John Walker Lindh: The first detainee

My son is not a traitor or a terrorist, says Frank Lindh, but a victim of hysteria

JOHN PHILLIP WALKER Lindh was labeled by the American government as "Detainee 001" in the "war on terror." John occupies a prison cell in Terre Haute, Ind., a prisoner of the American government since Dec. 1, 2001. He is entirely innocent of any involvement in the 9/11 terror attacks, or of any allegiance to terrorism — that is not disputed. Indeed, all accusations of terrorism against my son were dropped by the government in a plea bargain, which was approved by the U.S. district court in which the case was brought.

John was raised a Roman Catholic, but converted to Islam at 16. A year later, in 1998, he traveled to Yemen to embark upon a rigorous course of religious study. He later continued his studies in Pakistan,  and in late April 2001, he wrote to me and his mother, saying he planned to go into the mountains to escape the oppressive summer heat. We had no further contact with him for seven months. Unbeknownst to us, he crossed the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan, to volunteer for service in the Afghan army, which was then under the control of the Taliban government.

The Taliban were engaged in a long-running civil war against a Russian-backed insurgency known as the Northern Alliance. John was quickly accepted as a volunteer, and received two months of infantry training in a Taliban military camp before being dispatched to the front lines. His decision to volunteer was rash, and failed to take into account the Taliban’s mistreatment of their own citizens — especially women. But the brutal human-rights violations of the Northern Alliance warlords were also well-documented: massacres, rape — of both women and children — torture, and castration, all thoroughly documented in the U.S. State Department’s annual human-rights reports throughout the 1990s.

From the time of the Soviet invasion in 1979, tens of thousands of young Muslim men from all over the world had volunteered, and these young soldiers performed heroically in the defeat of the Soviet Union. Their cause was openly supported by the American government, particularly during the administration of President Ronald Reagan, who declared, "They are our brothers, these freedom fighters, and we owe them our help."

Given the history of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, it would seem absurd to suggest that John was being disloyal to America when he went into Afghanistan in the spring of 2001. At the time, the U.S. was, according to our own State Department, "the largest single donor of humanitarian aid to the Afghan people." In May 2001, President George W. Bush authorized a grant of $43 million to the Taliban government for opium eradication. Secretary of State Colin Powell personally announced the grant in a press release and pledged, "We will continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans." Although President Bill Clinton had placed the Taliban government under economic sanctions because of its human-rights violations, by 2001 the U.S. was sending millions in aid to the Taliban.