telegraph Seven years after John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban, was jailed for fighting for the enemy in Afghanistan, his parents are still battling a tide of public hatred, convinced their son was harshly treated
Bright stems of grass surround the ancient fortress of Qala-i-Jangi, its pale walls rising like a natural feature north of Mazar-i-Sharif, the medieval city at the northern tip of Afghanistan. Known as the Noble Shrine, it is a place where Shia and Sunni Muslims come to pay their respects at the tomb of Ali ibn Abi Talib, the Prophet Mohammed’s son-in-law. This is Tajik, Hazara and Uzbek country, forever hostile to the Pashtun Taliban who once ruled this ruined state. It is spring now and the snows have fled. But there was one terrible winter just over seven years ago when all sense of nobility was lost.
It was here that the world had its first glimpse of John Walker Lindh as he emerged on December 1, 2001, from the basement of the Qala-i-Jangi fortress, bedraggled and wounded, after one of the bloodiest episodes of the so-called war on terror. America was stunned – not that Lindh had survived, but that one of their countrymen had been fighting for the enemy.
Less than two months after the start of Operation Enduring Freedom, the US military operation in Afghanistan that was a response to the 9/11 attacks, two CIA men, Mike Spann and Dave Tyson, had appeared in the prison courtyard to interrogate the inmates over possible links with al-Qaeda. The prisoners had concealed weapons; someone grabbed a grenade, then all hell broke loose. The prisoners quickly overpowered their guards and then executed Spann, who became the first American to die in this latest war for Afghanistan. By the time the shooting died down, scores of soldiers from both the Taliban and their traditional enemies, the Northern Alliance, were lying dead and the surviving prisoners had retreated to a basement. The alliance soldiers dropped artillery rockets into the basement, poured in oil and fired bullets. When they flooded it with icy water, scores were drowned. It took the Northern Alliance fighters, along with their British and American special forces allies, a week to quell the uprising, leaving only 86 prisoners alive out of the original 300.
Few can forget the iconic image of John Walker Lindh, hidden behind dirt, a beard and wild hair ripped free of his turban. The media dubbed him the 'American Taliban’. A volunteer for the Taliban army, he was an eager convert to Islam who had strayed from his studies in Yemen and Pakistan. Like thousands of others he fled the American advance into Afghanistan. His Taliban commander had bartered with the Northern Alliance to allow safe passage back towards Pakistan in return for surrender. Instead, the Northern Alliance had taken them prisoner.
Yaser Hamdi, a Saudi-American national who was captured with Lindh, and held for almost three years without charge before being released back to his homeland, offers an alternative view of the battle of Mazar-i-Sharif: 'They called it an uprising, and it was not – it was some kind of massacre. It was 24 hours of asking Allah for help. Men crying out, men who were wounded, men who were sick, men who were dying. The Koran tells you how to pray in all situations. People there who couldn’t move and couldn’t turn to face Mecca still prayed. They prayed until they died.’
Within a day Lindh was strapped naked to a stretcher inside – according to his lawyers at his later trial – a freezing shipping container, in handcuffs so tight they cut off circulation, and the word 'Shithead’ scrawled on his blindfold. The lawyers also contended that it was two weeks before medics even treated the bullet wound in his thigh, and that for almost six weeks Lindh was held incommunicado, despite repeated attempts by them and the Red Cross to reach him, while he was interrogated. Prosecutors maintained that Lindh was properly looked after. Today he sits in the Federal Correctional Complex at Terre Haute, Indiana, serving a 20-year prison sentence for 'supplying services’ to the Taliban.
Born in Washington, DC, in 1981, John Lindh was an intelligent child, good at languages and music. His parents – Frank, a social worker turned lawyer, and Marilyn, a photographer (they are now separated) – encouraged his interests. But he was a shy, solitary boy, who was home-schooled for a time because of chronic diarrhoea, most likely caused by a parasite. For a man who would later go to fight for the misogynistic Taliban, John was surrounded by strong women. In addition to having a close bond with his mother and his paternal grandmother, Kate, he was also very close to his sister, Naomi, eight years his junior.
'One of my favourite games I used to play with John was with this huge world map we had,’ Naomi, now 20, says. 'John would say the name of a country and I would have to find it on the map. He made it pretty difficult; he would mention countries I’d never heard of, like Kyrgyzstan. What 16-year-old boy knows where Kyrgyzstan is?’
Marilyn stayed at home with John and his older brother, Connell, while her husband was finishing law school. A short time later, his father landed a job in San Francisco. John became reclusive; he wouldn’t hang out with other children his age. The major turning point of his young life came when he went to see the film Malcolm X. The movie’s scene at the Hajj – showing all Muslims coming together – prompted John, then 12, to begin exploring Islam. He decided to convert (or 'revert’ as Muslims call it) when he turned 16. He went to the Islamic Centre in nearby Mill Valley in late 1997 and took the shahada (conversion ritual).
His parents didn’t find out until sometime later when a friend from the mosque called asking for 'Suleyman’, his new Arabic name. It was a surprise, but his parents tolerated this decision and, according to his father, even welcomed it. 'He was very moved by that image of people coming together very peacefully,’ Frank Lindh says. 'When John converted to Islam, I did not regard it as a negative thing at all.’
'I don’t remember thinking it was weird,’ Naomi adds. 'I was too young to know what it was. I wasn’t even fazed when he began to dress traditionally. Kids at school thought it was bizarre, though.’
Lindh’s journey towards Afghanistan began in earnest when he joined the San Francisco branch of the global missionary Islamic group Tablighi Jama’at, which means 'a group that propagates the faith’. Lindh asked his parents to let him attend the Yemeni Language Centre in Sana’a, Yemen, so he could learn Arabic. It would be the only way, he told them, that he could become a teacher-scholar in the tradition of Islam. At that time Yemen wasn’t associated with terrorism.
He left America in July 1998, came home for 10 months, and then returned to continue his studies. The Yemen Language Centre was full of foreign students who had travelled just so they could party, so he decided to look for another school where studies were taken more seriously. He transferred to the Al-Imam Islamic University of Sana’a for a total Arabic-immersion programme.
By the autumn of 2000, Lindh’s Arabic was good enough to allow him to take the next step: memorisation of the 30 chapters of the Koran, which is a goal for many Muslims (making them a hafiz). For that, he decided, he needed to go to a madrassa (Islamic school) in Pakistan. He travelled around Pakistan for a couple of months and then attended a conference of the Tablighi Jama’at in Lahore before his Koran classes began. During late-night conversations, the other students told Lindh that if he really wanted to be a good Muslim he should go and fight in Kashmir. By standing alongside Muslim brothers fighting for an Islamic homeland, he would achieve religious peace.
In the summer of 2001, all his parents knew was that their son was escaping the heat by going up to the mountains for a couple of months. He told them not to worry. 'In Bannu, it’s starting to heat up,’ he wrote in an email. 'And Indian heat is not like Californian heat. I haven’t decided 100 per cent where I’ll go, but this should be worked out in the next two weeks. I’ll try to keep in touch, but in the mountains I may not have email access so I could end up sending you a letter or calling you before I go, then keep in contact by way of postal mail until the end of the summer.’ To his parents, this sounded like a reasonable plan.
'John was missing for seven months,’ says Frank Lindh, a tall, dignified man. We are sitting at the boardroom table of a swish San Franciscan lawyer’s office; to his right is Marilyn, John’s mother. 'We got an email in April [2001] saying he was going up into the mountains of Pakistan. He didn’t tell us he was going into Afghanistan. And from that time until he came to our attention via the media, we had no contact with him, and no idea where he was.’
Marilyn, a pale, elfin figure, says that a cousin saw a blurred image on a news website and asked her, 'Do you think this is John?’'That was Saturday, December 1,’ Frank says. 'And that’s when I started to contact people. If they had called him a child rapist, it couldn’t have been worse. He was a traitor, a traitor to them. Something about John’s journey, his conversion to Islam, the fact it was so close to 9/11, there was this kind of hysteria really.’
On learning of his capture, Donald Rumsfeld, the Secretary of Defence, personally ordered John Lindh’s interrogators to 'take the gloves off’, according to government documents later released during the Abu Ghraib investigations. The country’s highest legal officer, Attorney General John Ashcroft, repeatedly called him a 'terrorist’ during press conferences. Rumsfeld also claimed (falsely) that he had been taken with an AK-47 in his hands. Senator John McCain said he should be taken to the site of the 9/11 attacks 'to see how he felt’. New York’s mayor Rudolf Giuliani said Lindh should get the death penalty. All this before Lindh had even stepped inside a courtroom.
'He was facing several life sentences,’ Marilyn says. 'And a jury pool that was completely biased against him,’ Frank interjects. The judge had decided to hold the trial on the first anniversary of 9/11, in a courthouse five miles from the site of the attack on the Pentagon.
The media camped outside the family’s home in Marin County, California, where John had spent most of his teenage years and where they had all lived together until Frank announced his homosexuality in 1997. The family were still close, however, and Frank and Marilyn watched events unfold with disbelief. 'My life came apart and my family was under siege,’ Marilyn says. 'Everyone keeps trying to find out what was wrong with John. Nothing was wrong with John. Everyone tried to blame us. Nothing is wrong with our family. Instead this was the most striking example I have ever seen of demonising someone who doesn’t see things the same way as other people.’
Frank says the support of friends, colleagues at the state’s energy company where he worked as a corporate lawyer, was vital in keeping him sane. It was harder for Marilyn. 'I was like a vampire, only going out at night, because I was crying all the time,’ she says. 'It was just too hard to be in public and also because, after we had been in the media, we were recognised…’ she trails off.
Were they worried for their safety?
'I was,’ Marilyn says. 'For a period of time in the early days I was getting lots of phone calls and hate mail. One said, “You should be shot with the same gun they use to shoot your son.”’
They sought access, repeatedly denied, to their captured son. Meanwhile the father of Mike Spann was campaigning for Lindh’s death.
Mike Spann was a family man, a former Marine, a hero who would stop at nothing in his quest to guarantee freedom. He was shot in the head, overpowered as he tried to interrogate Taliban prisoners, including John Lindh, at Qala-i-Jangi.
Spann’s father became a fixture at the courthouse, demanding justice. At one point Frank Lindh approached him at the close of a pre-trial hearing, held out his hand 'as one father to another’, and said something to the effect of 'John had nothing to do with Mike’s death.’ Spann Sr bristled and walked away. 'I should have taken out some of my revenge on him,’ he said later.
At the trial in Virginia in September 2002, it was specifically mentioned during the judge’s summing up that John Walker Lindh did not shoot Mike Spann. In his court statement, Lindh apologised for his actions, and attempted to offer the explanation that Frank even to this day finds comforting: he was a traveller, a voyager in search of a deeper understanding of his religion, who was naive or tricked into joining a despotic regime.
'I went to Afghanistan because I believed it was my religious duty to assist my fellow Muslims militarily in their jihad against the Northern Alliance,’ Lindh said in a statement to the court as he was sentenced in October 2002. 'I felt 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 heard reports of massacres, child rape, torture and castration… I went to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting against terrorism and oppression, not to support it.’
Details of Lindh’s adventures emerged during the trial. In the mountainous border stretching between Pakistan and Afghanistan, he had passed through the old smuggling town of Peshawar, where in May 2001 he showed up at a recruiting centre for the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a Kashmiri separatist group considered a terrorist organisation by the US. At the end of June 2001 he left the HUM camp and crossed into Afghanistan. At Kandahar, he was directed to al-Farooq, a training camp funded by Osama bin Laden.
There Lindh had met bin Laden, but he said he had not realised who bin Laden was and that he found his speeches 'boring’. He was offered martyrdom operations, but had rejected becoming a terrorist and instead wanted to fight for the Taliban army – just like other Americans had done, for other powers in other wars, in the past. And so Lindh ended up in al-Ansar, the foreign section of the Taliban army, hoping to fight against the equally brutal warlords of the Northern Alliance. He was with them when the bombs began to fall from US planes on Qala-i-Jangi.
As the defence was getting ready to call Lindh’s captors to give evidence, there was a last-minute offer of a plea bargain from the government’s lawyers. If Lindh withdrew claims that he had been mistreated or tortured by US military personnel in Afghanistan and aboard two military ships during December 2001 and January 2002, he would face only two charges. 'The government dropped all terrorism charges, all charges of conspiracy to murder,’ Jim Brosnahan, Lindh’s lawyer, says. 'What was left was the charge that he had violated the trade sanctions imposed on the Taliban by the American government. And for violating those trade sanctions, and for carrying a weapon, because he was a soldier in the army of Afghanistan, he was sentenced to 20 years of imprisonment.’ In addition, special administrative measures were imposed: no talking to the media, no selling his book, no seeing friends, only limited contact with his family, no speaking Arabic, no letters to or from the outside.
Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism scholar from Sri Lanka based at the University of St Andrews, interviewed Lindh for more than eight hours at the request of his defence team. He warned them that he believed that Lindh was almost certainly a member of al-Qaeda. The defence, undeterred, pressed him to meet Lindh. The encounter surprised him. 'I have interviewed maybe 200 terrorists over the past few years,’ he told the New Yorker magazine in 2003, 'and I am certain that John Walker Lindh has never been a terrorist, and never intended to be one. A terrorist is a person who conducts attacks against civilian targets. John Walker Lindh never did that. He trained to fight in the Afghan army, against other soldiers. He was not a member of al-Qaeda. Dozens of others whom I’ve met who went to train and fight in Afghanistan also were not part of al-Qaeda.’ Gunaratna believes that Lindh 'presents no national-security threat. He’s been completely misrepresented to the American people.’
Today John Lindh – or Hamza Lindh as he likes to call himself – sits in a medium-security jail in Terre Haute. Last year, he was shunted from Victorville jail in California to Colorado’s Supermax prison, and from there to the mid-west. No journalist has spoken to him since his capture in 2001. Under the special administrative measures, the FBI can read his letters and bug his cell, or his conversations with other inmates. Whenever he spoke Arabic, even a greeting to another prisoner, he was sent to solitary confinement (that restriction has now been lifted).
According to those who have seen him, he has become increasingly devout and spiritual. He helps other Muslim inmates with their understanding of the religion. And he withdraws into himself, to help steel himself to the long years ahead.
Frank Lindh admits that his son 'had the zealous qualities of the recent convert. Of course, like many 20-year-olds, he was very naive about the world: who are the good guys, who are the bad guys. But he’s not a terrorist, nor a terrorist sympathiser.’ He refuses to give up in his quest – he is a one-man campaigner, tirelessly pushing his son’s case.
Yaser Hamdi, who was captured alongside Lindh, was released in October 2004. In December 2007 David Hicks, the so-called 'Australian Taliban’, was freed from Guantanamo Bay. In a deal with the US authorities, Hicks pleaded guilty to the charge of providing material support to a designated terrorist organisation (al-Qaeda). Hicks is now at home with his family, after serving nine months in an Australian prison.
The former chief prosecutor of the Guantanamo Bay trials, Colonel Morris Davis, has given evidence that he faced political pressure to prosecute Hicks, even though he did not want to proceed against him because the charges were not serious enough. The Australian public has proved generally sympathetic to Hicks’s predicament.
Meanwhile, it has been a lonely battle for Frank and Marilyn Lindh. Many Muslim groups have been silent. Although there is now a slow trickle of media support calling for John Lindh’s release, the years stretch ahead. Every year at Christmas, John Lindh’s lawyer, Jim Brosnahan, helps John file a petition for commutation of sentence to the President. Each year it is turned down.
Leaked reports in the US media suggest furious lobbying going on behind the scenes this time around, as George Bush prepares to leave office, with departing Presidents traditionally issuing several pardons on their last day in power.
Speaking just before Christmas, Frank Lindh said, 'When John was first picked up, President Bush was actually the only public official in the United States who spoke in a sympathetic way about John. There was something about John’s situation, his religious conversion and so forth that I think really did touch him… We think that this is the time when the President will revisit those original feelings that he had – the feelings of sympathy – and find it in his heart to release John from prison.’
Marilyn was more circumspect when we last talked. With a fatalistic sigh, she said, 'I just don’t know if anyone will ever be able to tell the true story of John. I don’t think he would anyway. Who’s going to believe him?’
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