Keeping the law out of it, however, most Americans became convinced that Walker is a traitor; and so last winter we faced the unlovely spectacle of a maddened public baying for the head of a young man more privileged than their sons or neighbors' sons, the kind of bright, muddled boy that some of us might remember from high school or college.

The agreed facts now suggest that Walker never attacked much less killed any American, and it was never credible that a small-time foreign "combatant" would have any special information beforehand about the events of Sept. 11. Normally, after a war, the small fry are disarmed and sent home; because he is American, Walker came back to us in chains, facing life imprisonment for shooting his mouth off in front of his interrogators in Afghanistan. Which suggests that his real crime has been arrogance, his presumption that life in America is sinful and wicked, inferior to the true Islamic religion. He has spurned Uncle Sam -- in the words of Ashcroft and his prosecutor Paul McNulty, "turned his back on the United States" -- and the family, or paterfamilias, can't forgive him.

But why -- logically speaking -- should an American raised with America's freedoms and privileges have to accept them? Or if he accepts them, be grateful? I live in this country, an American citizen who enjoys its power and protections, but I am not a proud American. A childhood spent in Europe returned me to this country thinking of myself as neither American nor European but as some sort of restless, vaguely global citizen; Walker's path may have been different, but the effect on his character is substantially the same. The world is full of such Americans, some of whom live here and many of whom don't. In fact, by rejecting America for the harsh restrictions of life with the Taliban, Walker proves himself far less a hypocrite than me. His life has its own integrity in his act of departure two years ago. Did anyone ask him, over in Kandahar or on that Navy ship, if he wanted to stay?

Surely we have the right -- short of actual proven violence or conspiracy -- to test our loyalty to our country, which is the only useful way, it seems to me, of finally embracing it. A noble American is one who has considered the alternatives and still returned, which is presumably not a journey on which Ashcroft and Co. have ever embarked. Yanking him home as we did -- the hand of John Ashcroft pulling a miscreant boy along by his ear -- we cut short the journey of John Walker before its time, and for no greater reason than to make an example of him.

Did we need the example, however? Walker's case is not even exceptional; it is unique. Our Puritan attorney general, hating the sin and the sinner alike, has daubed his own scarlet letter on a probably harmless young man and would gladly have killed him if he had half a chance, because in the scraggly bearded face (now clean-shaven) of John Walker Lindh he sees the kind of American who frightens him most: the kind with his own certainties, which are not the same as his elders'.

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