John Walker Lindh
=================

John Walker Lindh is the American citizen captured while fighting alongside the Taliban during the early phase of the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan. He was present at the Qala-i-Jangi fortress in northern Afghanistan at the start of the late-November 2001 prisoner uprising in which CIA officer Mike Spann was killed.

John Kiriakou fixes the two events together in sequence, "we had just caught John Walker Lindh, the American Taliban," and then the uprising broke out among the Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners already taken, in which Spann and a handful of others were overwhelmed, fired until they ran out of bullets, and Spann was stomped to death. Kiriakou dates the uprising to 30 November 2001, correcting himself in the telling.

Jesselyn Radack and the false rights claim

Kiriakou recounts, drawing on whistleblower attorney Jesselyn Radack's own account, that when Lindh was captured at the Qala-i-Jangi uprising, Radack, then a Justice Department ethics attorney on duty that day, was called from the Pentagon and told him, as clearly as she could, that Lindh had to be read his rights. He was not. Radack objected to the Justice Department's own director of ethics that proceeding without doing so was unconstitutional and unethical; days later, Attorney General John Ashcroft nonetheless gave a press conference stating that Lindh had been read his rights, had waived his right to an attorney, and had confessed. Per Kiriakou, "that was a lie." In a related claim from a different telling, Ashcroft separately stated that Lindh was entitled to choose his own lawyer.

What it cost Radack

Kiriakou follows the case past Lindh to what happened to the lawyer. Radack went through the chain of command to lodge a complaint and was told to keep her mouth shut; she went to the press instead and was fired from the Justice Department. The department then filed a complaint against her with the District of Columbia Bar Association, attempting to bar her from ever practising as an attorney again, and put her on the no-fly list as a terrorist sympathiser.

Kiriakou is careful about what her objection was and was not: "she wasn't taking a position on John Walker Lindh['s] politics, she was just treating him like any other American in trouble."

The Brinkema docket

Lindh's case belongs to a pattern Kiriakou describes from the inside of his own prosecution. The Eastern District of Virginia is known as the espionage court, because no national-security defendant has ever won a case there; and within it, Kiriakou says, one judge, Leonie Brinkema, reserves all national-security cases for herself. The list he gives is himself, Jeffrey Sterling, Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, Zacarias Moussaoui and John Walker Lindh.

See also

- Qala-i-Jangi uprising
- Mike Spann
- Jesselyn Radack
- Leonie Brinkema
- Eastern District of Virginia
