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I. INTRODUCTION
In late 1998, the Lindhs, two middle-class American parents, financed their teenage son's desire to venture from California across the globe to Yemen, where their devout Muslim son sought instruction in ancient Arabic tongues.1 The young Lindh abandoned his purely academic endeavors after traveling to Pakistan with an Islamic missionary, where he eventually settled in a madrasa2 outside Bannu in the Northern provinces.3 By the summer of 2001, Lindh chose to take up arms with the Pakistanis during the ongoing hostilities between Muslims and Hindus in the disputed region of Kashimir.4 Later, Lindh aligned himself with Ansar, a group of non-Afghan fighters, whose training was funded by Osama bin Laden.5 Soon, he was sent to fight the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan.6 Finally, after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Lindh found himself surrendering to the United States military, who transported Lindh and the rest of the captured enemy forces to a fortress prison in Mazar-e Sharif.7 The confined inmates revolted, but Walker was re-captured.8
After an extensive investigation into the events surrounding Walker Lindh's capture and subsequent arrest, an eight-count indictment was issued against Walker Lindh.9 Six months after the Grand Jury in the Eastern District of Virginia issued the indictment, Walker Lindh negotiated a plea bargain with the government in which he agreed to plead guilty to two charges: supplying services to the Taliban and carrying an explosive during the commission of a felony.10 On October 4, 2002, Walker Lindh was sentenced to twenty years in prison.11 Interestingly, as part of the plea agreement, the government agreed to "forego any right it ha[d] to treat [Walker Lindh] as an unlawful enemy combatant based on the conduct alleged in the Indictment."12 Arguably, this element of the plea agreement suggests that the government expressly recognized Lindh had a status under international humanitarian law because it alludes to Lindh as an unlawful enemy combatant. Nevertheless, the government ultimately opted to use the domestic criminal justice system as its adjudicatory framework for handling Lindh, rather than the legal mechanisms set forth under the Geneva Conventions. The government, defying prediction, positioned itself quite differently in the case of the second American Taliban, Yaser Esam Hamdi.13
Months after the first detainees were transferred to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, United...