An Army Islamic chaplain, who counseled al Qaeda prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, naval base, has been charged with espionage, aiding the enemy and spying, The Washington Times has learned.
Capt. James J. Yee, a 1990 graduate of the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., was arrested earlier this month by the FBI in Jacksonville, Fla., as he arrived on a military charter flight from Guantanamo. . .
Agents confiscated several classified documents in his possession and interrogated him. . .
The Army has charged Capt. Yee with five offenses: sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage and failure to obey a general order. The Army may also charge him later with the more serious charge of treason, which under the Uniform Code of Military Justice could be punished by a maximum sentence of life.
It could not be immediately learned what country or organization is suspected of receiving information from Capt. Yee. . .
Capt. Yee, 35, was a command chaplain for I Corps at Fort Lewis, Wash. The Army dispatched him to Cuba to attend to the spiritual needs of a growing number of captured al Qaeda and members of the Taliban, a hard-line Islamic group ousted from power in Afghanistan.
Capt. Yee, of Chinese-American descent, was raised in New Jersey as a Christian. He studied Islam at West Point and converted to Islam and left the Army in the mid-1990s. He moved to Syria, where he underwent further religious training in traditional Islamic beliefs. He returned to the United States and re-entered the Army as an Islamic chaplain. He is said to be married to a Syrian woman.
Capt. Yee had almost unlimited private access to detainees as part of the Defense Department's program to provide the prisoners with religious counseling, as well as clothing and Islamic-approved meals. The law-enforcement source declined to say how much damage Capt. Yee may have inflicted on the U.S. war against Osama bin Laden's global terror network.
Big mistake! Would any Muslim country be as solicitous about US and coalition troops? The West has got to stop being swayed into foolishness by the world press and left-wing nay-sayers.
The Bitter Irony
After the September 11 attacks, Capt. Yee, one of 17 Muslim chaplains, was the subject of a number of press articles on Islam.
A month after the attack on the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, he was quoted in an account by Scripps Howard News Service as saying that "an act of terrorism, the taking of innocent lives is prohibited by Islam and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not."
[. . . .]
At the Charleston brig, he joins three other notable detainees in the war on terrorism: Yaser Esam Hamdi, an American-born Saudi who fought with the Taliban; Jose Padilla, a former Chicago gang member who is charged with plotting to detonate a radioactive bomb; and Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, accused of being an al Qaeda sleeper agent.
The United States classifies the detainees at Guantanamo as "enemy combatants," not prisoners of war. The Pentagon will likely hold most of them until the war on terrorism is over.
My Commentary:
It is now time to call a spade a spade. The question is whether the US military should continue to trust its Muslim recruits. Simple prudence for my non-jihadi, non-Muslim troops would force me, as a commander, to say no -- reluctantly tarring loyal Muslims perhaps -- but needing to act to protect the majority of my forces and my country. Prudence would require this -- based on what I have learned of Islam. We have been tolerant in the West too long.
From what I have read, for example, of British Muslim immigrants who baldly state they are Muslim first, British second, I have concluded that it is impossible to know who is loyal and who is a jihadi. Were I in charge of a military force fighting Islamic extremists, fanatics, terrorists, mindless converts like Richard Reid, traitors like John Walker Lindh, Yaser Esam Hamdi, Jose Padilla and, allegedly, Capt. Yee, I would refuse to have Muslims in my force. It is simple, self-protective common sense.
Islam knows no boundaries of belief nor territory and Islam includes the concept and its imams preach too often about conducting jihad against infidels -- that’s us! The Islamicists' conduct--not straightforward war, in uniform and facing their enemies--but guerilla tactics, infiltrating the West, using our tolerance, laxity and naivete. Apparently, Islam demands extreme loyalty to Islam first and foremost, over loyalty to one’s country-- to the point of traitorousness. It is time for the West to wake up and realize this; then act in self-interest, before more harm is done. To those moderate Muslims, start speaking up so we can tell you from the jihadis –- but don’t expect to enter any army I would command--until the Islamic fanatics have been defeated.
Yee had been assigned to counsel the detainees in Cuba, now numbering 660, starting 10 months ago. Before that, he was a Muslim chaplain at the Army's Fort Lewis in Washington state.
Yee, who grew up a Lutheran in a New Jersey suburb, graduated from West Point in 1990 and then commanded a Patriot missile battery.
He converted to Islam about the time he served a stint in Saudi Arabia after the Persian Gulf War. After quitting the military, he spent four years studying Islam in Damascus, Syria, and returned to the United States a trained imam.
In the late 1990s, he rejoined the U.S. military as a Muslim cleric, and was frequently interviewed by U.S. news organizations about Islamic life within the U.S. military. He continually professed a message of peace.
"An act of terrorism, the taking of innocent civilian lives, is prohibited by Islam, and whoever has done this needs to be brought to justice, whether he is Muslim or not," Yee told Scripps Howard several weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
Terrorism researcher Steven Emerson, who frequently consults for government agencies, said yesterday that U.S. officials had been watching Yee for some time, and had been looking into whether he had counseled any of the prisoners in ways that discouraged them from assisting interrogators.
Yee's detention is only the latest controversy to hit the chaplain program, which oversees the approximately 12 Islamic imams in the U.S. military.
In June, The Washington Post disclosed that some chaplains' service Web sites for the Navy and the Air Force referred sailors and airmen interested in Islam to a site that provides links to the lectures of fundamentalist clerics, some of whom advocate jihad against the United States and Israel.
The inspectors general for the Pentagon and the Justice Department have launched reviews of the Muslim chaplain programs in the U.S. military and in federal prisons.
