Sarah: Is it just a random chance that causes you to do backpacking versus Taliban?
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we take you to the backcountry of history, the forgotten trails and cabins, and lead you up craggy mountains. And then we all have a mountain house dinner.
Mike: Are you saying that because you're in Vermont? Are you literally looking out the window and composing a tagline?
Sarah: Yes. I'm sitting here drinking milk from a glass bottle right now.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall, and I am a writer/dog sitter, currently at work on a book about the Satanic Panic.
Mike: And today we are talking about the American Taliban, John Walker Lindh.
Sarah: Was he called the ‘American Taliban’ at the time?
Mike: God, this was a cover story in Newsweek that ran in early 2002, with his face on the cover and the giant headline ‘American Taliban’. And it was a huge deal.
Sarah: Newsweek and Time covers, and People Magazine, are the fossils of deciding our cultural eras. It's like, oh, it's the Nancy Kerrigan Zohak. So, okay, Newsweek calls this the American Taliban.
Mike: What else do you know about him? What do you remember from that time?
Sarah: What I remember is that he was a white American guy who had, I guess, joined the Taliban or Al Qaeda or something. And that he was tried for war crimes and that he was sort of held up as maybe someone guilty of treason. And I remember in my head linking him to Timothy McVeigh. They were both like skinny, kind of blonde, white guys.
Mike: Ish. Yeah.
Sarah: Ish. Okay. But that there was just something sort of like every man about them. You would see that you were surrounded by men who looked like that. And this idea that he was the worst kind of traitor, I feel like that was how he was seen. But I don't remember the specifics of it at all. So just tell me, tell me the story please.
Mike: I think most people never learned the specifics because I've been researching this for the last two weeks and within minutes I was like, wait, what? So he was never a member of Al Qaeda. He never attacked Americans. He never planned to attack Americans. He never, in his life that we know of, expressed a desire to attack Americans or even negative thoughts about America. The closest thing we have to anti-American sentiment is that his parents, at one point, invite him to come home. And he says in an email, ‘I'm not that wild about the idea of coming back to America for the holidays’. That's it. Every kid that studied abroad has written that sentence in an email to their parents.
Sarah: I want to stay in Spain and Barcelona.
Mike: One thing that's really interesting and a theme throughout this story is that everything that John Walker Lindh did abroad really has nothing to do with America at all. He didn't really have strong feelings about America that we know of, but it's very hard for Americans to accept this isn't about you, man.
Sarah: We're so vain, we probably think this terrorism is about us.
Mike: Another thing to keep in mind for this is that he's a bad mascot for any point you want to make. If you want to tell a story about the radicalization of the suburbs and the dangers of religious extremists in America, he's not a great mascot for that. But he's also not a great mascot for the excesses of the war on terror and pulling innocent people out of nowhere and making their lives miserable. He doesn't really fit that narrative either. So he's born in February of 1981 in Washington, DC. His dad is a former social worker who is, at the time, working for the department of justice as a lawyer. His mom is a photographer, housewife, thing.
Sarah: Photographer housewife thing. That's the mom in the Stepford Wives.
Mike: Eventually they ended up moving to Marin County, California, which is north of San Francisco, an extremely affluent area. This kind of creates this like fallen suburban kid narrative that ends up getting retold in the media a million times.
Sarah: Oh, nothing sadder in America than a fallen suburban kid.
Mike: So you have established that this is like a normal family. It's an upstanding family. They have whatever, a four-bedroom house in a suburb. They go to good schools.
Sarah: How could you be spiritually lost if you grew up in a four-bedroom house?
Mike: That's the thing. Basically from the earliest days, John is kind of a wayward kid. He's really sick when he's in middle school. He has some intestinal digestive issues and he's so sick that he has to be homeschooled. It seems that he never quite fit in. He sort of bounces in and out of middle school. He ends up trying to go to a big public high school, but he's just lonely and alone.
And when journalists go back to interview kids from his high school, nobody really remembers him. He ends up going to this weird hippie school where the kids don't go to classes, they have independent reading. It's kind of like those universities that show up on right wing websites that are teaching underwater basket weaving. He goes to one of these high schools where he's basically just reading a bunch of stuff and then he meets with a tutor twice a week.
Sarah: These kids go to the most progressive school in history, but at what cost? Tonight on 60 minutes.
Mike: This is very central to the narrative that the right wing tabloids will eventually tell that it's the accesses of liberal boomer parenting gone wrong.
Sarah: Oh no. Oh, it was Marin County all along.
Mike: The only other noteworthy thing about his upbringing is that he's kind of an internet troll. So this is back in these sorts of AOL prodigy, early internet days.
Sarah: In the Eric Harris days.
Mike: Yes. Journalists started looking around at anything they could find from this guy after he became famous. And they find a couple of internet posts where he's on a lot of hip hop blogs. He writes some raps, which are so excruciating that I could not even read them. And I'm not going to repeat them here.
Sarah: That's charitable.
Mike: He does things where he pretends to be a black guy, which is not great. And then he pretends to be a black guy to yell at other people for being racist.
Sarah: Interesting.
Mike: So he's like, I'm black and I'm 35 years old. And you shouldn't say mean things about black people.
Sarah: Oh, that's nice.
Mike: And then the big thing that happens in his childhood is when he's 16, he reads the autobiography of Malcolm X.
Sarah: Oh my God. We shouldn't give children so much time for reading. They'll end up reading Malcolm X. That's the lesson here.
Mike: He also sees the movie which comes out around that time. You'll see in the movie, he goes to the Hodge at Mecca. It's this extremely important event in the life of every Muslim and John is really struck by this, that there's this devoutness, there's this kind of simplicity of people who aren't drinking, and they aren't mistreating women. And they're very traditional and these very traditional old school beliefs, he's really struck by this. And so he joins a mosque at the local mosque in Marin County.
Sarah: That's very sweet.
Mike: I mean, this becomes the community he's been looking for. I mean, it doesn't seem like he ever really had a group of friends. And so he kind of finally finds a thing.
Sarah: Yeah. This all seems like something that as a parent you would feel pretty good about.
Mike: Yeah. And it's also on some level, I feel like: game recognize game, that what his dad says later is that I'm a Catholic. Islam is not actually that different from Catholicism. Right. There's one deity, right. It's telling you, don't stay out late, don't treat people poorly. It's all basically the same stuff that Catholics are teaching their kids. So his parents don't actually see this as all that exotic or all that weird. And another thing to keep in mind for this is this is before 9/11. So the cultural construction of Islam back then was completely different. It's so hard to recreate this time now. There were no political connotations associated with Islam at that time at all.
So he ended up taking some equivalency exam. He ends up essentially finishing high school when he's 16. And then a little bit after that, when he's 17, he tells his parents that he wants to move to Sanaa, Yemen and learn Arabic. And so again, Yemen was a completely different country then.
Sarah: Yemen was referenced on an episode of Friends and that's what people know it for at the time. I can attest to that.
Mike: And so his parents basically considered this about the same as a kid that wants to study abroad in Malta, right? They're like, it's kind of weird, but it's an international school and our kid wants to learn Arabic and lots of kids study abroad.
