John Walker Lindh's Father Persists With Legal Fight

The spiritual journey of John Walker Lindh began in San Anselmo in 1993, grew deeper at the four years later and took flight at Madrasahs in the Middle East. That journey continues to this day in Indiana, quietly and studiously, according to his father, attorney Frank Lindh.

What happened in the middle of that 18-year span has been the subject of a media furor and legal debate, as John Walker Lindh became one of the most infamous figures in the post-9/11 invasion of Afghanistan when he was found amongst Taliban prisoners in December 2001.

Lindh, now 30, immediately became known as the American Taliban and was derided as a traitor, eventually agreeing to a 20-year prison sentence, which he continues to serve at the Federal Correctional Institution in Terre Haute, Indiana, while pursuing a liberal arts degree from the University of Indiana.

Frank Lindh spoke at the University of San Francisco’s Law School Wednesday afternoon, arguing that his son was denied the fundamental rights of a U.S. citizen. Lindh said that after his capture, his son was put through horrible physical abuse and was repeatedly and publicly labeled as a traitor and a terrorist with ties to Osama bin Laden by high-ranking government officials.

“There has never been a citizen of the United States of America who was subjected to the kind of prejudicial commentary that my son was,” Lindh said, referring to statements by President George W. Bush, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Attorney General John Ashcroft, among others that John Walker Lindh had ties to Al Qaeda.

Lindh said the media simply took the government’s word for it about his son’s ties to Al Qaeda and never fully investigated what he was doing in Afghanistan. Given the widespread belief that Lindh was a terrorist, American public opinion was strongly in favor of the death penalty for Lindh.

“There wasn’t a single media outlet in the U.S. that ever took an impartial look at what was really going on here,” Lindh said. “Can you imagine this young man’s ability to come home and have anything resembling a fair trial?”

Frank Lindh said that holding the trial in Virginia, not far from where the Pentagon was attacked on 9/11, and scheduling it for the one-year anniversary of 9/11 itself, made his defense team’s job impossible.

Lindh was introduced by USF Professor Peter Honigsberg, who focuses on a number of post-9/11 legal issues in his research. Honigsberg has invited Lindh to speak at the school every year since 2004.

“This is one of the most compelling stories we’ve ever heard here at this law school,” Honigsberg said. “It’s a sad story, but an incredible one. It moves me every time I hear it. Many people in John’s situation have been released back to their families. Perhaps we can soon say the same thing about John.”

John Walker Lindh was born in February 1981 in Washington, D.C., and named after John Lennon, who had been murdered in New York City two months earlier, as well as former John Marshall, the former chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. Frank Lindh graduated from Georgetown law school.

Lindh described his son as having “this quality of being centered, calm and highly intelligent and observant of what’s going on around him. He also has a very wry sense of humor.”

Lindh said he has always been a practicing Catholic and took John to church when he was young. That began to change around the time that the younger Lindh turned 12 and watched Malcolm X, Spike Lee’s acclaimed biopic that in part chronicled Malcolm X’s pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia, a story that captivated John Lindh.

“He had never really heard of Islam prior to that,” Frank Lindh said. “The film just riveted him. The image of all of these humble and spiritual people praying to God in this fashion – it really moved John.”

John Lindh dug deeply into Islam over the next four years, and eventually converted to Islam at the Islamic Center of Mill Valley on Shell Road at the age of 16, not telling his parents of his decision until he returned home to San Anselmo.

“It never bothered us,” Frank Lindh said. “God is supported with all of these religions. It is not my path to God, but it is an oath to God.”

John Lindh began studying Arabic, persuading his parents to let him go to Yemen in July 1998 at the age of 17 to do so. He returned in May 1999 because his student visa had expired, but went back in 2000. In November 2000, he told his parents he was going to Pakistan to attend a Koran memorization school. In April 2001, Lindh told his parents that they wouldn’t be hearing from him for a while because he was going to go up into the mountains to escape the heat.

His real plan, however, was to go over the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan to volunteer for the army “to help defend civilian people from warlords,” Frank Lindh said.

While the Taliban controlled most of the country by early 2001, the northern areas remained under the control of the former Soviet-backed Northern Alliance, and Lindh sought to defend civilians against those warlords.

Lindh enrolled an infantry training camp funded by bin Laden, and he eventually met Bin Laden. Frank Lindh said his son was unimpressed by the terrorist mastermind because he was not an “authentic, scholarly or decent Muslim person.”

Frank Lindh also noted that pre-9/11 U.S. policy in Afghanistan was not entirely adversarial with the Taliban, pointing to a $43 million grant issued by the State Department in April 2001 for opium eradication in the country.

But after 9/11, when it became clear that bin Laden was given safe harbor by the Taliban and hosted his training camps, all that changed. The U.S. aligned itself with the Northern Alliance, whose leader Gen. Abdul Rashid Dostum, took hundreds of Taliban prisoners into custody at his Qala-i-Jhangi fortress.

Those prisoners were kept in wretched conditions, Frank Lindh asserted, and dozens were murdered. During one skirmish, Lindh tried to flee and was shot in the thigh. He pretended to be dead and was later brought to a basement by fellow Taliban prisoners.

“John wanted to escape and find his way to safety,” Frank Lindh said. “But his problem was that he need to find someone he could give himself up to who would not kill him.”

Lindh was discovered among the survivors in the basement at Dostum’s forstress on December 1 and his story immediately sparked a media firestorm. Labeled the American Taliban, images of a tattered and dazed Lindh from the days after his capture could be seen in media outlets all over the world.

“The news media in the post-9/11 world did not live up to the ideal of a free press,” Frank Lindh said.

The parties eventually settled on a plea bargain in July 2002, with Lindh pleading guilty to two felony counts for providing services to the Taliban and carrying a weapon while doing so. The plea deal expunged a number of other charges, including conspiracy to murder U.S. nationals, providing material resources for
terrorist groups, and using firearms during crimes of violence. Lindh received a 20-year prison sentence.

Frabk Lindh said the U.S. government should have offered Lindh a job upon his capture.

"The smart thing - not just the honorable thing - for the government to do when they find this kid who's fluent in Arabic and knows his way around that world would be to give him a job," he said.

Frank Lindh said he has spoken to his son as recently as Wednesday morning, saying that his son remains largely unchanged by his years in prison.

“He has that same equanimity that he’s always had,” Lindh said. “He’s very calm and spiritual and he does his daily prayers. He still has that same wry sense of humor. And he spends most of his time studying. In some sense, his life hasn’t been interrupted.”

Lindh said he was not aware of any new effort by his son’s attorneys to petition President Obama for clemency, a request that was denied by President Bush at the end of his second term in 2008.

“John thinks that he has suffered a really terrible injustice,” Lindh said. “He was never a terrorist. He was falsely accused by government officials of being a traitor. But he’s not bitter. He’s still got that great disposition he’s always had.”