You're Wrong About - The American Taliban

Episode Date: June 5, 2019

“He’s been punished even more than the American prison system can aspire to punish anyone”: Mike tells Sarah how John Walker Lindh became a terrorist in the media, a freedom fighter in his own mind and something between the two in reality. Digressions include “Newsies," Bruce Willis and “Candide.” Sarah sneakily reveals her lifelong affection for Howard Stern. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

It's, is it just like random chance that causes you to do backpacking versus Taliban? Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we take you to the back country of history, the forgotten trails and cabins and leave you up craggy mountains and then we all have a mountain house dinner. Are you saying that because you're in Vermont? Yeah. Are you literally looking out the window and composing a tagline? Yes, I'm, I'm, I'm sitting here drinking milk from a glass bottle right now.

I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall and I am a writer slash dog sitter currently at work on a book about the Satanic Panic. And today we're talking about the American Taliban, John Walker Lind. Was he called the American Taliban at the time? Oh my God. This was a, uh, this was a cover story in Newsweek that ran in early 2002 with his face on the

cover and the giant headline American Taliban and it was a huge deal. Newsweek and Time Covers and People Magazine are like the fossils of deciding our cultural sort of eras. You know, it's like, oh, it's the Nancy Kerrigan Zoic. Yay. So, okay. Newsweek calls us the American Taliban. Yeah.

What else do you know about him? What do you remember from that time? Well, what I remember is that he was a white American guy who had, I guess, joined the Taliban or Al Qaeda or something. Yes. And that he was tried for war crimes. And yeah, that he was sort of held up as maybe someone guilty of treason. Yeah.

I remember it in my head linking him to Timothy McVeigh. They were both like skinny kind of blonde white guys. Ish. Yeah. Ish. Okay. But that there was just something sort of like every man about them, like you would see that you were surrounded by men who looked like that.

Right. And this idea that like he was the worst kind of traitor. I feel like that was how he was seen. But I don't remember the specifics of it at all. So just tell me, tell me the story, please. Well, I think most people never learned the specifics because I've been researching this for the last two weeks. And within minutes, I was like, wait, what?

So he was never a member of Al Qaeda. He never attacked Americans. He never planned to attack Americans. He never in his life that we know of expressed a desire to attack Americans or even negative thoughts about America. The closest thing we have to anti-American sentiment is that his parents at one point invite him to come home. And he says in an email, I'm not that wild about the idea of coming back to America for

the holidays. That's it. That's like every kid that studied abroad has written that sentence in an email to their parents. I want to stay in Spain and Barcelona. So I mean, one thing that's really interesting and a theme throughout this story is that everything that John Walker Lend did abroad really has nothing to do with America at all. Like he didn't really have strong feelings about America that we know of, but it's very

hard for Americans to accept like, this isn't about you, man. We're so vain. We probably think this terrorism is about us. And another thing to keep in mind for this is that he's a bad mascot for any point you want to make. If you want to tell a story about the radicalization of the suburbs and the dangers of religious extremists in America, but he's not a great mascot for that, but he's also not a great mascot for the excesses of the war on terror and pulling innocent people out of nowhere

and making their lives miserable. He doesn't really fit that narrative either. So he's born in February of 1981 in Washington, D.C. His dad is a former social worker who is at the time working for the Department of Justice as a lawyer. His mom is a photographer housewife thing. Photographer housewife thing. That's just like the mom and the Stafford wives. Eventually they end up moving to Marin County, California, which is north of San Francisco,

an extremely affluent area. They're sort of, I mean, this kind of creates this like fallen suburban kid narrative that ends up getting retold in the media a million times. Oh, nothing sadder in America than a fallen suburban kid. You have to establish that this is like a normal family. It's an upstanding family. They have whatever, a four bedroom house and a suburb. They go to good schools, et cetera.

How could you be spiritually lost if you grew up in a four bedroom house? Well, that's a thing. So basically as early like from the earliest days, John is kind of a wayward kid. He's really sick when he's in middle school. He has some intestinal digestive thing and he's so sick that he has to be homeschooled. It seems that he never quite fit in. He sort of bounces in and out of middle school. He ends up trying to go to a big public high school, but he's just lonely and alone.

And when journalists go back to interview kids from his high school, nobody really remembers him. He ends up going to this like weird hippie school where the kids don't go to classes. They have independent reading. It's kind of like those universities that show up on right wing websites that are like, they're teaching underwater basket weaving. Like he goes to one of these high schools where he's basically just like reading a bunch of stuff and then he meets with a tutor twice a week.

These kids go to the most progressive school in history, but at what cost tonight on 60 minutes? Yes. And this is very central to the narrative that like the right wing tabloids will eventually tell that it's the excesses of liberal boomer parenting gone wrong. Oh no. Oh, it was Marin County all along. The only other like noteworthy thing about his upbringing is that he's kind of an internet

troll. So this is back in these sort of AOL prodigy early internet days. In the Eric Harris days. Yes. Journalists start looking around at his, you know, anything they can find from this guy after he becomes famous and they find a couple internet posts where he's on a lot of hip-hop blogs. He writes some raps which are so excruciating that I could not even read them and I'm not

going to repeat them here. That's charitable. He does things where like he pretends to be a black guy, which is like not great. But then he like he pretends to be a black guy to like yell at other people for being racist. Interesting. So he's like, I'm black and I'm 35 years old and you shouldn't say mean things about black people.

Well, that's nice. And then the big thing that happens in his childhood is when he's 16, he reads the autobiography of Malcolm X. Oh my God. I shouldn't give children so much time for reading. They'll end up reading Malcolm X. I know. That's the lesson here.

He also sees the movie which comes out around that time. Oh yeah. You know the scene in the movie where he goes to the hajj at Mecca? It's this extremely important event in the life of every Muslim. And John is really struck by this, that there's this devoutness, there's this kind of simplicity of people who, you know, aren't drinking and they aren't mistreating women and they're very traditional and these very traditional kind of old school beliefs, he's really struck by this.

And so he joins a mosque at the local mosque in Marin County. That's very sweet. Yeah. I mean, this becomes the community he's been looking for, right? I mean, it doesn't seem like he ever really had a group of friends. And so he kind of finally finds a thing. Yeah. This all seems like something that as a parent you would feel pretty good about.

Yeah. It's also on some level, I feel like game, recognize game, that what his dad says later is that I'm a Catholic, Islam is not actually that different from Catholicism, right? There's one deity, right? It's telling you, like, don't stay out late, don't treat people poorly. Like, it's all basically the same stuff that Catholics are teaching their kids. So his parents don't actually see this as all that exotic or all that weird. And another thing to keep in mind for this is that this is before 9-11.

So the cultural construction of Islam back then was completely different. Like, it's so hard to recreate this time now. Yeah. Like, there were no political connotations associated with Islam at that time at all. Yeah. So he ends up taking some equivalency exam. He ends up essentially finishing high school when he's 16. And then a little bit after that when he's 17, he tells his parents that he wants to

move to Sanaa, Yemen, and learn Arabic. Wow. Again, Yemen was a completely different country then. Yemen was referenced on an episode of Friends, and that's what people know it for at the time. I can attest to that. And so his parents basically consider this about the same as a kid that wants to study abroad in Malta, right?