Sarah: It was on Friends.
Mike: It was on Friends. So he moves to Yemen, and I think this actually happens with a lot of people. You have these issues in your life, you have these challenges, and then you think that moving to a different place or drastically changing your circumstances is going to change things.
Sarah: That's why people get bangs.
Mike: Yes. So his version of getting bangs is basically moving to Yemen and the minute he gets to Yemen, exactly the same thing happens. There are other kids at his language school and he doesn't really fit in with them. A lot of them are kind of typical sort of spring break style study abroad students. They're there in Yemen to party and hang out and yes, they're learning Arabic, but they're also, smoking hookah and drinking alcohol and these kinds of things that he is really not into. He's super, super devout and super, just clean living wakes up at five in the day.
Sarah: Yeah. He's a little straight edge.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. There's a girl from Texas who's walking around with bare sleeves and he's kind of like, I don't know if I'm comfortable with that. He's becoming much more devout and having these much more traditional beliefs.
Sarah: As young men seem to tend to do at that age, if they're going to do it.
Mike: The whole thing is just so 17 to me. You find this idea and it's cool and new, and you don't really see any of the nuance in it. You're sort of looking around at other people and saying like, they're not doing it right or they’re not Muslim enough. This is the way that you join stuff when you're a kid. You have this extremely one dimensional understanding.
Sarah: This is why people join fraternities at this age too. And football teams are the same thing. These units of intense comradery, you know, that comes through shared belief and often a belief that's adversarial in some way. Right?
Mike: Totally. So basically, he's kind of bored. He's drifting away from the other students. He's not all that excited about this language school after a few months. He ends up dropping out of the language school and just sort of bumming around, hanging out in Yemen, looking for a mosque that better fits his interpretation of Islam, how he wants to use the religion. He ends up sort of out in the suburbs of Sonata at this other mosque, where he finds a community that's much more suited to him. And so what starts to happen is he starts to get insulated from outside information. So there's a bombing in 1998 where a US embassy in Africa is bombed by radical Muslim terrorists. And his mom emails him and she's like, some Muslims did this, you're Muslim. How do you feel about it? And he writes back, and he says it's actually the American government that did that. It wasn't Muslims.
This is seen later as the radicalization process is starting, but as someone who has spent a decent amount of time in rural areas of developing countries, that's just sort of the way that information travels in those countries, right. Where a lot of it is by word of mouth. There's not a lot of institutions of journalism or institutions of reliable information or what people consider reliable.
Sarah: And are used to the media being perhaps used as outlets for political narratives that may or may not be true.
Mike: And there is a lot of anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East for understandable reasons that go back like a hundred years. All the information that we have about John is that he did not read newspapers. His whole life he was not politically savvy or even politically interested. It just wasn't a field of human endeavor that he showed a lot of interest in ever. And so the fact that one of his buddies is like, oh, you know that bombing in Africa, you know, that was done by the U.S., right? He's like, yes, I don't sure. Sure, sounds fine. It's easy to look at people in the Middle East or people in developing countries that do this and sort of exoticize it. Like they don't have reliable information, but we all do this to some extent.
Sarah: No Americans do that. Right. Americans never have conflicting theories about the basic events of something in the news.
Mike: I mean, I'm just thinking of if some random friend of yours is like, oh, did you hear some like hard right psychopaths just won the election in Belgium. You're like, wow. Okay.
Sarah: I would say I don't like the word psychopath.
Mike: True. That is what you would say. Then it's like, because you don’t really care that much about Belgium, you're not going to go on Wikipedia and like fact check for yourself. And so three days later, when somebody is like, Hey, what about those elections in Belgium? You're like, yeah, this guy's crazy right wing. What's going on? That might not be true. Right. Your friend might be, that's not true. You're being radicalized. He's not right wing.
Sarah: I would be like, I trust Marsha about Belgium.
Mike: Yes, exactly. You're like, I don't really care too much. I'm just repeating very scrap type information that I've heard and just sort of repeating it without really thinking about it too much. That's kind of the entire premise of this show. We all do this.
Sarah: All of this is an endless game of telephone.
Mike: Yes. I don't think this necessarily excuses what happens later.
Sarah: I don't even know what happens later. I am on the edge of my freaking seat.
Mike: But so anyway, he's just getting farther and farther from the country that he left. So eventually his visa runs out and he has to come home. He comes home for 10 months. He's bored as hell in Northern California.
Sarah: Does he sit in the basement and eat pop tarts?
Mike: Basically. He gets a job at some warehouse, something, something. He starts telling his parents he wants to become a doctor and work in Pakistan in underserved communities. But he's bored. He is like every kid when they come home from study abroad where I feel ‘like this one time in Yemen’. His heart is not in the states anymore.
So he gets a new visa. He moves back to Yemen and again, he’s sort of adrift. He feels like I'm just doing the same thing again. Some of the novelty of this has worn off. And so he decided that the next stage of his language learning, the next stage of his religious learning, is memorizing the Quran.
Sarah: By heart? Word by word?
Mike: Yeah. And this is something that religious scholars do as part of their training. He also wants to become a religious scholar and potentially become like the equivalent of a priest. And so part of that is you go to a madrassa. And you memorize the Quran. So he essentially moves to the north of Pakistan. Once he's in this world, apparently the last year that he spent in the middle east, he spent $200. He goes for it. He's sleeping on tarps on people's floors. He's living in this madrassa. Apparently, he gives away all of his possessions and the only thing he owns is a copy of the Quran. His parents, again, are like it's an exotic thing for an 18 year old boy to do, but sure.
Sarah: Based on this information, I feel like I would think as his parent, I would be like, he's finding himself like 18 year old boys do. It's this or he gets really into snowboarding. It's recognizable as the kind of journey that 18 year old’s go on.
Mike: Totally. And if we didn't have all this implicit bias, I think toward Muslims and toward Islam, if he had gone to become a Christian missionary in the mountains of the democratic Republic of Congo, we'd be like, okay, that's an interesting thing and it's something Christians do.
Sarah: Yeah. You're a really young guy and you were going through that thing that young people, but maybe especially young men go through where you find a doctrine or a series of rules and you're like, I'm going to do this and make no compromises for anything. Heavy metal bands who were interviewed for the decline of Western civilization when they were asked what will happen if you don't make it, we're like, we will, we will make it. Everyone has some version of that story when they're growing up. And this just feels so far, just one of those.
Mike: That's actually what's so fascinating about it to me. This need, especially of young men, to have a theory of everything. Whatever it is. It's Ayn Rand or it's white supremacy or its political activism or volunteering.
Sarah: Or it's perfectly benign stuff. Guys who got really, really, really into mushroom hunting. But it's something.
Mike: What happens throughout most people's twenties is that you then realize a)it's not going to solve anything, b) that other people who've joined that movement have done so for not great reasons, right? It starts to dawn on you, oh, some of these people are assholes. Some of these people suck and some of the leaders of this movement are not great.
Sarah: This sounds like it might be a young Mike ‘dear diary’ moment.
