{"id":1476,"date":"2007-07-30T06:42:53","date_gmt":"2007-07-30T06:42:53","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2007-07-30T06:43:53","modified_gmt":"2007-07-30T06:43:53","slug":"youve_got_to_be","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=1476","title":{"rendered":"You&#8217;ve Got To Be Kidding Me"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/printedition\/opinion\/la-ed-lindh29jul29,1,6773523.story?track=rss\" target=\"browser\">LAT Editorial Board<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><i>John Walker Lindh broke the law. But &#8216;the American Taliban&#8217; wasn&#8217;t a terrorist, and he deserves clemency.<\/p>\n<p>\nThe president&#8217;s power to grant clemency &#8212; in the form of either a pardon or a commutation &#8212; is much maligned and occasionally abused, as was the case when President Bush used it to keep his colleague, I. Lewis &#8220;Scooter&#8221; Libby, from facing even a day in prison for lying and obstructing justice. But the power has its appropriate uses as well, and the case of John Walker Lindh calls out for it.<\/p>\n<p>\nKnown unfortunately as &#8220;the American Taliban,&#8221; Lindh became a symbol for fanaticism, even treason, in the early months of the nation&#8217;s response to Sept. 11. He was apprehended in late 2001 in the mountains of Afghanistan, where, at the age of 20, he was serving in the army of a nation that harbored terrorists, including Osama bin Laden. Weak and wounded, he was blindfolded and duct-taped naked to a stretcher, kept incommunicado in an uninsulated shipping container and interrogated by intelligence and FBI agents. Once home, he was charged with terrorism in a 10-count indictment, deliberately sought by the government in the Eastern District of Virginia, then still reeling from the attack on the Pentagon.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Can someone explain this to me? Use small words, I&#8217;m obviously not smart enough to understand the deep thinking behind it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The LA Times wants to free John Walker Lindh. He&#8217;s only a lad&#8230;society made him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1476"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1476\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1476"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1476"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1476"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}