They're like, it's kind of weird, but it's like an international school, and our kid wants to learn Arabic, and lots of kids study abroad. It was on Friends. It was on Friends. So he moves to Yemen. And I think this actually happens with a lot of people. You have these issues in your life, you have these challenges, and then you think that moving to a different place or drastically changing your circumstances is going to change

things. Yes. That's why people get bangs. Yes. So his version of getting bangs is basically moving to Yemen, and the minute he gets to Yemen, exactly the same thing happens. That there's other kids at his language school, he doesn't really fit in with them. A lot of them are typical sort of spring break style study abroad students.

They're there in Yemen to party and hang out, and yes, they're learning Arabic, but they're also smoking hookah and drinking alcohol, and these kinds of things that he is really not into. He's super, super devout and super just clean living, wakes up at five in the morning every morning. Yeah. He's a little straight. Super straight.

Yeah, exactly. There's a girl from Texas who's walking around with bare sleeves, and he's kind of like, I don't know if I'm comfortable with that. He's becoming much more devout and having these much more traditional beliefs. As young men seem to tend to do at that age if they're going to do it. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is just so 17 to me. Yeah.

You find this idea, and it's cool and new, and you don't really see any of the nuance in it. You're sort of looking around at other people and saying, well, they're not doing it right, or they're not Muslim enough. This is the way that you join stuff when you're a kid, that you have this extremely one dimensional understanding. This is why people join fraternities at this age, too, and football teams are the same thing. These units of intense camaraderie that come through shared belief, and often a belief

that's adversarial in some way. Totally. Basically, he's kind of bored. He's drifting away from the other students. He's not all that excited about this language school after a few months. He ends up dropping out of the language school and just sort of bumming around, hanging out in Yemen, looking for a mosque that better fits his interpretation of Islam, like how he wants to use the religion.

He ends up sort of out in the suburbs of Sana'a at this other mosque where he finds a community that's much more suited to him. What starts to happen is he starts to get insulated from outside information. There's a bombing in 1998 where a U.S. embassy in Africa is bombed by radical Muslim terrorists. His mom emails him and she's like, some Muslims did this. You're Muslim. How do you feel about it? He writes back and he says, well, it's actually the American government that did that.

It wasn't Muslims. This is seen later as the radicalization process is starting, but as someone who has spent a decent amount of time in rural areas of developing countries, that's just sort of the way that information travels in those countries, right? Where it's like a lot of it is by word of mouth. There's not a lot of institutions of journalism or institutions of reliable information or what people consider reliable. And are used to the media being perhaps used as outlets for political narratives that may

or may not be true. Then there is a lot of anti-American sentiment throughout the Middle East for understandable reasons that go back like a hundred years. All the information that we have about John is that he did not read newspapers. His whole life, he was not politically savvy or even politically interested. It just wasn't a field of human endeavor that he showed a lot of interest in ever. And so the fact that one of his buddies is like, oh, you know that bombing in Africa, you know that was done by the U.S., right?

He's like, yeah, sure, sounds fine. It's easy to look at people in the Middle East or people in developing countries that do this and sort of exoticize it like they don't have reliable information, but we all do this to some extent. Oh, yeah. No, Americans never do that, right? Americans never have conflicting theories about the basic events of something in the news.

Totally. I mean, I'm just thinking of like, you know, if some random friend of yours is like, oh, did you hear some like hard right psychopath just won the election in Belgium? You're like, wow, okay. I would say I don't like the word psychopath, Marcia. True. That is what you would say. But then it's like, because you don't really care that much about Belgium, you're not going

to like go on Wikipedia and like fact check for yourself. And so three days later, when somebody's like, hey, what about those elections in Belgium? You're like, yeah, this guy's crazy right wing. What's what's going on? That might not be true, right? Your friend might be like, that's not true. Like you're being radicalized. He's not right wing at all.

I would be like, I trust Marcia about Belgium. Yeah, exactly. You're like, I don't really care much. Like I'm just, I'm just repeating like very scrap type information that I've heard and just sort of repeating it without really thinking about it too much. Like that's kind of the entire premise of this show. Like we all do this. Yes, that all of this is an endless game of telephone.

Yes. I don't think this necessarily excuses what happens later. I don't even know what happens later. I am on the edge of my freaking seat. But so anyway, he's just getting farther and farther from the country that he left. So eventually his visa runs out and he has to come home. No, he comes home for 10 months. He's bored as hell in Northern California.

Does he like sit in the basement and eat pop tarts? Basically, he gets a job at like some warehouse, something, something. He starts telling his parents he wants to become a doctor and work in Pakistan on like underserved communities. But he's bored. I mean, it's like every kid when they come home from study abroad, right? Like this one time in Yemen, like he's just his heart is not in the States anymore. Yeah.

So he gets a new visa, he moves back to Yemen. And again, he's sort of adrift. He feels like I'm just doing the same thing again. It's, you know, it's some of the novelty of this has worn off. And so he decides that the next stage of his language learning, the next stage of his religious learning is memorizing the Quran. By heart, word by word. Yeah. Wow.

And so, I mean, this is something that religious scholars do as part of their training he wants also to become a religious scholar and potentially become like the equivalent of a priest. And so part of that is you go to a madrasa and you memorize the Quran. So he essentially moves to the north of Pakistan. Once he's in this world, apparently the last year that he spent in the Middle East, he spent $200. Wow.

Goes for it. He's like sleeping on tarps on people's floors. He's living in this madrasa. Like apparently he gives away all of his possessions. And the only thing he owns is a copy of the Quran. Wow. His parents, again, are like, well, it's an exotic thing for a 18 year old boy to do, but sure, whatever.

Based on this information, I feel like I would think as his parent, I would be like, he's finding himself like 18 year old boys do. Like it's this or it's like, you know, he gets really into snowboarding or it's like recognizable as the kind of journey that 18 year olds go on. Totally. And if we didn't have all this implicit bias, I think toward Muslims and toward Islam, like if he had gone to like become a Christian missionary in the mountains of the Democratic Republic of Congo, we'd be like, okay, like that's an interesting

thing and it's something Christians do. Yeah. And like, you know what, you were like a really young guy and you were like, you were going through that thing that young people, but maybe especially young men go through where you find a doctrine or a series of rules and you're like, I'm going to do this and make no compromises for anything. Heavy metal bands who were interviewed for the decline of Western civilization when they were asked, what will happen if you don't make it?

We're like, we will, we will make it. Everyone has some version of that story when they're growing up. And this just feels so far still just one of those. That's actually what's so fascinating about it to me is like this need, especially of young men to have like a theory of everything. Yeah. Whatever it is, it's like it's iron rand or it's white supremacy or it's like political activism or volunteering or it's perfectly benign stuff.

Like guys who get really, really, really into mushroom hunting. Yes. Yes. But it's something that happens throughout most people's 20s is that you then realize, A, that it's not going to solve anything. B, that other people who've joined that movement have done so for not great reasons, right? Like it starts to dawn on you.

