Remember Capt. Yee? Here's the latest about him.

[tbahrain]

A Chaplain's Test of Faith
As the Army's Case Against Muslim James Yee Collapsed, His Own World Was Crumbling, Too

By Ray Rivera
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, October 9, 2005; D01

His wife held the gun in one hand and two bullets in the other.

"Tell me how to use it," she whispered over the phone from the couple's Olympia, Wash., apartment. Of everything Chaplain James Yee had been through -- the arrest, the espionage allegations, the 76 days in solitary confinement -- this was the worst moment.

He had just been released a day earlier from a naval brig in South Carolina and ordered to Fort Benning, Ga. There, he would await trial -- but by then the government's case was eroding and becoming an increasing embarrassment to the Pentagon. Instead of spying and aiding the enemy -- death-penalty counts once promised by military prosecutors -- he was charged with mishandling classified documents.

His release from prison was the clearest sign yet that the government no longer considered him an imminent threat to national security.

Read more (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/10/08/AR2005100801314_pf.html)

[Tayeb]

s3

I recommend everyone to check the link and read the whole story. How much hatred is shown against Islam, it's incredible. I'm just cutting and pasting an excerpt:

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"An Unfriendly Atmosphere

On his arrival at Guantanamo, the outgoing Muslim chaplain left him with a warning: "This is not a friendly environment for Muslims, and I don't just mean for the prisoners."

Yee says he soon came to believe that Islam was used as a weapon against the detainees who practiced it. Guards, he writes, would frequently gather around the cell blocks and mock the prisoners during daily worship. Korans were often ripped and the bindings broken during cell searches.

As detainees confided in him, he heard more stories of insults to his religion taking place in the interrogation rooms. One detainee complained that some of the prisoners were forced to sit in the center of a Satanic circle drawn on the floor, outlined by lit candles. They were ordered to bow down as interrogators shouted, "Satan is your God, not Allah! Repeat after me!"

Yee said he initially found the complaints hard to believe. "But many detainees corroborated these stories, and translators" with the intelligence section "often confirmed them."

The book does not add greatly to previously reported charges made by released prisoners, FBI memos, and most recently by U.S. Southern Command, which confirmed at least five cases of soldiers desecrating the Koran and two cases of female interrogators using sexually explicit tactics.

The Army has thoroughly investigated allegations of abuses at Guantanamo, says Army spokesman Paul Boyce. "This is one person's representation of events," he says.

Yee began recording the complaints in a notepad he kept in his quarters and reported the complaints to his superiors, always in a "measured and professional way."

"As unhappy -- and even disgusted -- as I was about many of the things I witnessed, I never let my emotions show," he writes.

Called on by the base's public affairs office to guide visiting reporters around the prison, he did so without a whisper of his concerns. One visiting news crew asked him if he felt a conflict between his Islamic beliefs and his military mission. "Professionals never allow personal things to affect the way they perform a job," he told them.

As he lay in bed at night, though, he began to question his role there. He had come to Guantanamo confident he would be able to ensure the detainees could practice their religion, regardless of how miserable their living conditions were, he writes. But now he began to wonder if he were solely a "political appointment, a piece of theater meant to display the understanding and sensitivity we purported to have toward Islam."

The hostility extended to U.S. Muslim personnel. Several translators there came under investigation. One translator told Yee he was being investigated as well.

He confronted the camp's security officer, who told him, "Now chaplain, why would anybody want to arrest you, chaplain?"

The anti-Islamic sentiment emanated from the top down, Yee began to believe, recalling one of his first conversations with the Guantanamo commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller. The general told him he had lost several friends on 9/11 and had a deep hatred for "those Muslims" who had carried out the attacks. His emotions were so deep, the general said, that he had sought counseling from a chaplain. Miller did not respond to requests for comment last week."-

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Ma'a-salaama,