He took up arms with an enemy and fought against U.S. forces. In WWII if an American was captured on the battlefield fighting for the Nazis he could lawfully have been summarily executed on the spot. He falls outside the Geneva definition of a POW, as he’s actually a foreign spy.
That’s not something “that could happen to any of us.”
He was offered a chance to come clean prior to the prison uprising that killed Mike Spann. He did not.
His sentence was a plea bargain also. So live with it.