Amen to this: “For the first time, federal prosecutors explicitly accused John Walker Lindh on Tuesday of being partly responsible for the slaying of CIA agent Johnny ‘Mike’ Spann during an Afghan prison uprising in November.

“In a bluntly worded 32-page motion, the prosecutors said the Marin County man accused of participating in a conspiracy to kill Americans overseas and of providing material support for terrorists can be blamed directly for Spann’s death under the law of conspiracy,” The San Francisco Chronicle reports.

‘The fact that we do not have evidence that Lindh wielded the weapon that fired the bullet that killed Spann has been taken by the defense as an admission that Lindh was an innocent bystander. He was neither a bystander nor, in any respect can he be described as innocent,’ the U.S. attorneys prosecuting Lindh wrote in their filing with U.S. District Judge Thomas Ellis.

Spann was killed Nov. 25 in the uprising at the Qala-e-Jangi prison, where hundreds of Taliban prisoners, including Lindh, were held.

[…] Prosecutors filed their motion Tuesday to oppose efforts by Lindh’s lawyers to move the scheduled Aug. 26 trial from Virginia to San Francisco and to dismiss charges against him because of pretrial publicity. The prosecutors charged Lindh’s lawyers with generating much of that publicity, saying they had courted the press as part of a campaign to picture him as a ‘sweet, gentle youth.’

[…] ‘Lindh was a member of a conspiracy to kill Americans,’ wrote the prosecutors, led by U.S. Attorney Paul McNulty and Assistant U.S. Attorney Randy Bellows.

The prosecutors then cited the law of conspiracy, which says, for example, that a person who drives a getaway car for bank robbers is part of the robber conspiracy and would be liable for murder if someone in the bank were killed during the holdup.

‘By well-established conspiracy law, the murder of Mr. Spann . . . is attributable to all conspirators, and that is true whether they fired guns themselves or even knew that the uprising would take place,’ prosecutors argued in their court filing.

When Lindh was first arrested and indicted, I had little sympathy for him. Not surprisingly, nothing much has changed on my end.

His end, though, is quite a bit softer. And wider, too.

—–