The of father of John Walker Lindh “The American Taliban” wants his son to be given sympathy by way of a commutation of his sentence for committing acts of terror against the US on behalf of his hero, Usama bin Laden. Read this by Robert Young Pelton and tell me if Lindh should be given one ounce of sympathy.
After chronicling several times in which Lindh is given an opportunity to fess up and get the heck out of Afghanistan, the tell tale opportunity is when Lindh is face to face with CIA interrogator, Mike Spann, and knows of an impending attack by armed jihadis. Lindh, once again, sells out his country.
Spann and Tyson play a clumsy game of “good cop, bad cop”. But one thing is clear; they offer Lindh a way out. Lindh is alone with two of his fellow countrymen with full knowledge of the violence that is about to happen. He says nothing. If there was ever one moment that will define one man and damn another this was it. Lindh is put back into the lineup and Mike Spann will die in the next few minutes as Uzbeks rush up from the basement, yelling Allahhuakbar detonate hidden grenades. The fighting begins. Lindh has once again has been given a clear choice between right and wrong and once again. He makes that clear choice again.
Ms Taft:
I agree with yuor conclusion: John Walker Lindh is not entitled to any sympathy, but I am sorely troubled by the differences between Robert Young Pelton’s report and the Wikepedia article on Lindh:
“Complicating the prosecution was the nature of the confession. Photos emerged from Lindh’s captivity of him being held naked and bound, wearing an obscenity-covered blindfold. When details of the conditions of his captivity began to emerge, it was discovered that he had initially been wounded and hidden for a week with limited food, water, and minimal sleep in conditions of freezing water before being captured. After being captured and taken to a room with the only window blocked off, Lindh had his clothes cut off him and was duct-taped to a stretcher and placed in a metal shipping container for transportation. Lindh was not even released from the stretcher when he needed to urinate. Instead, guards propped him upright. When interrogated, he was denied a lawyer despite several requests, and was threatened with denial of medical aid if he didn’t cooperate. It took more than a week for his wound to be treated and the bullet removed.
“The court scheduled an evidence suppression hearing, at which Walker would be able to testify about the details of the torture to which he was subjected. The government faced the problem that a key piece of evidence—Walker’s confession—might be excluded from evidence as having been forced under duress. Furthermore, the hearing would turn a spotlight on the way that U.S. soldiers had conducted the interrogation.
“To forestall this possibility, Michael Chertoff, the head of the criminal division of the Justice Department, directed the prosecutors to offer Walker a plea bargain: He would plead guilty to two charges — serving in the Taliban army and carrying weapons. He would also have to consent to a gag order that would prevent him from making any public statements on the matter for the duration of his twenty-year sentence, and he would have to drop claims that he had been mistreated or tortured by U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan and aboard two military ships during December 2001 and January 2002. In return, all the other charges would be dropped.
“Walker accepted this offer. On July 15, 2002, he entered his plea of guilty to the two remaining charges. The judge asked Walker to say, in his own words, what he was admitting to. ‘I plead guilty,’ he said. ‘I provided my services as a soldier to the Taliban last year from about August to December. In the course of doing so, I carried a rifle and two grenades. I did so knowingly and willingly knowing that it was illegal.’ On October 4, 2002, Judge T.S. Ellis formally imposed the sentence: 20 years without parole.”
Who has more credibility: Michael Chertoff, then the head of the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, or Robert Young Pelton, a CNN corresponent whose article is hardly an example of clear writing? Fortunately, we do not need to make a decision on that question.
In law, a guilty plea is the strongest form of prove know to the law. Before accepting a guilty plea, a judge is required to determine that the defendant offering the plea is doing so knowingly, voluntarily, and willingly, with full knowledge of the rights he is waiving and with a full understanding of the consequences. Further, the defendant is required to state facts which show that he is in fact guilty. Lindh did that. He stated, in his own words, ‘I provided my services as a soldier to the Taliban last year from about August to December. In the course of doing so, I carried a rifle and two grenades. I did so knowingly and willingly knowing that it was illegal.’ Under the circumstances, he showed beyond any doubt that he was guilty.
At the time he acted as a Taliban sodier, Lindh was twenty. The suggestion that he was too young to understand the consequences of his actions strains credbility. At 20, had he remained in the United States, he could enter into legally binding contracts, he could marry, he could vote, he could enlist in the American military, and any claim that he was too young to understand the consequences of his actions would have been rejected.
For any sympathy that anyone might feel for Lindh, Sr., that his son will be in federal prison for many years, this is an instance in which John Walker Lindh has received a sentence appropriate to his actions.
traitors should always be shot. by the way, a new tape has surfaced, calling President Bush “a butcher,…a failure,…a curse on his country.” From al quaida? or was it the dnc? Whoops, we can’t tell the difference!! It’s past time for choosing sides.
bear:
ACtually, bear, there is a reasonably simple way to tell the difference between a tape issued by al Qaeda and a public announcement made by the Democratic National Committee: al Qaeda spokesmen speak Arabic and release their tapes on al Jazeera; the Democratic National Committee makes its announcements in English and use multiple channels of American news media.
As for the punishment of traitors, I agree with you that traitors should be punished severely, and the death penalty is not out of line for them. My point is that the interrogation of John Walker Lindh was so badly bungled that there was no way to go forward with a prosecution for many of the more serious crimes that Lindh had confessed to, because the federal prosecutors concluded that they could not get his confession admitted in an American court of law because it was the result of tactics so shocking that they would have been labelled torture, and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled almost 70 years ago that a confession obtained under torture is inherently unreliable.
So what was the point of abusing John Walker Lindh? Did it gain the United States anything? I don’t think so? Did it cost the United States a great deal? Yes. We could have brought much more serious charges against this man, and the opportunity to do that was forfeited because of abusive interrogation tactics.
So which side do I choose? I choose to stand with those who call on the United States to live up to the pormises on which the nation was founded.
Hey bear, good to see you are right on time, attacking your fellow American first, everytime Al Qeada makes another threat against us all.