- 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?
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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."
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- 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."
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- 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.
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- 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.
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- 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.)
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- 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.'"
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
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- http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1180726,00.html
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