Oh, some of these people are assholes. Like some of these people suck. And like some of the leaders of this movement are not great. This sounds like it might be a young Mike Deere diary moment. Totally. I mean, like up to this point, basically in this story, I am John Walker Lin. Oh yeah. So am I.

We all are. Yeah. So what's really interesting is after he gets to Pakistan, he gets even farther away from the internet. He stops emailing his parents because there's no internet cafes anymore. So he essentially has no links back to the previous John. He starts listening to essentially talk radio. There's a lot of talk radio in Northern Pakistan.

Oh, talk radio never leads anywhere good unless it's Howard Stern. And this is where like the kind of the right wing narrative of John Walker Lin starts to come into focus a little bit more because this is where he starts actually to get pretty radicalized because one of the things that is really popular in Northern Pakistan because it's on the border with Afghanistan is these guys called the Taliban who are freedom fighters in Afghanistan. Who, as I recall, were depicted in one of the Rambo movies and favorably. I mean, that's the thing is like basically he starts thinking like this

actually sounds pretty appealing. Like these guys are trying to create a Muslim state, like an entire country where I can live my values, where like it's totally safe for me to live my values. And he's like, and I'll never fit it in Marin County. I mean, I also think that, you know, he's memorizing the Quran. He's in this very remote area. He also doesn't really feel like he fits in there. I mean, so much of this is just he just has a personality that he doesn't feel

like he fits in everywhere and he keeps sort of moving the goalposts of like the next thing is where I'm going to fit in. The next thing is where it's all going to click into place for me. And because of these radio broadcasts, because of the people that he's hanging out with, he starts to put together this narrative of, well, this is it. Like they're kind of they're they're trying to create the kind of country that would be welcoming to people like me. And I would finally fit in.

See, and I'm convinced that it's the same basic urge that prompts a person to go on a long backpacking trip. Yes. Something I was thinking about is that the kind of 15 year old I was, like if I were a boy and socialized to project my frustrations outward and make them other people's faults, I can see myself becoming an incel as like a 15 year old. Me too, totally, totally.

And I was like, well, what did I do as the 15 year old I was? And I was like, well, I found Newsy's fan fiction, you know, and it's like two roads diverged in a yellow wood. Yeah, it really does seem like with John, you know, the combination of being painfully naive and always unhappy, always looking for the next thing. And not great at like fact checking things that people told him. This is what he ends up telling a interviewer later. And this becomes one of the main exhibits in why he's committed treason.

Oh, boy. He says, I lived in a region in the northeastern province. The people there in general have great love for the Taliban. So I started to read some of the literature of the scholars and the history of the movement, and my heart became attached to them. I wanted to help them one way or another. So I took the opportunity. He's being truthful when the spotlight is on him and you can't do that.

No, never. Yeah. And so what happens is he doesn't join the Taliban yet, but he joined something called HOM, which stands for something that I will grievously mispronounce, so I'm not going to try. But this is a terrorist affiliated organization. A sort of offshoot of this organization are the people that beheaded Daniel Pearl. Oh, wow.

And so John meets people that are affiliated with them. They recruit him. He ends up joining. And what he says later is he didn't know it was a terrorist organization that whenever a group recruits you, they never tell you their true nature, right? Like, when you join the Scientologists, they're like, we just want to give you stress tests. Yeah.

Listen, the US Army doesn't advertise joining up with footage of the Mali massacre. You know, it's in the interest of every militaristic group to camouflage its true intentions for its fighters. The moral and the legal principle that I've been struggling with in figuring out what I think about John Walker Lynde the last two weeks is there's some level of like naive is OK, right? But there's a point where naive becomes negligent.

If you think about Enron or something, right? Like if you join as an intern at Enron in 1998, I wouldn't hold random HR people and secretaries accountable for what was happening at the top of that organization. No. But then on the other end of the spectrum, you can't just like join the KKK and be like, oh, I had no idea they had some problematic views. Like, no, I expect you to do some basic due diligence, right?

Both of those cases are very easy. John obviously is somewhere in between, but there is a line where naive becomes negligent and sort of what you feel about John really comes down to where you put that line. So there's two different Islamic experts, like people that know the region, know the language, know all the organizations who each get days of interviews with John after he's imprisoned. They're hired by his defense team to sort of figure out like piece together

the timeline of what happened, piece together why he did that. Both of these scholars come away saying the dude is hopelessly naive. One of them, it's really interesting. You know, she's asking him, why did you enlist with the Taliban? Why did you enlist with this terrorist organization? And he's like, you know, they seem good. Like they made a pitch to me. Like it sounded like they were helping oppressed Muslims.

Like they said all they want to do is help the oppressed. And I wanted to help the oppressed. So I joined. And then this interviewer is like, well, do you know about all the terrorism that they've done and the people they've killed? You know about their treatment of women. And apparently John looks at her and he goes, I'd have to study that. The way that she puts it is that his knowledge is idiosyncratic and narrow.

The other interviewer says this too, that he's interviewing John and, you know, he's asking about Osama bin Laden and the Taliban and everything else. And John is just saying like, yeah, they seem to find whatever. And he's saying like, well, you know, how do you feel about the fact that they've carried out all these terrorist attacks on civilians? And John's like, oh, no, that's that's against Islam. The Quran is very clear that you can't murder women and children. So like they wouldn't have done that.

But the researcher says that he understands Islam, but he doesn't understand contemporary Islam. He's spending all this time memorizing the Quran. And he thinks that the Quran is the same as the institutions implementing it. He's like someone who gets converted to Catholicism. And he's like, oh, no, priests couldn't molest children because priests take a vow of celibacy. Yeah, exactly.

You also have a lot of willful blindness to the ethical complexities of an institution that you have just bought into. You know, if he's like in the honeymoon period with his faith, you can see there being a lot that he would just like, just try hard to ignore. I know. I mean, you know, you're just reading this and like putting your head in your hands and you're just like, John, you really didn't Google organizations before you joined man.

Like you didn't, you didn't think it through. Do you think he just really wanted to believe what he was told? Yeah, you know, and he just isn't, he just isn't someone who cares about politics. Right. He's really into reading. He's really into studying. This is how he interacts with the world is through reading about it. I bet he liked Dune.

It's also noteworthy to me that John ends up dropping out of this terrorist organization when he realizes that they have political goals. As he gets deeper into this terrorist organization, he realizes that like they're trying to take over territory. They're trying to take over secular countries. And he's like, well, wait a minute, no, those are secular countries. We were fighting on behalf of the oppressed. We wouldn't invade another country.

And so what he says later on, he says it was not an Islamic struggle. It was a political struggle. Wow. And that's the beginning of him, like the little seeds of, wait a minute. Like maybe institutions are run by people. It says a lot that he doesn't see Islam as political. Yeah. He's like, this has nothing to do with political gain or territory.

This is about a homeland and freedom and, and letting other people be, you know, like he presumes everyone to be as disinterested in power as he is. Exactly. Yeah. That's a very good way of putting it. And I think that is his central sin. It's his fatal flaw. Totally.

