Mar
22nd
Sun
22nd
What remains of the whole strangely unnerving affair is a much less convincing indictment in retrospect. Strip away all of the emotion and conjecture and gasbaggery on the political Right, add in all we’ve learned about the Bush Administration over the last seven years — the accusations of torture, the legal mishandling of detainee prosecutions, secret renditions, Abu Ghraib, the double-talk and grandstanding — and what you have is a case that might have been the ultimate canary in the coalmine. After all, federal prosecutors — so sure that Lindh had been al Qaeda and plotting to kill Americans — were nonetheless forced to plea bargain down from 10 charges to two, sending Lindh away only for his Taliban connections. Nothing in his conviction includes treason or terrorism or the al Qaeda treachery he had been tarred with by the court of public opinion. But this was 2002 — pre-Pat Tillman, pre-Jessica Lynch — Americans never questioned whether it was appropriate for the head of the Justice Department and trusted elected officials — including President George W. Bush – to declare Walker al Qaeda, even accuse him of treason and allude to possible execution, all while the man was allegedly still drugged and bound in a metal shipping container overseas and hadn’t even seen his lawyer yet.
