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Today's
Stories
February
2, 2004
Jeffrey
St. Clair
The Hollow Candidate:
The Trouble with Howard Dean
Jan.
31 / Feb 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
January 30, 2004
Saul
Landau
Cuba High on Neo-Con Hit List
Michael
Donnelly
Bush's Second Front: The War in
the Woods
Elaine
Cassel
Worse Than Jacko: Child Abuse at Gitmo
David Vest
More Halliburton News, Brought to You by Halliburton
Mike
Whitney
The Kay Report: Still Defending Aggression
David
Miller
The Hutton Whitewash
Sam
Husseini
How Many People Must Die Because of This "Mistake",
Senator Kerry?
January 29, 2004
Patricia
Nelson Limerick
John Ehrlichman, Environmentalist
Ron
Jacobs
Homeland Security and "Legalized"
Immigration
Rahul Mahajan
New Hampshire v. Iraq
Greg
Weiher
Bush Calls for Preemptive Strike on
Moon and Mars
Norman
Solomon
The State of the Media Union
Cockburn
/ St. Clair
Does NH Mean Anything?
January
28, 2004
Kathy
Kelly
Bearing Witness Against Teachers of
Torture and Assassination
January
27, 2004
Steve
Philion
Ritter Was Right: My Exchange with
CNN's Aaron Brown
Daniel
Ellsberg
Leak Against This War: Expose the
Lies from the Inside
C.G.
Estabrook
Can George Ever Really be Elected
President?
Josh
Frank
Hot Coals in Vermont: Dean's Smoke
Screens
Greg
Moses
Racism 101 All Over Again
Gilad
Atzmon
Blood, Soil and Art
Mike
Ferner
"We're All Lied To": an
Interview with Bruce Cockburn in Baghdad
Hammond
Guthrie
General Disorders of the Day
January
26, 2004
Sean
Donahue
The Toxic Career of Rand Beers: Kerry's
Drug War Zealot
Gary
Leupp
David Kay's Admission
January
24/5, 2004
Patrick
Cockburn
Iraq's Shia: "Our Day Has
Come"
Laura
Flanders
State of the Conservative Union
Simon Helweg-Larsen
Enter Berger: Signs of Hope in
Guatemala
Dave
Lindorff
Ground Control to Maj. George
Susan Davis
The Birdwatcher Menace
Alexander
Cockburn
The Fog of Cop Out: McNamara 10,
Morris 0
January
23, 2004
Yonathan
Shapira
An Israeli Pilot Speaks Out
Standard
Schaefer
Italian Philosopher Giorgio Agamben
Protests US Travel Policy
Josh
Frank
In Defense of Polluters: Howard Dean's
Vermont
William
A. Cook
Rule by the Corrupt and the Capricious
January
22, 2004
Sam
Smith
Howards End?
Patricia
Koyce Wanniski
Lost in Space
Alexander
Lukin
Putin and the Clans
Katherine
van Wormer
Dry Drunk Confirmed: O'Neill's
Revelations and Bush's Mind
Forrest
Hylton
The Prisoner, the President and the
Mafia
January 19, 2004
Justin E. H. Smith
Inside
America's Prisons: From Corrections to Retribution
Richard W. Behan
The GOP, Inc.
Ray McGovern
Bush's
State of the Union: Humility or More Hyperbole?
Werther
SOTUS:
the Stalin Moment of America's Nomenklatura
Phillip Cryan
Media Collusion in Colombia's War
Lee Sustar
A New Strategy to Reverse Labor's Decline?
Arthur Versluis
Great Lakes as Commodity: Privatizing Water
Uri Avnery
Anti-Semitism:
a Practical Manual
Steve Perry
Fresh Crack from Hawkeye State
January 17 / 18, 2004
Fadi Kiblawi and Will
Youmans
The
Use and Abuse of MLK Jr by Israel's Apologists
Joshua Muldavin
and Joseph Nevins
Blaming the Symptoms
Jeffrey St. Clair
Bad Days at Indian Point: Inside America's Most Dangerous Nuclear
Plant
Brian Cloughley
Iron Hammers in Iraq
Saul Landau
Fog of War: Vietnam and Iraq
M. Shahid Alam
Lerner, Said and the Palestinians
Richard Manning
Food Poisoning as Background Noise
Marjorie Cohn
The Guantanamo Concentration Camp
Mike Whitney
Scalia and Opus Dei: Radicals on the Court
Sadik Kassim
Meet Our New Saddam: Islam Karimov
Carol Norris
Arnold
and Bush's Numbers Don't Add Up
Joe Quandt
Suicide
Bombers: The Clash of Absurdities
David Krieger
Imagining MLK Jr at 75
Bruce Jackson
Making War, Making Movies
Ron Jacobs
Revolution in the Air: a review
Richard Edmondson
Rupert Murdoch and My Sister
Richard Forno
Apologizing for Preemption: Evil, Perle and Frum
Poets' Basement
Holt, Mickey Z, Albert & Guthrie
January 16, 2004
Kathy Kelly
A Visit
to Umm Qasr Prison
William S. Lind
More
Thoughts on 4th Generation Warfare
Gillian Russom
So.
