One last bailout.

“This is the last year that President Bush could consider giving a commutation to John Walker Lindh, and there are very good reasons to do that,” attorney Jim Brosnahan said at a news conference today in San Francisco. “I’ve never eliminated the idea that President Bush might think it’s the right thing to do, now that John has served seven years.”

Raj Chatterjee, another of Lindh’s attorneys, said others detained and/or charged in the “War on Terror” under similar or more serious circumstances have been released after serving less time. “There’s a fundamental principle of U.S. jurisprudence, and that is that prison sentences must be fair and similar cases should be treated similarly,” he said. “It has become abundantly clear that John has been treated differently.”…

Frank Lindh said they’re still pinning all hopes on Bush because the events transpired during his Administration, rather than waiting for Barack Obama to become president. Bush initially had referred to Lindh as a “poor fellow” who “has been misled,” but later supported his prosecution.

I don’t understand why this turd has become a cause celebre. He fought with the Taliban against the Northern Alliance after the U.S. entered the war; he claimed that he trained at an AQ camp in the summer of 2001 and was asked to carry out attacks against America and Israel (but declined); he didn’t warn anyone in the United States about anything, least of all Mike Spann even though he allegedly knew that the prison uprising in which Spann was killed was in the works; and rather than challenge the supposedly coercive circumstances of his interrogation in court, he copped a plea that reduced his potential sentence from life to 17 years with good behavior. By his own admission he’s a sworn jihadist, albeit one who’s supposedly expressed remorse for 9/11 (but not, according to his own father, for the U.S.S. Cole bombing). Exit question: Why, then, do I have an uneasy suspicion that Bush actually is going to trim a few years off his term?