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FTA:

"""As I wrote in an article in the Nation back in 2005, on the Friday before that suppression hearing, which was set for Monday, June 12, 2002, the Justice Department, at the direction of Assistant Attorney General Chertoff himself, offered Lindh's attorneys a one-day-only, take-it-or-leave-it plea deal. Chertoff (acting with an alacrity that stands in stunning contrast to his sluggish response time several years later when faced, as secretary of homeland security, with the Katrina disaster in New Orleans) offered to drop the serious charges of conspiracy to murder Americans, supporting terrorism, and all other more serious charges, in return for a guilty plea to the two most minor charges facing Lindh, but only if - and this is the key - Lindh would cancel the scheduled evidentiary hearing. Under the offered deal, Lindh was also required to sign a letter drawn up by Chertoff's office stating that he had "not been intentionally mistreated" by his American captors, and waiving any right to claim such mistreatment or torture any time in the future. Lindh agreed to this patently false demand, but following sentencing, Chertoff also, for good measure, added a gag order--technically a "special administrative measure"--barring Lindh from even talking about his experience for the duration of his sentence.

It is now clear why Chertoff went to such hurried and extraordinary lengths to completely silence Lindh. His wasn't just the first trial in the "War on Terror." Lindh was the first victim of the secret Bush/Cheney torture program.

At the government's request, Judge Ellis sentenced Lindh to 20 years on the two minor counts to which he pleaded guilty. The sentence itself was absurd. The first charge was "carrying a weapon," something that Texans and residents of what Sarah Palin called the "real" Virginia do every day, and the second, "providing assistance" to an "enemy" of the United States, is actually a violation of a trade law intended for use against US companies that trade with proscribed countries on a government "no trade" list like Cuba or North Korea. Ordinarily, conviction on this latter violation results in a fine for the companies involved. No one goes to jail for it.

What is clear now is that Lindh was sentenced so heavily on these minor charges not because he was a traitor, a murder conspirator or terrorist, but because he was living proof, back at the time of his trial in 2002, that the US had begun, way back in late 2001, a program of brutal torture in the so-called "War on Terror."
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