Cal Grocery Strikers Speak Out: "We Need Action!"
Ari Shavit
Survival
of the Fittest? An Interview with Benny Morris
Adi Ophir
Genocide Hides Behind Expulsion: a Response to Benny Morris
Dave Lindorff
The General's Henchman: Michael Moore Smears Kucinich
Steve Perry
Iowa Death Trip 2
January 15, 2004
Veteran Intelligence
Professionals for Sanity
Memo
to the President: Your State of the Union Address
John Chuckman
Dry
Hole in the Oval Office: President from Podunk Drilling, Inc
Chris Floyd
Mind Over Matter
Gil-Scott Heron
Whitey on the Moon
Gary Leupp
The
Silk Road: Random Thoughts on the Bam Earthquake and Satan
January 14, 2004
Greg Moses
Happy
Birthday, Dr. King: To Write Off the South is to Surrender to
Bigots
Kurt Nimmo
Bush and the Supremes: Amputating the Bill of Rights
Dave Lindorff
Preview of Iowa? Pennsylvania Straw Poll Spells Trouble for Traditional
Dems (and Dean)
Jason Leopold
O'Neill Claims Backed by Rumsfeld / Wolfowitz War Letters to
Clinton
Alexander Cockburn
Bush,
Oil and Iraq: Some Truth at Last
January 13, 2004
William S. Lind
How 2004
Looks from Potsdam
M. Junaid Alam
Do Iraqis Have a Right to Resist?
Mickey Z
Snipers:
No Nuts in Iraq
Adolfo Gilly
Chonchocoro:
The Prisoner and the Presidents
Steve Perry
You Love God, Right?
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click Here
for More Stories.
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February
2, 2004
Trampled Under Foot
The
Prosecution of Captain Yee
By TOM WRIGHT
Of all the lives heedlessly trampled underfoot
in the Bush-Ashcroft Stampede On Terror, few stories can compare
in their tawdry shabbiness, their sheer petty vindictiveness,
to the treatment of U.S. Army Capt. James J. Yee. Perhaps he
simply stood out as too much of an oddity, evenn by the individualistic
standard of today's Army of One. Maybe in the strange circumstance
he landed in, it was inevitable that he would become a target
of the general intolerance.
The son of Chinese immigrants, raised
a Lutheran in Springfield, N.J., Yee was a West Point graduate
and a Gulf War veteran, having served in a Patriot missile battalion
in Saudi Arabia. After the war, he settled in Syria, where for
four years he studied Islam and Arabic, and where he met his
wife Huda, the daughter of Palestinian refugees of the 1948 exodus.
Later he would rejoin the Army, this time in a very different
role, and as a real rarity: of the military's 3150 chaplains,
he was to be one of only 12 Muslims. His position was to thrust
him into prominence in the aftermath of Sept. 11, when the government
recruited him for a public relations role, conducting media interviews
to show that the War on Terror was not anti-Islamic. Soon he
would get a first hand look at that war.
From his assignment at the 29th Signal
Battalion at Fort Lewis, Wash., he was deployed in November,
2002 to the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo, Cuba. There he was
to attend to the spiritual needs of the 660 "enemy combatants",
mostly from the Afghanistan war, dropped into a legal Black Hole
so dense that not even their names could escape its pull, and
from which no sign of hope or recourse to international jurisprudence
could be detected on the mainland. It is unrecorded whether
or not Yee sensed the irony of his setting: Act I of the War
on Terror played out on the stage of Castro's Cuba, with scarcely
a chance to change costumes after the Cold War.
The island inmates were tagged "the
worst of the worst" (Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem), "devoted
to killing millions of Americans" (Dick Cheney). But as
Nicholas M. Horock and Anwar Iqbal argue in Mother Jones,
"it appears that many, perhaps most, inmates" are merely
"Taliban cannon fodder and other small fish." David
Cole points out in his book Enemy Aliens that after the
1991 Gulf War, in the golden days when the status of captured
prisoners was determined by factual hearings, two in three were
found not to have been involved in combat at all. "Surely
it is possible, indeed likely", he says, "that in the
chaos of the Afghanistan battlefield, the military picked up
some individuals who were not combatants." But we cannot
know, Bush having declined any opportunity to present evidence
of innocence. And so they wait out their days in the tropical
heat, forgotten amidst the barbed wire, the reptiles and the
frequent suicide attempts.
