News media obscured that Lindh fought against an Afghan faction, not the United States
Evidence
John Walker Lindh’s trajectory goes as follows: he was born in Maryland in 1981 and raised in Marin, California, which is repeatedly described in news reports as a liberal town where Feng Shui, Buddhism, hippies, and vegans are commonplace. At age twelve, he became interested in Islam after watching Spike Lee’s film Malcolm X. He attended an alternative high school where he designed his own course of study. Interested in religion and inspired by Malcolm X’s autobiography and hip-hop music, he converted to Islam in 1999 and went to Yemen to study Arabic. In search of more rigorous study, Lindh left Yemen for Pakistan, where he was exposed to Islamic fundamentalism and began training as a soldier for Al Qaeda. In November 2001 he was captured and imprisoned by the Afghan Northern Alliance (a group that opposed the Taliban) and later found by the U.S. military. While two CIA operatives interrogated him, a prison uprising broke out, and one of the operatives was killed. Many news stories do not clearly state that Lindh was fighting with Al Qaeda for the Taliban against the Afghan Northern Alliance, not against the United States. Regardless, the U.S. government charged him with conspiring to murder Americans and supporting a terrorist organization. — Evelyn Alsultany, Arabs and Muslims in the Media, 902
Categorization
- QUESTION: Why did news organizations systematically fail to clarify which side Lindh was fighting against? Worth chasing the specific editorial choices behind this omission.
- XREF: Connects to post-9/11 moral panic scholarship and Cohen’s work on how ambiguous facts get flattened into conformist narratives.