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The Strange & Troubling Tale
Of Gitmo Chaplain James Yee
'He Is Not Guilty And He Is Not Innocent'

By Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian - UK
3-30-4


When Guantanamo chaplain Captain James Yee was arrested allegedly with secret documents about the prison, he was threatened with execution and branded a traitor. So why after 200 days in jail was he only charged with adultery and quietly released?
 
Captain James Yee became a prime target in the war against terror one morning last September, although nobody deemed it particularly important to inform his wife, Huda Suboh, who drove to an airport outside Seattle later that day to meet a plane her husband had never actually boarded. Yee had been due home on leave from his job as a Muslim army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, but several days would pass before Suboh found out why he never showed up. He had been arrested and detained en route, suspected of espionage and aiding America's enemies. According to military officials, a search of his bags had revealed pages and pages of classified information - detailed maps of the base, diagrams of the cells, and notes on individual inmates. The implication was clear. Yee was up to no good, and may have been plotting a jailbreak of barely comprehensible audacity.
 
Falls from grace do not come much more precipitous. Despite their differing faiths, Yee, now 36, had been the answer to George Bush's prayers: a Chinese-American convert to Islam, he was regularly wheeled out in media interviews as living proof that Washington was not at war with Muslims. ("When I go into the field," he told one reporter, "I have a copy of the Koran, and next to it, a copy of the US Constitution.") Now the Guantanamo chaplain seemed to have confirmed the worst anti-Islamic prejudices, and imperilled his country at the same time. He was detained for months in a navy brig, spending a large proportion of the time in solitary confinement and shackled in leg-irons. Pentagon lawyers threatened the death penalty, which was unsurprising, because Yee's case was deeply alarming. It still is, but for different reasons. Earlier this month, the army quietly dropped all criminal charges against him; yesterday, he launched a legal battle to clear his name entirely. The military has offered no evidence for its allegations that he was a spy or a traitor, no apology - and no explanation for one of the strangest and most troubling tales from the new American era of homeland security.
 
President Bush's war was not Yee's first. A graduate of the prestigious West Point military academy, he had already served in a battalion in Saudia Arabia during the 1991 Gulf war. He was raised a Lutheran, but had drawn close to Islam, and after the conflict he left the army to study the Koran in Damascus for four years. "And not at some dinky school either - a real high Koran school," says his mother, Fong Yee, in the unmistakable tones of her Brooklyn birthplace. Speaking from her home in Springfield, New Jersey, she is plainly boiling with rage. "And when he came back, Jimmy was invited to the Pentagon. He was invited to rejoin the army. I got a commendation letter from General Miller" - Geoffrey Miller, who would later spearhead the prosecution of her son - "about how well he was doing. I got that in March. And then in September they arrest him."
 
Sent to Guantanamo in November 2002, Yee appears to have thrown himself into his duties. For 10 months, he was the only Muslim chaplain there, and in this role he arranged for ritual calls to prayer to be broadcast over Camp Delta's PA system. He checked that the inmates' dietary requirements were being met, and led a handful of Muslim troops in prayer. "He was called by the guards when there were problems," Father Raymond Tetreault, a Catholic chaplain who served alongside him, recalled in an interview with the Los Angeles Times. Yee would chide camp guards for insensitive behaviour, Tetreault remembered. He would upbraid them, for example, if they manhandled detainees' copies of the Koran. That seems to have been the only outward indication of any tension between Yee and his colleagues - until September 10 the next year, when he was stopped at an air base in Florida in possession of documents "that a chaplain shouldn't have", as one military official later put it to CNN.
 
By the time the story became public, through a leak to the Bush-friendly Washington Times newspaper, the seriousness of Yee's situation was evident. The Washington Times had obtained documents listing the proposed charges against Yee - espionage, spying, and aiding the enemy - and broke the news that he had been sent to a navy jail at Charleston, in South Carolina.
 
At first, Yee was considered to present a high security risk, and for many of his 76 days in confinement he wore manacles and leg-irons. "That hell will never be wiped out of his mind," says Fong Yee, who with her husband Joseph eventually obtained the right to visit James, once. "There was so much disrespect perpetrated on Jimmy. Nothing he could do except pray and read the Koran."
 
But with Yee now safely incarcerated, the army's zealous pursuit of the chaplain took a baffling turn. When charges were finally brought, they did not include espionage, but instead only a much lesser accusation of "mishandling classified documents". Exactly how secret the documents were proved to be somewhat mysterious, too: the Pentagon postponed Yee's trial five times while it tried to answer this question itself. "Think about it," says Gary Solis, a former prosecutor in the Marines who now teaches law of war at Georgetown University in Washington. "They charge him with having classified documents, but they don't know if they're classified or not. Now, I don't want to slam our military too badly in the foreign press, but does this not represent a certain lack of competence?" The army itself did not seem to treat the seized papers as if they posed a threat to national security. In the middle of trial preparations, military prosecutors accidentally delivered some of them to the home of Eugene Fidell, Yee's defence lawyer.
 
