J. Patrick Brown

In the darkest region of the political field, the condemned man represents the symmetrical, inverted figure of the king.
              —Michael Foucault

       The arrest, interrogation, trial, and imprisonment of John Walker Lindh exemplifies a double standard lurking just beneath the surface of the antiterrorist rhetoric adopted by the White House following the events of September 11, 2001. No American citizen should be allowed to support enemies of the United States while receiving the constitutional protections the country offers. The Bush administration has made this exceedingly clear, in language that evokes absolutist terms like good and evil.

       But an overview of the well-documented business practices of George W. Bush, his father, his friends, including Dick Cheney, and their network of business associates overseas and at home calls into question the sincerity of the White House’s antiterrorist language. The president and vice president’s friendly relationships with investment firms like the Carlyle Group and oil/defense contractors like Halliburton have put them in business relationships with unsavory characters such as Saddam Hussein and the Saudi royal family, and the Bush administration itself pumped millions of dollars into the Taliban regime as late as May 2001. The double standard, in short, is this: The only people who should have business befriending the enemy are those who have business befriending the enemy.

       In the Machiavellian realm of realpolitik, friendship is permeable category. In The Prince, Machiavelli sketches a scenario unsurprisingly close to American dealings in Afghanistan and, indeed, all over the world. Having seized a kingdom with the help of his allies, the beleaguered Prince is faced with a dilemma: His new subjects are unhappy. Let’s say they don’t like the puppet dictatorship hoisted upon them. “In this way,” Machiavelli instructs his Prince, “you may find that you have enemies in all those whom you have injured in seizing the Princedom.” Worse yet, “you cannot keep the friendship of those who helped you to gain it; since you can neither reward them as they expect, nor yet, being under obligations to them, use violent remedies against them.” The Prince is stuck. He cannot “use violent remedies” against his friends, even though he wants to, because he’s obligated to help them. At any moment, they could become his enemies.

       There are three ways out of Machiavelli’s scenario: reward your allies as they expect and as you promised; attack them; or, before entering a new providence, make sure that you have “the good will of its inhabitants.” This last is sage advice (Machiavelli’s own) for either a prince or a president, but it also happens to be the only advice American foreign policy has been consistently unable to heed.

       In 1985, when John Walker Lindh was four years old, the Taliban, in Ronald Reagan’s words, were “freedom fighters.” Senator Orrin Hatch praised them for their “determination and raw courage.” Bill Bradley chimed in, urging that they be recognized as “the sole legitimate representatives of the Afghan people.” But someone forgot to ask the Afghan people. Reagan’s compelling interest in the region was to defeat the Russian army there and to chip away at the communist bugaboo. This was an era when the domino effect was still taught in high schools and heartily believed in by politicos of all stripes. If Russia took Afghanistan, according to Cold War logic, she would take the world.

       To “stop the spread of communism,” Reagan enlisted the support of outsiders—non-Afghan Muslim extremists from extremist Muslim countries like Saudi Arabia—and promised them leadership of Afghanistan and ongoing support in the region. And leadership they got, displacing the legitimate rulers of the country, who banded together and became the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance has now become our friend.

       Saudi Arabia, our other friend, is one of the leading financiers of terrorism in the world. According to official summaries of documents captured by the Israeli Defense Forces in Operation Defensive Shield, “Saudi Arabia transferred, inter alia, large sums of money in a systematic and ongoing manner to families of suicide terrorists, to the Hamas Organization (on the U.S. list of terror organizations), and to persons and entities identified with Hamas.”

       Saudi Arabia also happens to be America’s top arms customer. According to the Federation of American Scientists’ Arms Sale Monitoring Project, the “U.S. government, through the Pentagon’s arms export program, has arranged for the delivery of more than $39.6 billion in foreign military sales to Saudi Arabia, and an additional $394 million worth of arms were delivered to the Saudi regime through the State Department’s direct commercial sales program” between the years 1990 and 2000. The figures quoted are unabashedly published by the Department of Defense.

       A nation doesn’t move billions of dollars in arms sales around without the help of a financial institution. The profits from these sales, after all, don’t fund domestic programs like welfare, education, or health care; they don’t even show up in public coffers. Arms trade is a publicly funded project leading to tangible private profit. And a good deal of it is managed by the Carlyle Group, an investment firm with a board of directors boasting the likes of Richard Darman, director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget from 1989 to 1993, and Robert E. Grady, Deputy Assistant to the president and executive associate director of the Office of Management and Budget under the senior Bush administration. The Group’s current chairman is Frank Carlucci, Secretary of Defense under George H. W. Bush from 1987 to 1989. Its senior advisor is James Baker III, Reagan’s White House Chief of Staff from 1981 to 1985, and Secretary of State from January 1989 through August 1992.

