Muslim Chaplain James Yee from Guantanamo will speak Wed 2/16

[no_hypocrisy]

at 7:00 p.m. at the Ridgewood Public Library, Ridgewood, NJ to discuss his book For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18550

At about the same time, he noticed plainclothesmen on the periphery of services he conducted and wondered if they were FBI agents. Several Muslim enlisted men, he heard, had been detained on their return to the mainland. Finally, on September 10, 2003, a day before the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Yee found himself taken into custody by agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, shortly after landing in Jacksonville on leave. After five days in solitary confinement, he was shown a memo signed by General Miller charging him with espionage. "Chaplain Yee is known to have associated with known terrorist sympathizers," it said. He was also said to have classified documents hidden away in his quarters at Guantánamo, along with a ticket to London, suggesting that he'd been preparing to flee. None of this turned out to be true.

-snip-


As the charges against him dwindled to nothing, the conduct of the prosecution became, if anything, more relentless, vengeful, and ugly. Yee's wife had returned to their home in Olympia, Washington, where she was visited by a female Defense Department investigator who showed her pictures of the chaplain with other women, and told her that he'd been having affairs. When, finally, the prosecution was unable to produce any evidence of his ever having possessed classified documents, let alone of having mishandled them, the criminal case collapsed. Far from acknowledging a miscarriage of justice, the prosecution said it couldn't disclose its evidence because of national security concerns. And still Yee wasn't in the clear. With the criminal charges erased, the chaplain was made to face administrative charges of adultery and downloading pornographic matter onto his laptop.

=more-