Spartan Daily - Serving San Jose State University since 1934

Issue date: 4/21/09 Section: News

Media Credit: Stefan Armijo Christopher Murray, a freshman computer engineering major, takes part in a video conference with Frank Lindh, father of the accused enemy combatant John Walker Lindh, on Thursday.

Frank Lindh, the father of the man commonly known as the American Taliban, spoke to Lecturer Richard Flynn's English 1B classes in a teleconference on Thursday morning.

John Walker Lindh, Frank Lindh's son, was captured as an "enemy combatant" during the war in Afghanistan, just a month-and-a-half after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11.

He is now serving a 20-year sentence for serving as a soldier in the Taliban army and carrying a weapon.

Frank Lindh spent about 25 minutes taking questions directly from students about issues such as his son's experiences in Yemen and Afghanistan, being targeted by the U.S. government, and John's face-to-face encounter with Osama bin Laden.

"John, himself, is very scholarly and thorough in studying traditional Islam," Lindh said. "When he heard bin Laden speak, he recognized almost immediately that he was not a scholar. So John found him boring and he actually reported that he fell asleep while bin Laden was speaking at the camp one night."

Lindh said his son explained in his sentencing statement to the court in 2002 that he joined the Afghan army to help defend innocent civilians who were being victimized by the Northern Alliance warlords.

John Lindh knew that bin Laden was funding the military camp where he was training, his father said, but did not know bin Laden was funding terrorist operations as well.

A major point that Lindh emphasized was that John was immediately labeled guilty of terrorism by the government, and the media was biased and unconstitutional.

"Even the president said that he was an al-Qaida warrior, which is wrong," said Richard Gonzales, a sophomore mechanical engineering student. "We have no evidence to prove that's right, so how can we really say that he's guilty of all these crimes?"

Tan Tran, a freshman biology student, said the media blew the story out of proportion and drew conclusions without having all of the facts.

"They just kind of took a story and played on the hatred and narrow-mindedness of the people of the time and ran with it. Since it was a good story, they knew that if they took a certain side, the people would be more interested in it," Tran said.

Frank Lindh called it a reversal of the normal relationship under the Constitution.

"The government and the media and everybody just assumed, because he was in Afghanistan, they assumed that he was guilty of somehow being involved in 9/11," Lindh said. "Instead of John having to wait for the government to prove that he was guilty, it was the opposite. John … had to prove that he was innocent."

Many students at the teleconference, which consisted of mostly freshmen and sophomores, said that they were too young at the time of John Lindh's capture to understand what was happening.

"It definitely deepened my understanding of the case," said Jillian Campregher, a sophomore music performance major, "because what was going on at that time, in that part of the world, was really muddled for me. I was really young and I still don't get it all straight."

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