Yes. It's like, I'm doing this out of a genuine desire to help the oppressed. So everyone else must be too. He doesn't really get like all of the histories of these countries, all the politics of these countries, all of like the super tangled like proxy wars that are being fought in a bunch of these countries. Like he just never really looks into it. So he committed the original and eternal American sin, which is sort of

bumbling innocently and confusedly into a very complicated situation. Yes. Yeah. And this is sort of where it really escalates is after a couple of months in Pakistan, he decides, I'm going to go to Afghanistan. So I'm going to take a little detour to talk about the politics of Afghanistan at the time. Okay.

So Afghanistan was a constitutional monarchy for a really long time. And then there was a communist uprising that assassinated the political leader. Then the Soviets get really interested because they're like, Hey, communists. Soviet troops come, a bunch of Soviet money comes, and they basically want to set up Afghanistan as a communist country. It never really clicks. The Soviets end up withdrawing in 1989. The Taliban sort of rises up out of the prisoner of war camps established by

the Soviets. Wow. The US, of course, starts funding the Taliban because the Taliban is fighting against the Soviets. And of course, as we have discussed on the show, the only spectrum that mattered at that time was communist versus capitalist. And the Taliban was against the communists. So we're for the Taliban.

Yeah. The enemy of our enemy is our friend in the East America. There's all these quotes from Ronald Reagan calling them freedom fighters. And so the Taliban with our help ends up taking over the country, but it's still a super fractious country, right? There's these other ethnic groups. There's other linguistic groups. The Taliban sort of imposes control, but there's two regions in the north of

the country that they never quite get control over. One of them is run by sort of the remnants of the Russian backed insurgency. It's called the Northern Alliance. So it's not Russians. It's mostly Tajiks and Uzbeks, but they're funded by the Russians. They're supported by the Russians. And there's kind of like a stalemate where the Northern Alliance has around 10% of the country and the Taliban sort of has the rest of the country.

And there's not a whole lot of like fighting necessarily, but it's just sort of like they are there. The Taliban hates them. They hate the Taliban, but like no one's really necessarily gaining or losing all that much territory. It's sort of like its own little cold war. This is what John signs up to fight for, that the message he gets is that the Taliban are freedom fighters and they are against this Northern Alliance group

that according to the information that he gets, the Northern Alliance is committing rape, it's murdering civilians. It's this awful regime. And so if he doesn't go and fight, the Northern Alliance could get more territory in Afghanistan and more Muslims are going to suffer. That's like the pitch to him when he goes and joins the Taliban. Right. That's what you tell a young person who you want to go fight for you

for much more complex reasons than you let him in on. Exactly. And, you know, what he doesn't know, I looked up in old physicians without a Borders report that the Taliban had already established itself as abysmal human rights violators, right? That they did this survey where they interviewed women who had been in prison and 47% of them were detained for not being in a mosque at prayer time, flying a kite, playing music at their wedding or laughing in public.

Laughing. You don't want to be like relativistic about this. Like the Taliban was very bad. There was a lot of torture. There was a lot of basically warlords being able to set their own interpretations of Islamic law and just like totally fuck with people. It was very bad. And it was also that information was very available that if John had tried,

he could have found out what the record of the Taliban was. So do you think that it was possible that he had no sense of, you know, the kind of, for example, extremely severe punishments that they handed out to people? Do you think he could have plausibly remained totally ignorant of that? Yeah, because I think what explains like 97% of this was his just lack of a general skepticism about being told things and he doesn't have the internet. So right. And so he didn't see how they treated people like in regions they had under control.

Yeah. OK. He's in Pakistan this whole time. So the Taliban is like something he is told about. Right. It's not like today because now, you know, ISIS uses Instagram all the time and you can see that they're all little jerks. Yeah. Yeah.

Was he aware of terrorism as a concept to any degree? I mean, he must have been right. Like his his dad had told him about the USS Cole attack, which took place in, I think, 2001. And he also sort of was like, oh, that's not really terrorism. It was like it was it was the Yemen government attacking a US ship, which it wasn't. But right, it's not clear that John knew that, right? So the information that he's getting about world events is mostly from people he knows. You know, many of the sort of Islamic terrorist attacks that are taking place this time.

There aren't terribly many, but the ones that are taking place, people around him are saying like, oh, you know, people are being framed. It's not really happening. It's like it's not really terrorism, etc. So it's not clear that he had any information about what was really going on. On the other hand, he easily could have found out like he could have done it and he didn't. Yeah. Basically, how how at fault John is it's up to you of like where you put that line

of like, when does it become negligent? And it's up to to what degree of, I guess, emotional intelligence and self awareness. Yeah. You expect from a what a 19 year old? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So John takes a bus into Afghanistan. He somehow finds like a recruitment booth or something. I don't know how logistically he does it, but he joins the Taliban.

The problem is he speaks Arabic and everything in the Taliban is in Urdu and Pashtun. Oh, he learned the wrong language. Yes. So they can't really use him. So there's this thing called Al-Ansar, which means the supporters. So it's like a little rump troop regiment who are all the Arabic speakers, right? Because people from all over the world come to join the Taliban cause. And this is sort of where the Taliban puts them.

There's like, OK, join with all the other Arabic speakers. He's like, Big Junior, Var City, Taliban. Yeah, exactly. There's like, sure, like join up. We'll we'll find some use for you. Very embarrassing for a young man on a quest. Yes. So they end up sending him to a training camp, which will later on be called a terrorist training camp.

But training terrorists and training army soldiers, like those are different skills. So apparently at the same camp, there's something like three thousand soldiers being trained there. And there's like 100, 200 people that are separately being trained in like terrorist tactics. So this gets called an Al-Qaeda training camp. It's accurate that Al-Qaeda is being trained there. But John did not go through Al-Qaeda training.

I am realizing as you're saying this, that I could not tell you with any confidence what exactly Al-Qaeda is. Like, I only live through this period of American news. But like, is that the terrorist arm of the Taliban? I feel like George W. Bush. I mean, the thing is, it was created separately. But after a couple of years, the Taliban starts harboring Al-Qaeda fighters. Like Afghanistan becomes like the headquarters for Al-Qaeda

because the Taliban supports them. So by this point, there's a lot of overlap. But the Islamic scholars that interview John later point out, it's a secret organization. You don't just go on Craigslist and click on like apply and then fill out your resume and join Al-Qaeda. Like it's a underground network. It's not something that is advertised to people. So there is no evidence of any kind that John ever joined Al-Qaeda.

So even the indictment that the U.S. government files on him later does not say that he joined Al-Qaeda. It is very careful to say things like he trained at an Al-Qaeda camp and he met with Al-Qaeda affiliated individuals. But I mean, the thing to keep in mind about all of John's engagement with the Taliban is that he's a fucking grunt. Like he is the lowest level of the totem pole in like not a particularly essential regiment. Do you think that he was held up by the media as being higher level and more

dangerous and more of a terrorist than he was? Because the public wanted and the government wanted to tell the public a story where someone important had been caught and was being brought to justice of the sort. Oh, yeah. And what's central is, first of all, when this eventually hits the media, this unit that he's in Al-Ansar will be translated as Al-Qaeda. That's just factually incorrect. Like this group has nothing to do with Al-Qaeda.

