Search for absolute truth
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A Long, Strange Trip to the Taliban
He was a bright, quiet kid from the heart of hot-tub country. How did John Walker Lindh go from hip-hop to holy war? The story of a spiritual journey gone awry—and what lies ahead for the United States’ most controversial POW.
The student was old for the madrasa, the primitive Islamic fundamentalist school in a remote corner of Pakistan. Most of the students were children, boys who had yet to reach adolescence. But this tall, bearded youth was 19, almost a man. He was a “model student,” says his teacher, Mufti Mohammad Iltimas.
The American Taliban had no intrests in girls or parties or world events. His only real interest was studying. He seemed fixated, determined to memorize every word of the Quran, all 6,666 sentences of the ancient holy book that dictates every aspect of a devout Muslim’s life, behavior and being. His only respite from studying, apart from the occasional foray to the cyber tea shop in Bannu to ship e-mails home, was books on Islam. He slept on a rope bed in his teacher’s study, in a place with no hot water, and no electricity after 10 p.m. And he peppered the mufti with questions about the devout life: “Should I recite verses in a soft voice or a loud one? While I am worshiping, how should I hold my hands?”
Most teenagers, when they rebel, say they want more freedom. John Walker Lindh rebelled against freedom. He did not demand to express himself in different ways. Quite the opposite. He wanted to be told precisely how to dress, to eat, to think, to pray. He wanted a value system of absolutes, and he was willing to go to extreme lengths to find it. Lindh, who grew up surrounded by upper-middle-class affluence in California, was determined to fit in at the Islamic religious school, an austere one-story building in a tiny village outside the town of Bannu in the Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan. Speaking with Mufti Iltimas, Lindh was critical of America as a land that exalted self above all else. Americans were so busy pursuing their personal goals, he said, that they had no time for their families or communities. In the Islamic world, by contrast, he felt cared for by others. “In the U.S. I feel alone,” he said. “Here I feel comfortable and at home.”
NO TIME FOR SOCIALIZING
And yet the young American, who went by the name Suleyman al-Faris, did not seem to enjoy the company of others. As the local mufti, Iltimas was constantly being invited out for lunches and dinners, and he would ask his protege to come along. Suleyman would always decline, saying that socializing was a “waste of time.” Suleyman was perhaps not as comfortable as he claimed to be. True, the villagers sent him food and did his laundry free of charge. But when the weather turned hot in April, he had trouble sleeping. He began to suffer from rashes and the incessant dust. He said he wanted to go into the cooler mountains. Then he vanished.
He did not surface for seven months. When he did, discovered by a NEWSWEEK reporter who first broke John Walker Lindh’s story on our Web site and in last week’s magazine, it was at a prison fortress in Afghanistan. Lindh’s body was caked with dirt and soot, and his hair was matted with sweat and blood. Shot in the leg during a revolt by Taliban prisoners, he had been hiding in a basement from American bombs. John Walker, as he later referred to himself to CNN journalists, was roundly vilified as a traitor. Talk-show hosts and tabloid headline writers described him as “a rat” and widely suggested that he should be shot for helping instigate America’s first combat death, that of CIA operative Johnny (Mike) Spann. President George W. Bush seemed more forgiving, calling Walker a “poor fellow” who had been “misled.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on the other hand, coolly stated, “We found a person who says he’s an American with an AK-47 in a prison with a bunch of Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters. He will have all the rights he is due.” Walker’s parents, San Francisco lawyer Frank Lindh and his legally estranged wife, Marilyn, were horrified. Their son was “sweet” and “shy,” they said. How could he have ended up trapped in a siege with a gang of terrorists?
The story of John Phillip Walker Lindh, a.k.a. Suleyman al-Faris, a.k.a. Abdul Hamid (his Taliban nom de guerre), a.k.a. John Walker, is one of the truly perplexing and intriguing mysteries of the post-September 11 universe. He grew up in possibly the most liberal, tolerant place in America, yet he was drawn to the most illiberal, intolerant sect in Islam, the Taliban. He told his parents he was converting to Islam partly because it was a gentle, peace-loving religion, yet he became a self-described “jihadist,” a holy warrior, and told our reporter that he “supported” the September 11 terrorist attacks. His parents say he’s a “victim” who was “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” But how, if he was really such a “good boy,” did he get there?
