John Montgomery  Presents This Week's Creep Logo by Lynn Kauczka

John Walker Lindh The 77 Virgins Lure Another Recruit

If you were searching through a pile of defeated Taliban prisoners, what would you expect to find? Probably mass quantities of lice, fleas, small rodents, box cutters, flight instruction manuals, Osama bin Laden's latest video, and heart-shaped lockets with pictures of camels inside. Of course, there are a few items you wouldn't expect to find there: Deodorant, shampoo, Mensa membership cards and What-Would-Jesus-Do bracelets.

Right. And there's one more thing you wouldn't expect to find in a pile of Taliban: An American. A bearded, dirty, AK-47 toting, Muslim extremist American who looks like a cross between Charles Manson and Jim Morrison on his death bed. Surprise! It's John Walker Lindh, the best and brightest the Taliban has to offer.

John, from Marin County in California, converted from a Catholic to a Muslim when he was 16 after reading "The Autobiography of Malcolm X". After that, he moved to Yemen to study Islam and soon informed his parents he planned to go to medical school and then move permanently to Pakistan to continue his spiritual path while ministering to the poor. Very commendable, but the next time they saw John, he was 20 years old and being paraded around on TV as a captured Taliban soldier at the Northern Alliance prison in Mazar-i-Sharif.

You may recall that the prison was the scene of an ugly uprising by the captured Taliban soldiers. 600 of them died during the insurrection, but John was one of only 86 who survived. They had been hiding in the the tunnels under the prison but got flushed out when the Northern Alliance flooded the tunnels. You may also recall that the first American casualty of the war was CIA agent Johnny "Mike" Spann, who got killed during the uprising. Ironically, it was Mike who first tried to interrogate John after his capture, but John refused to cooperate.

We might all be surprised at where John ended up, but nobody will be surprised at who his biggest fans are. His parents, Frank and Marilyn, have been all over the airwaves in support of their little Taliban fighter whom they named after John Lennon. "John is a good boy. I don't know of any information, any suggestion of any information indicating that he's done anything wrong," says Frank. Marilyn also vouches for her son, insisting that John is an impressionable youth who was brainwashed. Frank adds, "He's very pious and hard-working in his studies. He's chaste, with no girls or alcohol." Well, no wonder he went over the edge. That'll make anyone pick up an AK-47. Those 77 virgins they offer their martyrs get 'em every time.

Just for fun, let's list which important people John has pissed off so far in his short life: The Taliban hierarchy, the CIA, the United States military, the Pope, Yoko Ono, and most frighteningly, Attorney General Ashcroft, who by now must have figured out how to strip John of his American citizenship and haul him into one of those military tribunals hog-tied to a spit with an apple in his mouth.

And are you ready for one more surprise? Guess who's not pissed off at John? Our Compassionate Conservative Commander in Chief, who told Barbara Walters, "We're just trying to learn the facts about this poor fellow. Obviously, he has been misled, it appears to me." George must be trying to gain favor with those influential California Taliban voters.

What does the future hold for John? Right now, he's being held by US Special Forces somewhere. In the unlikely event that Ashcroft doesn't personally kill him with his bare hands, I figure he gets about 40 years in the can for treason. That makes him 60 years old when he gets released. How many of those virgins do you think will hold out that long?