[kattracks]

This explains a lot.

[Zipporah]

Everytime I read accounts of his family I am dumbfounded.. what IS wrong with these people?? Send your son to alone to YEMEN ???..he couldn't have been even 18 years old .. (he graduated 2 years early.) Are they INSANE??

[dougherty]

The title of this thread needs to be changed. This guy is far from brilliant.

[RIGHT IN SEATTLE]

I can't really express my rage------------------

I've been banned, held in detention, told by moderator to tone it down.

SKIN THE LITTLE SISSY ALIVE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

FREEP ME FOR MY REAL GUSTO

[ramdalesh]

Most Americans cannot understand the degree of rigor that went into this persons education. I have also studied religion passionately, searching for closure and peace. I can sympathize with John's soul searching...but he alienated himself from his people.

"Federal law forbids anyone owing allegiance to the United States, which includes all who hold U.S. citizenship, to levy war against the country or to give aid and comfort to its enemies" (qtd L.A. Times Dec. 5 William Webster-federal judge who headed both the FBI and the CIA) This rhetoric could become very dangerous.

What about other Americans who, like John convert to Islam. His case, and the legal rhetoric resulting from it, may generate suspicions, and bring other intellectuals to court. John is not in trouble for being Moslem. He is in trouble for pointing his AK-47 at America. It is one thing to shun the idols, and the shirk of American culture, to speak out in a public forum, and to speculate about political futures, it is another to go to war.

President Bush may declare anyone to be a threat to national security, and his decision may go unchecked. If John Walker/Suleyman Al-Lindh is convicted of treason it may happen without due process. Such a conviction could potentially threaten every American born Moslem in the United States. I worry that John is the zygote of modern McCarthyism. If moslem sympathies in the United States grow...and if at any point the war is not going good for the U.S. then I fear that the Government may go after Moslem Intellectuals in order to win the undeclared war on terror.

Suleyman Al-Lindh is not representative of other American Moslem Intellectuals.

Suleyman Al-Lindh is not representative of other American Moslem Intellectuals.
He is an extremist who left his country and his family...in his quest for God.

[independentmind]

Both John's father, Frank Lindh, a strict Irish Catholic, and his mother, Marilyn Walker, a Buddhist, were supportive of their son's new faith.

Like hell his father was a strict Irish Catholic. No strict Irish Catholic I have ever met allows his son at the age 16 to choose his own religion.

There is something very odd about this whole story. I think there is much we still don't know.

[Snuffington]

Now he's "brilliant", eh?

Wearing a dirty night shirt, going to Afghanistan, joining the Taliban, getting shot in the leg, and being taken prisoner, doesn't sound very "brilliant" to me.