John Walker, to use the name that has stuck, may remain a psychological puzzle. But he can be at least partly understood as a product of—or, more precisely, a reaction against—the culture and mores of a certain time and place. He was born in 1981, a year after the end of the so-called Me Decade that gave rise to a host of self-improvement and self-realization fads. His adolescent years were spent in Marin County, north of San Francisco. Marin County has been gently mocked by the cartoon strip “Doonesbury” as the epicenter of the self-esteem movement, a land of hot tubs, Rolfing and est, a bastion of moral relativism where divorces were for a time listed alongside marriages in the newspaper. Walker was named John after John Lennon, the Beatle. His father says he was not bothered when his two sons rejected the “strict Catholic manner” of his own upbringing. His mother was a child of the ’60s who dabbled in Buddhism and home-schooled John for a time. He was sent to an elite alternative high school where students were allowed to shape their own studies and had to check in with their teacher only once a week.
Walker discovered his passion for Islam online, after sampling other possibilities. At the age of 14, under the handle “doodoo,” he was visiting Web sites for hip-hop music with particularly crude raps on sex and violence. In one e-mail posting, he scorned a critic of hip-hop as a “worthless d—krider.” In one e-mail at the height of his fascination with hip-hop, he appeared to pose as an African-American, writing, “Our blackness should not make white people hate us.” But as he got older, he veered to a very different direction. He began visiting Islamic Web sites, asking questions like “Is it all right to watch cartoons on TV or in the movies?” His family says the turning point may have come at the age of 16 when he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X,” which describes the conversion to Islam of the famous black militant. Some Internet postings examined by NEWSWEEK show that young Walker soon became pretty militant himself. In a 1997 message to a hip-hop site, he demanded to know why a rapper named Nas “is indeed a ‘God’? If this is so,” Walker indignantly asks, “then why does he smoke blunts, drink Moet, fornicate, and make dukey music? That’s a rather pathetic ‘god’, if you ask me.” He quizzes an online correspondent about the Five Percent Nation of Islam—a small North American sect—about its adherents’ vision of bliss and how to pursue it. “I have never seen happiness myself,” writes Walker. “Perhaps you can enlighten me … where I can go to sneak a peek at it.” Selling off his hip-hop CD collection on a rap-music message board, he converted to Islam.
He began wearing Islamic dress, a long white robe and pillbox hat, and calling himself Suleyman. His flowing robes raised some eyebrows, even in Marin County, which is deeply tolerant of almost any form of self-expression. “It was like watching Jesus Christ walk down the street,” says a former neighbor. “That’s not your normal Marin attire, unless it’s purple.” Walker’s parents balked at calling him “Suleyman” (he remained “John” to them), but they tried to be nonjudgmental, even supportive, about his conversion. They were “proud of John for pursuing an alternative course,” says his father. They did not object when he dropped out and took the high-school-diploma equivalency exam.
At about this time, late 1998, Walker’s parents were splitting up. Frank went to live with a friend, Bill Jones, and Marilyn moved to a nearby apartment with young daughter Naomi. Their teenage son became obsessed with memorizing the Quran and the Sharia, Islam’s elaborate, fixed rules for living and worship. He became convinced that he needed to go to Yemen because Yemeni Arabic was the closest to the “pure” language of the Quran. His parents, though strapped for money because of their separation, agreed to pay for it. Frank later told NEWSWEEK that he wanted to support his son’s “passion” and “commitment to learning.” A SEARCH FOR ABSOLUTE TRUTH
Walker was troubled to discover that Islam was not quite as “pure” as he had hoped. He later complained to his mullah, Mufti Iltimas, that he was disappointed during his stay in Yemen to find Islam divided among the Sunni and Shiites and many other sects and factions. All Muslims should follow one code, one law—the absolute truth of every word of the Quran, he believed. Walker, who had been oblivious to politics in the United States, began to absorb some of the politics of radical Islam. In October 2000, when suicide bombers blew a hole in the side of the USS Cole as the American destroyer was refueling in the Yemeni harbor of Aden, Frank Lindh e-mailed his son to lament that some of the 17 young sailors killed in the blast were the same age as his son. Walker wrote back that bringing the U.S. destroyer into a Yemeni harbor was “an act of war” against Islam. His son’s message “raised my concerns,” Frank told NEWSWEEK, “but my days of molding him were over.”
