Posted on 07/15/2002 11:30:12 PM PDT by kattracks
WASHINGTON, Jul 16, 2002 (AP Online via COMTEX) -- John Walker Lindh took a journey, first in spirit, then in the physical world, that will keep him behind bars for what's left of his youth.
He was a dream chaser from an early age. When he liked hip-hop in his early teens, he collected 200 albums. When he turned to Islam, he was transformed and went abroad, alone, to soak himself in the faith. All before age 18.
On Monday he spoke as he usually seems to do, quietly, in addressing a judge. "I plead guilty," he said. "I plead guilty, sir." The judge asked him to speak up during his remarks.
The long bedraggled hair and beard of his Afghan days were long gone. The filthy, exhausted and disaffected American whom U.S. soldiers and their allies stumbled across in the early days of the war was beardless and with short hair, able to pass for the studious Californian he once was.
Gone, too, was the freedom he once had in such striking measure. The product of a comfortable, indulgent upbringing, Lindh was cut a lot of slack when chasing his dreams.
Now 21, Lindh will spend 20 years in prison for aiding the Taliban as an armed combatant. A deal with prosecutors avoids a life sentence he could have faced had he been convicted at trial of more serious crimes.
"I provided my services as a soldier to the Taliban last year from about August to November," he said, making an admission that was part of the plea arrangement. "During the course of doing so I carried a rifle and two grenades."
Lindh was a smart and introspective kid of 10 when his family moved to wealthy Marin County, outside San Francisco, from the Maryland suburbs of Washington in 1991.
He played the flute and video and computer games - Splatterhouse 2 and Captain America & The Avengers among his favorites - before starting to turn away from such idle pursuits at age 15, already a student of Islam.
When he was 16, Lindh began visiting a collection of evangelical San Francisco mosques. "He accepted Islam," said Ebrahim Nana of the Islamic Center of Mill Valley, where Lindh studied and attended prayers.
Lindh had adopted Islamic clothing in high school, grown a beard and asked to be called Suleyman. In 1998 he traveled to Yemen for 10 months with a mission to learn Arabic so he could read the Quran in its original language.
After eight months back at home, he went overseas again, to Pakistan and then Afghanistan, seeking what he regarded as purer forms of Islam like that offered by the Taliban. He grew more distant, even hostile, in his view of the United States.
"What has America ever done for anybody?" he asked in a February 2000 note urging his mother, Marilyn Walker, to move to Britain. His mother and father, Frank Lindh, had split up.
Lindh said family life in Pakistan "really makes me look upon American society with pity." He saw U.S. conspiracies behind Iraq's invasion of Kuwait and even the bombing of its own embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
"I don't really want to see America again," he said.
It was during this time that U.S. officials say he was training with al-Qaida terrorists in Afghanistan.
His parents lost touch with him in spring 2001.
"We miss him very much," his mother wrote to his teacher at a Pakistani school, where Lindh had studied until May of that year. "It isn't like him to have gone so long without making contact with us."
Their next sighting of him would be horrifying - on TV, as a captive at Afghanistan's Kala Jangi fortress, where a bloody uprising by his Taliban and al-Qaida comrades left CIA agent Johnny Micheal Spann dead shortly after he had interrogated Lindh on Nov. 25.
He'd gone weeks with little food and nearly drowned in a swampy prison cellar where he'd hid from the anti-Taliban northern alliance. He was shot in the leg.
U.S. officials, while accusing him of conspiracy to kill Americans, did not implicate Lindh directly in Spann's death. Spann's family felt he was somehow to blame, even if by association.
Gail Spann, the CIA agent's mother, said of Lindh's sentence: "I don't think it is a victory to my son, who gave his life. But we do live in a country where we have to abide by our justice system, and I respect our justice system, as did my son."
Grimacing from his injuries, speaking faintly but with conviction, Lindh stated his continuing allegiance to the Taliban during a hospital-bed interview. And in interrogations, U.S. officials said, he acknowledged meeting al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden.
His lawyers, before the plea agreement, were seeking to have such statements barred from his trial, saying he made them only because of the brutal conditions of his imprisonment.
Lindh's journey home was circuitous and secretive - a week at a Marine base in Afghanistan and a period aboard a U.S. ship in the Arabian Sea before his return to the United States for his first court date, Jan. 24, in a Virginia courtroom.
When the guilty plea came down, Bill Jones, a friend of Lindh's father, recoiled.
"I had a chill right down the middle of my stomach," he said. "His only guilt as far as I'm concerned is that he became a fundamentalist Muslim."
By CALVIN WOODWARD Associated Press Writer
Copyright 2002 Associated Press, All rights reserved
Also I know I'm out of the loop obviously, but this was a civilian court? I bet they'd crack down a lot harder on some ex-military who's mercing himself to make a buck or two. Not that I know much about that either, just remember reading something on the topic about the not-so-glamourous side of mercenary work, as in the U.S. coming down on your hard.
Brian
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