Am I the only one to be struck by the fact that John Walker was also the name of the U.S. sponsored terrorist sent to Nicaragua in the nineteenth century to stir up trouble for the benefit of interests back home?

Is the Taleb John Walker related to the premature contra John Walker?

Why don't we just agree that the government should follow the Golden Rule and do unto John Walker as it would wish to have the Taliban deal with an Afghani that they captured who had assisted the U.S. Marines in their invasion of Afghanistan? What would our government declare to be fair treatment of such a "traitor to Afghanistan?" I doubt they would call for summary execution. Probably, they would ask that he (or she) be treated as a comnbatant and a prisoner of war.

Our standards of judgment in matters of this sort should eschew jingoism and strive towards objectivity. The Golden Rule, honestly applied, takes us a long way to an appropriate answer.

By the way, when the Taliban captured by the Northern Alliance were shoved into shipping containers so that many of them suffocated to death, was that a war crime? When the Taliban prisoners later rebelled against their captors, was that not perhaps a legitimate response to a well-founded belief that their captors were likely to kill them in the near future?

There is much we don't know about the uprising at the fort where John Walker was being held. To begin, if all of the Taliban were participants in the uprising, how come many were found dead with their hands tied behind their back when our "allies" re-captured the fort following the American bombing.

Much is being hidden by the Bush administration's secrecy policies, and not all of it is being hidden as a legitimate part of the response to bin Laden. Much is being hidden in an attempt to protect the Bush Administration and its Afghanistan allies from legitimate and informed criticism.