Frank disagreed with his son, but he didn’t cut off the money. In late 1999 John Walker came home, mostly to see his mother, who had worried about him. John felt uncomfortable in America, however, and wanted to rejoin the Islamic world. In California he fell in with a large Islamic missionary group, the Tablighi Jamaat, which, according to intelligence sources, is sometimes used as a recruiting ground by extremist groups. Walker was taken under the wing of a Pakistani missionary named Khizar Hiyat, who had invited the impressionable Walker to join him on a drive to Nevada as he was spreading the word. After a brief return to Yemen, Walker traveled with Hiyat in Pakistan for a month before choosing the austere madrasa outside Bannu.
It is not clear how Walker wound up in Afghanistan. A friend from a San Fran-cisco mosque told NEWSWEEK that he received an e-mail from Walker a month before he left Bannu for the “cooler mountains” in May of this year. “He was intrigued by Afghanistan,” said the friend. “He said he was interested in getting a bird’s-eye view of how Sharia was being applied.” (In Bannu, Walker turned down the offer of an air conditioner as decadent, but he took an additional $1,200 from his father.) In his search for purity, Walker gravitated to the most extreme expression of Islam, the Taliban.
‘He’s Got To Decide if He Wants to Live or Die Here’
‘HE’S TOTALLY NOT STREETWISE’
It never occurred to Frank and Marilyn that their son would become a holy warrior. “He was the last person you would expect to go and fight,” Frank told NEWSWEEK. Added Marilyn: “He would freeze. He’s totally not streetwise.” Yet somehow, in fairly short order, Walker was at a Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, using the nom de guerre Abdul Hamid, learning to fire an AK-47 and crossing paths with none other than Osama bin Laden. According to his interview with CNN, Walker fought with Pakistanis in Kashmir in the summer of 2001. When the United States struck back after the September 11 attacks, Walker was sent to fight against the Northern Alliance in Konduz. Sold out by their leader, Walker and several hundred other Taliban marched 100 miles, surrendered and then were herded into container trucks and shipped to a fortress prison near Mazar-e Sharif. Walker’s own story of what happened next, first told to NEWSWEEK reporter Colin Soloway as Walker lay wounded and stunned after the revolt and siege at Qala Jangi prison, is hair-raising:
The Taliban began revolting as soon as they arrived at the prison. Two of the mujahedin threw grenades, hidden in their robes, killing two Northern Alliance generals. “After that they put us in the basement and left us overnight,” recalled Walker. “Early in the morning they began taking us out, slowly, one by one, into the compound … Our hands were tied, and they were kicking and beating some of us. Some of the mujahedin were scared, crying. They thought we were all going to be killed.” Walker saw “two Americans … taking pictures with a digital camera and a video camera. They were there for interrogating us.” The Americans were Mike Spann and another CIA operative later identified only as “Dave.” A video taken by an Afghan cameraman shows Walker sitting cross-legged, slumped silently before the two CIA men. Spann squats down and starts asking questions: “Who brought you here? Wake up! Who brought you here to Afghanistan? How did you get here?” Then Spann and Dave conduct some theater, speaking loudly so Walker can hear. “The problem is,” says Dave, “he needs to decide if he wants to live or die … We’re just going to leave him, and he’s going to f—king sit in prison the rest of his f—king short life. It’s his decision, man.” Spann tries to evoke some empathy from the prisoner. “There were several hundred Muslims killed in the bombing in New York City. Is that what the Quran teaches? I don’t think so. Are you going to talk to us?” Walker makes no response.
Shortly after this footage was shot, “someone either pulled a knife or threw a grenade at the guards or got their guns, and started shooting,” recalled Walker in his interview with NEWSWEEK. “As soon as I heard the shooting and screaming, I jumped up and ran about one or two meters, and was shot in the leg.”
The CIA’s Spann was beaten, shot and killed by the mob. Dave was believed to have been rescued by American Special Forces and British SAS troopers. The rebellious prisoners holed up in the basement, and American bombs began to fall. The Northern Alliance tried to burn them out by pouring in diesel fuel and lighting it, and then to drown them with thousands of gallons of water. Finally, after six days, Walker and 85 bedraggled others surrendered. Walker’s parents had not heard a word from their son after he left the madrasa at Bannu in May 2001. Marilyn had written her son, “I really need to hear your voice,” but she got no answer. Frank came up with an elaborate rationale for his son’s silence: under Islamic custom, John would have to obey his father, so he never asked for permission before joining up with the Taliban. After September 11, Frank and Marilyn were worried sick; Frank began visiting mosques in the San Francisco area, showing a photo of his son in full Islamic dress. Lindh says he dreaded the worst. “I would look at the moon and just wonder if John was somewhere seeing it, too,” he says. “I didn’t have the sense that he was.”
