Posted on 04/02/2002 9:18:03 AM PST by ArcLight
The old man knows he is being asked the question for a special reason.
Is John Walker Lindh — the young Californian accused of fighting for the Taliban — a traitor?
Sam Hawkins remembers when Americans asked the same question about him, back when he was a young soldier and a new, uneasy truce draped the Korean peninsula
"Traitor, yeah, they called me a traitor," he said. "But I wasn't really." Lindh, he said, is a different story.
In the winter of 1954, Hawkins was among 21 American prisoners of war who refused to come home after the Korean War. Instead, they headed to communist China, shocking their families and their nation.
Judging by their deeds, however...
The guys who were captured in Korea were "brainwashed" in North Korean POW camps. Their ideas were formed in the stressful context of war and long imprisonment, as referenced in the article.
Jihad Johnny came to his sincere views, voluntarily, in the free and open environment of Marin County, California. Later, his volutary schooling in Yemen. Then Pakistan. Then Afghanistan. Then he voluntarily went to support the fight in Kashmir. Then took up arms in Afghanistan. He was something like a POW in Mazar-i-Sharif for about a week, then U.S. custody.
He freely and sincerely took up his views before the imprisonment. The story about the Korean War prisoners is interesting, but a red herring as to understanding Jihad Johnny.
...
If there is any brainwashing going on now, its from his lawyers and family trying to get him to renounce his heart-felt beliefs. THEY are the brainwashers. ;)
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