First Victim on Road to Abu Ghraib: Rumsfeld Was Behind Torture of John Walker Lindh

By Dave Lindorff

 Should Congress or the US Department of Justice—or perhaps Spanish Investigating Magistrate Baltasar Garzón—ever decide to seriously prosecute those in the US who are responsible for the Bush/Cheney administration’s policy of torturing captives in the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars and the so-called “War” on Terror, they should go back and examine the case of imprisoned American John Walker Lindh, the young man who was captured with Taliban fighters back in the early days of the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

    It is well documented that Lindh was subjected to what any objective observer would call torture—duct-taped naked to a gurney, his eyes also duct-taped shut, left alone for 23 hours at a stretch in a closed, unheated, unlit steel shipping container, his wounded leg left untreated for a week, removed to be interrogated, threatened repeatedly with death by his American captives, mocked when he asked to see an attorney (his Constitutional right as a US citizen).

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DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist. His latest book is “The Case for Impeachment” (St. Martin’s Press, 2006). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net