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.[1][2]
Jesselyn Radack and the false rights claim
John 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.[3][4] 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.”[5] In a related claim from a different telling, Ashcroft separately stated that Lindh was entitled to choose his own lawyer.[6]