Mike: Totally. I mean, up to this point, basically in this story, I am John Walker Lindh.
Sarah: Oh yeah. So am I, we all are.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So what's really interesting is after he gets to Pakistan, he gets even farther away from the internet. He stops emailing his parents because there's no internet cafes anymore. He essentially has no links back to the previous John. He starts listening to essentially talk radio. There's a lot of talk radio in Northern Pakistan.
Sarah: Oh, talk radio never leads anywhere good unless it's Howard Stern.
Mike: And this is where, the kind of the right wing narrative of John Walker Lindh starts to come into focus a little bit more because this is where he starts actually to get pretty radicalized. Because one of the things that is really popular in Northern Pakistan, because it's on the border with Afghanistan, is these guys called the Taliban who are freedom fighters in Afghanistan.
Sarah: Who, as I recall, were depicted in one of the Rambo movies and favorably.
Mike: That’s the thing. Basically he starts thinking, this actually sounds pretty appealing. These guys are trying to create a Muslim state, an entire country where I can live my values where it's totally safe for me to live my values.
Sarah: And he's like, and I'll never fit in in Marin County.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, I also think that, you know, he's memorizing the Koran. He's in this very remote area. He also doesn't really feel like he fits in there. I mean, so much of this is just, he just has a personality that he doesn't feel like he fits in everywhere and he keeps moving the goalposts of, the next thing is where I'm going to fit in. The next thing is where it's all going to click into place for me. And because of these radio broadcasts, because of the people that he's hanging out with, he starts to put together this narrative of this is it. They're trying to create the kind of country that would be welcoming to people like me, and I would finally fit in.
Sarah: And I'm convinced that it's the same basic urge that prompts a person to go on a long backpacking trip. Something I was thinking about is that the kind of 15 year old I was like, if I were a boy and socialized to project my frustrations outward and make them other people's faults, I can see myself becoming an incel as a 15 year old.
Mike: Oh me too, totally, totally.
Sarah: And I was like what did I do as the 15 year old I was? And I was like I found Newsies fanfiction. You know, and it's like two roads diverged in a yellow wood.
Mike: Yeah. It really does seem like with John, you know, the combination of being painfully naive and always unhappy, always looking for the next thing and not great at fact checking things that people told him, this is what he ends up telling an interviewer later. And this becomes one of the main exhibits in why he's committed treason.
Sarah: Oh boy.
Mike: He says, “I lived in a region in the Northeastern province. The people there in general have great love for the Taliban, so I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement, and my heart became attached to them. I wanted to help them one way or another. So I took the opportunity.”
Sarah: He's being truthful when the spotlight is on him, and you can't do that.
Mike: No, never. Yeah. So what happens is he doesn't join the Taliban yet, but he joined something called HOM, which stands for something that I will grievously mispronounce so I'm not going to try. But this is a terrorist affiliated organization. A sort of offshoot of this organization are the people that beheaded Daniel Pearl. And so John meets people that are affiliated with them. They recruit him, he ends up joining. And what he says later is he didn't know it was a terrorist organization. Whenever a group recruits you, they never tell you their true nature. Right? When you join the Scientologists, they're like, we just want to give you stress tests.
Sarah: Yeah, listen, the U S army doesn't advertise joining up with footage of the My Lai Massacre. You know, it's in the interest of every militaristic group to camouflage its true intentions for its fighters.
Mike: The moral and the legal principle that I've been struggling with in figuring out what I think about John Walker Lindh the last two weeks is, there's some level of like, naive is okay. Right. But there's a point where naiveness becomes negligent. If you think about Enron or something, right? If you joined as an intern at Enron in 1998, I wouldn't hold random HR people and secretaries accountable for what was happening at the top of that organization. But then on the other end of the spectrum, you can't just join the KKK and be like, oh, I had no idea they had some problematic views. Like, no. I expect you to do some basic due diligence. Right? Both of those cases are very easy. John obviously is somewhere in between, but there is a line where naive becomes negligent and what you feel about John really comes down to where you put that line.
So there's two different Islamic experts, people that know the region, know the language, know all the organizations, who each get days of interviews with John after he's in prison. They're hired by his defense team to sort of figure out, piece together the timeline of what happened, piece together why he did that. Both of these scholars come away saying the dude is hopelessly naive. One of them, it's really interesting. You know, she's asking him, why did you enlist with the Taliban? Why did you enlist with this terrorist organization? And he's like, you know, they seem good. They made a pitch to me. It sounded like they were helping oppressed Muslims. They said all they want to do is help the oppressed and I wanted to help the oppressed so I joined.
And then this interviewer is like, do you know about all the terrorism that they've done and the people they have killed? Do you know about their treatment of women? And apparently John looks at her and he goes, I'd have to study that. The way that she puts it is that his knowledge is idiosyncratic and narrow. The other interviewer says this too, that he's interviewing John and he's asking about Osama Bin Laden and the Taliban, everything else. And John is just saying like, yeah, they seemed fine, whatever. And he's saying like, you know, how do you feel about the fact that they've carried out all these terrorist attacks on civilians? And John's like, oh no, that's against Islam. The Koran is very clear that you can't murder women and children. So like they wouldn't have done that. But the researcher says that he understands Islam, but he doesn't understand contemporary Islam. He's spending all this time memorizing the Koran, and he thinks that the Koran is the same as the institutions implementing it.
Sarah: He's like someone who gets converted to Catholicism and he's like, oh no, priests, couldn't molest children because priests take a vow of celibacy.
Mike: Yeah, exactly.
Sarah: You also have a lot of willful blindness to the ethical complexities of an institution that you have just bought into. If he's like in the honeymoon period with his faith, you can see there being a lot that he would just try hard to ignore.
Mike: I know. I mean, you know, you're just reading this and like putting your head in your hands and you're just like, John, you really didn't Google organizations before you joined? You didn't think it through.
Sarah: Do you think he just really wanted to believe what he was told?
Mike: Yeah. And he just isn't someone who cares about politics. He's really into reading. He's really into studying. This is how he interacts with the world, through reading about it.
Sarah: I bet he liked Dune.
Mike: It's also noteworthy to me that John ends up dropping out of this terrorist organization when he realizes that they have political goals. As he gets deeper into this terrorist organization, he realizes that they're trying to take over territory. They're trying to take over secular countries. And he's like, wait a minute. No, those are secular countries. We’re fighting on behalf of the oppressed. We wouldn't invade another country. And so when he says later on, he says it was not an Islamic struggle. It was a political struggle. And that's the beginning of the little seeds of wait a minute, maybe institutions are run by people.
Sarah: It says a lot that he doesn't see Islam as political. He's like, this has nothing to do with political gain or territory. This is about a Homeland and freedom and letting other people be. He presumes everyone to be as disinterested in power as he is.
Mike: Exactly. Yeah. That's a very good way of putting it. And I think that is his central sin.
Sarah: It's his fatal flaw.
Mike: Totally. Yes. It's like, I'm doing this out of a genuine desire to help the oppressed, so everyone else must be too. He doesn't really get all of the histories of these countries, all the politics of these countries, all of the super tangled proxy wars that are being fought in a bunch of these countries. He just never really looks into it.
