Lessons Unlearned

John Walker Lindh is a free man, sort of.

You remember John Walker Lindh?  The so-called American Taliban.  The California native turned Islamic militant captured in Afghanistan a few weeks after 9/11.  Yes, him.  He was let out of federal prison this week on supervised release 17 years into a 20-year sentence for numerous charges to which he pled guilty in 2002.

Like everyone else, I hadn’t thought of Lindh for a very long time.  Once he went to prison, the legal case against him was settled and so there was no reason for the media to pursue his story further.

John Walker Lindh’s moment in the spotlight was brief and confusing.  His name was initially reported to be simply “John Walker.”  We learned he was the son of Marin County navel-gazers whose religious seeking led him to fall into the rabbit hole of Islamic fundamentalism.  He had waged war on America, and a courageous CIA officer had lost his life as a consequence. 

Counternarratives fail to thrive in times of crisis.  There were fragments from which John Walker Lindh’s account could be elided.  There was the disturbing image of a naked Lindh blindfolded and duct-taped to a litter.  It was reported at the time that he had been held incommunicado aboard a U.S. Navy vessel for several weeks.  He was questioned by the FBI without benefit of counsel.  Little to none of that registered with the public at the time, however.

It did not register with me, either.  There is a whole new generation coming up who did not witness the September 11^th attacks.  For them, they will be as meaningful as Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination were for me as a child; important certainly, but events carrying no emotional freight.  But personally, the shock of that Tuesday morning reverberates almost two decades later.

The fall of 2001 was a surreal time.  There was the horror of large-scale terrorism visited upon us, live on TV.  The biggest news story over the summer had been the disappearance of Washington intern Chandra Levy and the revelation of her affair with congressman Gary Condit, which somehow made our collective complacency even more astounding.   Weeks dragged on, the destruction of the Twin Towers replayed endlessly on cable news.

Then, in early October, I logged on to the internet (on a dial-up connection, naturally) and learned we had begun bombing Taliban strongholds in Afghanistan.  Finally!  Something was being done.   We’d get bin Laden and his murderous crew and our thirst for justice would be slaked at last.  Within weeks, NATO forces routed the Taliban.

As we would find to our chagrin, the Taliban would prove quite resilient.  But as November came to a close, just after we had solemnly observed the first Thanksgiving of the War on Terror, the Taliban’s resolve in the face of what we thought was certain defeat became very clear.

The Northern Alliance and U.S. special operations forces had secured the surrender of Taliban forces in northern Afghanistan.  A number of prisoners were temporarily held in a fortress at Qala-i-Jangi, just outside Mazar-i-Sharif.  Seeking information on al-Qaeda activity, CIA officers Mike Spann and Dawson Tyson questioned a number of them.

One prisoner said there was an English-speaking man among them.  Facing certain questioning, Lindh was advised by his comrades to claim he was Irish rather than American.  When he was brought to Spann, however, it was readily clear Lindh was from the good ol’ U.S. of A.  News footage of the interrogation showed a visibly irate Spann haranguing his haggard and dazed prisoner.  At one point Tyson, seeking to further intimidate Lindh, turned to Spann and said they should just leave him to his fate, to rot in an Afghan prison.  Some time thereafter, Lindh was presumably returned to the prisoner population.

Later that night, a pre-planned uprising erupted at Qala-i-Jangi.  The prisoners overcame and expelled their Northern Alliance captors at the start of what would become a weeklong siege of the prison.  John Walker Lindh was among the prisoners, but his true role is open to question.  Lindh, understandably wanting to minimize his culpability, claimed he took refuge in a basement after being shot in the leg.  The U.S. government said he was an active participant. 

Lindh would have been in a world of hurt in any case once he fell into U.S. custody.  The mere fact he had joined the jihadists was damaging.  But there was an aggravating factor: Mike Spann had been killed in the early hours of the uprising, the first American to die in the War in Afghanistan. 

Mr. Spann was interred with honors at Arlington.  Mr. Lindh faced the consequences of Mr. Spann’s death, among other things.

The charges against John Walker Lindh were sobering, ten counts altogether.  Most were paired conspiracy and commission counts (e.g., Conspiracy to supply services to the Taliban / Supplying services to the Taliban).  Lindh was unquestionably guilty of nearly all, and so he pled in federal court so as to avoid a harsher sentence.  A little more than year after his capture in Afghanistan, Lindh entered federal prison and faded from public memory.

It would be helpful if Lindh would be permitted to tell his story.  It’s doubtful we will hear it anytime soon.  The Justice Department says that the federal Son of Sam law precludes him from giving his side, at least for pay.  He might need it; from what the media have reported the restrictions on Lindh for the next three years would make it difficult to obtain paying work.  But there is one discrepancy between Lindh’s claims and one of the charges which has me puzzled.  Perhaps the most serious charge Lindh faced in 2002 was conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens.  Lindh, through his family, denies he ever wanted to fight or kill Americans.   

It’s possible Lindh was an innocent abroad.  In his search for Islamic community, he was led into the Taliban’s arms.  It is unlikely he or anyone else in the Taliban rank and file had any advance knowledge of 9/11 though he almost certainly had to have known of the Taliban’s links to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.  But after the attacks, desertion or avoiding an armed confrontation with American forces became a dim prospect.

This begs the question why.  What would lead an American youth from an affluent background down such a path in the first place?  Regrettably, few of us are interested in knowing.  Empathy is not a virtue in our society.  Individuals who are square pegs get scant understanding from those who fit neatly into round holes.  

Then again, disaffection with the American way is nothing new.  During the Vietnam conflict, the New Left journal Ramparts once published a cover proclaiming, “Alienation is When Your Country is at War, and You Want the Other Side to Win.”  Our culture uncritically embraces American exceptionalism which in turn blinds us to the suffering our foreign policies bring to millions around the world.  For the small number of people at home who pay attention, however, such suffering affects them acutely.  An even smaller subset of them conclude that the only way to end the suffering is resistance.

Was John Walker Lindh one of these resisters?  Some of his statements seem to support this theory.  Is he still motivated by such sentiments?  Reports from prison, if true, would cast doubt on his reformation.  Lindh is said to sympathize with Islamic State.  He cannot obtain a passport or leave the country during his supervised release, though he acquired Irish citizenship through descent during his imprisonment and could settle in Ireland once the restrictions on him are lifted.  From there, his travels would be less visible to U.S. authorities and would arguably be even less so should he renounce his U.S. citizenship.

Then again, maybe Lindh’s idealism has waned sufficiently for him to retreat into obscurity.  Let’s hope that’s the case.  But until we address the conditions that produce young people like John Walker Lindh, we will see more of them.

© 2019 The Unassuming Scholar