When Frank Lindh at last saw the videotape of his wounded and battered son being loaded onto a hospital gurney, he sobbed uncontrollably. His friends had to hold him up. Marilyn also seemed to be in shock when NEWSWEEK interviewed her the next day. Her son, she said, had been “brainwashed.” When the TV satellite trucks showed up outside and the death threats began, she fled with her daughter to an undisclosed location. Frank, meanwhile, embarked on the TV talk-show circuit. He steadfastly refused to be judgmental. “I don’t think John was doing anything wrong,” he told CBS’s “The Early Show.” To ABC’s “Good Morning America” he said, “We want to give him a big hug and then a little kick in the butt for not telling us what he was up to.” He gently chided his son for not “coming to Papa” for permission. As for Walker’s comment to NEWSWEEK that he “supported” the September 11 attacks, Lindh suggested that his son may have been in shock (he may have been otherwise addled; Walker said he had been a heavy hashish user, according to one Northern Alliance source). The family’s latest defense is that their son did not have access to Western media, only the Taliban version of September 11, which may not have reported the atrocities and civilian death toll.
Just in case the U.S. government did not share this benign view of his son’s activities, Frank Lindh went out and hired one of the best-known trial lawyers in America, James Brosnahan, a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Iran-contra case. Though Walker’s family is begging for information, the government has not decided what it plans to do with Walker, who was being held at Camp Rhino outside Kandahar last week. (A military spokesman said he is being cared for and given “three hots and a cot.”) One source said that Attorney General John Ashcroft and other top Justice Department officials were “disgusted” with Walker’s actions and want to “make an example of him.” Because he is a U.S. citizen, he is not a candidate for the military tribunals that will be set up to try Al Qaeda and other terrorists. He could possibly be tried for treason, but that crime is hard to prove—there must be two witnesses to convict. Walker’s fellow Taliban may not be the most credible in court. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 41 percent of Americans believe that Walker should be charged with treason and put on trial for fighting with the enemy; an additional 42 percent say he should be tried only if there is specific evidence of his fighting against Americans. Walker may have some useful intelligence to bargain with. Though he was but a lowly foot soldier, the CIA would like to learn more about Al Qaeda’s recruiting. Sources say that Walker has proudly informed his interrogators that he was not merely Taliban but Al Qaeda. If Walker can inform on the terror network, he might be able to negotiate a plea bargain. Passions may cool, but facing an American jury in the present atmosphere could be one more unwise decision for a young man who has already made some seriously bad ones.
this guy did choose the right path---the path of Islam but my feeling is that he got carried away too much into fanaticism. Otherwise, he was not young or impressionable, like his father is saying. He made the right choice by using his mind and good judgement.
I find this article intresting, read it if u got time
we all thought we knew what danger looked like. Danger had a brown face and brown eyes.
SAN FRANCISCO, Dec. 10 — String the ******* up! Lock him in a cell and throw away the key! Only, please, get him out of our sight.
Before John Walker peered at us from under his mop of hair, we Americans had been comfortably arguing on talk radio and on those 24-hour TV news networks about “racial profiling.” Whatever our opinion, we all thought we knew what danger looked like. Danger had a brown face and brown eyes. BUT THE WALKER KID peered at us with blue eyes, and he sounded an American voice. And we found out that he comes from Marin, a green, upper-class California suburb.
It is easy enough to conclude that the spoiled little rich kid is a traitor or, like Patty Hearst, that he’s been brainwashed. Either conclusion spares us having to wonder if John Walker is a true son of America and might, indeed, be a precursor of many more suburban kids to come.
AN AMERICAN STORY
His, after all, is an American story. He was born on the East Coast, moved to California. His parents named him after John Lennon — a ’60s touch of sentimentality. For despite the Beatles’ urging that all we need is love, John Walker’s parents separated, just as Ringo and Paul and John and George separated.
His father, a corporate lawyer, assures us that his boy was a gentle child, and loving.
One suspects a lonely child. One wonders about his school. (His alternative-school principal remembers the boy as “self-directed.”) One wonders about the other kids at school, the pot, the sex, the routine chaos of American adolescence, the empty big house, the pimpled movies at the mall, the idiot gangs of jocks and goths.
MARIN COUNTY MUSLIM
• Daily action by allied military forces
Forty years ago, many African Americans turned to Islam — and for more than theological reasons. Attaching to Islam has long been a grievance against the humiliations imposed by the (white) West.
