In late April 2001, John 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 from him for seven months. Unbeknown to us, he crossed the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, with the intent of volunteering for service in the Afghan army under the control of the Taliban government.John should have been more careful about who he chose to hang out with. That doesn't mean he deserves to be treated in the way he was, but there are legitimate questions about his choices and judgement.
...
The training camp in Afghanistan where the Ansar received their infantry training was funded by Osama bin Laden, who also visited the camp on a regular basis. He was regarded by the volunteer soldiers as a hero in the struggle against the Soviet Union. These soldiers did not suspect Bin Laden's involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out in secret. John himself sat through speeches by Bin Laden in the camp on two occasions, and actually met Bin Laden on the second such occasion. John has said he found him unimpressive.
JESSELYN RADACK: Basically, the Justice Department disregarded the advice of the Ethics unit not to interrogate him without a lawyer, went ahead, interrogated him and, by the pictures we’ve seen worldwide, tortured him, and then went ahead to prosecute him.Yeah, Lindh got a fair trial. Sure. He belongs in prison.
Basically, Judge Ellis, who was overseeing the prosecution, ordered that all Justice Department correspondence related to the Lindh interrogation be turned over to the court. That order was concealed from me. I found out about it inadvertently from the prosecutor. And when I went to comply with the order, my emails with the advice not to interrogate him without counsel and the fact that the FBI had committed an ethics violation in doing so were missing from the file. I resurrected those emails from my computer archives and tried to get them to the prosecutor, and when that failed, I turned them over to the media.
As punishment — again, this was all under Michael Chertoff, who at that time was the assistant attorney general for the Criminal Division — under Chertoff, I was placed under criminal investigation. For what, I was never told. I was forced out of the Justice Department, fired from my next job at the government’s behest, referred to the state bars in which I’m licensed as an attorney, based on a secret report to which I did not have access, and put on the no-fly list. And all of that occurred on Michael Chertoff’s watch. So, to the extent that President Bush seeks to rehabilitate the beleaguered Justice Department, I think Chertoff is a very odd choice for that.
John described his motivation in similar terms. "I felt," he later explained to the court, "that I had an obligation to assist what I perceived to be an Islamic liberation movement against the warlords who were occupying several provinces in northern Afghanistan. I had learned from books, articles and individuals with first-hand experience of numerous atrocities committed by the Northern Alliance against civilians. I had heard reports of massacres, child rape, torture and castration."Note his evasion of the whole OBL connection:
To the western world, and to me as John's father after I learned where he had been, this was misplaced idealism. John's decision to volunteer for the army of Afghanistan under the control of the Taliban was rash, and failed to take into account the Taliban's mistreatment of its own citizens. But his assessment of the Northern Alliance warlords was neither exaggerated nor inaccurate. The brutal human rights violations committed by the Northern Alliance were thoroughly documented in the US department of state's annual human rights reports throughout the 90s. They did indeed include massacres, rape (of both women and children), torture and castration.
John's impulse was to help. In doing so, he was responding not only to his own conscience, but to a central tenet of the Islamic faith, which calls upon able-bodied young men to defend innocent Muslim civilians from attack, through military service if necessary. This is not "terrorism" at all, but precisely its opposite.
The training camp in Afghanistan where the Ansar received their infantry training was funded by Osama bin Laden, who also visited the camp on a regular basis. He was regarded by the volunteer soldiers as a hero in the struggle against the Soviet Union. These soldiers did not suspect Bin Laden's involvement in planning the 9/11 attacks, which were carried out in secret. John himself sat through speeches by Bin Laden in the camp on two occasions, and actually met Bin Laden on the second such occasion. John has said he found him unimpressive.I actually agree with a lot of what Lindh's father has to say, but he's incredibly evasive and self-serving here. Anybody with an iota of interest in the middle East at the time knew OBL was a guy who killed civilians and supported killing more. JWL didn't know about 9/11, but by that time OBL was already notorious for other crimes.
After 9/11, America's intelligence agencies came under intense scrutiny for their failure to anticipate and prevent the attacks, and their apparent inability to track down Osama bin Laden. It is a curious fact of history that John Lindh, an idealistic 20-year-old Californian, suspecting nothing of bin Laden's connections to terrorism, was able without difficulty to meet this notorious figure in the summer of 2001. Why American intelligence agents were unable to do so remains unexplained. John himself did not believe he was encountering a terrorist. John knew only that bin Laden had been generous in funding the military camp, and he was able to discern that Bin Laden was not a legitimate scholar or leader in the traditions of Islam.
In the 1991 book Presumed Guilty: When Innocent People Are Wrongly Convicted, author Martin Yant discusses the use of coercion in plea bargaining.[20]The intentions behind plea bargaining are, as always, good, but the practice has drawn a lot of criticism for it's side effects, and is not widespread elsewhere in the world, AFAIK.Even when the charges are more serious, prosecutors often can still bluff defense attorneys and their clients into pleading guilty to a lesser offense. As a result, people who might have been acquitted because of lack of evidence, but also who are in fact truly innocent, will often plead guilty to the charge. Why? In a word, fear. And the more numerous and serious the charges, studies have shown, the greater the fear. That explains why prosecutors sometimes seem to file every charge imaginable against defendants.
« Older Typeface based on sculpture becomes motorized scul... | Sam and Bethany Torode publish... Newer »
This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments
posted by MikeMc at 11:39 AM on July 10, 2011 [10 favorites]