uman nature demands that there be someone to blame and then punish when we are harmed. If we can't find one who directly caused the injury, then we look for a substitute. But someone must pay. This is what the prosecution of John Walker Lindh, and the entire national clamor for his head, is all about. If we had Osama bin Laden to prosecute, Lindh would be just a tiny newspaper item back near the used car ads. Instead, he serves as our surrogate bin Laden. We have seen this kind of search for scapegoats before.
Many people have forgotten about, and many others have never heard of the horrendous People's Temple massacre in Jonestown, Guyana in late 1978. The crazed preacher Jim Jones ordered his followers to shoot an investigating U.S. congressional delegation. California Congressman Leo Ryan and San Francisco Examiner photographer Tim Reiterman were killed. Several others in the delegation were badly wounded. Jones then pressured more than 900 members of his congregation to commit suicide and was himself killed. The response of the entire world was outrage and shock. Here in the United States, those emotions were quickly followed by the demand that someone be held accountable. The problem was, everyone responsible was dead.
A small group of the People's Temple members who were not present at the massacre survived. They were mostly the players on the cult's basketball team that had been competing against local teams in the Guyana capital city of Georgetown. A few weeks after the killings, this pathetic little group returned to the states. Their plane landed at Kennedy Airport where more than a hundred federal agents surrounded it on the tarmac. The group was detained and taken to an aircraft hangar. The exhausted, emotionally numbed little band of survivors was kept inside the hangar where they were abusively interrogated and threatened by FBI agents for more than 20 hours. Then they were given subpoenas ordering them to appear before a federal grand jury in San Francisco.
One of the survivors was Tim Jones, the 20-year-old adopted son of Jim Jones. At sixteen, Tim had married another teen-age member of the Temple. They had three children and they loved each other very much. Tim's wife and kids, along with the other Temple members, drank the poisoned Kool-Aid at Jim Jones' command and they all died together in one big, heartbreaking mound of bodies at Jonestown.
I was appointed by U.S. District Judge Robert Peckham to represent Tim at the grand jury proceedings in San Francisco. Immediately after the tragedy, news media accounts had portrayed the group of survivors as ruthless, dangerous people. The basketball team in particular was vilified. The players were described as Jim Jones' "henchmen and bodyguards." There were also wild accounts of fearsome weapons that Jones supposedly had in the Guyana jungle including a "low yield nuclear device." None of this was true.
When Tim Jones first came to my office, I spent the entire day listening to a totally lost young kid. I don't remember if they yet had the term "post-traumatic stress disorder" back in 1978, but Tim was its poster boy. He was in a trance. He told me everything about Jim Jones, about Jonestown, People's Temple, and about his beloved young wife and three dead babies. There was no holding back, no attempt to put any favorable gloss on himself or on the Temple. Even if he had wanted to do that, which he didn't, he simply did not have any reserves left to pull it off.
Tim was the first witness scheduled to appear before the grand jury. When he and I drove up in my 1969 Volkswagen and parked in the garage across the street from the federal courthouse, we saw the building surrounded by press and TV news media from everywhere in the world. This was to be the first public look at someone "responsible" for the horrible tragedy. We pushed our way through the mob as people stabbed cameras and microphones in our faces. Somewhere in all that, my briefcase full of papers got jostled open, pulled from my grip and trampled. There was no going back for it or any of its spilled contents. I played offensive lineman for Tim as we scurried through the lobby and dove into an elevator.
Tim spent several hours being worked over before the grand jurors by federal prosecutors. Since the lawyer for a witness is not allowed inside the grand jury room, I waited by the door and had him come out after each question so we could discuss his answer. After a couple of hours, it was clear from the questions that they were easing up on him. They had expected Darth Vader and instead got a baby-faced kid who only shaved twice a week. Finally, they told him to go home.
There was an undercurrent of frustration and resentment by the public, and by the media, when it became clear that the survivors would not be charged with anything. Who else was there to punish for the terrible things that happened?
The memory of Tim keeps coming back to me as I hear more about John Walker Lindh. I have scrutinized all the accounts of Lindh's alleged conduct in Afghanistan. I have studied the laws he is charged with violating. I have closely examined the laundry list of charges that the government has scissored, pasted and duct taped together in order to prosecute him. For the life of me, I can't find any crime that Lindh's reported behavior adds up to.
Perhaps the difference between what happened to Tim Jones and what is happening to John Walker Lindh can be explained by the sheer difference in scale between the tragedies of Jonestown and the World Trade Center. More than 900 Americans were killed in a mass suicide in a Central American jungle versus more than 3,000 killed in a foreign attack on New York and Washington, D.C. That may be the reason for the distinction between these two 20-year-olds. Or maybe we have simply become a people who need scapegoats more now, at this time in our history, than we did back in 1978.
Peter Keane is the dean of Golden Gate University School of Law. He is a former president of the Bar Association of San Francisco and a former vice president of the California State Bar.
