Lindh, Frank - short clip - WhyWasJohnThere
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Transcript
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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 |
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