       Holding the majority stock in some of the nation’s major arms manufacturers, the Carlyle Group owns the fifth largest supplier of weapons to the world, United Defense Industries. In 1995, the bin Laden family, through its construction company, Binladen Group, invested $2 million in the Carlyle Group fund. In 1998, George Bush senior traveled to Saudi Arabia on behalf of the Group to meet with his bin Laden friends personally.

       Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) was the first public figure in America after September 11 to demand a full-scale investigation into the White House’s friendship with the Saudi Arabian interests. The media booed and hissed her claims that the president and his staff knew that attacks on America were imminent and that they engaged in a conspiracy of silence. Most everyone dismissed out-of-hand that some of Bush’s closest friends were going to profit from the war on terrorism. Still frightened out of their wits by the anthrax scare (only liberals were targeted) in the weeks following 9-11, Americans were in no mood for a history lesson, and McKinney was shouted down after her March 25 radio appearance on KPFA.

       It was several weeks before the media took another look at her prophecy. The prophetic voice never predicts the future; it simply points out what seems obvious based on universal patterns from the past. That Bush’s family and friends might profit from America’s tragedy is not a shocking idea for anyone familiar with the history of Bush-style insider dealing.

       John Walker Lindh blindly started walking into the middle of the brand new war on terrorism in 1996. While Bush senior and his Carlyle Group friends were cutting deals with Saudi Arabia, he was home in Marin County reading The Biography of Malcolm X, a book that fundamentally changed his worldview. Chat-room transcripts have him denouncing hip-hop for its gratuitous violence and hatred, its misogyny and deep-seated self-racism. (We can probably assume that, like most suburban kids, he was exposed to only the basest commercial hip-hop, music that hearkens back to the minstrel show in form and substance.) His culture was steeped in religious experimentation: while his parents were both Catholic, his mother also practiced Buddhism, and the San Francisco Bay Area abounded with inter-religious horizons. He was quickly becoming the product of successful capitalism, casting his vote in a world of free-market choice. The only remarkable element of his story is that he didn’t become the kind of freewheeling New Ager abundant in the hills of Marin. Disparaging post-9-11 reports frame his story as typically Californian, a natural progression from liberal upbringing to liberal anti-Americanism. John Walker Lindh became, in fact, the opposite of a liberal: an Islamic fundamentalist, a religious conservative, a shadow of the Christian right.

       Once he decided to practice Islam, his entire life came into focus. He breezed through high school in two years with an eye on learning Arabic in Yemen. Abdullah Nana, his friend at the Islamic Center of Mill Valley, describes him as “humble, soft-spoken, and quiet.” His personality, it seems, was marked by sincerity and humility. His parents, one imagines, were impressed and had no cause for concern when he moved to Yemen in 1998 at the age of eighteen. Reagan’s freedom fighters still occupied Afghanistan, the Persian Gulf War seemed a distant memory, and the Clinton administration claimed to find no connection between Al Qaeda and the first World Trade Center bombing.

       Al Qaeda was still operative, though, as were the same Texas-sponsored oil shenanigans that put America in bed with the Middle East to begin with. It was Persian Gulf oil that originally piqued Osama bin Laden’s interest in terrorizing the West. Prior to the Bush senior attack on Iraq, Al Qaeda was committed to one thing only: bringing Muslim countries under strict Islamic law. But when Bush stormed Saddam Hussein, bin Laden sniffed foul play. The U.S. Ambassador to Iraq had, after all, promised Saddam that the United States would not interfere with his planned sack of Kuwait. Bush senior had a vested interest in making this promise. Kuwait, according to Hussein, was over-producing oil, and if Hussein wanted to help stabilize the price at the pump, that was fine by the Texan’s White House.

       But Saudi Arabia was not okay with the plan. In fact, it felt threatened and compelled to call on America’s international leadership for help. Once again, seeing an impending threat to international oil (an attack on the Saudis would destabilize the market altogether), Bush acted. But he also agreed that the United States would pull out of the Gulf after routing the Iraqi threat. Those were the terms of agreement with Saudi Arabia, and those were the terms that Bush broke after the war was over. U.S. ships remained stationed in the Gulf, and Bill Clinton kept them there.