Secondly, the extremely inconvenient fact for John is that this Al-Ansar unit and the camp that he's at are both funded by Osama bin Laden. Whoops. Yes. So of course, in the indictment, of course, in all of the media coverage, what comes up is that John has met with Osama bin Laden, which makes him seem super high level. Has he? Yeah.

Oh yeah. And so it's actually true that he's met with bin Laden, but I have a friend that worked at the Seattle Supersonics. John's relationship with Osama bin Laden is essentially the same as her relationship with Howard Schultz. It's just like this random rich guy that like comes around sometimes and like he kind of sucks. He says weird shit to you and he's like, hey, Tiger, working hard.

And you're like, yeah, whatever, man. So is Osama bin Laden going around to the different Taliban training facilities and sort of doing like regional manicure stuff? Like literally, yes. First of all, keep in mind this is before 9-11. So like Osama bin Laden is not famous. He's just another gross beard. Like he has no reason to think Osama bin Laden is like hot shit.

So the first time he meets Osama bin Laden, bin Laden shows up at the training camp in an envoy of Toyota Land Cruisers. And so instantly John is like, what a dick. Like it's so hot here. We're like sleeping on the ground. It's like super pared down conditions. And then this asshole shows up in like an air conditioned $70,000 SUV. So it's great because in the classic way of a teenager to like see very deeply about

some things and completely miss things that would be obvious to a grown up. He's like, fuck Osama bin Laden. He's a fucking capitalist. Totally. He's just like, he's like, this dude sucks. There's this great quote in this terrific New Yorker article that runs in 2003 where one of these Islamic scholars that ended up interviewing John, they ask him like, so what was Osama bin Laden like?

And he says, to tell you the truth, he was really boring. I was tired. The training was grueling. Most of the speakers stood up when they spoke, but he sat down and he talked in this really soft voice about the history of Afghanistan, how everyone had invaded it, starting with the Greeks. I listened to the beginning, but it wasn't very interesting. So I fell asleep.

I love this that he like, he just did not, he saw Osama bin Laden as like someone from corporate giving a lecture on reusing interoffice memo envelopes. Yes. And exactly like there's one moment where him and the other grunts are like cleaning the floor or something and bin Laden comes by and like shakes their hand. So like this, of course, like he's shaking hands with bin Laden. But apparently bin Laden is just like looking good guys and walks on. Like it's it is the way that you would just deal with like some upper boss.

Like he's working at like a like an Altoona blockbuster and the regional manager comes by and he's like, make sure all those cases for Demi more striptease are in order, young man. And you're like, yes, sir. Literally, yes. So then he ends up sort of going to the front lines, which is like the least interesting part of the story. Like when you hear that he was like a Taliban fighter, you imagine like some

sort of saving private Ryan thing where he's like running in the field and like dodging gunfire. Basically, because this war is at a stalemate, all he does is sit on guard duty and wait for something to happen and nothing ever happens. He's only on guard duty for a couple of weeks. He goes to the front lines. This is the worst timing in the history of the world. The week before September 11th, he's like, I'm going to join the Taliban

and go to this province in a remote area. And basically, until everything explodes later, he just like sits there. Like he's not in a village. He's not near a road. There's just sort of an imaginary line across this extremely remote part of Afghanistan at the time. And his job is literally to just sit there and like call someone if he sees anything. So he's like a little border guard in the bureaucracy of the Taliban.

Yes, exactly. He's like the lowest possible level. It's basically just like a two week camping trip where it's like him and these other dudes, they're hanging out, they're speaking Arabic, they're making food. He becomes famous because he can make pasta and none of the other guys had ever made cooked pasta before. So he becomes like a celebrity in his unit for like this guy knows how to make pasta for lunch.

That's adorable. They're just hanging out. Like there's nothing, nothing happens. Yeah, because war is mostly boredom and then death. Yes, essentially. Yeah. So what ends up happening and what turns this story into a escalating nightmare that you will not believe is 9-Eleven.

At some point during this time when he's sitting up there, he finds out about 9-Eleven. We don't know when he found out about it. We think it's a couple days later because information takes a long time to travel. One of the main arguments for John being like this terrible terrorist is that like he knew about 9-Eleven and he didn't leave. But we don't know what he found out about 9-Eleven. Right. It's not even clear that he found out that Osama bin Laden did it.

I mean, you know, you never know how these kind of rumors word of mouth information spread. So for all we know, he could have found out that Bush did 9-Eleven. Jet fuel can't melt steel beams and like they're framing bin Laden. Right. There's also some evidence that he tried to leave at that point. And, you know, I don't know how much this to believe because it's all sort of word of mouth, but he says that he was afraid of saying anything bad about bin Laden

because he was afraid that the other soldiers would kill him because everybody was really paranoid about spies. Right. So if you said anything a little bit out of the ordinary, people might start to suspect you. Either way, a month after 9-Eleven, America completely turns its stance on Afghanistan upside down. So it used to be supporting the Taliban against the Russian backed insurgents,

but now it supports the Russian backed insurgents against the Taliban. So all of a sudden, this stalemate isn't so stale anymore. The US starts doing bombing campaigns. The US starts giving money and weapons to the Northern Alliance. So all of a sudden, the Northern Alliance is like, hell, yeah, like we can take over the rest of the country now. And so his unit basically sees like all of this happening and sees that like the writing is on the wall.

So they're like, fuck this, we're retreating. So his entire unit spends two days walking from this super remote area where he is to a city called Konduz. One third of his unit dies on that walk. What? Yeah, because there's no water, there's no food. They just have to keep going and they basically collapse by the side of the road. That's terrifying.

That's harrowing to think about. So at the time, the Northern Alliance is being run by this guy named Abdul Rashi Dostam, who's basically a warlord. He's been running the Northern Alliance for a while and he is known as a total brutal asshole. So his signature move is when he captures Taliban fighters, he castrates them alive and then locks them in a shipping container to let them die. He's awful.

That's a lot. And so what's driving the surrender is every single person in John's unit knows that if they fall into the hands of the Northern Alliance, that's what's going to happen to them. Right? So this is what motivates them to do this insane walk for two days. Yeah, so much better to die and not stop walking when you put it that way. Seriously.

And so they end up getting to Konduz. Eventually, one of the leaders of the unit somehow contacts Dostam and negotiates a surrender. He says, look, we'll give you $500,000. If you put us on trucks, drive us to the rest of the Taliban forces and like we'll all pretend that this never happened. So this evil warlord Dostam agrees. He makes all of them surrender.

Each soldier has a rifle and two grenades. That's all they get. That's like the only weapons they get for this campaign. And so he takes all of their guns. He takes all their grenades, puts them all onto these trucks and then immediately breaks his promise. So instead of taking them back to the other troops, he decides he's going to give them to the Americans for interrogation.

