Lindh, Frank - short clip - WhyWasJohnThere

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-	In America after 9/11,	0:00
	people, the media and the government	0:04
	and the ordinary people who take their information	0:05
	from the media and the government,	0:08
	began to confuse the Taliban without Al-Qaeda.	0:10
	And everybody associated with all of that	0:13
	was considered to be a terrorist.	0:16
	It was an irrational,	0:18
	fear-based, emotional response to the 9/11 attacks.	0:20
	The 9/11 attacks were carried out	0:25
	by authentic, hardened terrorists,	0:27
	who really had a depraved sense of values.	0:29
	And they killed all those innocent people; a horrible thing.	0:33
	But soldiers fighting in this civil war,	0:36
	inside of Afghanistan, were just that,	0:39
	they were just soldiers in a civil war in Afghanistan.	0:41
	And many of them, like John,	0:45
	were there for altruistic, idealistic reasons.	0:47
	They were there because they thought	0:51
	they were going to defend innocent people.	0:53
	They were in fact, defending innocent people from attack.	0:55
	So it's, again, I would certainly not want my son to go	0:59
	to Afghanistan and volunteer for the army there	1:03
	in a civil war like that.	1:06
	I wish he hadn't done that, but that is not terrorism.	1:07
	That's just joining an army.	1:11
	That's what Ernest Hemingway did	1:13
	for the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.	1:14
	He fought in an army.	1:18
	So I was pretty confident.	1:20
	I understand the question, you know.	1:21
	Well, how do you know?	1:23
	Because you go on Larry King, you know,	1:24
	in these early days in December	1:26
	and you haven't had contact with your son for seven months,	1:27
	how do you know that he hasn't become a terrorist	1:30
	and hasn't aligned himself with terrorism?	1:33
	And the answer is on some level,	1:37
	I don't really know completely,	1:38
	and I have a little anxiety about that,	1:40
	but for the most part,	1:41
	I feel pretty confident about my son	1:42
	and how, you know, what the kind of person he is.	1:45
	And I've been vindicated in that.	1:47
	I mean, it's certainly clear now.	1:49
	Now that all the facts are known,	1:51
	that no, John never had any involvement	1:52
	of any kind with terrorism or sympathy for terrorism.	1:54

Item Info

Title:

Lindh, Frank - short clip - WhyWasJohnThere

Date:

April 2, 2011

Interviewer:

Honigsberg, Peter Jan

Interviewee:

Lindh, Frank

Role:

Detainee Family

Description:

This interview may include descriptions of violence.
Father of John Walker Lindh
Frank Lindh, male, age 58, is the father of John Walker Lindh, a 20 year-old American citizen captured in Afghanistan in November 2001 and held for 54 days without access to family or lawyers.
Description was provided by Witness to Guantanamo.

Subject:

United States

Format:

oral histories

Language:

English

Extent:

2:02:09

Digital Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo

Source Collection:

Witness to Guantanamo Video Collection, 2009-2017

Rights:

Limited Re-Use

CC BY-NC-ND 4.0

Rights Note:

Unless otherwise noted, copyright is held by Peter Hongisberg. Under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International license, you are free to use and share these materials subject to the following conditions: You must attribute Peter Hongisberg as the rights holder. You may not use the material for commercial purposes. You may not distribute any modifications to the materials. For other uses, including commercial uses, please contact Rubenstein Library at http://library.duke.edu/rubenstein/ask.

Identifier:

e58f348ae98b5ba2f690a039d76eece5
witnesstoguantanamo
ark:/87924/r4f191084
10c13ae8-2f0b-4790-a94a-4044c07ada4a

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Lindh, Frank - short clip - WhyWasJohnThere

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