Big Don, Little Dick

Don't kid yourself. Rumsfeld and Cheney were involved in this up to their eyeballs. No Comment (06.25.07):

"In the early days in Afghanistan, two Westerners were picked up with what were believed to be Al Qaeda or Taliban units. They were a kid from California named John Walker Lindh and a young Australian kangaroo skinner named David Hicks.

As an act of political largesse directed by Dick Cheney, the man who runs our secret government, Hicks was released from Gitmo and returned to Australia. Lindh, however, didn’t have it so good."

Torturing an American Citizen

"A decision was made to make an example of him. So he was sentenced to 20 years without parole by Judge T.S. Ellis III in a case prosecuted by Paul J. McNulty, a man who later made his reputation in the U.S. attorney scandal, and now faces suggestions of perjury and lying to Congress."

At the time, I was told repeatedly that prosecutors were frantic to secure a plea bargain because they knew that Lindh had been tortured and that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was deeply implicated in the decision to torture him."

TPMMuckraker has more.