Oh, classic warlord to be fair. And so it's going to take a while for the Americans to get there. So he drives them to this fortress. I don't like where this is going. It keeps getting worse, Sarah, for like the next 17 years. It's awful. OK, all right. So he drives them to this fortress.

It's got a like a basement thing that's like kind of prison. Oh, God. This is quite a horror movie we have happening. One of the things with, you know, whenever you're dealing with prisoners of war, the sort of the understood problem with that is that there's far more prisoners of war than there are troops. There's only about 80, 85 Northern Alliance troops, but there's 500 prisoners of war at this point.

So there's sort of this mounting tension as the Taliban soldiers realize they've been had and the Northern Alliance soldiers realize if these guys want to do an uprising, we would struggle to contain it. And so what happens as soon as they get there, one of John's colleagues smuggled one of his cronades into the fortress in his ass. No, I think like in his jacket. Oh, OK, I think they're like really large. All right.

In the like eventual movie about this, you can just imagine sort of zooming in on this guy's face as he like reaches into his jacket. Yes. And then zooming in on John's face as he like starts to realize what is about to happen and the guy pulls the pin, throws the grenade. So he pulls out the grenade, the grenade goes off. And then sort of in punishment, the Northern Alliance guys shoot a couple of the prisoners of war.

So the uprising doesn't happen. It's just that one grenade and no casualties, rats. But this, of course, increases the tensions, right? Because it's like they sort of know these guys want to fight back now. And so they put all 500 of these or however many people are left, they put them all into the Spaceman dungeon. They throw a bunch of grenades down the airlock. Oh, my God.

Into this extremely confined space. So they go off, John gets like some shrapnel wounds. He basically curls up into a corner and tries sleeping, but of course, doesn't get any sleep. Are they like tearing off people's limbs and stuff? Is there like carnage? It's like screaming people and bodies. Like it's the worst thing imaginable.

Yeah. So the next day, there's two CIA agents that get there. Nobody knows their CIA agents because they're both just wearing like sweatshirts and jeans. One of them is named Johnny Michael Spawn, and he becomes important later on. But these two CIA agents, they start pulling Taliban soldiers out kind of one by one to like interrogate them. So there's actually footage of John being pulled out of this basement, leaned up against a tree, and they ask him a bunch of questions.

And he just kind of doesn't respond. He doesn't know who they are. He says later that he thinks they're mercenaries of some kind. They're like bounty hunters and that they're going to basically buy him. Yeah, who the fuck would you think they are at that point if they're wearing sweatshirts and you've just been through that kind of an experience? Yeah. And then sort of as half the prisoners of war are outside being interrogated

and half are still in this basement, suddenly somebody sets off another grenade. Wow. John has no idea any of this is happening, but essentially a war breaks out. Oh, God. So all of a sudden, there's sort of this prisoner uprising where people come flooding out of the basement. They try to overrun the Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance just starts spraying machine gunfire into this group of prisoners.

This guy spawn also pulls out his weapon, shoots, just starts shooting all the prisoners that he can in this kind of wave. He ends up getting shot in the head and killed. He is the first casualty of the war in Afghanistan. Oh, God. All of this melee is happening around John, and he's basically just sitting up against this tree, has no idea what's going on. He tries getting up and running away, but he gets shot in the leg.

He falls to the ground. He spends the next 12 hours pretending to be dead as bodies are piling up around him. Then at night, somehow he gets back to this basement where essentially all the prisoners of war that don't want anything to do with this, that are like, we surrender. That's where they're all huddled at that point. Ultimately, the Northern Alliance killed all the prisoners of war that had been trying to do the uprising. Oh, God.

All of these sort of peaceful, we surrender prisoners of war are just in this basement. They spend the next seven days in this basement. The Northern Alliance starts throwing grenades down. They start shooting down. At one point, they pour diesel fuel into the air duct, so it's like dripping on them. And then they set it on fire. Oh, my God. It's burning.

There's, you know, they're screaming. There's people dying. There's dead bodies. Eventually, on the seventh day, the Northern Alliance starts pouring water down the air ducts so that the wounded soldiers who can't get up will drown. Oh, God. John somehow uses some sort of stick, like a cane to like lean himself up against the wall to get his mouth above the water.

But this water is just like dead bodies and jet fuel. And he ends up swallowing some of it and getting his like intestinal bug. And, of course, I was like, when he said they were pouring water through the ducts, I was like, oh, to rinse it off. The story is like so much darker than that. There's like no, there's like no human kindness anywhere for the rest of the story. It truly, it really boggles the mind, right? Like this degree of cruelty, it's really incredible to contemplate.

It's totally unreal. There's also these CIA guys before they died called in an air strike. So they called in for US support for the US to bomb the Taliban, like the evil Taliban fighters. So the only like darkly hilarious part of the story is that the US misses. And they drop a 2,000 pound bomb on their own allies, the Northern Alliance. Oh, my God. So this whole thing, God, this is like an 18th century novel. This is like Candid.

Yeah, it's like the last two episodes of every season of Game of Thrones, where you're like, oh, like she escaped from the rapist. And it's like, oh, no, she's with the worst rapist now. Like it just keeps getting worse. So anyway, after seven days, finally, after this bomb drops, after everything is sort of over, he hears people calling him out of the basement and he emerges to find all these red cross units. There's medical personnel, there's US troops, like it's over. Of the 500 people in his unit that they begin with, only 86 are still alive.

Wow. He gets taken to the hospital. He gets hydrated. He gets painkillers. And then it all gets worse. This is Candid. Yes. So the first thing that happens when he gets to the hospital is a CNN interviewer finds him.

Oh, CNN makes everything better. This is like the most infuriating part of this entire fucking story. I've read the transcript of this interview. It sets the entire template for everything we know about John Walker Lynde. Like this four stupid minutes tells Americans the story they will tell themselves over and over again for years. So first of all, the interviewer comes up to him and says, hey, who are you? He turns the camera on.

Lynde says, you don't have permission to film me. The CNN guy says, we respect that while still filming. And he's like, we're not even worried about the interview right now. We're just concerned about your welfare. Do you have any messages you want to send home, whatever? John says, if you're concerned about my welfare, don't film me. And then the CNN journalist goes, do you want some food? I brought some cookies.

John is like, he's under heavy sedation. He has not slept in days. He is severely traumatized from whatever he has seen in the last seven days. He says, I really can't think very clearly right now. Please let's not do this. And the journalist just keeps filming and interviews him anyway. And so the interview itself is so weird. He's asking him, they almost sound like networking questions.

He's trying to catch him in, you're a member of Al Qaeda. So he asks him, he's like, oh yeah, have you heard of this guy, Abdul Aziz? Do you know him? Turns out that's a famous Al Qaeda warlord. But John does not know this. So John's like, why are you asking me if we know the same people right now? One of the quotes that he gets is about jihad. He asked John something about, did you want to wage jihad?

And John is like, well yes, of course. Because he understands that word to just mean struggle, which is what it means literally. There's also this little exchange they have about, he's asking about the basement. He's like, did you think you were going to die? And John is like, of course I thought I was going to die. And he's like, is it your dream to die? Like, do you want to become a martyr?

