A person reported to be John Walker Lindh leaving prison. Photo / Getty Images
A person reported to be John Walker Lindh leaving prison. Photo / Getty Images
John Walker Lindh, known widely as the "American Taliban," has been released from prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, according to the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Lindh was freed on probation after serving 17 years of a 20-year sentence for providing support to the Taliban. He was captured during the invasionof Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 and returned to the United States the next year.
The bureau provided no further details, citing a policy against revealing inmate release plans for "safety, security and privacy reasons." A lawyer for Lindh, William Cummings, declined to comment.
The New York Times had previously reported that Lindh, 38, was scheduled for release Thursday. At the time, Lindh, his parents, lawyers and prosecutors all declined to discuss his plans. But CNN has since reported that, according to Cummings, Lindh will live in Virginia.
Lindh was 17 when he left his home in California in 1998 to study Arabic in Yemen. He made his way to Pakistan in 2000 and later to Afghanistan, where he served as a Taliban volunteer at an al-Qaida training camp.
After his capture, Lindh was held at a prison near Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, where an uprising claimed the first US casualty of the war, a 32-year-old CIA officer named Johnny Micheal Spann.
Spann was killed after questioning Lindh, though the government offered no evidence that Lindh participated in the revolt. At trial, he pleaded guilty to charges of providing support to the Taliban and carrying a rifle and grenade.
Johnny Spann, Spann's father, remains disappointed in the outcome of Lindh's trial.
Johnny Micheal Spann is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. Photo / AP
"We've got a traitor that was given 20 years and I can't do anything about it," Spann, a real estate dealer in Winfield, Alabama, previously said to The Times. "He was given a 20-year sentence when it should've been life in prison."
Under the conditions of his release, Lindh is barred from owning an internet-connected device without permission from the probation office. He is also barred, unless otherwise approved, from any online communications not in English and may not communicate with any known extremists.
Lindh is prohibited from owning a passport and from international travel, too, a ban that prevents the immediate possibility of a move to Ireland, where Lindh obtained citizenship through his grandmother while in prison.
Under the terms of his release, he must also undergo mental health counselling.
At his sentencing in late 2002, Lindh said that he condemned "terrorism on every level, unequivocally" and had made a mistake in joining the Taliban. But assessments in recent years suggest that he may not have fully rejected extremist views.
The American Taliban soldier John Walker-Lindh treated at an Army hospital on December 2, 2001 in Sheberghan, Afghanistan. Photo / Getty Images
A 2017 report by the National Counterterrorism Center, first published by Foreign Policy magazine, said that as of the previous year, Lindh had "continued to advocate for global jihad and to write and translate violent extremist texts."
Another 2017 assessment, from the Bureau of Prisons, said he had made supportive statements about the Islamic State group.
In a statement on Thursday, however, the Bureau of Prisons said it had found, through staff interviews, that many inmates turned away from radicalised ideology while in prison thanks to "self-study," prison programming or the length of their sentence.
"While we are aware of a small number of this population who have returned to BOP custody, none have returned to BOP custody for terrorism-related charges," the agency said.
