Chapter 3.4 Peak Deception: Radack Made No Recommendation Whatsoever About the Lindh Interview

In case you missed it in my last article, Jesselyn Radack made no recommendation about what the government should do about the John Walker Lindh interrogation. In response to finding out that an FBI agent had interviewed him over the previous weekend, she wrote to John De Pue (with emphasis):

Please keep me in the loop as you learn more details. The interview may have to be sealed or only used for national security purposes; however, I don’t have enough information yet to make that recommendation.

De Pue wrote back:

We are trying to figure out what actually transpired and what, if anything, Walker said. It may well be that the questioning was for intelligence purposes and that he was questioned as any other prisoner of war would be.

At 2:04 p.m., Radack responded, but we don’t know what she said because she didn’t leak all of her emails to journalist Michael Isikoff. Again, this is the first email she’s been hiding from the public. De Pue responded:

If what you are telling us is true—and I am sure that it is—the FBI needs to b alerted at once.

She responded to this email twice. First, she advised him to keep his mouth shut and not contact the FBI. Before that, she wrote (with emphasis):

The part about the interview possibly needing to be sealed? It’s premature to conclude that yet. I need more factual information.

Note what she told him in two separate emails:

The interview might have to be sealed or only used for national security purposes; however, I don’t have enough information yet to make that recommendation.

The part about the interview possibly needing to be sealed? It’s premature to conclude that yet. I need more factual information.

I don’t have enough information yet to make that recommendation…It’s premature to conclude that yet. I need more information. In addition to cherry-picking her leaked emails and advising De Pue to keep to himself what one presumes was pertinent information about the government’s investigation of Lindh, Radack failed to make a single recommendation about the interview.

Her own leaked emails prove that she knowingly misled the public for years. She flat-out said she couldn’t make a recommendation, and if you think this is nitpicky, ask her why she keeps lying about it.

Similarly to how she twisted what De Pue told her, “Lindh’s father hired an attorney for him,” into “I was unambiguously told Lindh was represented,” she has since perverted her own words into something she never said to support her whistleblower story.

In early 2005, she accurately recounted in the LA Times her conversation with De Pue, “I advised that the interview might have to be sealed and used only for intelligence-gathering or national security purposes, not criminal prosecution.” However, she failed to mention that she never recommended a course of action.

As the years went on, this story, like so many others, became increasingly manipulated. By 2007, she no longer told De Pue that the interview might have to be sealed; she categorically told him that it had to be:

The same attorney called me back on Monday and said, ‘Well, the FBI is interviewing him anyway. What will we do now?’ At that point, I advised that the interview would have to be sealed and used only for national security or intelligence-gathering purposes, not for criminal prosecution.

The following year, she pushed the same narrative:

The Criminal Division called back on Monday and said that the FBI had interrogated him anyway. They wanted to know what to do. I advised that the interview would have to be sealed and used only for national security purposes or intelligence-gathering, not criminal prosecution.

In 2008, she told Vanity Fair’s Cullen Murphy and Todd Purdum:

I gave that advice on a Friday, and the same attorney at Justice who inquired called back on Monday and said essentially, oops, they did it again. They interrogated him anyway. What should we do now? My office was there to help correct mistakes. And I said, well, this is an unethical interrogation so you should seal it off and use it only for intelligence-gathering purposes or national security but not for criminal prosecution.

The disinformation train rolled on via Harper’s Magazine when she told Scott Horton in 2012 that she advised the interview should not be used against Lindh:

I then advised that the tainted interrogation should not be used against him in a criminal prosecution.

That same year, she stated in front of an audience at the 29th Chaos Communication Congress that she told De Pue the interview needed to be sealed off and not used for criminal prosecution:

She said the same thing in 2014 during an interview with the late Gavin MacFadyen’s The Whistleblower Interview Project:

The charade continued two years later at Harvard’s Human Rights Journal’s Spring Symposium, where she told the audience that she had advised that the interview “should be sealed,” again omitting the part where she told De Pue, “[H]owever, I don’t have enough information yet to make that recommendation” and “The part about the interview possibly needing to be sealed. It’s premature to conclude that yet.”

She did the same thing during an interview with Rico Brouwer in 2019:

Finally, in Showtime’s 2021 documentary Detainee 001, she told documentarians:

I get a callback on Monday and the Justice Department attorney, my counterpart in terrorism and violent crimes said, well, the FBI interrogated him anyway so what do we do now? So I advised that the interview would have to be sealed and only used for national security and intelligence gathering purposes but not for criminal prosecution.

Her own emails, available since 2002 to every journalist on the planet, including all the fat cats getting paid six-figure salaries to do journalism, unequivocally prove she never told De Pue the Lindh interview had to be sealed or used for national security purposes. She told him that it “may” have to be sealed but she “didn’t have enough information to make a recommendation” because it was “too premature to conclude.”

For the record, these were the last emails Newsweek published that she wrote to De Pue. I’m not ignoring other emails she sent him; you can see for yourself right here. Sure, there are three more missing emails she didn’t leak, which we haven’t discussed yet, but her claims have always been based on the ones that were published. And, in those emails, she never told De Pue that the interview couldn’t be used for criminal prosecution, either.

So, let’s keep beating this dead horse in light of the media’s failure to research her story even once in the past 24 years: After spending less than 14 minutes researching the case, she told De Pue to keep his mouth shut and that she didn’t have enough information to make a single recommendation about the interview.

This is like asking your friend, who claims to be an expert on local car dealerships, if you should buy a car from XYZ Dealership and she tells you, “I need more information before I can give you any sort of recommendation.” After receiving no recommendation or advice from her, you go ahead and buy a car at XYZ Dealership. They end up selling you a lemon, and your friend spends the next two decades telling everyone that they warned you not to buy a car from them. That’s some bullshit right there.

Sources:

1. https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna3067190
2. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-feb-04-oe-radack4-story.html
3. legacy.buzzflash.com/commentary/jesselyn-radack-was-the-justice-department-official-who-knew-too-much–a-buzzflash-interview (https://archive.is/0OJKM)
4. https://www.inquirer.com/philly/opinion/inquirer/20080602_Report_on_FBI_interrogations_omits_the_Lindh_case_of_torture.html (https://archive.ph/yqrC8)
5. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2009/02/bush-oral-history200902 (https://archive.ph/Pq3Ui)
6. https://harpers.org/2012/06/_traitor_-six-questions-for-jesselyn-radack/
7. (Harvard) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fHOKUDP9n0g
8. (Potkaars) youtube.com/watch?v=euE76-hA9F
9. (Detainee 001) https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=aCk7P6voen0