Sarah: So he committed the original and eternal American sin which is bumbling innocently and confusedly into a very complicated situation.
Mike: Yeah. This is sort of where it really escalates. After a couple of months in Pakistan, he decides I'm going to go to Afghanistan. So I'm going to take a little detour to talk about the politics of Afghanistan at the time. So Afghanistan was a constitutional monarchy for a really long time. And then there was a communist uprising that assassinated the political leader. Then the Soviets get really interested cause they're like, Hey communists. Soviet troops come, a bunch of Soviet money comes, and they basically want to set up Afghanistan as a communist country. It never really clicks.
The Soviets ended up withdrawing in 1989. The Taliban rises up out of the prisoner of war camps established by the Soviets. The US, of course, starts funding the Taliban because the Taliban is fighting against the Soviets. And as we have discussed on the show, the only spectrum that mattered at that time was communist versus capitalist. And the Taliban was against the communist so we're for the Taliban.
Sarah: Yeah. The enemy of our enemy is our friend in 80s America.
Mike: There's all these quotes from Ronald Reagan calling them freedom fighters. And so the Taliban, with our help, ends up taking over the country, but it's still a super fractious country. There are these other ethnic groups, there's other linguistic groups. The Taliban sort of imposes control, but there's two regions in the north of the country that they never quite get control over. One of them is run by the remnants of the Russian backed insurgency, it's called the Northern Alliance. So it's not Russians, it's mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks, but they're funded by the Russians. They're supported by the Russians. And there's kind of like a stalemate where the Northern Alliance has around 10% of the country. And the Taliban sort of has the rest of the country. And there's not a whole lot of fighting necessarily, but it's just sort of, they are there. The Taliban hates them, they hate the Taliban, but no one's really necessarily gaining or losing all that much territory. It's sort of like its own little Cold War.
This is what John signs up to fight for. That the message he gets is that the Taliban are freedom fighters, and they are against this Northern Alliance group that, according to the information that he gets, the Northern Alliance is committing rape, it's murdering civilians, it's this awful regime. And so if he doesn't go and fight, the Northern Alliance could get more territory in Afghanistan and more Muslims are going to suffer. That's the pitch to him when he goes and joins the Taliban.
Sarah: Right. That's what you tell a young person who you want to go fight for you for much more complex reasons than you let him in on.
Mike: Exactly. And you know what he doesn't know, I looked up an old Physicians Without Borders report, that the Taliban had already established itself as abysmal human rights violators, right. They did this survey where they interviewed women who had been in prison and 47% of them were detained for not being in a Moscow prayer time, flying a kite, playing music at their wedding, or laughing in public.
Sarah: Laughing.
Mike: You don't want to be relativistic about this. The Taliban was very bad. There was a lot of torture. There was a lot of basically warlords being able to set their own interpretations of Islamic law and just totally fuck with people. It was very bad, and it was also, that information was very available. If John had tried, he could have found out about what the record of the Taliban was.
Sarah: So do you think that it was possible, he had no sense of, for example, extremely severe punishments that they handed out to people? Do you think he could have plausibly remained totally ignorant of that?
Mike: Yeah, because I think what explains like 97% of this was his lack of a general skepticism about being told things and he doesn't have the internet.
Sarah: And so he didn't see how they treated people like in regions they had under control?
Mike: Yeah. He’s in Pakistan this whole time. So the Taliban is something he is told about.
Sarah: Right. It's not like today because now ISIS uses Instagram all the time and you can see that they're all little jerks. Was he aware of terrorism as a concept to any degree?
Mike: I mean, he must've been right. His dad had told him about the USS Cole attack, which took place in, I think 2001. And he also sort of was like, oh, that's not really terrorism. It was the Yemen government attacking a US ship, which it wasn't, but it's not clear that John knew that. Right? So the information that he's getting about world events is mostly from people he knows. Many of the Islamic terrorist attacks that are taking place at this time, there aren't terribly many, but the ones that are taking place, people around him are saying, oh, you know, people are being framed. It's not really happening. It's not really terrorism, et cetera. So it's not clear that he had any information about what was really going on. On the other hand, he easily could have found out. He could have done it and he didn't, basically. How at fault John is, it's up to you where you put that line of, when does it become negligent?
Sarah: And it's up to, to what degree of, I guess emotional intelligence and self-awareness you expect from a 19 year old.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So John takes a bus into Afghanistan. He somehow finds a recruitment booth or something. I don't know how logistically he does it, but he joins the Taliban. The problem is he speaks Arabic and everything in the Taliban is in Urdu and Pashtun.
Sarah: Oh, he learned the wrong language.
Mike: Yes. They can't really use him. So there's this thing called Al-Ansar, which means the supporters. So it's like a little rump troop regiment who are all the Arabic speakers, right. Because people from all over the world come to join the Taliban cause, and this is sort of where the Taliban puts them. There's like, okay, join with all the other Arabic speakers.
Sarah: He's like the junior varsity Taliban.
Mike: Sure, like join up. We'll find some use for you.
Sarah: Very embarrassing for a young man on a quest.
Mike: Yeah. Yes. So they end up sending him to a training camp, which will later on be called a terrorist training camp, but training terrorists and training army soldiers, those are different skills. So apparently at the same camp, there's something like 3000 soldiers being trained there. And there's 100, 200 people that are separately being trained in terrorist tactics. So this gets called an Al Qaeda training camp, it's accurate that Al Qaeda is being trained there, but John did not go through Al Qaeda training.
Sarah: I am realizing, as you're saying this, that I could not tell you with any confidence, what exactly Al-Qaeda is. I only live through this period of American news, but is that the terrorist arm of the Taliban? I feel like George W. Bush.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, the thing is it was created separately, but after a couple years, the Taliban starts harboring Al Qaeda fighters. Afghanistan becomes the headquarters for Al Qaeda because the Taliban supports them. So by this point, there's a lot of overlap, but the Islamic scholars that interview John later point out, it's a secret organization. You don't just go on Craigslist and click on, apply and then fill out your resume and join Al-Qaeda. It's an underground network. It's not something that is advertised to people. So there is no evidence of any kind that John ever joined Al Qaeda. So even the indictment that the US government files on him later does not say that he joined Al Qaeda. It is very careful to say things like he trained at an Al Qaeda camp, and he met with Al Qaeda affiliated individuals. But the thing to keep in mind about all of John's engagement with the Taliban is that he's a fucking grunt. He is the lowest level of the totem pole in not a particularly essential regimen.
Sarah: Do you think that he was held up by the media as being higher level and more dangerous and more of a terrorist than he was because the public wanted, and the government wanted to tell the public a story where someone important had been caught and was being brought to justice of a sort?
Mike: Oh yeah. And when this eventually hits the media, this unit that he's in, Al-Ansar, will be translated as Al Qaeda. That's just factually incorrect. This group has nothing to do with Al Qaeda. Secondly, the extremely inconvenient fact for John is that this Al-Ansar unit and the camp that he's at are both funded by Osama Bin Laden.
Sarah: Whoops.
