Martyrs in the making at Guantanamo

But because the Bush administration feared bringing him and his accomplices to trial in an ordinary American criminal court -- where the rights of the accused are protected -- Mohammed and his comrades are now in a position to challenge the justice and the legality of the proceedings against them in the court of public opinion. In this, they're taking a page from a script first written by Irish Republicans early in the 20th century, then picked up by Gandhi's passive resisters and Jewish freedom fighters in British-occupied Palestine. It's a tactic that usually works -- particularly when the prosecuting state is acting in defiance of its own laws.

That doesn't make Mohammed and his accomplices innocent, and it doesn't make them victims. However, it may very well make them martyrs in the eyes of marginalized young men in fanatic-infested backwaters across the Islamic world.

It's hard, moreover, to imagine this abomination of a "trial" coming at a worse time, because the chance to portray the Guantanamo defendants as martyrs is just the lifeline Al Qaeda needs at the moment. Earlier this month, Lawrence Wright, whose magisterial "The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11" won last year's Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction, returned to the subject of the terrorist organization in a brilliantly reported New Yorker magazine article that has been too little noticed. In his article, Wright demonstrates that, while Al Qaeda continues to enjoy some success in Iraq and increased security and freedom of action in Pakistan's tribal areas, the organization is being rocked by an ideological civil war.

When it comes to theological firepower, Al Qaeda's big guns always have been Egyptian. The most important of these is a physician/theologian named Sayyed Imam Sharif, a onetime Koranic prodigy turned Islamic militant and comrade in arms to the Egyptian Ayman Zawahiri and the Saudi Osama bin Laden. According to Wright, 20 years ago Sharif wrote two books that are essentially the blueprint for what we've come to call jihadism, and he formerly led the murderous Egyptian terrorist group Al Jihad.

Since shortly after 9/11, Sharif has been in an Egyptian prison, where he's now at the center of a movement that renounces violence as an instrument of reform, repenting even of the assassination of Anwar Sadat. Under the nom de guerre "Dr. Fadl," Sharif has written a book called "Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World" that essentially repudiates all Islamic justifications for Al Qaeda's actions. In an interview, the author even called 9/11 "a catastrophe for Muslims." These views have rocked the jihadist world and forced Zawahiri, as Al Qaeda's chief spokesman, on the defensive.

"It's clear," Wright says, "that radical Islam is confronting a rebellion within its ranks, one that Zawahiri and the leaders of Al Qaeda are poorly equipped to respond to." As Karam Zuhdy, leader of Egypt's Islamic Group, a now-peaceful offshoot of the jihadist movement, recently told Wright: "Dr. Fadl's revisions and Zawahiri's response show that the movement is disintegrating."

It would be all of a piece with the Bush administration's sputtering and ineffectual engagement with the real Islamic terrorist threat -- as opposed to the one it tried to conjure in Iraq -- if young Islamists now found themselves inspired by the faux-martyrdom of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his accomplices. And if they are executed after tribunals involving testimony obtained by torture, in which they've been deprived of an adequate defense and to which the media have been granted only partial access, that's exactly what will happen.

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timothy.rutten@latimes.com