TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — John Walker Lindh, the so-called
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — John Walker Lindh, the so-called “American Taliban” whose capture in Afghanistan riveted a country in the early days after the September 11 attacks, has been released from prison, authorities said.
After serving 17 years of a 20-year sentence, Lindh, the first US-born detainee in the war on terror, on Thursday walked out of a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, the Bureau of Prisons confirmed, and will join the small, but growing, group of Americans convicted of terror-related charges attempting to re-enter into society.
Lindh will live in Virginia subject to the direction of his probation officer, his lawyer, Bill Cummings, tells CNN. But some are already calling for an investigation into his time in prison — where he is said in two US government reports to have made pro-ISIS and other extremist statements — that could send him back into detention.
Reports of Lindh’s maintained radicalization, detailed in two 2017 official counterterrorism assessments, are also driving questions about the efforts of the US government to rehabilitate former sympathizers like him, who are expected to complete prison sentences in waves in the coming years.
Raised in the suburbs north of San Francisco, Lindh took an interest in Islam at a young age, converting to the religion at 16 and moving to the Middle East to learn Arabic after finishing high school.
In 2000, according to documentation of his interrogations, Lindh went to Pakistan and trained with a radical Islamic group there before moving to Afghanistan and joining the Taliban.
Because he was not native to Afghanistan and did not speak the local languages, Lindh told investigators that he joined the “Arab group,” or al Qaeda, studying maps and explosives, fighting on a front line, and at one point, meeting with Osama bin Laden.
When US troops first encountered Lindh in November 2001, just weeks after the September 11 attacks, he was bedraggled and injured.
A CNN camera filmed as Lindh, a daze cast over his dirty face, told American forces how he had wound up at a detention camp in northern Afghanistan and survived a Taliban uprising there that killed hundreds of prisoners and a CIA officer, Johnny Michael Spann.
Lindh admitted to participating in the revolt near Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan, but prosecutors did not say that he had a role in Spann’s death.
Initially charged with a raft of serious offenses, including conspiracy to kill US nationals, Lindh, in 2002, struck a deal reportedly offered by prosecutors in part to prevent details of the apparent mistreatment of Lindh at the hand of US forces by his defense. Lindh pleaded guilty to fighting alongside the Taliban.
At a sentencing hearing in Virginia that year, he sniffled and nearly broke down as he addressed the court in a 14-minute speech.
“Had I realized then what I know now about the Taliban, I would never have joined them,” Lindh said. “I never understood jihad to mean anti-Americanism or terrorism.”
That contrition has been contested by a pair of official reports, from the National Counterterrorism Center and the federal Bureau of Prisons, that were first published by Foreign Policy in 2017.
According to the NCTC report, as of May 2016, Lindh “continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts.” In March 2016, the report says, he “told a television news producer that he would continue to spread violent extremist Islam upon his release.”
Lindh had made “pro ISIS statements to various reporters,” the Bureau of Prisons report also stated.
In an email to his father included in the BOP report, Lindh said that he was “not interested in renouncing my beliefs or issuing condemnations.”
The two assessments do not provide details for the statements, and the BOP and the NCTC declined to comment to CNN on the reports.
On Wednesday, a local NBC News station in Los Angeles released excerpts from correspondence a producer there had with Lindh from behind bars, where Lindh said in 2015 he thought ISIS was doing a “spectacular job.
