The Muslim News - Interview - A true American patriot

Issue 224, Friday 21 December 2007 - 11 Dhu al-Hijjah 1428

Interview - A true American patriot

By Ala Abbas

Born in the state of Illinois, James Yee insists he’s an American when I make the mistake of calling him a third-generation immigrant. “I’m not an immigrant,” he says matter-of-factly, “I didn’t emigrate.”
This immediate first impression I serendipitously garnered of Captain James Yee was also the first vestige of a fervent and genuine patriotism that could well make him the subject of America’s most symbolic blunder since 9/11.
Captain James Yee, a Chinese American, was the Muslim chaplain to the Guantanamo Bay camp. Having graduated from West Point, he had served seven years active duty and seven years in the inactive reserve of the US army before becoming a Muslim army chaplain in 2001. But just under a year after he had started work at Guantanamo, he was arrested himself.
It was just like a Hollywood movie. After failing to turn up at an airport in Washington DC to meet his wife and child, Mrs Yee later finds out her husband is being held in a super maximum security prison in South Carolina after having been arrested and accused of espionage and treason and threatened with execution. He was kept in solitary confinement for 76 days. Not only was no proof of the charges offered, but Yee was never officially charged with these capital crimes. What he was charged with - less serious crimes like the mishandling of classified information - were dropped and he was reinstated as a Muslim chaplain, received an honorable discharge from the army and given a second US army commendation medal for exceptional meritorious service.
And there you have it. Although the US Government has not officially apologised for this gross blunder, Yee sees his reinstatement into the army as a partial admission of error.
The first burning question I have is why he thinks this happened to him and the answer I get is simple, frank, but will leave a permanent blight on the US Government’s human rights record.
James Yee believes he was the target of “sheer bigotry”, and was silenced for exposing the “systematic” abuse of prisoners’ rights in Guantanamo. Clearly, realising he couldn’t be silenced and that arresting him was making them look even worse, the Government was forced to let him go.
“The level of abuse in Guantanamo Bay was certainly systematic when you look at who was in charge and what connections they had to the Pentagon. You need to take a hard look at the bigger picture,” he says. Yee tells me he believes that same picture was behind the Abu Ghraib prison tortures, too. The prisoner abuse, which Yee detailed in his 2005 book For God and Country, included a deliberate and calculated disrespect for the religion of the majority Muslim prisoners. This included reckless handling of prisoners’ copies of the Qur’an and female interrogators stripping naked and grabbing the genitals of prisoners. One of these forms of religious disrespect, which verged on what Yee termed “psychological torture”, involved a “satanic circle” with the symbol of a pentagram in the centre. The shackled prisoners would be forced by interrogators to bow down in the centre of these circles while the latter would scream “Satan is your God now, not Allah.”
All this had been suggested in FBI memos and investigations, and was confirmed to Yee in confidence by American translators who were present at the interrogations and were part of his congregation. But it didn’t just stop at sadistic abuse. Yee claims he suffered from a general anti-Islamic atmosphere in Guantanamo where Muslim personnel were bullied and treated as suspicious and sympathetic.
Yee immediately raised concerns about this abuse and “how religion was being used as a weapon.” His chain of command in the detention-side of the operation valued his input as he gave them an understanding of why the prisoners were rioting, going on hunger strikes and attempting suicide. His supervisors even awarded him for speaking out and he received the best officer evaluation report that he had ever received in his entire career as a military officer. He was able to correct a lot of the issues inside the cell blocks and the detention-side of the operation, but most of the abuse was coming from the intelligence-side of the operation of which he had no control.
Yee never expected the abuse he was witnessing to go as far as getting him arrested for speaking out against it. It came as a complete shock to him. “As an American citizen, as a US officer - a chaplain - it was my duty to raise concerns about what could potentially be war crimes.”
His arrest and detention left his confidence in the leadership of his country and the military “completely shaken”.
“Obviously it was a gross miscarriage of justice…a huge intelligence blunder, and to think that most of the people who were behind this whole incident were intelligence operatives. If they got it so wrong it is scary to think that my country has to rely on the competence of these people.”
But Yee believes it was more than just a blunder. “My being an American Muslim made it easy for them to target me, and my patriotism was also a primary reason why they came after me and threw me in jail: it was my advocacy of essentially American values, values of diversity, tolerance, religious freedom, justice, humane treatment of prisoners - these are American values, and they are universal values.”
This experience, however, has made him anything but bitter. “In terms of values, I still uphold the same values that I did before and after everything that happened to me…those are values that are reflected not only in the US constitution but in my faith, Islam. So I continue to advocate and believe these are the values that will make any society better… I will continue to do what I can to hopefully make these values more ingrained in the people of my country.”
And so goes the story of a true American patriot. Out of a figure like James Yee or the peddlers of the current US Administration, I wonder who the founding fathers would rather meet if they were alive today.