Why punish Lindh--but not Fonda?(John Walker Lindh)(Jane Fonda )

A small item in a newspaper caught my attention a few weeks back. It reported that the father of the man who became known as "the American Taliban" asked President Bush to grant clemency to his son. The request got Frank Lindh nowhere, and his son remains in prison.

Many Americans have forgotten John Walker Lindh's name. Many more never even heard of him. Here's a reminder. Several months after the September 2001 terrorist attack on our nation, with American forces already engaged in toppling Afghanistan's Taliban government, a 20-year-old American from Marin County, California, was found in Afghanistan among an assortment of dead and wounded Taliban fighters in a prison where U.S. forces were holding captives. A recent convert to Islam, he had journeyed to Afghanistan only six months earlier to study the Koran and soon found himself pressed into the military forces of his newly found friends and co-religionists. Asked to choose between being trained as a terrorist or fighting against Afghanistan's anti-Taliban Northern Alliance, he opted for the latter and was captured after U.S. forces had joined with the Northern Alliance to topple Afghanistan's government. He participated only in action against the Northern Alliance, never knowingly against U.S. troops and then only if American advisers happened to be among his enemy.

Brought to the United States and charged with conspiring to kill Americans and supporting terrorists, he avoided a life sentence by pleading guilty to lesser charges and is currently serving 20 years in a federal prison. It can be said of him that he personally targeted no American; had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack; refused terrorist training; and never allowed himself to be used to denounce the country of his birth. His crime was being part of the government that was then ruling Afghanistan. That regime's crime was shielding bin Laden who was hardly known by most Americans until after the devastation at New York's World Trade Towers and elsewhere.

I'm no fan of John Walker Lindh. I continue to find it amazing that any American would follow the path he took. But if he earned punishment, how about another individual who committed far worse crimes in 1972, was never charged, and manages still to remain a revered figure--Jane Fonda?

Think back to the days when the Vietnam War was still raging. By 1972, tens of thousands of Americans had already been killed; many thousands more had been wounded; hundreds of captured Americans were rotting in North Vietnam's prisons; and our nation was being torn apart by an increasingly unpopular war.