Songfacts®:

• Steve Earle wrote this from the perspective of John Walker Lindh, an American who converted to Islam and ended up fighting for the Taliban. The song created a great deal of controversy before it was even released. Based on the lyrics, some members of the media, including the tabloid TV show Inside Edition, blasted it for sympathizing with Lindh, although that was not Earle's intention. The New York Post ran the headline: "Twisted ballad honors Tali-Rat."
  
  Responding to the criticism in the November 2002 edition of Harp, Earle said: "They don't want John Walker to be a human. You know why? Because they couldn't catch Osama bin Laden and we need him. We need a bogey man. You know, we're trying desperately to create one. We've been trying desperately to create one ever since the Soviet Union collapsed. It's the stupidest thing that we – and I have to include myself in it – we are ostensibly a democracy and we are a people and we are a society. But the stupidest thing we ever did was starve the Soviet Union to death because that was the bogeyman for a long, long time. We knew exactly why we were doing what we were doing, we had a straight, consistent story to tell everybody about why we were doing what we were doing. But my problem and the reason I think all these questions need to be asked... As soon as Ashcroft started suggesting that people are less than patriotic when they question anything the administration does, my alarm started going off."
• Earle doesn't condone the actions of Lindh, but feels that it could have happened to just about anyone growing up in America. When this was released, Earle's son was 20-years-old, about the same age as Lindh. He says the point of the song is that this could have happened to anyone's kid, and he was trying to humanize him.
• The chorus comes from a verse from the Qur'an, "I am a witness, there is no God but God."
• Earle recalled to Spin magazine in a 2011 interview: "I wrote that song because no one else was f---ing going to. And I did it because my son Justin is exactly the same age as John Walker Lindh. So I saw a skinny, 20-year-old kid very similar-looking to my own, firstborn son, duct-taped to a f---ing board in Afghanistan. My first thought was, 'Oh my God, he has parents somewhere.' And I respond to some things as a man, some things as a boy, some things as an artist, and some things as a parent. And I responded as a parent. I knew there were going to be repercussions. It was funny, when the whole thing came down, somebody on Fox accused me of doing it to sell a lot of records. I was like, 'Dude, there are a lot of things you can do to sell records in this climate and that ain't one of them.'"