       It would be comforting to believe that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney have more to gain by building allies in the Middle East than by manufacturing enemies, but history belies this hope. The first George Bush administration had created a threat to the Saudis by fooling Hussein into a sense of ease, and then used that threat to put permanent troops at Saudi Arabia’s door. Recalling Machiavelli’s maxim (that one should, before expanding one’s empire, have “the good will of its inhabitants”), it should come as no surprise that Osama bin Laden felt that Bush had betrayed the Saudis, and in doing so threatened the geological center of the Islamic faith. This was the home of Mecca, the holiest site of Islam, and the United States military had no business being there.

       Saudi Arabia may or may not have agreed with this perspective, but its leadership was not at all pleased with bin Laden’s harsh criticism of Saudi-U.S. relations and in 1991 revoked Osama’s citizenship. A few years later, just before jumping on board the Carlyle train, his family denounced him as well. By that time, the terrorist leader whom the United States bankrolled to defeat Russia had access, according to U.S. government estimates, to $300 million from his family’s construction business. A good sum of that money came from contracts with the CIA to build a multibillion dollar cave complex in the mountains of Tora Bora.

       Many Americans, during the Persian Gulf War, vehemently denied that the 1991 attack against Hussein was connected to any other motive than freedom and democracy. The oil connection was just a ruse, they argued, a conspiracy theory invented by peaceniks and sundry other misfits to discredit Republicans. But any doubts about the Bush-Cheney “oil conspiracy theory” should have been dispelled in 1995, when Cheney took leadership of Halliburton, one of the largest and most influential oil company service providers in Texas.

       According to a Washington Post story reported on June 23, 2001, between 1998 and 1999 Halliburton, with Cheney at the helm, racked up contracts with Iraq through its off-shore subsidiaries worth “$73 million in oil production equipment and spare parts.” These contracts helped Iraq rebuild the same infrastructure the Bush-Cheney White House now desperately wants to destroy—again. Cheney, it seems, was committing the same crime that Bush and his team laid on John Walker Lindh: lending material support to an enemy that (so we are told) is conspiring to kill American nationals.

       Stateside, then, with people like Dick Cheney loaning it corporate support, the oil rush continued throughout the '90s. In 1997, representatives of the Taliban government visited the Houston, Texas, headquarters of Unocal, where executives spared no expense wooing them. Taliban officials stayed in a five-star hotel and took rides around the city in a company limousine, visiting the Houston Zoo, the NASA Space Center, and, according to a London Telegraph article, a Super Target discount store for socks and toothpaste.

       But the business was serious. Months earlier, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan’s neighbor, had signed an oil agreement with Mobil and Monument Oil, and Unocal was sponsoring the initial exploration. An estimated 15 billion barrels of oil and 9 trillion cubic meters of natural gas lie beneath the soil in the region surrounding the Caspian Sea. A pipeline through Taliban country was obviously essential to Unocal’s long-term development plans in the region.

       One would expect a deal of this magnitude to have a clear result one way or the other: the Taliban must have either accepted or rejected the Unocal agreement. But there are two versions of what happened in Texas when the Taliban came to visit. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, “in January 1998,” a few months after their trip, “the Taliban signed an agreement that would allow a proposed 890-mile, $2 billion, 1.9 billion-cubic-feet-per-day natural gas pipeline project led by Unocal to proceed.” Unocal, however, contends that such an agreement was never reached, claiming that only a preliminary “letter of support” was signed. No matter whose story is true, the pipeline project was quickly stalled. In August 1998, the United States launched air strikes in Sudan and Afghanistan in retaliation for the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. Investors quickly pulled out of the pipeline plan.

       In a 1998 speech before the Cato Institute (ironically?) titled “Defending Liberty in a Global Economy,” Cheney referred to Caspian oil in quasi-religious language: “I can’t think of a time when we’ve had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as the Caspian. It’s almost as if the opportunities have arisen overnight. The good Lord didn’t see fit to put oil and gas only where there are democratically elected regimes friendly to the United States. Occasionally we have to operate in places where, all things considered, one would not normally choose to go. But we go where the business is.” Cheney also noted, referring to Halliburton, that about 70 percent to 75 percent of his business was oil-related, serving customers “like Unocal.”