Come on. And John says, it's the dream of every Muslim to become a martyr, which again is true in this literal sense. But once that gets broadcast in America, that basically becomes, are you a suicide bomber? I mean, I just feel like knowing what I know now about the details of this prisoner of war situation, I feel like I see this as a story of young American is too idealistic,

not thoughtful enough about the ethical complexities of what he's doing and then receives all the punishment anyone could ever experience. Oh yeah. Like, continue, just continue. I mean, he also, you know, he starts, the media immediately starts blaming him for the death of the CIA agent Spawn. Oh, come on. Exactly. So they are victims of the same thing, right?

Neither one of them had any idea this uprising was going to happen. No. I found footage where they interview the CNN journalist, Matt Lauer interviews him and, you know, he's talking about like, we pulled John out of this basement and Matt Lauer says, were you surprised that an American would be willing to endure such hardship in a fight against other Americans? Oh.

So like the idea that like John never signed up to fight Americans and John really didn't give that much of a shit about America, like that never appeared. Well, it was just a time when we were, because what I remember was that after 9-11, there was a sense that like we were going to go get Osama bin Laden and it wasn't going to take very long. And I remember for some reason vividly remember Bruce Willis

being quoted in a magazine saying that he would like pay the CIA or whoever to like put him alone in a room with bin Laden. Oh my God. There was just this feeling of like, you know, a real bloodlust for the people who had planned September 11th. Absolutely. And so it feels like we wanted to get our hands on someone who mattered and, you know, we're willing to jam someone into that template.

And so, I mean, one of the things I found this really interesting analysis of this that in the month after John was captured, there were 581 news stories about him. What's really interesting is that in his little Arabic speaking unit, there was another American. Oh, hey. However, the guy's name was Yasser Hamdi. Uh-huh.

And basically because he's Arab, the rest of the country is kind of like, oh, okay. Yep. He only appeared in the media 13 times. And so a lot of the narrative around John was sort of this betrayal of whiteness, this betrayal of sort of American-ness. Yeah, fallen whiteness. Yeah.

And that so much of the media narrative at the time when you read all these old stories, it's always like, how did this nice suburban kid join the Taliban? There's this abysmal Time Magazine article from 2003 where they spend four long paragraphs talking about John's internet trolling when he was 14. And then they spend one paragraph on his entire time in Afghanistan. The crimes that he's actually accused of Taliban, yada, yada, yada. But like anyway, he was such an internet troll like 10 years ago. That's where the focus is, right?

It's all about juxtaposing this normal suburban Northern California kid with this Al Qaeda terrorist that he became. I've been thinking about how serial killers became such a cornerstone of pop culture. People just always want narratives about evil hiding in plain sight. And so the story where John Walker Lynn grew up with an idyllic American ideal white suburban life, but then he was evil all along. And so he had to become a terrorist. That's a story that's going to sell well the same way that any story involving a serial

killer is going to sell well. Totally. Yeah. And when you're talking about an Arab American, it's like the evil isn't really hiding there because we don't really trust Arab Americans anyway. Right. So 40% of the US population wants him to get the death penalty. Oh my God!

For what? The thing that everybody says is treason. Well, that's the thing like John Ashcroft says extremely bananas things. Fucking Rudy Giuliani shows up to say I believe the death penalty is the appropriate remedy. Above your pay grade, Rudy. Hillary Clinton calls him a traitor. Nobody was like arguing for due process. And doesn't John Ashcroft say something about like based on the severity of the crimes he's

accused of, we have to violate his due process rights in some way? Yeah. So I mean, this is the ugliest part of the story. John Ashcroft gives a number of press conferences where he says, you know, one of the quotes is Americans who love their country don't dedicate themselves to killing Americans. John eventually does come back to the US, but not for another month. After he goes to this hospital, they transfer him to this extremely remote facility in the hills of Afghanistan called Camp Rhino.

So almost immediately they strap him to a gurney. They put really thick plastic restraints on him. They don't give him food or water. They don't treat his bullet wound. Oh God. And they put him in a shipping container. Wow. They wait two days.

He's totally malnourished. He has no idea what is going on. He's in a blindfold. There's also there's photos of the surface where one in which he's strapped to the gurney. There's another one where a bunch of soldiers have written shithead on his blindfold and are sort of posing around him. That's another one that went public eventually. Oh wow.

Because his father is a former Justice Department lawyer, his dad gets a lawyer pretty quickly. Like his dad knows how the system works and is like super concerned. Eventually after two days, John is called into some sort of interrogation room. They don't tell him that his dad has a lawyer, even though they know that. He asks for a lawyer and they say, well, there aren't any lawyers here. And then they imply that if he doesn't talk, they're just going to shove him back into the shipping container forever. Oh God.

Oh God. So they end up basically taking this long confession from him, but they don't actually write down the confession. So the only actual document of this that we have is the wire, like the cable that the interrogator sends back to the attorney general. But yeah, but because no one wrote it down, we can't hear them suggesting things for him to confess to and him then confessing to them. There's no notes.

There's no videotape. He never signs a written confession, right? They're like, even if you're a teenage shoplifter, they show you a piece of paper with like, what are you admitting to? That never happens. So the only written document we have is the sort of after the fact interpretation by the guy who was interrogating him. That's the only thing that ever gets written down.

That's terrible. So finally, after this is now three weeks since he's been shot, they finally treat the wound, they finally do surgery. All of this is before Abu Ghraib, by the way. We had kind of some plausible deniability about not torturing people in the Middle East at the time, yeah. Although, fascinatingly, most of this was actually known at the time because John's lawyers end up filing a bunch of motions talking about the torture.

Yes, but he is a treasonous traitor, Michael. No one cares if we torture someone who commits treason. That's the thing. Everyone was just kind of like, eh. It's just like, I don't understand any cosmology where you think it's acceptable to put someone in a shipping container with no food or water and an untreated bullet wound. I don't care what you think that person might be guilty of. You know, it's one thing if you have been personally wronged by them,

but this is the government. And this is what's so chilling about it, is that at the time John Ashcroft is basically saying that he's not subject to the Geneva Conventions because basically the unit, like the Taliban that he was in, is fundamentally illegal. That seems rather an academic distinction. I mean, whatever, right? And then there's this thing of, you know, he's an enemy combatant, so he's not subject to any constitutional rights, which is also insane.

Basically, the argument is that if you're accused of terrorism, none of these protections apply, which, you know, as a legal principle is just completely backwards. Maybe sometimes the search for information is just an excuse to torture someone. Well, this is actually what's really fascinating and something that John's father brings up later, that they didn't interrogate him before they tortured him. This is a guy that you think had contact with bin Laden. Maybe you should ask him where bin Laden is. You could have actually maybe gotten some decent intelligence from this guy.

To me, it's not even like it's evil, though it obviously is, but it's more just like incompetent. Yeah. There's also really interestingly, there's emails from within the Justice Department, where the ethics advisor of the Justice Department sent messages to Rumsfeld and Ashcroft saying, you can't do this. That there's this woman named Jessalyn Radek, who's dope, who basically said, like, no. I mean, A, nothing he says is fucking admissible if you're getting it through torture.

