In New Book Ex-Chaplain at Guantánamo Tells of Abuses
By NEIL A. LEWIS
October 3, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/03/politics/03yee.html

WASHINGTON, Oct. 2 - James J. Yee, a former Muslim
chaplain at the Guantánamo Bay detention center, says
in a new book that military authorities knowingly
created an atmosphere in which guards would feel free
to abuse prisoners.

Mr. Yee, 37, is a former Army captain and a West Point
graduate who was arrested and imprisoned in 2003 on
suspicion of espionage. It was a case that, in the
end, proved groundless, to the embarrassment of the
Pentagon.

Mr. Yee was ultimately deemed guilty of minor
administrative charges involving adultery and the
presence of pornography on his computer, and given an
honorable discharge. But those convictions, too, were
later dropped.

The book, "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism
Under Fire," offers Mr. Yee's first public comments on
what occurred at the camp while he was there.

In the book, to be published this week by
PublicAffairs, Mr. Yee writes that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey
D. Miller, the prison's commanding officer - who would
later become Mr. Yee's chief antagonist in pressing
suspicions of espionage against him - regularly
incited anger toward the prisoners with emotional
slogans delivered to the troops.

Mr. Yee writes that when General Miller visited the
prison, he would tell the guards sternly, "The war is
on." That remark and similar comments, Mr. Yee writes,
were designed to let soldiers know they were operating
in a combat environment where it was understood that
rules protecting detainees were relaxed and instances
of mistreatment would be overlooked.

"Soldiers know that when you are in combat there's
considerable leniency in the rules," Mr. Yee said in
an interview, "and the leaders, including General
Miller, wanted to put them in that frame of mind."

He said that General Miller told him that he remained
deeply angry over the loss of military friends who
were killed in the attack on the Pentagon on Sept. 11,
2001.

The general, who is now assigned to duty in the
Pentagon, declined through a spokesman to comment on
the book.

Mr. Yee says the guards were constantly reminded of
the Sept. 11 attacks by General Miller and others, and
they "retaliated in whatever way they could" against
the detainees.

"In some cases, punishment often meant physical
force," he writes.

Mr. Yee describes how, to extract prisoners from their
cells, soldiers used a procedure known as "irfing": a
team in heavy body armor, called an Immediate Reaction
Force, would physically subdue the prisoners and
remove them from their cells.

He writes that the irfing operations were sometimes
needed to control unruly prisoners, but "they were
doing it so frequently, so regularly at Guantánamo
that I came to believe it was solely to rile the
prisoners."

He says some prisoners were irfed because of such
violations as having extra plastic foam cups in their
cells; the procedure would later be described as
necessary to "retrieve contraband."

The military has said repeatedly that incidents of
abuse have occurred, but that they are isolated and
that all accusations are thoroughly investigated.

In the book, Mr. Yee writes that as he got to know
prisoners through his chaplain duties, he became
increasingly certain that many were not the hardened
terrorists that the authorities had depicted them to
be.

He says that while he was chaplain to about 600
detainees, the authorities regularly arranged for him
to meet reporters and Congressional visitors to
demonstrate the military's efforts to accommodate the
inmates' religion. He came to believe, however, that
he was being exploited to present a false image about
the camp's atmosphere.

He writes that he rarely witnessed physical abuse of
the sort that has since become a point of contention
between the military on one side and human rights
groups and defense lawyers on the other. But he says
that in his tenure at Guantánamo, he regularly heard
about prisoners being beaten and humiliated in their
interrogation sessions.

He says he was told of the abuse by detainees and by
Arabic-speaking translators who were present at many
of the interrogations. He writes that these accounts
were given to him months before similar accusations
became public through press reports and the disclosure
of internal memorandums by agents of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.

In the interview, Mr. Yee declined to discuss the
details of the adultery and pornography charges
against him, except to say they were used to humiliate
him because the military was embarrassed over its
handling of his case. He also does not go into the
details of the charges in his book.

Mr. Yee was reared as a Lutheran in New Jersey and
graduated from West Point in 1990. He converted to
Islam and left the Army in the early 1990's, returning
later as a chaplain. He now lives with his family in
Olympia, Wash., where he is studying for a doctorate
in international relations.
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More about America's War Crimes at:
http://www.islamawareness.net/WarCrimes/American/