The American Taliban up for release

At the time I regarded his punishment as absurdly draconian, and it very possibly has pushed him back into a Jihadism he seemed very much to regret and perhaps to be abandoning when tried.

John Walker Lindh, Known as the ‘American Taliban,’ Is Set to Leave Federal Prison This Week

When he ran off to join the Islamists he had no way of knowing the US would choose to fight a war against the Taliban, whom he had joined when the US was at peace with them and the Afghanistan they controlled.

As an American citizen, he was tried in federal court, unlike citizens of other countries who were also picked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan but who ended up in the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. 

At his sentencing in October 2002, he condemned “terrorism on every level, unequivocally,” said he made a mistake by joining the Taliban and denounced Osama bin Laden’s terrorist attacks as “completely against Islam.”

But two leaked United States government intelligence counterterrorist assessments first published by Foreign Policy magazine in 2017 cast Mr. Lindh in a different light. 

A 2017 report by the National Counterterrorism Center titled “U.S. Homegrown Violent Extremist Recidivism Likely” said without elaboration that as of May 2016 Mr. Lindh “continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts.”

A 2017 Federal Bureau of Prisons intelligence assessment, which included a photograph of Mr. Lindh with a shaven head and a bushy brown beard, said he had earlier made supportive statements about the Islamic State.

. . . .

Johnny Spann, the father of the C.I.A. operative who was killed in Afghanistan, remains bitter about the Lindh case and said he is distrustful of the decision to let Mr. Lindh go. 

His son is buried at Arlington National Cemetery, about eight miles from the Alexandria courthouse where Mr. Lindh was charged.

“We’ve got a traitor that was given 20 years and I can’t do anything about it,” said Mr. Spann, a real estate dealer in Winfield, Ala. 

“He was given a 20-year sentence when it should’ve been life in prison.”

Mr. Spann’s son, who went by Mike, was killed at the start of an uprising by prisoners inside a mud-walled 19th-century fortress at Qala-i-Jangi in northern Afghanistan after he questioned Mr. Lindh, videotapes at the time showed. 

But even before Mr. Lindh’s guilty plea to two charges — to providing support to the Taliban and to carrying a rifle and grenade — the government offered no evidence that he participated in the revolt.

. . . .

Karen J. Greenberg focused on the Lindh case in her 2016 book, “Rogue Justice: The Making of the Security State.”

“He devoted his years in prison to becoming a student of Islamic texts,” said Ms. Greenberg, who is the director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University School of Law. 

“I think the best you can hope for him is that he finds a way to live a quiet life, along those lines, doing whatever it is he wants to peacefully do.”