Enough is enough. It’s time to free John Walker Lindh, poster boy for George Bush’s, Dick Cheney’s and John Ashcroft’s ‘War on Terror,’ and quite likely first victim of these men’s secret campaign of torture.
Lindh is in the seventh year of a 20-year sentence for ‘carrying a weapon’ in Afghanistan and for ‘providing assistance’ to an enemy of the United States. The first charge is ridiculously minor (after all, it’s what almost everyone in Texas does everyday). The second is actually a violation of a law intended for use against US companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government ‘no trade’ list like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, violation results in a fine for the executives involved. FULL ARTICLE
10 comments ↓
But the US doesn’t torture! I was just following orders! It wasn’t my order! It wasn’t me!
or whatever other garbage excuse these people give.
I think all the wrong people are in prison these days. Free the political prisoners – there’s a few in DC that should be there instead!
If there is proof he never fired a shot at any US soldier or allies..then yes…let the guy out…and if he had, but never hit anyone…let the guy out…
Steve
Of the more than 100,000 Iraqis, that have been put in prison by our soldiers and Government, of the more than 10,000 who have been tortured, of the uncounted hundreds that have been tortured to death, over 100 fully documented, less than 1 of 100 of the total sum of them, have ever fired a shot at an American, or have taken up arms against any American.
During the time at Gitmo that the Senate Report was published two years ago , only 24 of the 571 incarcerated at the time of the report, could even be proven that they were ever on any battlefield, not just during the Iraqi war. Of the 571 there during that report, one had actually been caught on the battlefield fighting Americans. It is all in the Report.
This is why there will be no public trials like an American citizen should have. The lie will be exposed. In a normal court, almost none of the 100,000 detainees can be proven as guilty of fighting against Americans. Over 91% of them were sold to the U S Army for the bounty offered.
And if fighting against Americans, is a crime, what are we doing paying the Sunni Militia not to fight us? It wasn’t the surge, it was the bakshish that stopped the killing.
As there is no justice to the forturers,
There is no justice for the tortured.
All personal records of the prisoners are to be destroyed,
Their letters, their poetry, their correspondence with their attorneys.
This, all in the name of National Security.
What will remain is records of our government’s assertion,
That all of the prisoners are guilty
That they have confessed (though not the agony that caused the confession)
And that they are all dangerous
And may fight us if freed. (Why should they be angry after seven or eight years of torture and humiliation if they are not terrorists?)
1984 is alive and well in 2009 America (and Orwell spins in his grave.)
Whatever happened to innocent until proven guilty??
The Iraqi people were so demonized by Neo-Con propaganda that when Gulf War I came along , many of the people in America were ready to kill anything Arab. But the majority of Americans didn’t want to intercede in the GWI.
So the Daddy Bush Administration hired a PR firm to look for an event that would inflame the American Public. The incubator incident was identified by that group as the most promising so the story was ginned up and presented to the American people. Remember the tearful Kuwaiti Nurse with her sad story about the Iraqi troops throwing the infants out of those incubators and taking the incubators back to Baghdad?
About two years after the war was over, BBC had a documentary about the invention of that atrocity. The head nurse turned out to be the daughter of Salah-al-Salah the ruler of Kuwait and the rest of the characters ( hospital staff ) turned out to be profressional actors. They inflamed America enough by this incident that never happened and their protrayal of a brutal Iraqi Army that the American public was ready to go to war.
Remember our resolve to preserve that Mid-East Democracy? Turns out that the Government of Kuwait was made up of the family of Salah. But before the invasion he took his 66 wives and servant staff and spent the war in London.
What should we do with the PR Firm? The Ruler of Kuwait? The actors? Better yet what about Secretary of State Baker who sent Ambassador Glaspie to tell Saddam that his two year old issue with Kuwait was none of the United States business and we would not intervene if he invaded Kuwait when Kuwait refused to stop slant drilling across the border into the Ramallah Oil field in Iraq?
By the way those oil companies doing the drilling were American.
What do we do about all this and all that followed?
You think they wouldn’t lie? Remember Private Lynch ?
I cannot believe what they have done to this poor kid, who was used as a sacrificial lamb. what is more, he has been serving his time in isolation, and, since it is a federal crime, i suspect, that there is no parole, so he must do the entire sentence.
i remember at the time thinking that his attorneys had committed malpractice by having him agree to this unexplainable, unthinkable sentence for being at the wrong place at the wrong time.
it was clear, even then, that the statements he had made were uttered under duress. the pictures of his bondage had already surfaced.
no one at the time, of any prominence, spoke out against this cruelty. Obama needs to pardon him immediately, and i am glad at least Lindorff has taken up this advocacy.
r cole
Obama will probably pardon Cheney and his pet monkey first.
These government people always shield their own kind, at least at the highest levels of power. Unless people really develop a sustained outrage calling for bush’s trial, it’ll never ever happen. Obama, by shielding him, is as much of an accomplice as anybody.
Leave a Comment