A federal court has jailed the "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh for 20 years for collaborating with the Taliban in Afghanistan brought down after last year's September 11th attacks.
Lindh, 21, who was detained in Afghanistan last November, was also ordered to serve six years of probation after the prison term.
Under a deal with prosecutors, Lindh pleaded guilty to collaborating with the Taliban and one of carrying an assault rifle and grenades while fighting with the extremist regime that was forced out of Kabul last October by Afghan opposition forces.
However he told the court "I have never understood Jihad (holy war) to mean anti-Americanism or terrorism. I condemn terrorism on every level unequivocally".
Lindh was carried on a stretcher out of a prison near the northern Afghan city of Mazar-i-Sharif last November after a violent uprising by captured Taliban and al-Qaeda prisoners.
Dirty, unshaven, and exhausted, he said he had joined the Taliban militia six months earlier.
Soon after his capture Attorney General John Ashcroft declared that Lindh's "allegiance to those terrorists never faltered".
In recent months however the image of the bearded "enemy combatant" has softened. President George W. Bush expressed pity for Lindh, calling him "a poor misguided Marin County hot-tubber," alluding to Lindh's hippy-style upbringing.
Lindh's parents, members of San Francisco's "Flower Power" generation of the late 1960s and early 1970s, named him John after Beatle legend John Lennon.
He gave up the name at the age of 16 in order to become Suleyman al-Lindh, after his conversion to Islam.
AFP