LOST IN THE JIHAD.(case of John Walker Lindh, convicted of fighting for the Afghan Army)

Five weeks ago, John Walker Lindh, better known as the American Taliban, was quietly transferred to a medium-security prison northeast of Los Angeles, in the Mojave Desert. He was relieved by the move, which took place after federal officials in Alexandria, Virginia, had debriefed him for a year about his knowledge of Muslim extremists. His temporary cell in Virginia had reminded Lindh of a dog kennel; his meals were delivered through a metal slot in the door, and he had no interaction with other inmates. At the new prison, Lindh has a roommate and a window. On occasion, he can mingle with the general prison population, which includes about twenty other Muslims, most of them American-born converts like himself. His main diversions are translating ancient Arabic religious texts and reading. His lawyers recently bought him a subscription to the New York Times, and now that he's back in California, where he was raised, he has asked to receive the Los Angeles Times. Lindh has also met his goal of reading a hundred books during his first year in prison. His favorites have included Dostoyevsky's "The Brothers Karamazov,"Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning,"and the Harry Potter novels, whose publication passed him by while he was cloistered in the Islamic madrasahs of Pakistan and camped alongside Taliban soldiers in Afghanistan.

Lindh, who is now twenty-two years old, pleaded guilty last summer to having aided the Taliban regime. He is due to spend the next twenty years in prison. Ordinarily, a first-time offender convicted of a single, nonviolent felony would be spared such a long sentence. Lindh, however, is the first American to have been successfully prosecuted as part of the Bush Administration's war on terrorism. Lindh was accused not only of embracing the beliefs of people who hated his own country but also of taking up arms with them and being connected to the death of a young C.I.A. officer, Johnny Micheal Spann. From the moment Lindh was captured, in December of 2001, he was widely condemned as a murderous traitor.

The Justice Department, in particular, promoted this view. Before Lindh was indicted, Attorney General John Ashcroft held a press conference in which he revealed that the department planned to charge Lindh with "conspiracy to kill nationals of the United States"and with "providing material support"to Al Qaeda. Ashcroft declared that Lindh's "allegiance to those fanatics and terrorists never faltered, not even with the knowledge that they had murdered thousands of his countrymen."When Ashcroft announced the indictment, which included ten counts, he described Lindh as "an Al Qaeda-trained terrorist."Lindh faced the possibility of three life sentences plus an additional ninety years in prison.

This past summer, however, the government abruptly dropped nine of the original charges. The case was settled in a weekend-long flurry of negotiations that ended at 2 a.m. on the day that key evidence against Lindh was to be challenged in open court. As part of the plea agreement, Lindh accepted guilt on a charge that was not directly related to terrorism: violation of a 1999 executive order forbidding American citizens from contributing "services"to the Taliban. Ashcroft's high-profile prosecution effort mysteriously imploded. The Attorney General was not entirely convincing when he declared that Lindh's plea agreement was "an important victory in the war on terrorism.”

Today, the government continues to regard Lindh as an enemy of the state who poses a serious danger to national security. Lindh is therefore covered by Special Administrative Measures, which prohibit him from speaking to the media. Bryan Sierra, a Justice Department spokesman, declined "to discuss the legal basis"for this decision, but noted that "such measures are intended to monitor activity in the most dangerous cases, to prevent them from plotting violent acts.”

With this gag order in effect, and with many documents in the case still classified, much remains unknown about why the prosecution collapsed. Fragments of this story, however, have lately begun to emerge. Lindh's own words have surfaced in the form of notes taken during lengthy conversations with him by people involved in preparing his defense. In addition, a former Justice Department lawyer who is troubled by the government's handling of the case has decided to speak out.

Rohan Gunaratna, a respected terrorism scholar from Sri Lanka, interviewed Lindh for more than eight hours last summer in Alexandria. Gunaratna, who is affiliated with the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, is the author of six books, including the recent "Inside Al Qaeda."A short, compactly built man with a friendly, wide face, Gunaratna met with me recently in Manhattan. He said that he had been wary when Lindh's defense lawyers first approached him about serving as an expert witness. He warned them that he believed that Lindh was almost certainly a member of Al Qaeda. The defense, undeterred, pressed him to meet the young suspect, and Gunaratna eventually agreed.