Whenever "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh is in the news, I invariably get sucked in because I was the Justice Department ethics attorney who blew the whistle on his mistreatment and the Department's subsequent discovery abuses. Today, The Birmingham News, among others, has a headline:
Taliban Soldier John Walker Lindh Seeks Bush Pardon in Killing of CIA Agent From Alabama
These 15 words contain numerous inaccuricies that are meant only to incite fury.
The Birmingham News article is completely irresponsible and factually wrong. Here's a link to the article: http://blog.al.com/...
John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban" was initially charged with ten counts, nine of which were dropped.
Yet The Birmingham News article states provocatively in the second graph:
The nine charges against him included a murder conspiracy role in the slaying of Americans such as of [sic] CIA agent Johnny Micheal Spann, 32, of Winfield, Ala.
The article neglects to mention that the reason the U.S. dropped nine of the ten charges was because, as then-U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty acknowledged, there were risks to going forward to trial,
particularly the conspiracy-to-commit murrder charge.
(Quoting Jane Mayer, "Lost in the Jihad," The New Yorker, Mar. 10, 2003).
In point of fact, Judge T.S. Ellis III, of the Eastern District of Virginia, specifically found that there was no evidence linking Lindh to Spann's death.
The Defense Department, apopletic that its new policy on the torture of captives in the war on terrorism was going to be exposed, made it clear to the Justice Department that it wanted them to cut a deal with Lindh. The deal was that the serious charges against Lindh (e.g., terrorism, attempted murder, conspiracy to kill Americans, etc.) would be dropped and he would plead guilty to just two technical charges: providing aid to the Taliban government in violation of President Clinton's economic sanctions and carrying a weapon.
For that, he was sentenced to 20 years. The other defendant identically-situated to him, "enemy combatant" Yaser Hamdi, was released scot-free after the U.S litigated his case all the way up to the Supreme Court and lost. If part of the penalogical purpose of punishment is proportionality, there is none here. In Lindh's case, the government went after a minnow with a sledgehammer, as it later did with me, because the big terrorists were, and still remain, at large.