       Despite their interest in working with the Taliban Unocal likely never closed the deal with them after all. On January 12, 1998, Unocal Vice President John J. Maresca testified before the House of Representatives “that construction of our proposed pipeline cannot begin until a recognized government is in place [in Afghanistan] that has the confidence of governments, lenders, and our company.” The Taliban were not as cooperative with Unocal’s plan as the 1997 letter of support suggested. One year later, under Bill Clinton’s watch, Maresca became the United States’ special ambassador to the Taliban regime. It seems unbelievable that he should so suddenly find himself working in the executive branch, but he was used to positions like that. From 1986 to 1988, he had served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary for NATO Policy with the Department of Defense under both Reagan and the George Bush senior.

       While the vice president of Unocal was requesting government intervention on behalf of his personal business plan, John Walker Lindh was on his way to Yemen. He was still living in Yemen in October 2000 when Muslim soldiers bombed the USS Cole, which was docked in the country’s waters. His father, Frank Lindh, recalls sensing that John had changed after that event: He received an email from his son, which argued that the attack on the Cole was provoked, that the U.S. military had no business lurking in Muslim territory. The Cole’s encroachment, as far as he was concerned, represented an act of war. He decided to attend a madrassa, or religious school, in Pakistan. His teacher there, Mufti Mohammad Iltimas, called him a model student. Clearly, he was developing sympathy with Muslim resistance against U.S. domination in Muslim countries, but the government’s own indictment against him says only that he went to Afghanistan’s front lines to fight against the Northern Alliance months before the United States sent troops there.

       Following 9-11, the Bush press corps painted Walker Lind’s military career as anti-American. It wasn’t. It was a resistance to the Northern Alliance. The means of resistance, at most, were questionable. Was it wise to lend support to a repressive regime that slaughtered thousands of its citizens and systematically repressed women? Clearly not. Nor was it wise for Reagan to do so, or Bush and Clinton after him.

       The Bush administration, meanwhile, continued its friendship with the Taliban even while Walker Lindh was training to fight on their behalf. Most of what we know of his whereabouts following that last email to his father comes from his interrogation, filtered through the FBI’s summary of a confession he never signed, and an interview conducted while he was drugged. We do know, however, that Bush gave Secretary of State Colin Powell the green light to funnel $43 million in aid to the regime in May 2001 in recompense for their destroying most of Afghanistan’s opium crop. $43 million can open a lot of schools for women; or it can crush a few thousand lives. No doubt the Taliban didn’t have the former in mind.

       Walker Lindh, meanwhile—sometime around June—joined the ongoing resistance against the Northern Alliance (a resistance undoubtedly bolstered by our $43 million) at one of the many former CIA-funded training camps in Pakistan. What he did between then and September 11 is unclear. He fought on Ronald Reagan’s side, just a month after the United State’s dropped money in that side’s lap.

       But on September 11, 2001, all sides shifted, and the Bush disaster-for-profit engine went into full gear. Conspiracy theorists have speculated that Bush and company knew prior to 9-11 that attacks would take place and intentionally suppressed that information to force a justified attack against Afghanistan. Unfortunately, such speculations only serve to discredit the more reasonable assertion that Bush’s friends, whether or not they knew the nature of the attacks beforehand, did indeed use the attacks on New York and the Pentagon to further their economic interests. Still, there are several unanswered questions around 9-11 that, since they have become so disastrously tied to Cynthia McKinney’s outspoken leftism, may never receive the attention they deserve. (One unfortunate outcome of the McKinney theory is that it permanently ties demands for disclosure and investigation to extreme liberalism rather than to, more properly, democracy’s imperative that citizens retain a certain amount of vigilance.)

       Since Bush, quickly taking action to ensure the secrecy of his White House, has issued Executive Order 13233, indefinitely sealing the records of his presidency and all three presidencies reaching back to Ronald Reagan, a full-scale investigation into the administration’s corporate handouts around 9-11 may never happen. But even the culture of fear that plagued the nation for months in late 2001 didn’t stop a few reporters from closely examining the opportunistic practices of Bush associates. On September 27, the Wall Street Journal published a report calling the Carlyle Group to the carpet on its dealings with the bin Ladens. Just six days later, the Group’s web page (hampered by a flood of irate emails) shut down. To help slow the tide of dissent, the bin Laden family graciously (though only publicly) withdrew its holdings from the fund. By then, most of the nation was already aware that, on the afternoon of 9-11, no commercial flights were in American skies except one: a single airliner chartered by the administration to evacuate several bin Ladens and friends from the country.