Before the status of the documents could be determined, though, Yee received two further blows from an unexpected direction: he was charged with adultery, and with downloading pornography on to an army computer. (He denied both.) At a hearing attended by his wife and their daughter Sarah, now four, Yee listened as a female soldier, who had been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony, detailed an alleged affair with him. In 20 years as a military lawyer, Solis says, he had never seen an adultery accusation used in this way: the archaic-sounding charge is almost always used against soldiers to back up a far more serious one, such as rape. The prosecution was beginning to look desperate. "It was just a very shabby attack on Yee," Solis says. "They said, 'Hey, our case has turned to crap, but oh wait, we have this.' They picked something to embarrass and humiliate him that was entirely unrelated." Yee's security status was downgraded, and he was eventually released, with severe restrictions on his movements.
 
Back at their home in Springfield, people were beginning to treat Yee's parents with suspicion, but it was not in Fong Yee's nature to let them gossip undisturbed. "You'd go to the mall," she says today, "and people would recognise that I'm [south-east] Asian, and you'd hear them whisper about how she looks like that chaplain who was a spy. I'd go stand behind them in line and just put my nose in and say, 'You know, I feel like you're talking about me. I wonder if you'd like some information about the case?'" She believes the army was motivated by "paranoia" about Islam, though Yee's religious choices had never been a family issue. "I raised him a Christian. Big deal!" she says. "That's what mothers are supposed to do: raise 'em something, and then they're free to choose."
 
 
Earlier this year, Fidell offered prosecutors a deal: drop the charges against his client, and he would submit to a lie-detector test to prove he knew nothing about espionage plots at Guantanamo. The army, Joseph Yee says, "just didn't know how to back off and say they'd made a mistake".
 
And then, the Friday before last, just short of 200 days since Yee was first detained, General Miller authorised the army's southern command, based in Miami, to issue a statement. It was released on a Friday evening, traditionally the best time in the American news cycle to bury a story. The army would not, after all, be presenting evidence relating to any maps, notes or diagrams Yee was allegedly carrying. "Citing national security concerns that would arise from the release of the evidence," it read, "Miller decided to drop these charges."
 
The pornography and adultery charges, meanwhile, were relegated to a non-criminal hearing, which took place last week. He was found technically guilty, but the army opted to impose none of the punishments within its power - docking his pay, for example, or confining him to barracks for several weeks. He received a written reprimand, and launched an appeal against it yesterday. A case that had begun with the threat of the death penalty had ended with the lightest ticking-off it was within the court's power to give.
 
"In the end, they didn't even have the good grace to dismiss the charges in a gentlemanly way," Solis says. "In law, we have a saying: bad cases never get better, only worse. This case was bad from the beginning. And when it turned worse, the lawyers didn't have the sense to back off. Instead, they did whatever it took to make Yee look bad." Yee is not giving interviews, but Fidell told reporters his client had been "the victim of an incredible drive-by act of legal violence".
 
Lieutenant Bill Costello, a spokesman for southern command, insists the Yee family are "absolutely not" entitled to an apology. "The risk to our national security and our operations at Guantanamo Bay and the war on terror that would have been jeopardised, merely to prosecute Chaplain Yee, was weighed - and overwhelmingly it was not worth the risk." On the document-mishandling charges, Costello says, "He's not guilty and he's not innocent."
 
"That's beneath contempt as an official statement," says Fidell. "It shows exactly the tin ear that has characterised the government's actions in this case." (Pressed on the matter, Costello subsequently concedes that Yee is indeed innocent until proven guilty.)
 
The terms of Yee's reprimand allow him to return at once to resume his job at his home base of Fort Lewis, in Washington state. When I spoke to Joseph Yee, midway through the proceedings, he seemed to discount this as a possibility for his son - even though leaving the army, he said, might break his heart. But now there is an iron determination in Fong Yee's voice. As usual, she says, she wouldn't seek to determine James's choices in life. "But if it was me? I would stay in the army. You know, I liked my job before you stepped on me. I loved it. So I'm not going to leave it now. I would want the government to see what an honourable person looks like. I would say: 'You made a big mistake. Now let me carry on doing my job in a respectful and patriotic way.'"
 
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004
 
http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1180726,00.html


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