Walker: The Road Ahead

You're saying you can understand how easy it is for a youngster to be led astray by religion or ideology?

When I was a young man, at an earlier time in this country's history, I was a member of a paramilitary, right-wing religious group called the Jewish Defense League. I emigrated to Israel, but happily I realized that the Zionist dream that I had embraced was in fact a nightmare for the Palestinian people. Equally happily, I took the admonition "Make love, not war," seriously. But a number of people I was with in the Jewish Defense League became terrorists. Had things gone a little bit differently, I too could have ended up in a similar position, involved in something way over my head in another country.

Did Walker's isolation, physically and mentally, contribute to his loss of perspective?

I think so. If you read his e-mail postings [after he converted to Islam at age 16] they're sort of pathetic. No drinking, no drugs, no sex, no music. Come on, you're a teenager!

Could Walker improve his situation if he cooperates with U.S. authorities and shares any information he has about Al Qaeda and the Taliban?

Assuming Mr. Walker has some beans to spill, the government may very well decide to work out some sort of plea bargain with him. The one glitch is, the snitchocracy, as it were, the system of rewards for informers, perversely saves the biggest rewards for the worst criminals. The more you know, the more people you kill, the more confederates you have, the more you have to bargain with. It's usually the poor schlub at the bottom, the mule in the drug program, the button man in the mob hit, who has very little to bargain with. But one of the things that would be interesting to know, is how on earth did this guitar strumming, white boy suburbanite, Cat Stevens-wannabe manage to infiltrate the Taliban, a task that is supposedly so formidable that not even the best of the Central Intelligence Agency has been able to achieve it over the past six years?