       The Wall Street Journal expeditiously kept its ink out of the Bush-bashing business for a while, but other stories continued to break. On May 7, 2002, the Los Angeles Times reported that the Carlyle Group, only two weeks after September 11, had signed a lucrative $665 million contract with the Army, taking advantage of Congressional support for a new Crusader missile. In one day, the group earned itself a $237 million profit from the deal. On September 12, while the nation was still in mourning, Carlyle decided to take holdings in United Defense, its largest contractor to the Pentagon, public. We were going to war, and George W. Bush was in the unique position of being the only U.S. president in history whose father is on the payroll of a defense contractor. While the rest of the nation was preparing for massive layoffs, a few of Bush’s closest compatriots were gearing up for the wartime economy. When Cynthia McKinney demanded investigations into Washington insider dealings on March 25, then, revelations of such dealings had already hit the press.

       Stranger than the somewhat predictable Bush connection to the military-industrial complex in general and the Carlyle Group in particular was the fact that no one had found Osama bin Laden, and Americans were beginning to wonder whether anyone ever would. It was no longer escaping notice that solid evidence had never placed bin Laden in Afghanistan. The White House was feeding the public only a few random videotapes of him that could have been recorded anywhere in the Far to Middle East, along with some secret confessions from unnamed sources: secret surveillance and undocumented sightings.

       In the light of imminent U.S. attacks, the Taliban themselves even repeatedly offered to help hunt him down, wherever he was. A more likely place to find him might have been in Pakistan, where he regularly reviewed his troops. Or in the United Arab Emirates, where he was receiving medical treatment in the summer of 2001. Or hiding far, far away from the Bush-Cheney plan. But, whatever its stated intention, the hunt for Osama bin Laden could easily have been a ruse for a slash-and-burn operation intended to oust a regime uncooperative to U.S. business interests. To really find him would have required intelligence, not muscle. But muscle could kick the Taliban out of power, and did. What Afghanistan got in its place was an oil-friendly Hamid Karzai, the interim leader of the country who the Saudi paper Al-Watan points out was a Unocal consultant in 1994. And, to keep Mr. Karzai company, Bush appointed Zalmay Khalilzada, another former Unocal consultant, as the new U.S. special envoy to Afghanistan.

       The Pentagon didn’t find bin Laden in Afghanistan. But it did find John Walker Lindh, and that was enough Taliban for the administration’s press corps. On September 20, 2001, while the Carlyle Group was beginning to set itself up for the wartime economy, Taliban soldiers surrendered to U.S. troops in negotiations 100 miles outside the prison town of Mazar-i-Sharif. John Walker Lindh was among them.

       In late November, some of the prisoners at Mazar-i-Sharif revolted, no doubt because the Northern Alliance had executed a hundred soldiers there earlier in the month. Although only a few soldiers initiated the revolt (Walker Lindh was not among them), the ensuing battle resulted in the death of two-thirds of the prisoners at the complex. During the conflict, neutral captives took cover in a basement on the grounds. The soon-to-be-dubbed American Taliban spent the next seven nights with this group while American and Northern Alliance troops poured water, dumped gasoline (then ignited it), dropped grenades, and opened fire on them. The stench of humanremains and feces floating in the water-gas mixture finally forced their emergence.

       This was the condition in which Walker Lindh was found by Robert Pelton, the CNN reporter who captured the first images America would see of its native son: tattered, bearded, and filthy. He looked like Cat Stevens dragged from a sewer. Pelton brought him to a nearby hospital, offered him blood thinners, and switched on his camera. The American Taliban first came home digitized on CNN, which initiated the process of turning him into a thing, an objectified representation of everything the Bush administration pretended it wasn’t.

       The media immediately leaped into action when CNN released its Walker Lindh tape on December 19. The first stage of his trial, then, was public: a good old-fashioned Protestant confession of faith in the devil, in everything evil and anti-American. The press made its case against Walker Lindh by noticing that a fine American had died at Mazar-i-Sharif, a CIA operative named Mike Spann, and the public outrage was unstoppable. Had Walker Lindh personally killed Spann? It didn’t matter. The point was that Mike Spann was good. John Walker Lindh was bad. The obvious unspoken point underneath the rhetoric was that Mike Spann was working on behalf of a hawkish regime with close friends that put the Taliban in power to begin with. If Walker Lindh was a trained and hired killer, so was Spann.

       But the American Taliban had kept his sympathies with radical Islam, even after recognizing the significance of his actions, and that was what first damned him. The very moniker “American Taliban” arose from the fact that Walker Lindh had said “They were my brothers” at a time when everybody failed to remember who George Bush’s family was, where they were, and what they were doing. The administration’s prior dealings favoring the Taliban regime brings up a question central to the war on terrorism’s effectiveness: Does the White House really have a problem with material support for enemies on its own terms, or is it actually more concerned with ideological agreement with the enemy on terms its citizens choose?

