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Why Did John Walker Lindh Make a Deal?

The defense wanted to avoid a life sentence. And prosecutors seemed to realize they were stoking a bonfire to fry a guppy
/ Source: Newsweek Web Exclusive

His father compared him to Nelson Mandela. His lawyer said “this isn’t Rambo.” The government, which earlier had called him a “terrorist,” settled instead for John Walker Lindh’s admission that, for four months last year, he had been a grenade-toting foot soldier for the Taliban in Afghanistan. That admission—in a plea bargain announced in court on Monday—means that the 21-year-old Lindh will spend some 20 years of his life in federal prison.

IN RETURN, HE WILL BE spared the ninety-years-plus-life sentence he faced had he been convicted on terrorism and conspiracy charges in a trial that was scheduled to begin next month at a federal court in Alexandria, Virginia. By 2022, when he walks out of a federal prison, Lindh will be 41 years old. By then, a whole generation of Americans will probably have no idea who the “American Taliban” was or what threat he may have posed to national security.

It could have been that growing realization—that the government had stoked a bonfire to fry a guppy—that helped motivate federal prosecutors to strike a deal with Lindh. Even though they were nearly certain to win convictions on at least some of the charges against Lindh, the case looked far less spectacular than it did last December, when the disheveled young American was captured on the Afghan battlefield and instantly became an icon in the war on terrorism.

While George W. Bush first dismissed Lindh as a “poor fellow,” Attorney General John Ashcroft quickly upped the ante, saying that Lindh consorted with Osama bin Laden, “chose to embrace fanatics,” and that his tale of a religious quest gone wrong was nothing but a ruse. Eight months later, the administration appears to have moved full circle. Especially with accused hijacker Zacarias Moussaoui about to stand trial in the same Virginia courthouse, it made sense, conceded U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty, for the government to “conserve precious resources” for a bigger fish. Lindh’s guilty plea allows the government to chalk him up in the “win” column in the war on terrorism, without the risks and uncertainties of a trial in which the defendant’s self-incriminating statements formed the backbone of their case.

In their pretrial maneuvering, Lindh’s lawyers were exploiting that perilous weakness in the government’s case with increasing effectiveness. The photo of Lindh, naked, blindfolded and strapped tightly to a stretcher, was becoming nearly as ubiquitous as that of the sooty, wild-eyed, bearded creature after his arrest in Afghanistan. This week, defense lawyers were planning to lay out in perhaps embarrassing detail the allegedly coercive conditions under which they claim that Lindh’s battlefield statements that he had been trained by Al Qaeda were extracted. “We were actually looking forward to that hearing,” says George Harris, one of Lindh’s attorneys. As part of the plea bargain, Lindh was forced to acknowledge that he was not “intentionally mistreated by the U.S. military” and to drop all claims of abuse.

But while Lindh’s lawyers were making some headway in the court of public opinion with their torture narrative, they were getting nowhere with the judge. In a contentious hearing last week, Judge T. S. Ellis III signaled that he was unlikely to accept motions by the defense team to have Lindh’s incriminating statements to federal investigators thrown out. The prospect of facing a hostile judge, in addition to a pro-government jury drawn from the hordes of retired military and government workers who live in the Virginia suburbs, prompted the defense team to seek a deal over the weekend. “Even if he had been convicted on one charge of supplying services to the Taliban he could have been sentenced to 40 years,” says attorney George Harris. Twenty years didn’t seem all that bad by comparison.

As if the courtroom odds weren’t daunting enough, last week the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Yaser Esam Hamdi, a U.S. citizen of Saudi descent who is being held with Taliban prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, should be considered an enemy combatant and was not entitled to defense counsel. If you don’t like my rulings, Ellis seemed to suggest, try your luck with the court of appeals. “The handwriting was on the wall,” says a Justice Department official.

Even James Brosnahan, Lindh’s combative lead attorney, acknowledged on Monday that accepting a 20-year sentence for a 21-year-old client was a better option than testing his slim odds in court. “Our goal frankly was to give him some kind of future in the chaos,” said Brosnahan.

In Afghanistan, at least some U.S. soldiers thought Lindh had got off easy. “Twenty years? I thought they should have just shot him in the first place,” Private Mike Stokes, 19, of the 511th Military Police company of the 10th Mountain Division, told NEWSWEEK at Bagram airbase outside Kabul when he heard the news of Lindh’s plea. Stokes, who was sent to Afghanistan straight out of infantry training last winter, believed almost all of his fellow soldiers would think the sentence wasn’t harsh enough. “We have to worry about people from other countries attacking us,” he said. “We shouldn’t have to worry about people from our country trying to kill us. If you’re going against our country, you have no right to live.”

Lindh’s father, Frank Lindh, said Monday that he tried to comfort his son by telling him that Nelson Mandela, another “good man,” had done more than 26 years of hard time—a bit of imagery unlikely to sit well with the public.

Lindh’s lawyers are likely to ask that he be sent to a federal prison in Northern California close to his parents’ separate homes in Marin County, Calif. Judge Ellis still has to confirm his 20-year sentence—something he has indicated he will do. While Lindh will not be eligible for parole, he may earn some time off for good behavior.

In their continuing campaign to polish Lindh’s public image, lawyers said Monday that their client was looking forward to broadening his education in prison—studying not only Islam and Arabic, but also American history and English literature. Barred from reading newspapers or magazines during his months in detention, Lindh has been devouring the works of James Joyce. Over the next 20 years, he should have time to memorize them all.

With Michael Isikoff in Washington and Colin Soloway in Afghanistan

© 2003 Newsweek, Inc.