Mike: Yes. So of course in the indictment, of course, in all of the media coverage, what comes up is that John has met with Osama bin Laden, which makes him seem super high level.
Sarah: Has he?
Mike: Yeah. Oh yeah. And so, it's actually true that he met with Bin Laden, but I have a friend that worked at the Seattle Supersonics. John's relationship with Osama bin Laden is essentially the same as her relationship with Howard Schultz. This random rich guy that comes around sometimes and he kind of sucks? He says weird shit to you. And he's like, hey, tiger. Working hard! And you're like, yeah, whatever, man.
Sarah: So is Osama Bin Laden going around to the different Taliban training facilities and sort of doing regional manager stuff?
Mike: Literally. Yes. First of all, keep in mind, this is before 9/11. So he is not famous.
Sarah: He’s just another gross beard.
Mike: He has no reason to think, Osama Bin Laden is hot shit. So the first time he meets Osama Bin Laden, Bin Laden shows up at the training camp in an envoy of Toyota land cruisers. And so instantly John is like, what a dick. It's so hot here. We're like sleeping on the ground. It's super pared down conditions. And then this asshole shows up in an air conditioned, $70,000 SUV.
Sarah: So it's great because in the classic way of a teenager to see very deeply about some things and completely miss things that would be obvious to a grownup, he's like, fuck Osama bin Laden. He's a fucking capitalist.
Mike: Totally. He's like, this dude sucks. There's this great quote in this terrific New Yorker article that runs in 2003, where one of these Islamic scholars that ended up interviewing John, they asked him, so what was Osama bin Laden like? And he says to tell you the truth, he was really boring. I was tired. The training was grueling. Most of the speakers stood up when they spoke, but he sat down and he talked in this really soft voice about the history of Afghanistan, how everyone had invaded it, starting with the Greeks. I listened to the beginning, but it wasn't very interesting. So I fell asleep.
Sarah: I love this, that he saw Osama Bin Laden as someone from corporate giving a lecture on reusing interoffice memo envelopes.
Mike: Yes. Exactly like there's one moment where he and the other grunts are like cleaning the floor or something. And Bin Laden comes by shakes and their hands. So this, of course, is seen as, he's shaking hands with bin Laden, but apparently bin Laden is just like, ‘looking good guys’ and walks out. This is the way that you would just deal with like some upper boss.
Sarah: Like he's working at an Altoona Blockbuster and the regional manager comes by and he's like, make sure all those cases for Demi Moore’s strip tease are in order, young man. And you're like, yes, sir.
Mike: Literally. Yes. So then he ends up sort of going to the front lines, which is the least interesting part of the story. When you hear that he was like a Taliban fighter, you imagine some sort of Saving Private Ryan thing where he's like running in the field and dodging gunfire. Basically because this war is at a stalemate, all he does is sit on guard duty and wait for something to happen and nothing ever happens. He's only on guard duty for a couple of weeks. He goes to the front lines, this is the worst timing in the history of the world, the week before September 11th. He's like, I'm going to join the Taliban and go to this province in a remote area. And basically until everything explodes later, he just sits there. He's not in a village, he's not near a road. There's just sort of an imaginary line across this extremely remote part of Afghanistan at the time. And his job is literally to just sit there and call someone if he sees anything.
Sarah: So he's like a little border guard in the bureaucracy of the Taliban.
Mike: Exactly. He's the lowest possible level. It's basically just a two-week camping trip where it's him and these other dudes. They're hanging out, they're speaking Arabic, they're making food. He became famous because he can make pasta and none of the other guys had ever made cooked pasta before. So he becomes like a celebrity in his unit for like, this guy knows how to make pasta for lunch.
Sarah: That's adorable.
Mike: They're just hanging out. There's nothing, nothing happens.
Sarah: Yeah. Because war is mostly boredom and then death.
Mike: Yes, essentially. Yeah. So what ends up happening and what turns this story into an escalating nightmare that you will not believe, is 9/11. At some point during this time when he's sitting up there, he finds out about 9/11. We don't know when he found out about it. We think it's a couple days later because information takes a long time to travel. One of the main arguments for John being this terrible terrorist, is that he knew about 9/11 and he didn't leave, but we don't know what he found out about 9/11. It's not even clear that he found out that Osama bin Laden did it. I mean, you never know how these kinds of rumors, word of mouth, information spread. So for all we know he could have found out Bush did 9/11, jet fuel can't melt steel beams, and like they're framing bin Laden. Right?
There's also some evidence that he tried to leave at that point. And, I don't know how much of it to believe, cause it's all sort of word of mouth, but he says that he was afraid of saying anything bad about bin Laden, because he was afraid that the other soldiers would kill him because everybody was really paranoid about spies. So if you said anything a little bit out of the ordinary, people might start to suspect you. Either way, a month after 9/11 America completely turns its stance on Afghanistan upside down. So it used to be supporting the Taliban against the Russian backed insurgents. But now it supports the Russian backed insurgence against the Taliban.
So all of a sudden, this stalemate isn't so stale anymore. the US doing bombing campaigns, the US starts giving money and weapons to the Northern Alliance. So all of a sudden, the Northern Alliance is like, hell yeah. We can take over the rest of the country now. And so his unit basically sees all of this happening and sees that like the writing is on the wall. So they're like, fuck, this we're retreating. So his entire unit spends two days walking from this super remote area where he is to a city called Kunduz. One-third of his unit dies on that walk. Yeah, because there's no water. There's no food. They just have to keep going. And they basically collapsed by the side.
Sarah: That's terrifying. That's harrowing to think about.
Mike: So at the time the Northern Alliance is being run by this guy named Abdul Rashid Dostum who's basically a war lord. He's been running the Northern Alliance for a while. And he is known as a total brutal asshole. So his signature move is, when he captures Taliban fighters, he castrates them alive and then locks them in a shipping container to let them die.
Sarah: Oh my God. That's a lot.
Mike: And so what’s driving the surrender is every single person in John's unit knows that if they fall into the hands of the Northern Alliance, that's what's going to happen to them. Right. So this is what motivates them to do this insane walk for two days.
Sarah: Yeah. So much better to die, non-stop walking when he put it that way.
Mike: Seriously. And so they ended up getting to Kunduz. Eventually one of the leaders of the unit somehow contacts Dostum and negotiates a surrender. He says, look, we'll give you $500,000 if you put us on trucks, drive us to the rest of the Taliban forces. And we'll all pretend that this never happened.
So this evil warlord, Dostum agrees, he makes all of them surrender. Each soldier has a rifle and two grenades. That's all they get. Those are the only weapons they get for this campaign. And so he takes all of their guns. He takes all their grenades, puts them all onto these trucks and then immediately breaks his promise. So instead of taking them back to the other troops, he decides he's going to give them to the Americans for interrogation.
Sarah: Oh, classic war cord, to be fair.
Mike: And so it's going to take a while for the Americans to get there. So he drives them to this fortress.
Sarah: I don't like where this is going.
Mike: It keeps getting worse, Sarah, for like the next 17 years, it's awful. He drives them to this fortress. It's got a basement thing that's kind of prison-ish.