Islam offered black neo-nationalists something else: Probably more than any other religious tradition in the world, Islam, in its various fundamental strains, promises moral rectitude. Malcolm X, who had been a street punk and a pimp, found rectitude — a starched white shirt — after he became a black Muslim.
Forty years later, we learn that John Walker was changed by reading Malcolm X.
Soon John Walker Lindh (who had dropped his father’s name to become John Walker) is converted into Suleyman Al-Lindh. He had been raised Catholic. But his parents were following their separate paths. Mama was a California Buddhist. Papa remained a Marin County Catholic.
At 16, the boy is worshipping at the Mill Valley Islamic Center. But he wants less of the chaos and flux of America intruding on his new faith. He yearns to be a Muslim in a Muslim country.
The Catholic father and Buddhist mother grant their son permission to travel to unlikely Yemen to study Islam. Later, he briefly returns to Marin (on Christmas vacation? for the Fourth of July?), and announces to his parents that he wants to become a doctor and to minister to the poor of Pakistan.
He gets lost in Pakistan. For months, his parents have no idea where he is or how. They apparently have no idea how their gentle son becomes a militant warrior, a puritan at war with America.
I keep thinking of T.E. Lawrence, an English public schoolboy of an earlier generation who suffered from pirate envy. He found adventure and a heroic identity as an Arab warrior-became “Lawrence of Arabia” — and he ended up in Cinemascope, played by Peter O’Toole.
It is doubtful that Brad Pitt or Keanu Reeves would ever consent to play the part of Abdul Hamid (the most recent incarnation of John Walker Lindh). Americans are not, after all, in a romantic mood about Islamic militants, especially not the homegrown sort.
But, I wonder, how many more John Walkers are there in America? Is it possible that fundamentalist Islam — angry, violent, focused — could find a new generation of converts, not in inner-city black America, but from white American suburbs, like Littleton, Colo., or Marin County, Calif.?
The other day, on an airplane, I caused a minor panic every time I got up and went to the toilet. I am brown, you see, and look sort of Arabic. So not a few of my fellow passengers watched my every step. But sitting beside me on the plane was a blond kid, 16 or 17, I’d guess.
He said nothing. He ignored the movie; ignored the insufficient chicken offered by the flight attendant. He stared out the window.
Dreaming of what?
WOW yaar thats a good story and I bet there are many in the US, many who think "are we really on the right track", "are we really doing the right thing". And its true if your kinda tan or anything like that people are gonna start looking at you. Anyone tan or anything like that, they call him a Arab, even if he/she is a Pakistani,Turk, Persian or etc...
This young mans story is very moving, Mashallah. Allah yahdi men ya hub.
I got this other story in an e-mail, but I dont have any link, so dont ask me for one.
American carnage
by Larry Mosqueda, Ph.D. - The Evergreen State College
Like all Americans, on Tuesday, 9-11, I was shocked and horrified to watch the WTC Twin Towers attacked by hijacked planes and collapse, resulting in the deaths of perhaps up to 10,000 innocent people.
I had not been that shocked and horrified since January 16, 1991, when then President Bush attacked Baghdad, and the rest of Iraq and began killing 200,000 people during that "war" (slaughter). This includes the infamous "highway of death" in the last days of the slaughter when U.S. pilots literally shot in the back retreating Iraqi civilians and soldiers. I continue to be horrified by the sanctions on Iraq, which have resulted in the death of over 1,000,000 Iraqis, including over 500,000 children, about whom former Secretary of State Madeline Allbright has stated that their deaths "are worth the cost".
Over the course of my life I have been shocked and horrified by a variety of U.S. governmental actions, such as the U.S. sponsored coup against democracy in Guatemala in 1954 which resulted in the deaths of over 120,000 Guatemalan peasants by U.S. installed dictatorships over the course of four decades.
Last Tuesday's events reminded me of the horror I felt when the U.S. overthrew the governments of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and helped to murder 3,000 people. And it reminded me of the shock I felt in 1973, when the U.S. sponsored a coup in Chile against the democratic government of Salvador Allende and helped to murder another 30,000 people, including U.S. citizens.
Last Tuesday's events reminded me of the shock and horror I felt in 1965 when the U.S. sponsored a coup in Indonesia that resulted in the murder of over 800,000 people, and the subsequent slaughter in 1975 of over 250,000 innocent people in East Timor by the Indonesian regime with the direct complicity of President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissenger.
