John Walker Lindh’s punishment smacks of self-righteous cruelty, says matthew carr |
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This month marks the sixth anniversary of the Nato bombing campaign that swept away the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. It is also nearly six years since a young American Muslim named John Walker Lindh (right) was captured by the Northern Alliance warlord and US ally Rashid Dostum.
On November 25, 2001, the bearded and dishevelled Lindh was filmed by the BBC in a makeshift prison near Mazar i-Sharif, kneeling in front of a CIA officer named Johnny Mike Spann. By the end of that day Spann had been killed, after some 330 Taliban prisoners staged an uprising and holed themselves up in a basement.
For six days, the basement was bombed, filled with burning fuel and then freezing water, before Lindh and 84 survivors surrendered. Though wounded, he was strapped naked onto a stretcher with duct tape, and interrogated by US Special Forces.
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The bearded and dishevelled Lindh was filmed by the BBC in a makeshift prison
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The journey that a callow, middle-class youth from liberal Marin County, California, took to become the 'American Taliban' began when Lindh saw the film Malcolm X at the age of 12. After converting to Islam in 1997, at the age of 16, Lindh embarked on an extraordinary spiritual quest which took him from Arabic classes in Yemen to Afghanistan in May 2001, where he enlisted to fight for the Taliban against the Northern Alliance.
At that time, pre-9/11, the Bush administration was still courting the Taliban. In the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack, however, Lindh became a universal hate figure in the United States, where he was variously depicted as a traitorous terrorist and a symptom of liberal moral depravity. In January 2002 he was brought back to the US and charged with 10 offences, including association with al-Qaeda.
Lindh always maintained that he had never intended to fight Americans and had refused invitations to participate in suicide attacks. Most of the charges were dropped in a plea bargain in which Lindh pleaded guilty only 
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Congress vs the country
War on political dissent