Here Capt. Yee carried out his duties,
and what his own views were he has kept close to his vest. Some
hints, though, have appeared in the press, like this report in
the L.A.Times, quoting Father Raymond Tetreault, a Catholic
priest who served with Yee in the Camp last year. The priest
"said Yee alone spoke Arabic and spent the most time with
the detainees." "He could go into the detention cell
areas and talk to different onesHe was called by the guards when
there were problems. So he did go in there, and he would go and
visit them on a regular basis.
Sometimes, the priest recalled, Yee would
scold guards for upsetting detainees by doing things such as
picking up copies of the Koran in prisoners' cells. Yee, he said,
would explain to the guards that it was forbidden for "infidels"
to touch the holy book."
In 1971 the Stanford Prison Experiment
showed us how an ordinary group of college students, randomly
assigned to the role of guard or prisoner, could in no time at
all jettison their middle-class pretensions, revive some atavistic
impulse lurking in their brain stems, and abandon themselves
to a sordid hierarchy of Foucaultian domination. If that's the
outcome in Palo Alto, then consider what kinds of attitudes are
possible if one thinks he is guarding the 9/11 planners, and
with the virtual impunity afforded by the secretive location?
And what view would attach to a Muslim chaplain suspected of
sympathy with them?
On September 10, 2003, Yee's wife Huda
drove to Sea-Tac Airport to meet her husband, due to return for
family leave. He never got off the plane. For ten frantic days,
she would try to locate him, but the Army would tell her nothing.
Only from the media would she learn his fate, when the Army
leaked the news to the right-wing Washington Times. Yee
had been arrested on suspicion of espionage, and his military
lawyers had been told to prepare a death penalty defense. Detained
after his flight from Cuba to Florida, he was blindfolded and
driven to a military brig in South Carolina. There he spent
the next seventy-six days, much of it in solitary confinement
and in manacles and leg-irons, while television satellite trucks
parked in front of his parents' New Jersey home and erected another
outpost of the global panopticon.
And what were the charges, incidentally,
that could lead the West Point graduate to the gallows? His
lawyers (and the media) got the story that he carried in his
luggage notebooks containing prisoners'names, a sketch of the
prison compound, and unspecified information about Syria. Maybe
it wasn't a newly awarded flight school diploma, but in the current
hysteria it did suffice to land him in the same brig as the nation's
most notorious accused terrorists. The technical charges: two
counts of ''failing to obey a lawful general order,'' specifically
taking classified material and ''wrongfully transporting classified
material without the proper security containers or covers.''
At first the government claimed that
Yee's search and arrest at the Florida air station arose from
his own suspicious behavior. (He supposedly denied having luggage
with him; his lawyer explained that at the time he was escorting
a child from Cuba to the care of another adult in a different
part of the airport, and he didn't have his luggage with him
just then.) But the government later abandoned that pretense
and admitted that FBI agents were already in waiting for him,
having received a "tip" from the Army, which had put
Yee under surveillance.
Yee and his lawyers argued that the materials
he carried were just his own notes about prisoners he counseled,
and the material on Syria was a term paper he was writing as
part of a graduate class he was taking. But the stew thickened
with the arrests over the next few weeks of two more men at the
base with whom Yee was known to have visited socially. Senior
Airman Ahmad I. Al-Halabi, a translator, was arrested on suspicion
of espionage, and on September 29 another translator, Ahmed F.
Mehalba, like Yee, was charged with possessing classified information.
The media were dutiful. Official leaks
were handed off to the press, and reporters dashed the length
of the field to their foregone conclusions. The L.A. Times explained
that the three ("all Muslims") possessed classified
material "possibly to give it to outside terrorist networks."
The sensitive ear detects the Freudian overtone in official
qualms "that Al Qaeda may have managed to penetrate what
was supposed to be an impregnable prison." But the real
fears, deep in the hearts of men, may be gleaned from this item,
actually printed in Airman Al-Halabi's court papers and no doubt
included so as to seal his doom:
"While at Guantanamo Bay, "Al-Halabi
made statements criticizing United States policy with regard
to the detainees and U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East.
He has also expressed sympathy for and has had unauthorized contact
with the detainees, including providing unauthorized items of
comfort to the detainees."