I was reminded of the shock and horror I felt during the U.S. sponsored terrorist contra war (the World Court declared the U.S. government a war criminal in 1984 for the mining of the harbors) against Nicaragua in the 1980s which resulted in the deaths of over 30,000 innocent people (or as the U.S. government used to call them before the term "collateral damage" was invented--"soft targets").
I was reminded of being horrified by the U. S. war against the people of El Salvador in the 1980s, which resulted in the brutal deaths of over 80,000 people, or "soft targets".
I was reminded of the shock and horror I felt during the U.S. sponsored terror war against the peoples of southern Africa (especially Angola) that began in the 1970's and continues to this day and has resulted in the deaths and mutilations of over 1,000,000. I was reminded of the shock and horror I felt as the U.S. invaded Panama over the Christmas season of 1989 and killed over 8,000 in an attempt to capture George H. Bush's CIA partner, now turned enemy, Manual Noriega.
I was reminded of the horror I felt when I learned about how the Shah of Iran was installed in a U.S. sponsored brutal coup that resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 Iranians from 1952-1979. And the continuing shock as I learned that the Ayatollah Khomani, who overthrew the Shah in 1979, and who was the U.S. public enemy for decade of the 1980s, was also on the CIA payroll, while he was in exile in Paris in the 1970s.
I was reminded of the shock and horror that I felt as I learned about the how the U.S. has "manufactured consent" since 1948 for its support of Israel, to the exclusion of virtually any rights for the Palestinians in their native lands resulting in ever worsening
day-to-day conditions for the people of Palestine. I was shocked as I learned about the hundreds of towns and villages that were literally wiped off the face of the earth in the early days of Israeli colonization.
I was horrified in 1982 as the villagers of Sabra and Shatila were massacred by Israeli allies with direct Israeli complicity and direction. The untold thousands who died on that day match the scene of horror that we saw last Tuesday. But those scenes were not repeated over and over again on the national media to inflame the American public.
The events and images of last Tuesday have been appropriately compared to the horrific events and images of Lebanon in the 1980s which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousand of people, with no reference to the fact that the country that inflicted the terror on Lebanon was Israel, with U.S. backing. I still continue to be shocked at how mainstream commentators refer to "Israeli settlers" in the "occupied territories" with no sense of irony as they report on who are the aggressors in the region.
Of course, the largest and most shocking war crime of the second half of the 20th century was the U.S. assault on Indochina from 1954-1975, especially Vietnam, where over 4,000,000 people were bombed, napalmed, crushed, shot and individually "hands on" murdered in the "Phoenix Program" (this is where Oliver North got his start). Many U.S. Vietnam veterans were also victimized by this war and had the best of intentions, but the policy makers themselves knew the criminality of their actions and policies as revealed in their own words in "The Pentagon Papers," released by Daniel Ellsberg of the RAND Corporation.
In 1974 Ellsberg noted that our Presidents from Truman to Nixon continually lied to the U.S. public about the purpose and conduct of the war. He has stated that, "It is a tribute to the American people that our leaders perceived that they had to lie to us, it is not a tribute to us that we were so easily misled."
I was continually shocked and horrified as the U.S. attacked and bombed with impunity the nation of Libya in the 1980s, including killing the infant daughter of Khadafi. I was shocked as the U.S. bombed and invaded Grenada in 1983. I was horrified by U.S. military and CIA actions in Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan, Brazil, Argentina, and Yugoslavia. The deaths in these actions ran into the hundreds of thousands.
The above list is by no means complete or comprehensive. It is merely a list that is easily accessible and not unknown, especially to the economic and intellectual elites. It has just been conveniently eliminated from the public discourse and public consciousness. And for the most part, the analysis that the U.S. actions have resulted in the deaths of primarily civilians (over 90%) is not unknown to these elites and policy makers. A conservative number for those who have been killed by U.S. terror and military action since World War II is 8,000,000 people. Repeat--8,000,000 people. This does not include the wounded, the imprisoned, the displaced, the refugees, etc. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated in 1967, during the Vietnam War, "My government is the world's leading purveyor of violence." Shocking and horrifying.
Nothing that I have written is meant to disparage or disrespect those who were victims and those who suffered death or the loss of a loved one during this week's events. It is not meant to "justify" any action by those who bombed the Twin Towers or the Pentagon. It is meant to put it in a context. If we believe that the actions were those of "madmen", they are "madmen" who are able to keep a secret for 2 years or more among over 100 people, as they trained to execute a complex plan. While not the acts of madmen, they are apparently the acts of "fanatics" who, depending on who they really are, can find real grievances, but whose actions are illegitimate.
