To be honest, I’m not sure what this piece is trying to argue, but I think it’s an interesting read for some of the information, especially three years after the fact.
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Dumping of the Links
Can Islam Change? I would have liked it better if he asked “Can Muslims Change,” but the points are still interesting. I am loving Bollywood Muslim. The Muslim Brotherhood (Ikhwan al-Muslimin) in the US. Ohio Muslims engaged in the process. Michael Muhammad Knight on Progressive Islam. (I agree with him on CAIR and ISNA). Reconstruction and Planning Kabul. [PDF] Don’t stop Batman, stop the Brownie. A take on the second debate that I never would have had. Dishoom.
Boston beats New York
What a headline! This whole A-Rod trade has got Boston in an uproar, so I thought I’d give them a win over New York (namely me as the officially designated representative of the state.) I was working on a post about inclusion in the state, one which will probably still appear in some form, when today’s Boston Globe ran this op-ed about the French and the Bay Staters.
Prisoner Treatment, Morality, and #Torture
Juan Cole is brilliant in his analysis of how the US lost the moral high ground on prisoner treatment, in part because of our torture polices. But I fear that the argument that the public humiliation of prisoners is against international law won’t take the US very far after 8 years of Bush-Cheney. After the evidence surfaced that the US military took all those humiliating pictures of prisoners at Abu Ghraib to blackmail them by threatening to make them public, the US assertion of support for this principle of the Geneva Conventions will be met with, well, let us say…
One thought on “John Walker Lindh”
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It’s funny how Lindh was first an example to civil rights activist as to how a prosecution of an enemy combatant should work (especially compared to Hamdi and Padilla), and now he’s an example of how a prosecution should not have worked. I remember all the complaints that the white boy from Marin County was treated better (in that he had the opportunity for a trial and well-heeled counsel) than Hamdi and Padilla. Now, the same people see Lindh as a victim treated far worse than Hamdi (and we’ll see how mi cabron, Padilla, will end up).
Plenty of smarmy ideas in the article (it’s Mother Jones, after all) and I don’t have time to whack them all — one lie is that Lindh had no support outside his family at the time. Not true, a handful of Salafis were protesting and praying outside EDVA every day Lindh was there. You can google “free john walker lindh” and take a look at the support now for this moron (am I telegraphing my opinion here?). But I do have a suggestion: he can sue his lawyer for malpractice for counseling him to cop the plea. Just kidding, Jimmy (if you’re a blog reader) — I don’t advocate suing lawyers : ^).
One other comment — the article clearly takes the view that the war on terror is a legal problem the success of which can be judged by the number of convictions the government has won. And that is probably the biggest problem of all — the idea that we can depose, subpoena and “Mirandize” our way in this fight.