Sarah: Oh God, this is quite a horror movie that we have happening.
Mike: One of the things with, you know, whenever you're dealing with prisoners of war, the sort of the understood problem with that is that there's far more prisoners of war than there are troops. There's only about 80, 85 Northern Alliance troops, but there's 500 prisoners of war at this point. So there's this mounting tension as the Taliban soldiers realize they've been had and the Northern Alliance soldiers realize if these guys want to do an uprising, we will struggle to contain it. And so what happens as soon as they get there, one of John's colleagues smuggled one of his grenades into the Fortress.
Sarah: In his ass?
Sarah: No. I think in his jacket.
Sarah: Oh, okay.
Mike: I think they're really large jackets.
Sarah: All right.
Mike: In the eventual movie about this, you can just imagine zooming in on this guy's face as he reaches into his jacket. And then zooming in on John's face as he starts to realize what is about to happen. And the guy pulls the pin, throws the grenade.
Sarah: So he pulls out the grenade, the grenade goes off.
Mike: And then sort of in punishment, the Northern Alliance guys shoot a couple of the prisoners of war.
Sarah: So the uprising doesn't happen? It's just one grenade and no casualties. Rats.
Mike: This of course increases the tensions, right? Because they sort of know these guys want to fight back now. And so they put all 500 of these or however many people are left, they put them all into this basement dungeon. They throw a bunch of grenades down the airlock.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: Into this extremely confined space. So they go off, John gets some shrapnel wounds. He basically curled up into a corner and tried sleeping, but of course didn't get any sleep.
Sarah: Are they tearing off people's limbs and stuff? Is there carnage?
Mike: It's like screaming people and bodies, it's the worst thing imaginable. So the next day there's two CIA agents that get there. Nobody knows they're CIA agents because they're both just wearing sweatshirts and jeans. One of them is named Johnny Michael Spann and he becomes important later on. But these two CIA agents, they start pulling Taliban soldiers out kind of one by one to interrogate them.
So there's actually footage of John being pulled out of this basement, leaned up against a tree, and they asked him a bunch of questions and he just kind of doesn't respond. He doesn't know who they are. He says later that he thinks they're mercenaries of some kind that are bounty hunters and that they're going to basically buy him.
Sarah: Yeah. Who the fuck would you think they are at that point? If they're wearing sweatshirts and you've just been through that kind of an experience.
Mike: Yeah. And then sort of as half the prisoners of war are outside being interrogated and half are still in this basement, suddenly somebody sets off another grenade.
Sarah: Wow.
Mike: John has no idea any of this is happening, but essentially a war breaks out. So all of a sudden there's sort of this prisoner uprising where people come flooding out of the basement, they try to overrun the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance just starts spraying machine gunfire into this group of prisoners. This guy Spann also pulls out his weapon, just starts shooting all the prisoners that he can in this kind of wave. He ends up getting shot in the head and killed. He is the first casualty of the war in Afghanistan.
Sarah: Oh God.
Mike: All of this melee is happening around John and he's basically just sitting up against this tree and has no idea what's going on. He tries getting up and running away, but he gets shot in the leg. He falls to the ground. He spends the next 12 hours pretending to be dead as bodies are piling up around him. Then at night, somehow he gets back to this basement where essentially all the prisoners of war that don't want anything to do with this, that are like, we surrender, that's where they're all huddled at that point. Ultimately the Northern Alliance killed all the prisoners of war that had been trying to do the uprising.
Sarah: Oh God.
Mike: All of these sort of peaceful, we surrender prisoners of war are just in this basement. They spend the next seven days in this basement. The Northern Alliance starts throwing grenades down. They start shooting down. At one point they pour diesel fuel into the air duct, so it drips on them and then they set it on fire. It's burning. There's screaming. There's people dying or dead. Eventually on the seventh day, the Northern Alliance starts pouring water down the air ducts so that the wounded soldiers who can't get up will drown. John somehow uses some sort of stick, a cane, to lean himself up against the wall to get his mouth above the water. But this water is just dead bodies and jet fuel. And he ends up swallowing some of it and getting an intestinal bug.
Sarah:And of course I was like, when you said they were pouring water through the ducts, I was like, aw, to rinse it off?
Mike: The story is so much darker than that. There's no human kindness anywhere for the rest of the story.
Sarah: It truly boggles the mind. Right? This degree of cruelty. It's really incredible to contemplate.
Mike: It's totally unreal. Yeah. There are also, the CIA guys before they die called in an airstrike. So they called in for U.S. support, for the U S to bomb the Taliban, the evil Taliban fighters. So the only darkly hilarious part of this story is that the US misses and there they drop a 2000 pound bomb on their own allies, the Northern Alliance.
Sarah: Oh my God. So this whole thing- God, this is like an 18 century novel. This is like Candide.
Mike: Yeah. This is the last two episodes of every season of Game of Thrones where you're like, oh, she escaped from the rapist and it's like, oh no, she's with a worst rapist now. It just keeps getting worse.
After seven days, finally, after this bomb drops, after everything is sort of over, he hears people calling him out of the basement and he emerges to find all these Red Cross units. There are medical personnel, there's US troops. It's over. Of the 500 people in his unit that they begin with, only 86 are still alive. He gets taken to the hospital, he gets hydrated, he gets painkillers. And then it all gets worse.
Sarah: This is Candide!
Mike: Yes. So the first thing that happens when he gets to the hospital is a CNN interviewer finds him.
Sarah: Oh, CNN makes everything better.
Mike: This is the most infuriating part of this entire fucking story. I've read the transcript of this interview. It sets the entire template for everything we know about John Walker Lindh. Four stupid minutes tells Americans the story they will tell themselves over and over again for years. So first of all, the interviewer comes up to him and says, Hey, who are you? He turns the camera on. Lindh says you don't have permission to film me. The CNN guy says ‘we respect that’ while still filming. And he's like, you know, we're not even worried about the interview right now. We're just concerned about your welfare. Do you have any, you know, messages you want to send home? John says, “If you're concerned about my welfare, don't film me.” And then the CNN journalist goes, “Do you want some food? I brought some cookies.”
John is under heavy sedation. He has not slept in days. He is severely traumatized from whatever he has seen in the last seven days. He says, I really can't think very clearly right now, please, let's not do this. And the journalist just keeps filming and interviews him anyway. And the interview itself is so weird. He's asking him, they almost sound like networking questions. He's trying to catch him in, you're a member of Al Qaeda. So he asked him, he was like, oh yeah, have you heard of this guy, Abdul Aziz? Do you know him? It turns out that's a famous Al Qaeda warlord, but John doesn't know this. So John is like, why are you asking me if we know the same people right now?
One of the quotes that he gets is about jihad. He asked John something about, did you want to wage jihad? And John is like yes, of course, because he understands that word to just mean struggle, which is what it means literally. There's also this little exchange they have about like, he's like asking about the basement and he's like, did you think you were going to die? And John was like, of course I thought I was going to die. And he's like, is it your dream to die? Do you want to become a martyr?
Sarah: Come on.