Just from legal grounds, this is not clever. Secondly, no, you have to let the Red Cross see him. You have to advise him of his rights. He has a lawyer. She laid out why this was illegal. They basically fired her. Even after a court order, they suppressed the internal emails in which she had complained. Someone, probably her, leaked them to Newsweek.

There's now all these emails where the Justice Department knew how bad this was and did it anyway. And there's even emails between lawyers for the Justice Department basically saying, we have no case against this guy because all he did was join the Taliban. So this lawyer also points out that it's not clear what the actual crime is here. Well, and so what is the crime, as he brought to trial? Yes. So I've read the indictment.

The indictment charges him with 10 counts. It's just it's just it's very bad. It's like it's conspiracy to kill Americans. It's conspiracy to kill the CIA agent. It's knowing about 9-11 but not doing anything about it. What's really interesting is because his lawyers are threatening to go public with the torture, the prosecutors eventually come up with a plea deal where they drop every single charge against him other than violating sanctions.

What is violating sanctions? So it's basically the kind of thing where like if you know an Iranian warlord wants to set up a bank account at Bank of America, you're not supposed to give it to them, right? Because we're not supposed to aid in a bet like terrorist regimes, whatever. This is the law that you would apply against Chevron. Like you you don't do this for individuals. So the only thing they ever get him on is that he provided material support to a actor that was under sanctions and the material support was himself,

right, that he provided his own services. And then they doubled his sentence because he had a gun while doing it. So it's like aggravated because he had a rifle while he was doing it. It's also super noteworthy that they dropped the conspiracy charges. They dropped everything involving Al Qaeda. They dropped everything involving Spawn, the CIA agent. So even by the government's own case, John Walker Lind was not a terrorist. John Walker Lind was not an Al Qaeda.

He's an aggravated sanctions violator. Yeah, exactly. Right. And so so I mean so much of this is timing. They scheduled the trial for August of 2002, which means that it would have been going on at the one year anniversary of 9-11. When they got him out of Afghanistan, they brought him back to DC so that they could try him in the Virginia suburbs where the Pentagon is located.

You know, facing all of this, his lawyers, they agree to a 20 year long sentence for this sanctions violation and for carrying a rifle basically. My God. And you know, one thing that's really interesting and I cannot get over is since 9-11, since the beginning of the war on terror, whatever, there's been something like 400 other Americans that have been charged for participating with the Taliban or even joining Al Qaeda.

There's a guy who joined Al Qaeda, planned an attack on the New York subway system. Wow. He only got 10 years. Timing. Timing. It's also that a lot of these other people who had done essentially the same thing, they were higher up in the organization. They could use their leverage and their information about Al Qaeda

to get a shorter sentence for themselves. Whereas because John was such a grunt and frankly, so uninterested in the political dimensions of anything that he was doing, he has no intel to give the US. It's this weird conundrum where it's like the lowness of his place on the totem pole is what makes his sentence so high. But then if he was that low on the totem pole, why is his sentence so high? I remember the sense that I had of all this as it was happening

was that he was an American who had gone and he had become a terrorist and he had committed terrorist acts and that he maybe had been behind 9-11 in some way. I compared him to Timothy McVeigh in passing at the top of this episode and these kinds of associations aren't random. Totally. I had an idea in my head of he was at least credibly accused of specific acts. I don't think that we can reasonably call him a terrorist based on what we know.

Absolutely not. It's worth staring it in the face, the fact that he joined an armed struggle. It's not like he joined the Boy Scouts and then he got caught up in this war. He joined to do war. Like he learned how to fire rocket propelled grenades at this training camp. He learned how to fire AK-47s. He definitely did something that most of us feel deeply uncomfortable with. The place that I came down on this legally and morally speaking,

tell me if you totally disagree with this. But to me, it feels like he was fucking negligent in joining first one terrorist organization and then another terrorist adjacent organization. There is a real negligence there. Like to me, it crosses the line into like you should have known. However, whatever lesson going to prison would teach him, I think he learned from like being shot in the leg and trapped in a basement and watching people burn alive around him.

Like I don't think there was any way if he had gotten probation or something that he would come out of this being like, was it a good idea to join the Taliban? Who can say? Right. It is impossible to teach somebody more of a lesson than what he went through. Yeah, it's an interesting thing because he's actually been punished more than even the American prison system can aspire to punish anyone.

Exactly. Which is truly astounding. First time. And so yeah, the only thing left is the kind of probation where you would be like, okay, here's how you can find fulfillment in your life outside of rigid theosophies. Also, let's deal with the trauma that you've been through because trauma doesn't actually make earlier trauma get better. It's like, if something's too salty, you don't add salt.

I don't know how much simpler I can break it down. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I agree with you. I mean, yeah, I mean, another thing, you know, now that he's been in prison for 17 years, you know, he got out, what was it, last week, two weeks ago, you know, there's now, it seems like you also have to deal with the collateral consequences of what it does to imprison somebody for 17 years where there were some quotes that came out.

I think it was last year where a journalist was writing him letters and asked him about ISIS. And they said, you know, does ISIS represent Islam? He writes back a handwritten letter that says, yes, ISIS represents Islam, and they're doing a spectacular job. The Islamic State is clearly very sincere and serious about fulfilling the long neglected religious obligation of establishing a caliphate through armed struggle, which is the only correct method. I know, it's like, John, you know, we don't know very much like he's been

out of contact with the outside world for another 17 years. It's not clear what information he has about ISIS. There's another journalist contacted him about ISIS, and I think it was 2014, and he's like, I've never heard of ISIS. What do they do? So we don't really know what he knows about the rest of the world. He still seems painfully naive. There's a journalist that writes him and says, like, you know, what do you think about the violence that ISIS is doing? And he's basically like, oh, no, like the only people that ISIS has killed

have been people that went to ISIS territory without permission. I'm sure if you asked for permission, they'd show you around. And it's like, John, really like, so yeah, what do you think? What do you think are the lessons of all this? Yeah, my big thought at the end of this is that I just think that people should not torture other people ever. That's fair. I support you. Because it didn't, it didn't improve anything in this story.

And I feel as if a big part of this was based on our need to believe that it's necessary to torture people sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. Would you say something funny to end on? Because this is a fucking, this is one of the darker ones. I know. I don't know if I can turn this one around. Why don't we just fade out on discordant laughter? That's usually what we do. It's just like less,

usually it's less dark than this. I know. I guess I got nothing. I mean, okay, here's like a possible silver lining. The fact that he is out of prison will cause people to revisit this event or visit it if they never heard about it. And a new generation that never experienced this news or thought they experienced it is going to look at what happened and be like, what the fuck was that about? And that's how progress is made. So that's something. I just think the biggest lesson to come out of this is never become so famous

that people look into what you wrote on the internet when you were 14. Yeah, that's a very good general rule of thumb. I think that's the key. Oh, but read my Newsy's fan fiction though.