Osama Bin Laden at this point has been accused by the media and the government of being the mastermind of Tuesday's bombings. Given the government's track record on lying to the America people, that should not be accepted as fact at this time. If indeed Bin Laden is the mastermind of this action, he is responsible for the deaths of perhaps 10,000 people-a shocking and horrible crime. Ed Herman in his book The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda does not justify any terrorism but points out that states often engage in "wholesale" terror, while those whom governments define as "terrorist" engage is "retail" terrorism. While qualitatively the results are the same for the individual victims of terrorism, there is a clear quantitative difference. And as Herman and others point out, the seeds, the roots, of much of the "retail" terror are in fact found in the "wholesale" terror of states. Again this is not to justify, in any way, the actions of last Tuesday, but to put them in a context and suggest an explanation.
Perhaps most shocking and horrific, if indeed Bin Laden is the mastermind of Tuesday's actions; he has clearly had significant training in logistics, armaments, and military training, etc. by competent and expert military personnel. And indeed he has. During the 1980s, he was recruited, trained and funded by the CIA in Afghanistan to fight against the Russians. As long as he visited his terror on Russians and his enemies in Afghanistan, he was "our man" in that country.
The same is true of Saddam Hussein of Iraq, who was a CIA asset in Iraq during the 1980s. Hussein could gas his own people, repress the population, and invade his neighbor (Iran) as long as he did it with U.S. approval.
The same was true of Manuel Noriega of Panama, who was a contemporary and CIA partner of George H. Bush in the 1980s. Noriega's main crime for Bush, the father, was not that he dealt drugs (he did, but the U.S. and Bush knew this before 1989), but that Noriega was no longer going to cooperate in the ongoing U.S. terrorist contra war against Nicaragua. This information is not unknown or really controversial among elite policy makers. To repeat, this not to justify any of the actions of last Tuesday, but to put it in its horrifying context.
As shocking as the events of last Tuesday were, they are likely to generate even more horrific actions by the U.S. government that will add significantly to the 8,000,000 figure stated above. This response may well be qualitatively and quantitatively worst than the events of Tuesday. The New York Times headline of 9/14/01 states that, "Bush And Top Aides Proclaim Policy Of Ending States That Back Terror" as if that was a rationale, measured, or even sane option. States that have been identified for possible elimination are "a number of Asian and African countries, like Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, and even Pakistan." This is beyond shocking and horrific-it is just as potentially suicidal, homicidal, and more insane than the hijackers themselves.
Also, qualitatively, these actions will be even worse than the original bombers if one accepts the mainstream premise that those involved are "madmen", "religious fanatics", or a "terrorist group." If so, they are acting as either individuals or as a small group. The U.S. actions may continue the homicidal policies of a few thousand elites for the past 50 years, involving both political parties.
The retail terror is that of desperate and sometime fanatical small groups and individuals who often have legitimate grievances, but engage in individual criminal and illegitimate activities; the wholesale terror is that of "rational" educated men where the pain, suffering, and deaths of millions of people are contemplated, planned, and too often, executed, for the purpose of furthering a nebulous concept called the "national interest". Space does not allow a full explanation of the elites Orwellian concept of the "national interest", but it can be summarized as the protection and expansion of hegemony and an imperial empire.
The American public is being prepared for war while being fed a continuous stream of shocking and horrific repeated images of Tuesday's events and heartfelt stories from the survivors and the loved ones of those who lost family members. These stories are real and should not be diminished. In fact, those who lost family members can be considered a representative sample of humanity of the 8,000,000 who have been lost previously. If we multiply by 800-1000 times the amount of pain, angst, and anger being currently felt by the American public, we might begin to understand how much of the rest of the world feels as they are continually victimized.
Some particularly poignant images are the heart wrenching public stories that we are seeing and hearing of family members with pictures and flyers searching for their loved ones. These images are virtually the same as those of the "Mothers of the Disappeared" who searched for their (primarily) adult children in places such as Argentina, where over 11,000 were "disappeared" in 1976-1982, again with U.S. approval. Just as the mothers of Argentina deserved our respect and compassion, so do the relatives of those who are searching for their relatives now. However we should not allow ourselves to be manipulated by the media and U.S. government into turning real grief and anger into a national policy of wholesale terror and genocide against innocent civilians in Asia and Africa. What we are seeing in military terms is called "softening the target." The target here is the American public and we are being ideologically and emotionally prepared for the slaughter that may commence soon.