Mike: And John says, it's the dream of every Muslim to become a martyr. Which again is like true in this literal sense, but once that gets broadcast in America, that basically becomes, are you a suicide bomber?
Sarah: I mean, I just feel like knowing what I know now about the details of this prisoner of war situation, I see this as a story of, a young American is too idealistic, not thoughtful enough about the ethical complexities of what he's doing and then receives all the punishment anyone could ever experience. Continue just continue.
Mike: I mean, the media immediately starts blaming him for the death of the CIA agent Spann.
Sarah: Come on.
Mike: Exactly. So they are victims of the same thing, right? Neither one of them had any idea this uprising was going to happen. I found footage where they interviewed the CNN journalist, Matt Lauer interviews him. And, you know, he's talking about like, we pulled John out of this basement. And Matt Lauer says, “Were you surprised that an American would be willing to endure such hardship in a fight against other Americans?” So like the idea that John never signed up to fight Americans, and John really didn't give that much of a shit about America, that never appeared.
Sarah: What I remember was that after 9/11, there was a sense that we were going to go get Osama bin Laden and it wasn't going to take very long. And I remember for some reason vividly, I remember Bruce Willis being quoted in a magazine saying that he would pay the CIA or whoever to put them alone in a room with bin Laden. There's just this feeling of real blood loss for the people who had planned September 11th. And so it feels like we wanted to get our hands on someone who mattered and we're willing to jam someone into that template.
Mike: I mean, one of the things I found in this really interesting analysis of this, in the month after John was captured, there were 581 news stories about him. What's really interesting is that in his little Arabic speaking unit, there was another American.
Sarah: Oh, hey.
Mike: However, the guy's name was Yasir Hamdi. And basically because he's Arab. The rest of the country is kind of like, oh, okay, he only appeared in the media 13 times. And so a lot of the narrative around John was sort of this betrayal of whiteness, this betrayal of Americanness.
Sarah: Yeah. Fallen whiteness.
Mike: Yeah. And that, yeah, so much of the media narrative at the time, when you read all these old stories, it's always like, how did this nice suburban kid join the Taliban? There's this abysmal Time magazine article from 2003 where they spend four long paragraphs talking about John's internet trolling when he was 14. And then they spend one paragraph on his entire time in Afghanistan. The crimes that he's actually accused of, Taliban, yada, yada, yada, but like, anyway, he was such an internet troll like 10 years ago. That's where the focus is. Right. It's all about juxtaposing this normal, suburban, Northern California kid with the Al Qaeda terrorists that he became.
Sarah: I've been thinking about how serial killers became such a cornerstone of pop culture. People just always want narratives about evil hiding in plain sight. And so the story where John Walker Lindh grew up with an idyllic American ideal white suburban life, but then he was evil all along and so he had to become a terrorist. That's a story that's going to sell well the same way that any story involving a serial killer is going to sell well.
Mike: Totally. Yeah. And when you're talking about an Arab American, the evil isn't really hiding there because we don't really trust Arab Americans anyway. So 40% of the us population wants him to get the death penalty.
Sarah: Oh my God. For what?
Mike: The thing that everybody says is treason. John Ashcroft says extremely bananas things. Fucking Rudy Giuliani shows up to say, “I believe the death penalty is the appropriate remedy.”
Sarah: Above your pay grade, Rudy.
Mike: Hillary Clinton calls him a traitor. Nobody was arguing for due process.
Sarah: And doesn't John Ashcroft say something about, based on the severity of the crimes he's accused of, we have to violate his due process rights in some way.
Mike: Yeah. So, I mean, this is the ugliest part of the story. John Ashcroft gives a number of press conferences where he says, one of the quotes is, Americans who love their country don't dedicate themselves to killing Americans. John eventually does come back to the US, but not for another month. After he goes to this hospital, they transfer him to this extremely remote facility in the Hills of Afghanistan called Camp Rhino. So almost immediately they strap him to a gurney. They put really thick plastic restraints on him. They don't give them food or water. They don't treat his bullet wound.
Sarah: Oh God.
Mike: And they put him in a shipping container. They wait two days. He's totally malnourished. He has no idea what is going on. He's in a blindfold. There are photos that surface, one in which he strapped to the gurney. There's another one where a bunch of soldiers have written ‘shithead’ on his blindfold and are sort of posing around him. That's another one that went public eventually.
Because his father is a former justice department lawyer, his dad gets a lawyer pretty quickly. His dad knows how the system works and is super concerned. Eventually after two days, John is called into some sort of interrogation room. They don't tell him that his dad has a lawyer, even though they know that. He asks for a lawyer. And they say there aren't any lawyers here. And then they imply that if he doesn't talk, they're just going to shove him back into the shipping container forever.
Sarah: Oh God. Oh God.
Mike: So they ended up basically taking this long confession from him, but they didn't actually write down the confession. So the only actual document of this that we have is the wire, the cable, that the interrogator sends back to the attorney general.
Sarah: Because no one wrote it down, we can't hear them suggesting things for him to confess to and him confessing to them.
Mike: There's no notes. There's no videotape. He never signs a written confession. Even if you're a teenage shoplifter, they show you a piece of paper with, what are you admitting to. That never happened. So the only written document we have is the after the fac interpretation by the guy who was interrogating him, and that's the only thing that ever gets written down.
Sarah: That's terrible.
Mike: So finally, this is now three weeks since he's been shot, they finally treat the wound. They finally do surgery. All of this is before Abu Ghraib, by the way.
Sarah: We had some plausible deniability about not torturing people in the Middle East at the time. Yeah.
Mike: Fascinatingly, most of this was actually known at the time because John's lawyers end up filing a bunch of motions talking about the torture.
Sarah: Yes. But he’s a treasonous traitor, Michael. No one cares if we torture someone who commits treason.
Mike: That's the thing. Everyone was just kind of like, eh.
Sarah: I don't understand any cosmology where you think it's acceptable to put someone in a shipping container with no food or water with an untreated bullet wound. I don't care what you think that person might be guilty of. You know, it's one thing if you have been personally wronged by them, but this is the government.
Mike: This is what's so chilling about it. At the time John Ashcroft is basically saying that he's not subject to the Geneva conventions because basically the unit, the Taliban that he was in, is fundamentally illegal.
Sarah: That seems rather an academic distinction.
Mike: I mean, whatever. Right. And then there's this thing of, he's an enemy combatant, so he's not subject to any constitutional rights, which is also insane. Basically, the argument is that if you're accused of terrorism, none of these protections apply, which, as a legal principle, is just completely backwards.
Sarah: Maybe sometimes the search for information is just an excuse to torture someone.
Mike: This is what’s actually really fascinating, and something that John's father brings up later that they didn't interrogate him before they tortured him. If this is a guy that you think had contact with bin Laden, maybe you should ask him where bin Laden is. You could have actually maybe gotten some decent intelligence from this guy. To me it's not even that it’s evil, though it obviously is, but it's more just incompetent.
