The Hindu : The strange tale of Guantanamo chaplain

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Mar 31, 2004

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International

The strange tale of Guantanamo chaplain

By Oliver Burkeman

WASHINGTON, MARCH 30. 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.

Capt. Yee had been due home on leave from his job as a Muslim army chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, but several days would pass before Ms 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. Capt. 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, Capt. Yee, now 36, had been the answer to the President, George W. 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. Now, the 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 Capt. 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.

Mr. Bush's war was not Capt. Yee's first. A graduate of the 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, Capt. 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 public address system. He checked that the inmates' dietary requirements were being met, and led a handful of Muslim troops in prayer. At first, Capt. 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 their son, once. ``There was so much disrespect perpetrated on Jimmy. Nothing he could do except pray and read the Koran.''

But with Capt. Yee 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''. Before the status of the documents could be determined, though, Capt. 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 4, Capt. Yee listened as a female soldier, who had been granted immunity in exchange for her testimony, detailed an alleged affair with him.

The prosecution was beginning to look desperate. ``It was just a very shabby attack on Yee,'' says Gary Solis, a military lawyer. ``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.''

Capt. Yee's security status was downgraded, and he was eventually released, with severe restrictions on his movements. - Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004.

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