"Nightmare At Guantanamo"-US Army Chaplain Stood Tall-While Arrested & Falsely Accused Of Treason

[kpete]

James Yee And The Nightmare At Guantanamo
By: Blue Texan Monday March 24, 2008 10:30 am


As a Muslim, U.S. Army Chaplain James Yee stood tall for humanity while ministering to the detainees at Guantanamo Bay - to the point that he was arrested and falsely accused of treason.
By Brad Buchholz

The Bush Administration has presided over a stain on the nation's honor that will never be removed. James Yee, who was charged by the military with espionage in order to silence him, details just how low BushCo has taken us.

http://firedoglake.com/2008/03/24/james-yee-and-the-nightmare-at-guantanamo/

Nightmare at Guantanamo

"We say that the war on terror is not a war against Islam, but that's not how it felt most days at Guantánamo," Yee writes in "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," his 2006 memoir. The environment at Guantánamo "excused, if not encouraged, open hostility toward Islam."

By almost every measure, Yee's tour at Guantánamo was a nightmare, offending his sensibilities as an American and a Muslim. For 10 months, from November 2002 to September 2003, Yee says, he bore witness to man's inhumanity to man as the Guantánamo prisoners were systematically beaten and humiliated by U.S. military police and interrogators.

Yee says he was horrified to see "religion used as a weapon" against Guantánamo detainees — as prisoners told him of detainees being forced to bow down in the middle of a satanic circle in an interrogation room and profess that Satan was their god, not Allah. Detainees were mocked during prayer and taunted or teased sexually by American women while chained. At first, Yee thought it an act of compassion that Guantánamo detainees were allowed to keep a Quran in their cells. But the detainees begged Yee to have them taken away, he says, for American MPs took such delight in mishandling the books or breaking their bindings during random searches.

Read The Interview at:
http://www.statesman.com/search/content/editorial/stories/insight/03/23/0323yee.html

http://firedoglake.com/2008/03/24/james-yee-and-the-nightmare-at-guantanamo/

[no_hypocrisy]

1. I've heard James Yee speak two years ago.

He told a story that could easily be described as a Kafka nightmare.

[Newsjock]

2. And it's something I live with forever

I was one of the mid-level editors at a newspaper near Yee's home base of Fort Lewis, Wash. Although I put forth a valiant effort to give the chaplain his innocence until proven guilty (which, of course, he never was), the forces in the newspaper and in the community were too great for me to overcome. As I look back on our coverage now (I saved all of it), I am disgusted and enraged at how a scared, terrified American populace took a person such as Chaplain Yee and used him as a punching bag for all of their anger and prejudice.

It's one of the reasons why I am no longer a journalist, but I still can never properly atone for not doing more to speak out against the horrors that our government perpetrated on its own people.

[lumpy]

3. Thanks for posting this. Been wondering what has happened to

Chaplain Yee. There is no doubt in my mind that Yee was incarcerated for his humanitarian stance regarding the prisoners that have been held in Guantanamo going on 7 years.

[Solly Mack]

4. K&R

[wildbilln864]

5. k&r! nt

:hi: