John Walker Lindh

Esquire, of all things, gets a shout out from The Revealer for this article on John Walker Lindh. You really need to go read the whole thing. Here are a few excepts:

*Even after the Justice Department offered a plea bargain in July 2002 and dropped eight of the ten charges against him, even after prosecutors finally admitted that there was no evidence that he had joined Al Qaeda or threatened to kill Americans, even after he wound up pleading guilty only to carrying a rifle and grenades for the Taliban, the government and its negotiator, Michael Chertoff, made his silence a condition of the plea.

*He would spend, instead, twenty years in jail, and during that time not only would he be unable to have any visitors but his attorneys and his father and his mother and his brother and his sister and his grandmother; not only would his visitors be forbidden to relate to the public anything he said or thought; not only would the FBI have to read and clear any letter he sent or received and the government reserve the right to bug his conversations with his cellmates and monitor his phone calls. No, he would also have to abide by the following provision of the SAM: "All communications with others will be in English."

*And so the zealous guard reports that zealous prisoner 45426-083 has spoken words in the forbidden tongue. And when prisoner 45426-083 returns to his cell, he is ordered to back up to the feeding slot in his cell door. He is handcuffed through the slot and led away to the Special Housing Unit—also known as the SHU, also known as the hole. There he has to strip naked and is searched under his testicles and in the cavity of his ass. And there Hamza settles into his cell, with the Arabic singing in his head, where no one can stop it.

*When no less successful a parent than George Herbert Walker Bush was lampooning John Walker Lindh for being a "misguided Marin County hot-tubber," Frank Lindh was being lampooned for actually raising his son in a place like Marin County, and then for divorcing his wife, Marilyn Walker, and living with a man.

* "A Christian guard—a good, decent man—told me something one day," says Shakeel Syed. "He said, 'Some of us try to provoke him once in a while. We try to make him mad.' Then he said, 'We fail miserably.'

Goddess knows, I was no fan of the Taliban's for years and years before it became the American Way to be mad at the Taliban. But would someone explain to me why the United States of America continues to act as if it means to ape every single one of the Taliban's faults?