WASHINGTON, 18 March 2004 — US Army chaplain James Yee and army prosecutors are said to be nearing an agreement in which the US Army would drop its most serious criminal charges against the Muslim chaplain. In exchange, he will agree to undergo up to 30 days of counterintelligence interrogations and a polygraph test.
Capt. Yee was arrested last September at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, on suspicion that he was part of an espionage ring. He was kept in solitary confinement for 76 days, much of the time in chains. One of his lawyers said he was treated worse than the prisoners he ministered there. In the end, he was never formally charged with anything.
The army’s charges against him — mutiny and sedition, aiding the enemy and espionage were among those listed on his confinement order. Whatever case the army brought against him quickly fell apart, and Yee was released in November.
Capt. Yee was at his pretrial hearing, called an Article 32, in December at Fort Benning, Georgia, when a military judge suspended the proceeding because prosecutors had not performed a required classification review of documents seized from the chaplain. Negotiations then began between the US Southern Command, which oversees the detention facilities at Guantanamo, and Yee’s civilian attorney.
In the agreement, the army will drop the classified information charges, but Capt. Yee will be subjected to administration punishment on charges of committing adultery and storing pornographic material on his computer. In addition, he would resign from the army, but with an honorable discharge.
Yee’s family are furious, saying the new charges of adultery and downloading pornography on a government-issued computer, are attempts to discredit him rather than admit they were wrong. Some of Yee’s supporters have suggested the chaplain was imprisoned because he was going to speak out against the conditions at Guantanamo, where the US has imprisoned hundreds of alleged terrorists. Yee’s wife, Huda Suboh — whom he met while studying Islam in Damascus in the mid-1990s — told journalists an army investigator was aggressive and disrespectful, and felt the charge of adultery was used as a tactic to make her angry enough to incriminate her husband.
