Lindh's Chutzpah
Like the man who kills his parents and pleads for mercy because he's an orphan, Marin mujahid John Walker Lindh is petitioning the court to dismiss the charges against him, arguing that he can't get a fair trial anywhere in America--the country against which he took up arms.
Meanwhile, Lindh has changed the story of his capture in Afghanistan. The New York Times describes an account that appears in a motion Lindh's lawyers filed last week:
[The lawyers] began their narrative with Mr. Lindh's unit in retreat from advancing Northern Alliance soldiers. . . . The unit eventually negotiated a surrender to the Northern Alliance at the Qala Jangi fortress outside Mazar-i-Sharif, but when a grenade went off unexpectedly, the captors drove their captives into a basement. To torment the unit, the captors dropped grenades down the air ducts, just missing Mr. Lindh, who was crouched in a corner. The prisoners were later brought up one by one and interrogated, and, the lawyers said, the American interrogators did not identify themselves as Americans.
But here's the account Lindh gave in a December Newsweek interview (the magazine identified him by his adopted Muslim name, Abdul Hamid):
Hamid said he had been fighting with the Taliban during the two-week siege of the city of Konduz, about 100 miles to the east of Mazar e Sharif. Finally, under a negotiated deal, the foreign Taliban forces surrendered to the Northern Alliance forces of Gen. Rashid Dostum. But almost as soon as Hamid and about 500 others were taken to the fortress. "Two of the [Taliban] threw grenades they had hidden in their clothes, and killed a couple of people," Hamid says.
"After that they put us in the basement and left us over night. Early in the morning, they began taking us out, slowly, one-by-one, into the compound. Our hands were tied, and they were beating and kicking some of us. Some of the Mujahedin [Taliban] were scared, crying. They thought we were all going to be killed.
"I saw two Americans there. They were taking pictures with a digital camera and a video camera. They were there for interrogating us."
Interesting, isn't it, that the grenades the Taliban threw now "went off unexpectedly" and that Lindh now didn't know his interrogators were America. [ OpinionJournal ]
9:45:38 AM 
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