if these limits may, at any time, be passed by those intended to be restrained?"
-- Chief Justice John Marshall, Marbury v. Madison, 1803
Johnny Walker
by Lee
Reason has an interesting post about Jihad Johnny.
In his New York Times legal column, Adam Liptak notes that the plea deal struck by John Walker Lindh’s lawyers, admired at the time because it spared him a potential life sentence, is looking crappier every day. Although Lindh joined the Taliban’s war with the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan, he did not fight Americans or participate in terrorism. Yet he is being punished much more severely than men captured in Afghanistan around the same time whose offenses were as bad or worse. Yaser Hamdi, who also was accused of helping the Taliban, was held in military custody without charge from 2001 until 2004, when he was released and sent to Saudi Arabia after the Supreme Court ruled that he had a right to challenge his detention. David Hicks, the Australian who recently admitted providing material support to Al Qaeda, received a nine-month sentence from a military commission (on top of the five years he had already been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay) and will be free by the end of the year. In effect, Hamdi got three years and Hicks got six, while Lindh, probably the least culpable of the three, got 20. With credit for good behavior, he has 13 more years to serve. Since he signed a plea agreement, his only hope of getting out sooner is commutation.
Clearly, due process, which Lindh got but Hamdi and Hicks did not, is not the same as lenience. In fact, judging from these cases, the conservatives who insist on military detention for people like Hicks and Hamdi are soft on terrorism.
Lindh had his day in court, he had legal rights and representation, he made his deal, and he should do his time. End of story. That being said, how pathetic is it that one of the main prosecutions the Bush administration can point to as evidence of its unrelenting war on terror is some dickhead teenage kid from Northern California.
Perhaps we should have tortured him.
Comments
Lindh is a traitor so the 20 years seems completely appropriate to me.
It IS pathetic though that this is the best they’ve done. They don’t even have a plan for what to do with the rest of them. Planning is not something they do.
Perhaps we should have tortured him.
No, watching his cheese eating Chardoney drinking parents and their Quasimodo of a lawyer on TV is torture enough for me.
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You get the best deal you can at the time you can get it.
John got the shaft, tough deal, oh well.
Shouldn’t be toting around guns and ammo for the enemy douche.
If we had done that he would probably be a permanent resident at the Lincoln bedroom as compensation for his plight.
Not really sure why nobody shot this fool in the Afghani desert.