There's also really interestingly, there's emails from within the justice department where the ethics advisor of the justice department sent messages to Rumsfeld and Ashcroft saying, you can't do this. There's this woman named Jessalyn Radek who's dope. Who basically said like, no. I mean, a) nothing he says is fucking admissible if you're getting it through torture. So just from legal grounds, this is not clever. Secondly, no, you have to let the Red Cross see him. You have to advise him of his rights. He has a lawyer. She laid out why this was illegal. They basically fired her. Even after a court order, they suppressed the internal emails in which she had complained. Someone, probably her, leaked them to Newsweek.
There are now all these emails where the justice department knew how bad this was and did it anyway. And there's even emails between lawyers for the justice department, basically saying, we have no case against this guy, because all he did was join the Taliban. So this lawyer also points out that it's not clear what the actual crime is here.
Sarah: And so what is the crime? Is he brought to trial?
Mike: Yes. So I’ve read the indictment. The indictment charges him with 10 counts. It's very bad. It's a conspiracy to kill Americans. It's a conspiracy to kill the CIA agent. It's knowing about 9/11, but not doing anything about it. And what's really interesting is, because his lawyers are threatening to go public with the torture, the prosecutors eventually come up with a plea deal where they drop every single charge against him other than violating sanctions.
Sarah: What is violating sanctions?
Mike: So it's basically the kind of thing where if an Iranian warlord wants to set up a bank account at Bank of America, you're not supposed to give it to them, right. Because we're not supposed to aid and abet terrorist regimes, whatever. This is a law that you'd apply against Chevron. You don't do this for individuals. So the only thing they ever got him on is that he provided material support to an actor that was under sanctions. And the material support was himself. Right. That he provided his own services. And then they doubled his sentence because he had a gun while doing it. So it's aggravated because he had a rifle while he was doing it. It's also super noteworthy that they dropped the conspiracy charges. They dropped everything involving Al-Qaeda. They dropped everything involving Spann, the CIA agent. So even by the government's own case, John Walker Lindh was not a terrorist. John Walker Lindh was not in Al Qaeda.
Sarah: He's an aggravated sanctions violator.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. So much of this is timing. They scheduled the trial for August of 2002, which means that it would have been going on at the one-year anniversary of 9/11. When they got him out of Afghanistan, they brought him back to DC so that they could try him in the Virginia suburbs where the Pentagon is located. Facing all of this, his lawyers agree to a 20 year long sentence for this sanctions violation and for carrying a rifle basically. One thing that's really interesting and I cannot get over is, since 9/ 11, since the beginning of the war on terror or whatever, there's been something like 400 other Americans that have been charged for participating with the Taliban or even joining Al-Qaeda. There's a guy who joined Al-Qaeda, planned an attack on the New York subway system. He only got 10 years.
Sarah: Timing.
Mike: Timing. It's also that a lot of these other people who had done essentially the same thing were higher up in the organization. They could use their leverage and their information about Al Qaeda to get a shorter sentence for themselves. Whereas because John was such a grunt and frankly so uninterested in the political dimensions of anything that he was doing, he had no Intel to give the US. It's this weird conundrum where the lowness of his place on the totem pole is what makes his sentence so high. But then if he was that low on the totem pole, why is his sentence so high?
Sarah: I remember the sense that I had of all this as it was happening was that he was an American who had gone, and he had become a terrorist, and he had committed terrorist acts. And that he maybe had been behind 9/11 in some way. I compared him to Timothy McVeigh in passing at the top of this episode. And these kinds of associations aren't random. I had an idea in my head of like, he was at least credibly accused of specific acts. I don't think that we can reasonably call him a terrorist based on what we know.
Mike: Absolutely not. I mean, it's worth staring it in the face, right? The fact that he joined an armed struggle. It's not like he joined the Boy Scouts and then he got caught up in this war. He joined to do war. He learned how to fire rocket propelled grenades at this training camp. He learned how to fire AK 47s. He definitely did something that most of us feel deeply uncomfortable with.
The place that I came down on this, legally and sort of morally speaking, tell me if you totally disagree with this, but to me it feels like he was fucking negligent in joining first one terrorist organization, and then another terrorist adjacent organization. There is a real negligence there. To me, it crosses the line into, you should have known.
However, whatever lesson going to prison would teach him, I think he learned from being shot in the leg and trapped in a basement and watching people burn alive around him. I don't think there was any way, if he had gotten probation or something, that he would come out of this thing thinking, was it a good idea to join the Taliban? Who can say. It is impossible to teach somebody more of a lesson than what he went through.
Sarah: It's an interesting thing because he's actually been punished more than even the American prison system can aspire to punish anyone. Which is truly astounding.
Mike: First time.
Sarah: The only thing left is the kind of probation where you would be like, okay, here's how you can find fulfillment in your life outside of rigid theosophies. Also let's deal with the trauma that you've been through because trauma doesn't actually make earlier trauma get better. If something's too salty, you don't add salt. I don't know how much simpler I can break it down. Yeah. I agree with you. I agree with you.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, another thing, you know, now that he's been in prison for 17 years, you know, he got out, what was it last week, two weeks ago, you know, there's now- it seems like you also have to deal with the collateral consequences of what it does to imprison someone for 17 years where there were some quotes that came out, I think it was last year, where a journalist was writing him letters and asked him about ISIS. And they said, you know, does ISIS represent Islam? And he writes back a handwritten letter that says, “Yes, ISIS represents Islam and they're doing a spectacular job. The Islamic state is clearly very sincere and serious about fulfilling the long neglected religious obligation of establishing a caliphate through armed struggle, which is the only correct method”. I know. It's like John, we don't know very much, he's been out of contact with the outside world for another 17 years. It's not clear what information he has about ISIS.
Another journalist contacted him about ISIS, and I think it was 2014 and he's like, I've never heard of ISIS. What do they do? So we don't really know what he knows about the rest of the world. He still seems painfully naive. There's a journalist that writes to him and says like, you know, what do you think about the violence that ISIS is doing? And he's basically like, oh, no, the only people that ISIS has killed have been people that went to ISIS territory without permission. I'm sure if you asked for permission, they'd show you around. John, really? So yeah. What do you think? What do you think are the lessons of all this?
Sarah: Yeah, my big thought at the end of this is that I think that people should not torture other people.
Mike: That's fair. I support you.
Sarah: Because it didn't improve anything in this story. And I feel as if a big part of this was based on our need to believe that it's necessary to torture people sometimes.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. We should say something funny to end on because this is a fucking, this is one of the darker ones.
Sarah: I know. I don't know if I can turn this one around. Why don't we just fade out on discordant laughter?
Mike: That's usually what we do. It's just less, usually it's less dark than this.
Sarah: I know. I got nothing. I mean, okay, here's a possible silver lining. The fact that he is out of prison will cause people to revisit this event or visit it if they've never heard about it and a new generation that never experienced this news or thought they experienced it is going to look at what happened and be like, what the fuck was that about? And that's how progress is made. So that's something.
Mik:; I just think the biggest lesson to come out of this is never become so famous that people look into what you wrote on the internet when you were 14.
Sarah: Yeah. That's a very good general rule of thumb.
Mike: I think that's the key.
Sarah: But read my Newsies fanfiction, though.