None of the previously identified Asian and African countries are democracies, which means that the people of these countries have virtually no impact on developing the policies of their governments, even if we assume that these governments are complicit in Tuesday's actions. When one examines the recent history of these countries, one will find that the American government had direct and indirect influences on creating the conditions for the existence of some of these governments. This is especially true of the Taliban government of Afghanistan itself.
The New York Metropolitan Area has about 21,000,000 people or about 8% of the U.S. population. Almost everyone in America knows someone who has been killed, injured or traumatized by the events of Tuesday. I know that I do. Many people are calling for "revenge" or "vengeance" and comments such as "kill them all" have been circulated on the TV, radio, and email. A few more potentially benign comments have called for "justice." This is only potentially benign since that term may be defined by people such as Bush and Colin Powell. Powell is an unrepentant participant in the Vietnam War, the terrorist contra war against Nicaragua, and the Gulf war, at each level becoming more responsible for the planning and execution of the policies.
Those affected, all of us, must do everything in our power to prevent a wider war and even greater atrocity, do everything possible to stop the genocide if it starts, and hold those responsible for their potential war crimes during and after the war. If there is a great war in 2001 and it is not catastrophic (a real possibility), the crimes of that war will be revisited upon the U.S. over the next generation. That is not some kind of religious prophecy or threat, it is merely a straightforward political analysis. If indeed it is Bin Laden, the world must not deal only with him as an individual criminal, but eliminate the conditions that create the injustices and war crimes that will inevitably lead to more of these types of attacks in the future.
The phrase "No Justice, No Peace" is more than a slogan used in a march, it is an observable historical fact. It is time to end the horror.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/1/120801_walker_06.jpg
Walker at 12 years old. He was home schooled for a while, then sent to an elite alternative high school were students were allowed to shape their own studies and had to check in with a teacher only once a week.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/1/120801_walker_07.jpg
At age 14, Walker visited hip-hop Web sites and at one point posed as an African-American, writing ‘Our blackness should not make white people hate us.’ As he got older, he began surfing Islamic sites.
http://www.gupistan.com/gallery/1/120801_walker_08.jpg
By the time he turned 17, Walker had begun his conversion to Islam. In a fax to his parents released today, he says ‘I cannot give you many details about my situtation, but it would be good to hear from you all.’
BTW he also fought in Kashmir. Is it just me or pretty much every nationality on planet earth has beaten up Indian Army terrorists?
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Originally posted by Badshah420:
BTW he also fought in Kashmir. Is it just me or pretty much every nationality on planet earth has beaten up Indian Army terrorists?
[/quote]
yeaha, especially muslims have beaten them a lot, they have been under their cantrol for centuries.... they deserve it.
Alright this is hilarious :D. Hmm, seems hid pops also came outta the closet in 1998 in SFO 
AMERICAN TALIBAN LINDH IN GAY PLEASURE TRIANGLE: REPORT
By BRAD HUNTER
September 30, 2002 – American Taliban John Walker Lindh enjoyed secret gay sex romps with his Muslim mentors, a new report claims.
Married Pakistani businessman Khizer Hayat told Time magazine he was 21-year-old Lindh’s lover.
An imam from the Lindh’s madrasah - an Islamic religious school - also hinted that he enjoyed carnal capers with the young zealot.
“He was liking me very much. All the time, he wants to be with me,” Hayat told Time. “I was loving him. Because love begets love, you know.”
Lindh - whose father came out of the closet in 1998 - met Hayat in 1999 at a San Francisco mosque.
Lindh’s spiritual adviser in Pakistan, Mufti Mohammed Iltimas Khan, said the young convert spoke wistfully of his first meeting with Hayat.
“It was the beginning of the dangerous journey, the first jaunt, the pleasure journey,” the holy man said.
In October 2000, Lindh wrote to Hayat, inquiring about madrasahs in Pakistan. A week later, he phoned and announced he was arriving in Islamabad.
“He was ready to stay with me, but I [eventually] pushed him into the madrasah,” Hayat said.
Now, the businessman appears to be jealous of the teacher he recommended, Mufti Iltimas Khan.
“He [Lindh] loved me more,” Hayat sniffed.
What the ****!? I bet this guy just wants publicity.
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*Originally posted by fakeer: *
this brother chose the right path may allah protect him and give him his rewards for fighting the evil with which he grew up.man this is guy is a guy with great will power as ali r said .Allah give us strength to do the same. inshallah.
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Ameen