'He is not guilty and he is not innocent' (on James Yee)

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

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 Guantánamo 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 Guantánamo 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."

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http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1180772,00.html