My son is not a traitor or a terrorist, says Frank Lindh, but a victim of hysteria

John Walker Lindh, seen here in an undated police photo, was arrested in 2001 as a terrorism suspect, and remains in custody today. Photo: REUTERS/Alexandra Sheriffs Dept

JOHN PHILLIP WALKER Lindh was labeled by the American government as “Detainee 001″ in the “war on terror.” John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Ind., a prisoner of the American government since Dec. 1, 2001. He is entirely innocent of any involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks, or of any allegiance to terrorism — that is not disputed. Indeed, all accusations of terrorism against my son were dropped by the government in a plea bargain, which was approved by the U.S. district court in which the case was brought.

John was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam at 16. A year later, in 1998, he traveled to Yemen to embark upon a rigorous course of religious study. He later continued his studies in Pakistan,  and in late April 2001, he wrote to me and his mother, saying he planned to go into the mountains to escape the oppressive summer heat. We had no further contact with him for seven months. Unbeknownst to us, he crossed the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, to volunteer for service in the Afghan army, which was then under the control of the Taliban government.

The Taliban were engaged in a long-running civil war against a Russian-backed insurgency known as the Northern Alliance. John was quickly accepted as a volunteer, and received two months of infantry training in a Taliban military camp before being dispatched to the front lines. His decision to volunteer was rash, and failed to take into account the Taliban’s mistreatment of their own citizens — especially women. But the brutal human-rights violations of the Northern Alliance warlords were also well-documented: massacres, rape — of both women and children — torture, and castration, all thoroughly documented in the U.S. State Department’s annual human-rights reports throughout the 1990s.

From the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979, tens of thousands of young Muslim men from all over the world had volunteered, and these young soldiers performed heroically in the defeat of the Soviet Union. Their cause was openly supported by the American government, particularly during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who declared, “They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help.”

Continues…

Send to Kindle

By Frank Lindh

Frank Lindh, father of ‘American Taliban’ John Walker Lindh, explains why his son is an innocent victim of America’s ‘war on terror’

John Walker Lindh following his capture by US troops in December 2001. Photograph: Getty Images

John Walker Lindh following his capture by US troops in December 2001. Photograph: Getty Images

John Phillip Walker Lindh, my son, was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam when he was 16 years old. He has an older brother and a younger sister. John is scholarly and devout, devoted to his family, and blessed with a powerful intellect, a curious mind, and a wry sense of humour.

Labelled by the American government as “Detainee 001″ in the “war on terror”, John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Indiana. He has been a prisoner of the American government since 1 December 2001, less than three months after the terror attacks of 9/11.

John is entirely innocent of any involvement in the terror attacks, or any allegiance to terrorism. That is not disputed by the American government. Indeed, all accusations of terrorism against John were dropped by the government in a plea bargain, which in turn was approved by the US district court in which the case was brought.

Despite its proud history as a stable constitutional democracy, the US has, for 10 years, been affected by post-traumatic shock, following the horrific events of 11 September 2001. I can find no other explanation for the barbaric mistreatment and continued detention of a gentle young man like John Lindh.

Continues…

Send to Kindle

With the death of Osama bin Laden, there is now an opportunity for a huge peace dividend — an end to the occupation of Afghanistan, and an opportunity to close Guantánamo — which will probably not happen, even though it should, because of powerful vested interests. These include the lawmakers intent on using bin Laden’s death as an excuse to further ramp up the “War on Terror” by revising the Authorization for Use of Military Force, the founding document of the phoney war, and to claim, in spite of all the evidence, that George W. Bush’s torture program was a good idea and helped to track down bin Laden (which it didn’t), and that Guantánamo was useful for producing reliable intelligence (which it wasn’t).

I tackled all of these dangerous lies and distortions in my articles, With Osama bin Laden’s Death, the Time for US Vengeance Is Over, Osama bin Laden’s Death, and the Unjustifiable Defense of Torture and Guantánamo and No End to the “War on Terror,” No End to Guantánamo, but although I also implied that it was ridiculous to continue holding people at Guantánamo whose only crime seems to have been that they saw Osama bin Laden from afar while attending a training camp in Afghanistan, what I didn’t reflect on directly were specific victims of the hysteria of the “War on Terror.”

Clearly, this process includes dressing up soldiers at Guantánamo as terrorists to placate those who believe that being strong means being both brutal and stupid, but, as the lawyer Frank Lindh explained in an op-ed in the New York Times last week, it also includes his son, John Walker Lindh, forever tarred as “the American Taliban,” who was one of the first scapegoats of the “War on Terror.”

Seized by the Northern Alliance and transferred to US custody after the horrific Qala-i-Janghi massacre in northern Afghanistan in November 2001, Lindh was never sent to Guantánamo (even though he had been designated as Guantánamo prisoner number 1 — ISN number 001), because the horrors of Guantánamo were only for foreigners, and not for anyone in possession of an American passport.

Continues…

Send to Kindle

After he was captured in 2001, fighting alongside Taliban forces in Afghanistan, John Walker Lindh became the most hated man in America. He was beaten, vilified, and then—in a strange plea bargain orchestrated by the U.S. government—sentenced to twenty years in a federal prison. Now, in an exclusive interview, his parents break their long silence to reveal new details and to ask: When we punished John Walker Lindh, did we go too far?

Of the children produced by this couple whom a New York tabloid once called “California airheads unfit to raise lettuce,” two out of three are growing up to be responsible adults. And their other child, their second, the one who was pulled from a bloodied basement in Afghanistan, a soldier of the Taliban who was instructed at a bin Laden training camp, the one who scandalized a nation? He turned out to be exceptional.

Every other month, Frank Lindh travels from San Francisco to Terre Haute, Indiana, to spend four hours with his son. John Walker Lindh is currently serving a twenty-year prison sentence for violating an executive order, signed by President Clinton in 1999, prohibiting aid to the Taliban. He is an inmate of the Communications Management Unit, a wing of the Federal Corrections Institute where the government congregates inmates whose communications they want to monitor. Frank and Marilyn alternate months, flying in late on a Sunday, then back again Tuesday evening. John, who is now 28, is allowed four hours of visits a month, limited to weekdays, which makes it hard for his brother and sister to visit. Except for them and his grandmother, who visited just once, his parents are the only outsiders he’s seen in his seven years in custody.

Continues…

Send to Kindle