Instead he and other soldiers were captured by the Northern
Alliance and beaten senseless in the presence of two CIA officers,
Johnny "Mike" Spann and Dave Tyson, who interrogated Lindh and
threatened him with death on the spot. When some of the other
prisoners rebelled (Lindh was not involved), Northern Alliance troops
shot and killed scores of prisoners, many with their arms tied behind
their backs. Lindh was shot in the leg. Spann was killed. (Though he
was not involved, Lindh was later charged with conspiracy to murder
Spann.)
When Lindh was finally in U.S. custody, Secretary of
"Defense" Donald Rumsfeld's office told an Army intelligence officer to
"take the gloves off" and ask Lindh whatever he wanted, only reading
him his rights after he said something incriminating. The officer
asked for a copy of the Miranda warnings and never received it and
never read Lindh his rights. Instead, U.S. Special Forces tied his
hands, put a hood over his head, drove him for hours, placed him in a
dark room, and taunted him, denying his many requests for counsel.
The
same day that Newsweek broke the story of the "American Taliban,"
Lindh's mother called the State Department, the ACLU, Amnesty
International, and Human Rights Watch, all of which refused to help
her. Lindh's father persuaded James Brosnahan to take the case the
next day, by which point, in the words of Jesselyn Radack, Lindh
"was
being discussed on every radio show, and images of him were constantly
shown on TV. President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld,
Powell, Ashcroft, and Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain made
inflammatory comments and prejudicial statements, none of them true,
that Lindh was an al Qaeda fighter, terrorist, and traitor; fired his
weapon; attended a terrorist training camp; supported bin Laden; and
had foreknowledge of September 11th – even though the government from
the first day of Lindh's capture was in possession of facts to the
contrary."
Jesselyn Radack should know. Radack was a top
graduate from Yale Law School in 1995 who went straight to work in the
U.S. Justice Department. By the time our nation was adopting torture
as an open and respectable practice, Radack worked in the Justice
Department's Professional Responsibility Advisory Office. There she
received a call from counter-terrorism prosecutor John De Pue who
wanted her advice on the FBI's proposal to interrogate Lindh without
allowing him access to counsel, even though his father had retained a
lawyer who was demanding to meet with Lindh and demanding that
interrogations cease. Lindh, meanwhile, had been blindfolded, stripped
naked, bound to a stretcher with duct tape, taunted, threatened, and
locked in an unheated metal shipping container in the bitter cold at a
Marine base in Afghanistan.
Radack made a fateful decision.
She took an action that was drastically out of place in the Ashcroft
Justice Department, although she herself did not then realize how out
of place it was. She told De Pue the truth. She told him that the FBI
could not legally interrogate Lindh, knowing that his father had
retained counsel on his behalf.
Radack recounts what happened
next in her book "The Canary in the Coalmine: Blowing the Whistle in
the Case of 'American Taliban'." The book interweaves an account of
the Justice Department's retaliation against Radack for doing her job
and making public what she had done, with an account of the Bush
Administration's development of greater and greater use of torture,
violation of rights, secrecy, and lies.
The Justice
Department lied about how Lindh was treated. Michael Chertoff even
perjured himself in the U.S. Senate. Senator Kennedy and others knew
the truth and still voted to confirm Chertoff to head up efforts to
keep our "homeland" secure. Lindh is serving a 20-year sentence and is
under a gag order not to talk about it. Our government is torturing
the innocent and guilty alike around the globe. And many secrets are
being kept secret by those who know better, because they've seen what
has been done to Radack and others like Bunnatine Greenhouse, James
Yee, Sibel Edmonds.
The Justice Department aggressively attacked
Radack, costing her a job there and a later job with a private law
firm, threatening her license to practice law, damaging her reputation,
denying her income, placing her on the "no-fly" list, and endlessly
harassing her. Her book recounts the hell she went through.
As
we watch the Libby trial unfold, let's bear in mind that this is what
it is about: retribution against Joe Wilson who told the truth about
the lie that launched the war. His wife was collateral damage.
Buy Radack's book:
http://www.patriotictruthteller.net
Support the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition:
http://www.nswbc.org
Writings 
It began with that monstrous young man so evil we needed to blindfold him and strap him to a board, that confusing young man who looked like Christ but cast us in the role of crucifiers, that treasonous young man who brought dark and heathen evils across linguistic and cultural borders and brought torture onto the list of accepted government actions.
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