John Walker Lindh, the so-called "American Taliban" whose capture in Afghanistan riveted a country in the early days after the September 11 attacks, has been released from prison.
After serving 17 years of a 20-year sentence, Lindh, the first US-born detainee in the war on terror, on Thursday walked out of a federal prison in Terre Haute, Indiana, and will join the small, but growing, group of Americans convicted of terror-related charges attempting to re-enter into society.
Lindh will live in Virginia subject to the direction of his probation officer, his lawyer, Bill Cummings, tells CNN. But some are already calling for an investigation into his time in prison ‐ where he is said in two US government reports to have made pro-ISIS and other extremist statements ‐ that could send him back into detention.
Reports of Lindh’s maintained radicalization, detailed in two 2017 official counterterrorism assessments, are also driving questions about the efforts of the US government to rehabilitate former sympathizers like him, who are expected to complete prison sentences in waves in the coming years.
Lindh’s behavior must have been particularly good, at least from the prison system point of view. Federal guidelines require prisoners to serve at least 85% of their sentence regardless of their disposition while incarcerated, and that’s precisely what Lindh served. Even so, Lindh would have been released no later than three years from now regardless of his behavior, unless he committed other prosecutable crimes while in prison.