U.S. prosecutors also acknowledged that they have no evidence that John Walker Lindh, the U.S. citizen captured with Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, has committed any crime.

In cases where a prisoner is found not guilty in a military tribunal, Rumsfeld said, "it does not change the fact that he is an enemy combatant." Even though "it might not be possible to establish beyond a reasonable doubt" that an inmate "committed a particular crime," he added, Washington is under no obligation to release the person.

White House officials say no charges have yet been filed against the 544 prisoners held under inhuman conditions at the U.S. prison camps, nor have they been afforded prisoner-of-war status. U.S. officials assert that Geneva Convention rules "apply to some extent" to imprisoned Taliban officers and soldiers, but not those deemed to be members of al Qaeda.

Under the Geneva Convention, prisoners have the right to return to their countries at the end of a military conflict. "The way I would characterize the 'end of the conflict' is when we feel that there are not effective global terrorist networks functioning in the world," said Rumsfeld. He indicated that Washington would decide on its own whether it would release any of the prisoners.

The 300 imprisoned at Washington's illegally-occupied Guantánamo Bay naval base in Cuba are kept in open-air, eight-foot by eight-foot chain-link cages. One military commandant of the camp earlier told the press that some of the prisoners are "victims of circumstance" and are innocent. This past week Maj. Gen. Michael Dunlavy, head of U.S. antiterror intelligence, told the Miami Herald that some of those caged at Guantánamo are "lost souls" who could provide very little useful information. At least two of them suffer from severe mental illness, he said.

Among those held at Guantánamo are "people who were lost in society," said Dunlavy, and others who "were drawn into the promise of a jihad to fight the Northern Alliance." The Herald said that among those "are captives who provide little to zero intelligence value to the U.S. military and civilian law enforcement agencies."

The inmates have been protesting their treatment by organizing a hunger strike. U.S. military doctors have begun force-feeding two prisoners who refused food for 30 days to protest their detention at Guantánamo Bay. The doctors sedated the prisoners, then forced tubes through their noses and throat to pump nutrients into their stomachs. The military task force running the prison camp said the two detainees refused to eat "because they wanted to go home and not eating provided a means for them to protest their detention."  
 
No evidence against Lindh
After a public campaign to demonize U.S. citizen John Walker Lindh, government officials now admit they have no evidence he broke any laws. Lindh was indicted February 5 by a federal grand jury after being captured in Afghanistan while Washington conducted its bombing raids there. The grand jury in the Eastern District of Virginia filed a 10-count indictment against him that included "conspiracy to murder U.S. citizens" and "providing material support and resources to terrorist organizations."

In a question on whether the government's case against Lindh included charges of attempts to kill CIA agent Johnny Spann, who was slain in a prison uprising in Afghanistan, John Davis, an assistant U.S. attorney at the court hearing in Alexandria, Virginia, said, "There is no evidence at this time and no allegation of personal involvement in that overt act of this conspiracy."

The judge in the case, T.S. Ellis, said the prosecution did not have to prove that Lindh "actually shot at or did anything directly against Americans but that he joined the conspiracy to harm Americans." According to the Times, Ellis asserted that "a conspirator does not have to know everything that the conspiracy did."

In addition to using conspiracy charges to frame up five Cuban revolutionaries last year, the U.S. government is patching together another "conspiracy" case to railroad Zacarias Moussaoui, dubbed the "20th hijacker," to death row. Moussaoui is accused of training to join the 19 men who died in the September 11 suicide attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He had been arrested in Minnesota three weeks earlier and was in prison that day.

A federal grand jury charged Moussaoui with conspiring to plan the September 11 attacks. The Justice Department announced March 28 that it would seek the death penalty against him. "It is unusual, lawyers said, to seek a death penalty in a case in which the defendant had no direct involvement in the fatal acts," said an article in the International Herald Tribune. Moussaoui's trial, like Lindh's, will be conducted in Virginia, one of the states leading the charge in legalized murder.

"My son is a scapegoat," said Mous-saoui's mother, Aicha Moussaoui, noting that she had expected the death penalty announcement. "They can't find the people who are truly responsible for this crime."  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home