Author: Rowan Scarborough
Publication: The Washington Times
Date: September 20, 2003
URL: http://www.washtimes.com/national/20030919-105619-9614r.htm
An Army Islamic chaplain, who counseled
al Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, has been charged
with espionage, aiding the enemy and spying, The Washington Times has learned.
Capt. James J. Yee, a 1990 graduate
of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., was arrested earlier
this month by the FBI in Jacksonville, Fla., as he arrived on a military
charter flight from Guantanamo, according to a law-enforcement source.
Agents confiscated several classified
documents in his possession and interrogated him. He was held for two days
in Jacksonville and transferred to a Navy brig in Charleston, S.C., where
two Army lawyers have been assigned to his defense.
The Army has charged Capt. Yee with
five offenses: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure
to obey a general order. The Army may also charge him later with the more
serious charge of treason, which under the Uniform Code of Military Justice
could be punished by a maximum sentence of life.
It could not be immediately learned
what country or organization is suspected of receiving information from
Capt. Yee. He had counseled suspected al Qaeda terrorists at Guantanamo
for a lengthy period.
Capt. Yee, 35, was a command chaplain
for I Corps at Fort Lewis, Wash. The Army dispatched him to Cuba to attend
to the spiritual needs of a growing number of captured al Qaeda and members
of the Taliban, a hard-line Islamic group ousted from power in Afghanistan.
Capt. Yee, of Chinese-American descent,
was raised in New Jersey as a Christian. He studied Islam at West Point
and converted to Islam and left the Army in the mid-1990s. He moved to
Syria, where he underwent further religious training in traditional Islamic
beliefs. He returned to the United States and re-entered the Army as an
Islamic chaplain. He is said to be married to a Syrian woman.
Capt. Yee had almost unlimited private
access to detainees as part of the Defense Department's program to provide
the prisoners with religious counseling, as well as clothing and Islamic-approved
meals. The law-enforcement source declined to say how much damage Capt.
Yee may have inflicted on the U.S. war against Osama bin Laden's global
terror network.
The source said the "highest levels"
of government made the decision to arrest Capt. Yee, who had been kept
under surveillance for some time.
The military's "convening authority"
- the officer who would authorize criminal proceedings - is the commander
of U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the prison at Guantanamo.
After the September 11 attacks,
Capt. Yee, one of 17 Muslim chaplains, was the subject of a number of press
articles on Islam.
A month after the attack on the
World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, he was quoted in an account
by Scripps Howard News Service as saying that "an act of terrorism, the
taking of innocent lives is prohibited by Islam and whoever has done this
needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not."
In another account, the Voice of
America News Service paraphrased Capt. Yee as saying Islam is a religion
of peace and the concept of "jihad," or holy war, simply means "to struggle."
"The basics, you always begin with
the basics when dealing with anything," Capt. Yee was quoted as saying.
"I discuss the articles of faith, what Muslims believe. The five pillars
of Islam and then of course, I relate it to the events of September 11
to include some of the concepts found in Islam and how it deals with matters
of war."
At the Charleston brig, he joins
three other notable detainees in the war on terrorism: Yaser Esam Hamdi,
an American-born Saudi who fought with the Taliban; Jose Padilla, a former
Chicago gang member who is charged with plotting to detonate a radioactive
bomb; and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, accused of being an al Qaeda sleeper
agent.
The United States classifies the
detainees at Guantanamo as "enemy combatants," not prisoners of war. The
Pentagon will likely hold most of them until the war on terrorism is over.
