www.nybooks.com/articles/18550
Captain James Yee, a 1990 graduate of the US Military A cademy at West Point, witnessed innumerable such fittings during the ten months he was a daily presence as a Muslim chaplain inside the cages of Camp Delta where supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists were dumped a s a way of holding them beyond reach of any US court. This might have pr epared him for his own fitting in a "three-piece suit," which occurred a t the naval brig in Jacksonville, Florida, shortly after his arrest in S eptember 2003 on what he was eventually advised were charges of mutiny, aiding the enemy, and espionage, on any of which prosecutors could have demanded the death penalty. Al-Qaeda, anonymous investigators suggested to the press, had infiltrated Guantnamo in the person of this West Point graduate, a third-generatio n Chinese-American from New Jersey who had made his first profession of faith as a Muslim at a Newark mosque, three months after completing his officers training.
advertisement James Yee's spiritual journey over the next decade, which eventually brou ght him to Cuba as the fourth Muslim chaplain assigned in less than a ye ar to Camp Delta's detainees, seems to have begun almost casually. At fi rst, his conversion "did not feel particularly momentous," he tells us i n his memoir For God and Country. In his description, it sounds more lik e a consumer than a theological choice: accepting the "simplicity" of Is lam's belief in one God didn't require trading in Jesus for Muhammad, as he saw it, but putting them more or less on a par as prophets. Although he had been raised as a Lutheran to believe in the Trinity, he had neve r considered religion to be a major factor in his life and didn't see wh y it had to become one as a consequence of his conversion. Islam, at thi s stage, was a more comfortable creed, not a way of life. To his apparent surprise, its claim on his attention gradually deepened, particularly when he was assigned to Saudi Arabia, after the first Gulf War, as an air defense artillery officer in a Patriot missile crew. Sett ing an example of religious tolerance that, needless to say, went unreci procated, the American command allowed its troops to frequent a Saudi "c ultural center" at King Abdul Aziz air base where non-Muslims were quiet ly proselytized Yee claims that large numbers of Americans converted du ring the Gulf Warand Muslim servicemen could sign up for bus excursions to Mecca. Yee, who professes to have felt entirely at home in the relat ively homogeneous New Jersey suburb where he'd grown up as a member of a n ethnic minority, found a kind of liberation in the "diversity" of Isla m This was real multiculturalism, all those Asians, Africans, Iranians, and Turks mixed in with Arabs and praying on a footing of equality; Mecca, as he experienced it on this first of t hree trips (the first a mere visit, the second two a proper Hajj), was w hat his father had always taught him America was supposed to be. "The di versity of Islam," he writes, "was incredible.... So moved was he that within two years he'd resigned from the army with th e aim of pursuing Islamic studies to qual-ify as an imam and immersing h imself in Arabic; within three years, this Chinese-American West Point g raduate from New Jersey was enrolled in Abu Noor University in Damascus where he stayed four years, returning home with a Palestinian wife who k ept herself covered and spoke only limited English. Captain Yee's story is remarkable even before he was recruited back into the army as a Musli m chaplain, even before he was sent to Guantnamo. His story up to this point, before it turns really dark, has strong interest as a narrative o f one American's quest in the mall of religions, faiths, and cults that this country becomes for so many of its denizens. One would like to see what a novelist with a taste for American tales of improbable self-inven tion and cultural mutation, TC Boyle, perhaps, would do with it. To te ll the rest of Captain Yee's story would require Joseph Conrad. Its subsequent episodes display the US military's profound confusion abou t Islam: its self-congratulation and religiosity, which lead it to boast that it provides Korans, chaplain services, and an opportunity to pray in the direction of Mecca to those it detains indefinitely as "terrorist s"; while its overriding devotion to its mission leads it to interfere w ith the religious practice of those same detainees in order to pressure them psychologically, squeeze them for intelligence they may or may not have held back, and, generally, show them who's in charge. It's asking a lot of the individual military policeman, not to mention the individual major general, to draw a fine line between the war on terror and a war on Islam, when Islam and their own misery are all that unite the inmates in the wire-mesh cages of a high-security prison. In this case, the maj or general was General Geoffrey Miller, who had been dispatched by Donal d Rumsfeld to Camp Delta and later Abu Ghraib prison in Iraqwith the s pecific charge of improving the "harvest" of what's known as "actionable intelligence." Into this storm of cultural confusion and ruthless resolve walked the nai ve James Yee in November 2002, rendered even more so by his head-turning success in his first posting as a chaplain at Fort Lewis, Washington, w here he'd won the warm approbation of his commanders who thus reinforced the conviction he'd formed in Mecca that there could be no conflict bet ween service to Allah and service to America. In Yee's eclectic theology , American values like religious freedom "are inherent in Islam and were a large part of what had led me to embrace this religion." In the immed iate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the newly minted chaplain ha d initiated at Fort Lewis a series of "sensitivity training" sessions on Islam for officers and enlisted men, in which he earnestly argued that terrorist attacks on innocents were inimical to the teachings of the Kor an. "This work was fulfilling," he declares in For God and Country, writ ten "with" (or perhaps by) a journalist, Aimee Molloy. Soon he was being sent to other military installati ons to make the same presentation and army publicists were arranging for him to be interviewed on National Public Radio and MSNBC. "I had become the US military's poster child of a good Muslim," he says. He was so prized during this period that no one in the military seems to have raised questions about his long stay in Damascus, a line on his rs um that might have rung some bells during a security vetting, if there had been such a thing for chaplains assigned to Guantnamo. It seems the re wasn't, at least in the case of the one Muslim chaplain with a West P oint diploma. If his Syrian connection was ever noted, it would have bee n only later when a cloud of suspicion had already settled over the head s of all the Muslim servicemen with access to this remote and heavily gu arded prison. Then the fairly striking (but easily explained) fact that he had tried placing phone calls from Guantnamo to Damascuswhere his w ife and daughter had gone for the duration of his stay in Cuba, in order to be with her familymay well have been added to the dossier being ass embled for General Miller that depicted James Yee, grotesquely and impla usibly, as an al-Qaeda ringleader. Before the case against Chaplain Yee collapsed, Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Jon Kyl of Arizona, the columnist John Leo, as well as a n array of conservative and Christian bloggers would seize on his arrest as evidence that radical Islamicists had taken control of the recruitme nt of Muslim chaplains into our armed forces. They offered no evidence b earing on his recruitment back into the army, however; by his own tellin g, Yee was first approached by a Muslim African-American, an ex-marine, at a Ramadan banquet at that hotbed of Islamic ferment, that notori- ous madrasa, the Pentagon. Yee had scant opportunity to offer a public rebuttal of the charges he fa ced, or the portrayal of him as a traitor by anonymous government leaker s, or the further allegations the charges and leaks inspired. "Speech t...
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