated foreign terrorist organizations, including al-Qaeda; and three, engaging in prohibited transactions with the Taliban. If convicted of these charges, Walker could receive life imprisonment.
AMY GOODMAN: At the time, John Walker Lindh was twenty years old. Days after Ashcroft's press conference, Lindh was allowed to briefly see his parents. His father Frank spoke to the media soon after.
FRANK LINDH: John loves America. We love America. John did not do anything against America. John did not take up arms against America. He never meant to harm any American, and he never did harm any American. John is innocent of these charges.
AMY GOODMAN: While John Walker Lindh was constantly being referred to as the American Taliban and as a traitor in the US media, the government's case against him largely fell apart.
As part of a plea deal, the Bush administration eventually dropped all the terrorism-related charges and the charge that he had conspired to kill Americans. In exchange, John Walker Lindh pleaded guilty to serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons. He was given a twenty-year sentence and agreed not to talk about what had happened for the duration of his sentence and agreed to drop any claims that he had been tortured by the US military.
In the interview, we hear how Lindh came to convert to Islam, and then travel to Yemen to learn to speak classical Koranic Arabic:
AMY GOODMAN: And when did he decide to convert to Islam?
MARILYN WALKER: You know, in terms of when he decided, I'm not quite sure. The formal conversion was when he was sixteen. But he was inspired by a film, Spike Lee's film of Malcolm X, and the scene where the Hajj takes place. And he was really impressed with seeing these, you know, millions of people, all colors, all races, and that really moved him.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Frank Lindh, your reaction when you heard he was converting to Islam and wanted to go to the Middle East to study?
FRANK LINDH: Well, Juan, it sort of happened one thing at a time. He did convert, and Marilyn and I learned about it, actually, after the fact. But he went to a local mosque in Mill Valley, California and converted, went through this conversion ceremony, and then we found out later.
John was raised Catholic. I'm a Catholic, Roman Catholic, so it was certainly different. But we always, I think, had a feeling that it was a good thing for John. We respect Islam and so forth, so we've always supported his pursuit of Islam. He's a very spiritual person. And so, he did-yes, he converted when he was sixteen. It was about a year later that he made his decision to go to the Middle East to study Arabic, to learn to speak Arabic.
AMY GOODMAN: Why Yemen?
FRANK LINDH: Well, Yemen is-John did his research, and he convinced us that Yemen is really the best place to go to learn classical Arabic, kind of without a lot of modern vernacular, the traditional Arabic of the Koran. He was convinced, and we believed-still do-that that was the best place to go to learn Arabic. And he did, in fact, become fluent in Arabic.
He returned from Yemen when his visa expired, then returned, and went on to Pakistan to study and memorize the Koran:
JUAN GONZALEZ: So then he returned to Yemen, and you thought he was still in Yemen. When did you discover that he had-
FRANK LINDH: No, no, not exactly, Juan. He was in regular contact with us by email. He would go to internet cafes, and periodically he's write to me, to Marilyn, to his sister, and so forth. And then, in November of 2000, he asked me for my permission for him to go to Pakistan to study the Koran itself. There's a Koran memorization tradition in Pakistan. They have schools, these madrasas, that have specialized in that for several hundred years to memorize, literally, the Koran, and this is the goal of every educated Muslim. So I said, "Alright, you can go with my blessing, John." So, from Yemen, then he went to Pakistan and enrolled in a Koran memorization school in Pakistan.
AMY GOODMAN: So he's in a madrasa in Pakistan--
FRANK LINDH: Beginning, yeah, in November 2000.
AMY GOODMAN: So, this is before 9/11.
FRANK LINDH: Oh, long before 9/11. President Clinton was still the president at that time.
Where things went wrong was when Lindh made a decision without consulting his parents--a decision to get involved in the Afghan civil conflict, fighting in support of the Afghan government, which the US was supporting with hundreds of millions of dollars of foreign aid at the time, more than any other country:
FRANK LINDH [cont]: And then, in the spring of 2001, he made a decision that he didn't actually share with us, to go into Afghanistan to try to help defend--what he thought was doing was defending civilians in Afghanistan who were under attack by the Northern Alliance warlords, who were backed not by the United States, but by the Russians and the Iranians, and they were, in fact, committing atrocities against civilians. So John told me and his mom, with emails, "I'm going up to the mountains for the summer." This was in late April of 2001. But what he didn't tell us, the full truth was he intended to go over the mountains and into Afghanistan and spend the summer there.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And at that time, the new Bush administration was providing some degree of support for the Taliban, wasn't it?
FRANK LINDH: Yeah, I think fair to say, Juan, more than "some degree." We were the largest single donor of money to the Afghan government. In the first few months of the Bush administration in early 2001, we contributed hundreds of millions of dollars to the Taliban government. Our government did. And these were-this was all public. Secretary of State Colin Powell in April, around the same time John went, had a press conference and a public announcement about a grant of $46 million to the Taliban government. But that was just one of several grants that we made during that time.
AMY GOODMAN: So John Walker Lindh went to fight alongside the US-backed Taliban forces against the army of the Northern Alliance, which was run by General Dostum, who has now become the chief secretary--chief security aide to President Hamid Karzai. But very--
FRANK LINDH: Well, that's a lot of-yes, but, I mean, I think we all agree that John didn't do the right thing. I mean, it was a mistake--I think a mistake for him to go and get involved in another country's civil war. I mean, if he had consulted with me, I would have said, "No, John. Stay away from that." But he did, yes. He didn't go and fight against America. He went and aligned himself with the side that we were, and had been, supporting in that civil war.
They go on to play an excerpt from the documentary Afghan Massacre: Convoy of Death which begins with the battle of Qala-e-Jangi in late November 2001 that John Walker Lindh survived, and they detail his harrowing experiences, which he thought would come to an end once he was finally released to American custody.
AMY GOODMAN: .... I mean, you were so deeply relieved that he was in US military hands. Both Marilyn, you, and Frank thought, well, this is the beginning of the end or the beginning of the beginning, that you can get your son back.
FRANK LINDH: Well, we did think he was in safe hands, or would be in safe hands, once he got into US custody.
AMY GOODMAN: So, what happened?
FRANK LINDH: Well, he was taken to southern Afghanistan to Camp Rhino. And instead of being treated humanely, as you would expect under the Geneva Convention--
AMY GOODMAN: He was shot.
FRANK LINDH: He was already wounded. He had a bullet wound in his thigh, and he had shrapnel wounds in his legs. He was dehydrated. He suffered hyperthermia. He was very close to death in that media interview there.
And instead of being treated humanely--it's a difficult subject for us, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld--this is a document that came out in the discovery in John's case-ordered, "Take the gloves off." Juan referred to this. This was his order, direct order from the Secretary of Defense. And from that point forward, they severely abused John to the point that I would say constitutes torture. He was stripped naked in the winter. His bullet wound was left untreated. They put painful restraints, plastic restraints, around his wrists and his ankles, and he was tied to a gurney and placed naked in a metal--unheated metal shipping container in the desert and left there for two days and two nights shivering. His wounds were left--
AMY GOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld-
FRANK LINDH: His wounds were left untreated.
AMY GOODMAN: Donald Rumsfeld's words? This is on his orders?
FRANK LINDH: Yes, it's in a document that John's lawyers received from the government, and those are the words in the document: "Take the gloves off in your interrogation of John Walker Lindh."
JUAN GONZALEZ: And other than that communication that you had from him through the Red Cross, Marilyn, did you get any other communication from him during this time?
MARILYN WALKER: No, no. And we wrote letters. Frank had written a letter to him through the Red Cross. I had written a letter. And he never received them. The Red Cross was not allowed to see him during that time to deliver the letters.
AMY GOODMAN: What?
MARILYN WALKER: The Red Cross was not allowed to deliver the letters that we wrote.
FRANK LINDH: We wrote letters saying, "John, we love you. We support you. We've hired a lawyer to help you. Please ask the authorities to allow us to visit you." And none of our letters were delivered to him.
At this time, his parents had retained a top lawyer to represent him, but Lindh knew nothing about it:
JUAN GONZALEZ: And the efforts of your lawyer on this side, in the United States, to reach the military or somehow or other get to him as a client, what happened there?
FRANK LINDH: Well, this lawyer is heroic. He's a wonderful lawyer, James Brosnahan in San Francisco. As soon as John was picked up on the 1st of December, I went in on Monday morning, the 3rd of December. I had known him as a lawyer. I asked him to represent my son. He agreed to do it. And he immediately, on that day, on the 3rd of December, sent a letter to Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld; Secretary of State Powell; George Tenet, the director of CIA; several other government officials; and said, "I represent John Lindh. Please give me and his parents safe passage to come and visit with him." So the government knew as of December 3rd. Attorney General Ashcroft was in that letter, as well, that John was represented by James Brosnahan.
AMY GOODMAN: And what happened?
FRANK LINDH: Well, the government never told him. They held him for fifty-four days incommunicado, until he was brought back to Washington, DC area, northern Virginia.
AMY GOODMAN: Questioning him?
FRANK LINDH: Oh, yes, yes, questioning. After the torture, he was brought in and said, "If you'll talk to us, we'll stop torturing you."
This is how the Bush, Cheney and the rest of the brave, brave chickenhawks in their Admihnistration "defended America" by trampling on our values and throwing away the chance to gain some real insight from an American who had been with the Taliban and could provide invaluable insight into their feelings, motivations and worldview. Worse still, Colin Powell, a supposed "man of honor", went along with them, willingly.
There is much, much more to this interview, including Lindh's brief encounter with, and low opinion of bin Laden, whose terrorist activities he knew nothing of. But let me repeat the four points I made above:
(1) Lindh was not guilty of any of the charges against him that were dropped. (2) Lindh had been denied counsel in Afghanistan, even though his parents had already retained counsel for him in California--who was simultaneously denied access to his client. (3) Lindh had been tortured and was about to testify about his torture when the government offered its deal, to prevent his testimony from becoming public. (4) Lindh took the deal because a fair trial was impossible, he faced certain conviction because of the state of national hysteria at the time, and the way he had been portrayed in the stenographic press.
If Lindh's true story had been told at the time, if there were any interest in hearing the truth, about how wildly off the rails we had already gone, think how much tragedy, how much needless loss of life, how much bitter enmity might have been avoided.
Think, too, that although our rhetoric has changed, we are still killing innocent civilians in order to teach the world that killing innocent civilians is wrong.
Still waiting for change we can believe in. Still waiting for change we can actually see. |
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