Lindh, Frank - short clip - TaketheGlovesOff

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-	Under the Laws of War and under the Geneva conventions	0:00
	we treat prisoners humanely.	0:03
	That's what we do.	0:05
	It's not just the law.	0:07
	It's the way we are as people.	0:08
	And I had this great assurance	0:10
	of the sense of assurance that good,	0:12
	Johns now with people like my father, you know	0:13
	who are American soldiers and he'll be okay now.	0:16
	He'll be treated well and humanely.	0:19
	And even if the government's going to prosecute them	0:22
	and come after him with these accusations	0:24
	at least they'll get humane treatment	0:26
	and his wounds will be treated and so forth.	0:28
	And then as, as now we know,	0:31
	later we learned later he was treated very inhumanely	0:33
	by the Americans.	0:37
	He was allowed to send that initial letter,	0:38
	but then they packed him on a plane and they flew him	0:40
	down to Southern Afghanistan, to a place called Camp Rhino,	0:43
	a Marine Corps base in Southern Afghanistan.	0:46
	And they stripped off his clothes in the nighttime,	0:50
	in the desert there and bound him.	0:55
	His wounds were untreated.	0:58
	He had an AK 47 bullet in his leg, shrapnel wounds,	1:00
	hypothermia.	1:05
	He, he was in very bad shape from this situation	1:06
	he'd been rescued from the massacre.	1:10
	And instead of giving him medical treatment,	1:14
	they bound him hand and foot naked on a stretcher	1:16
	with these extremely painful plastic restraints and put him	1:19
	in an, in a shipping container out in the unheated desert	1:23
	in the winter in Afghanistan, he said, they say,	1:27
	later they said he was shivering uncontrollably.	1:30
	And they kept him that way for like a night and two days	1:33
	or two days and two nights, some long period	1:36
	of time strapped to a stretcher naked, the American Marines.	1:39
	And they were Marines.	1:47
	And there's photographs of all this.	1:48
	There's photographs of John's condition that were taken.	1:49
	And while they were kept them that way	1:52
	they were shouting to inside from the outside, shouting	1:55
	into the shipping container, we're going to kill you.	1:58
	We're going to kill you.	2:00
	He was in terrible condition and	2:02
	ne was psychologically in horrible,	2:04
	horrible fear of being killed by his own people.	2:07
	The American troops there at Camp Rhino.	2:10
	It was really disgraceful.	2:13
	John is labeled as the government as the, by the Pentagon	2:15
	as detainee 001 in the War on Terror.	2:19
	This has come out later.	2:23
	He's the first detainee and this practice	2:24
	of stripping them naked, stripping prisoners naked	2:28
	and torturing them physical, putting them	2:31
	through physical torture is something that was not unique	2:33
	to my son.	2:39
	It was practiced on a wide scale basis in Afghanistan.	2:40
	And then later in Iraq.	2:44
	In John's case, that we can trace literally to an order	2:45
	from the secretary.	2:48
	Take the gloves off, and I think had a particular meaning	2:50
	to the soldiers at that Marine base	2:53
	at Camp Rhino and to their commanders.	2:55
	It meant you could do anything you want to this boy.	2:58
	And it meant that that, like my father used to say,	3:02
	your name, rank, and serial number, and treat them humanely,	3:06
	that those rules were off.	3:08
	We're under different rules.	3:10
	He was, he was very clear.	3:11
	I think Rumsfeld was clear that we're now going	3:12
	to have different rules.	3:15
	There's something different now.	3:17
	We're not having the Geneva conventions.	3:18
	This is, for whatever reason, we're going to do	3:20
	a different approach here.	3:22
	We're going to abuse the hell out of these people.	3:23
	And so, yeah, I believe it's a policy.	3:26

Item Info

Title:

Lindh, Frank - short clip - TaketheGlovesOff

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:

d6fa9f027e26e7c7dbfa9e39c83a5a54
witnesstoguantanamo
ark:/87924/r4902616f
45502770-b9dd-434b-ab5b-edbf96bd4586

Permalink:

https://idn.duke.edu/ark:/87924/r4902616f

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Lindh, Frank - short clip - TaketheGlovesOff

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