Western Resistance

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April 9, 2006

US: Johnny Walker, Label Jihad

Article III, Section 3 of the United States Constitution states:

Section 3. Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court.

The Congress shall have power to declare the punishment of treason, but no attainder of treason shall work corruption of blood, or forfeiture except during the life of the person attainted.

It is surely a high legal standard to be met when convicting somebody of treason. But in the case of John "Taliban" Walker, it was possible to do so. We would have been wise to kill the bastard: The new Malcolm X

The Federal Correctional Complex on the edge of the southern Californian town of Victorville is a grim, inhospitable place. Its squat concrete blocks are surrounded first by walls and barbed wire fences and then by the scrubby expanse of the Mojave Desert.

The prison sits just off Route 66, the highway where Nat King Cole famously invited travellers to "get your kicks". But this stretch of the road, lined by ugly cement factories and crumbling wooden shacks, could not be further from its romantic image.

John Walker Lindh
Converted: John Walker Lindh

It is here in the medium-security jail that John Walker Lindh is serving the 20-year sentence imposed after he was captured fighting alongside the Taliban on the battlefields of northern Afghanistan in November 2001.

Lindh, who was given a defence lawyer and taken before an independent civilian court, had pleaded guilty to joining the Taliban and carrying weapons but, in a plea bargain, prosecutors dropped the most serious charge against him, of conspiracy to kill US nationals.

The Islamic convert had attended al-Qaeda training camps and met Osama bin Laden, but denied that he was a member of the terror network responsible for the September 11 attacks on his homeland.

Better known simply as the "American Taliban", Lindh, now 25, has largely disappeared from public attention since his imprisonment in October 2002, not least because the terms of his incarceration effectively forbid him from communicating with the outside world. But the Sunday Telegraph has now been given the first account of his life behind bars, provided by a former fellow Muslim inmate and the religious counsellor who visits him in prison. They describe a devout, quiet and scholarly figure who has become a spiritual role model for his fellow Muslims. He has even earned the respect of other prisoners who once condemned him as a "traitor", they said.

As Robert Spencer notes, this is the beginning of the transformation of John Walker Lindh from an overt Jihadi into a covert one. Because that is what Johnny Taliban will continue to be; an agent of Islamic tyranny.

Posted by Ruy Diaz at April 9, 2006 10:17 AM

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