       The second stage of Walker Lindh’s prosecution was Catholic in the most medieval sense of the term. It was a regimen of torture and forced confession under which the CIA held him for two weeks while the media was chasing ratings with his image. He was bound in electrical tape, denied both a lawyer and Miranda rights, and forced to sign a confession. All of this happened behind closed doors, in the inquisitor’s confessional, under the reasonable and constant fear of death. His body became an object holding dark and unredeemable secrets. It contained knowledge of evil happenings, perhaps, but more importantly, it had sinned and needed to suffer the consequences. It was probed for information, but more importantly, it gave his accusers the opportunity for violent release, the chance to feel powerful against a mind they could not control. Just as the public jeered him, his inquisitors unleashed their derision on him: “We can only help those who cooperate”; “Do you want to die here?”; “We’ll tear you to shreds, sell your parts, and donate your remains to a Christian organization.” Those were their words. Several soldiers blindfolded him, scrawled “shithead” across the blindfold, and posed for pictures beside him. The CIA’s interrogation was, in the last analysis, so brutal and unwarranted that the executive branch, represented by John Ashcroft, could not prosecute its mostextreme charges against him: that he had conspired to kill Americans and lent material support to the enemy. “John Walker Lindh chose to fight with the Taliban,” Ashcroft told the public on January 15, “chose to train with Al Qaeda, and to be led by Osama bin Laden. We may never know why he turned his back on our country and our values, but we cannot ignore that he did.” But then the case began to fall apart when, late in the trial’s preliminary hearings, the Ashcroft defense was forced to admit that it had deceived the court.

       Early in the hearings, the prosecution argued that the defendant had been read his Miranda rights. Now the prosecution changed its mind: the defendant had not been given his Miranda rights because, it claimed, war did not require it. Again, the prosecution had argued that Walker Lindh was offered a lawyer and voluntarily rejected one. When the defense noted that Walker Lindh’s father had written a letter telling his son that a lawyer had been hired and that the CIA had intercepted this letter, the prosecution again changed its mind.

       It was becoming increasingly clear that Ashcroft’s wily prosecution was bogus. Until September 11, Walker Lindh was fighting on the right side, the side the White House was giving money to. Worse still, prosecuting Walker Lindh on the basis of a conspiracy theory (conspiring to kill Americans) would only give credence to conspiracy theories in general. Who else had chosen to fight with the Taliban? Who else had given them material support? Who else were their friends? These were precisely the questions Walker Lindh’s attorneys were planning to ask. “The phenomenon of young men traveling from all parts of the world to participate in the religious struggle in Afghanistan,” the defense argued in its docket submitted on June 13, 2002, “dates back to the 1980s, when Afghan and foreign mujahideen, funded in large part by the United States, fought against communist invaders form the Soviet Union.” The trial of Walker Lindh was about to become a comparison between two ways of befriending terrorists: the government’s legal way, and Walker Lind’s personal way. One month after the defense submitted its argument, John Ashcroft all but dropped the Administration’s case, accepting a plea bargain instead. Walker Lindh would spend twenty years in jail on two of the weakest charges against him: moving weapons and having undesirable friends. Dick Cheney, George W. Bush and his father, along with Ronald Reagan, are guilty of no less.

       Trying Walker Lindh, from Ashcroft’s point of view, marked “an important victory in America’s war on terror.” Indeed, it had. From the culture of paranoia immediately following the attacks of 9-11, John Walker Lindh emerged as a free gift to the administration: a scrubbily packaged exemplar of un-American activities (remember that term?), an anti-Christ to the George Bush-Jesus act. If the Bush-Cheney plan is to go into the world spreading the gospel of Democracy and (more importantly) free but tax-funded weapons trade, Walker Lindh is the traveler who goes into the world as a curious sojourner, to be converted, and to join the jihad.

       On September 6, 2002, responding to critical statements about the White House Bill Maher had made on Politically Incorrect, Ari Fleischer warned that “Americans need to watch what they say, watch what they do.” We also needed to watch what we noticed about the president’s team, watch what we reported, and watch what we thought. Walker Lindh became the symbol of everything the government could inflict on the politically rebellious that might, at any time, transgress the Fleischer maxim. He not only did the wrong thing, so to speak, but said the wrong thing. He not only befriended the temporary enemy, but admitted it. And that is the greatest sin of all—A sin the present White House and its friends have not (yet) been caught committing.