This statement, which was widely reported,
does not seem to have attracted the attention of many civil liberties
scholars or other antiquarians, but it has implications worth
pursuing. It is of a kind with this syllogism, also from the
L.A. Times: "There are indications that the chaplain,
Army Capt. James Joseph Yeewho spent some years in Syria before
returning to the United States, may have become sympathetic with
the plight of the Muslim detainees." In other words, it
is enough merely to have lived in an unapproved country, or to
have expressed out loud an opinion that would not be heard on
the Evening News with Dan Rather, to lend credence to capital
espionage charges against a member of the U.S. Armed Forces.
In reality, one need only be a member of--oh you know-- that
race or religion. Or as the New York Times put it (ever so delicately)
the problem at the base was just that "some senior officers
at Guantanamo were skeptical about the wisdom of having Muslims
and Arab-Americans involved in the interrogations of prisoners
and other camp operations, and there was smoldering suspicion
over what they were doing when they met with one another".
Well, like a bad sequel to a bad movie,
it just keeps getting worse. There was the small embarrassment
about Col. Jack Farr of Army Intelligence, who was also charged
with "wrongfully transporting classified material without
the proper security container," but who for some reason
was not blindfolded, thrown into solitary confinement or publicly
linked to Osama bin Laden. In fact, he was not even arrested,
but we are assured that this had nothing to do with his being
a non-Muslim. Then the military prosecutors themselves committed
the very same offense, when they mailed to one of Yee's attorneys
documents that later turned out to be classified. (They did
not arrest themselves.)
Then there was the small problem of the
government's repeated delays in Yee's court martial hearing,
to complete a "classification review." (Translation:
" Gosh, it seems that maybe we never got around to actually
classifying that information. We'll check.") Then most
of the charges against Airman Al-Halabi were dropped. And at
last, the espionage scenario embroidered around James Yee unraveled.
Yee still faces minor charges on the documents possession, but
the government knows he is no security risk, which they demonstrated
conclusively when they released him on his own recognizance on
November 25.
With his career over, his name smeared
with the charge of disloyalty and terrorism, his family left
to face the neighbors who no longer make eye contact, what would
now be the course taken by the institution he served, i.e. the
mighty Armed Forces of the World's Only Superpower? You were
correct if you answered: "destroy him in front of his family
and religious community, too". And so, anon, he was charged
with committing adultery and viewing pornography on a government
computer. His court martial hearing was held, with his wife
and young daughter in the courtroom, and it dealt entirely with
the sexual charges against him. Every lurid detail was pointlessly
included.
This is not only about humiliation: with
the new sex charges added, Yee faces a maximum of thirteen years
in prison. To truly see the intentional cruelty behind these
charges, consider their context.
For the last two years, the military
has brought adultery charges only when attached to a serious
crime like rape. By Executive Order, military law was modified
in 2002 to limit adultery prosecutions. By the signature of
President Bush himself these cases would henceforth be pressed
only when the conduct was "directly prejudicial to good
order and discipline or service discrediting". Neither condition
applied to Yee's case. Why the revision? Recall the name 1st
Lt. Kelly Flinn. She was the Air Force's first female B-52 bomber
pilot, and back in 1997 there was quite an outcry when she was
forced to accept a general discharge after revelations of an
affair with a married man. Women's groups pointed to, well,
a certain double standard that seemed to operate.
Sure enough, only a few months later,
Four-star Gen. Joseph Ralston was nominated as Chairman of the
Joint Chiefs of Staff. But before he could be installed, the
same little story surfaced about him! And darned if every man
from the Secretary of Defense on down just could not understand
what all the fuss was about. Of course General Ralston was passed
over for that job, and someone else, someone of unimpeachable
moral character, was put in charge of bombing defenseless countries.
Now I, for one, will withhold my protest
if the worst thing that happens to Capt. Yee is that he gets
overlooked during the next vacancy at the Joint Chiefs. But as
for the rest of it, this depraved spectacle that turns James
Yee and his family into just another bit of collateral damage,
that reminds all American Muslim of their place in this country,
it simply degrades and shames us all.
Tom Wright
lives in Olympia, Washington. He can be reached at: tomwright59@yahoo.com
Weekend
Edition Features for February 1, 2004
Paul
de Rooij
For Whom the Death Tolls: Deliberate
Undercounting of Coalition Fatalities
Bernard
Chazelle
Bush's Desolate Imperium
Jack
Heyman
Bushfires on the Docks
Christopher
Reed
Broken Ballots
Michael
Donnelly
An Urgent Plea to Progressives: Don't Give in to Fear
Rob Eshelman
The Subtle War
Lee
Sustar
Palestine and the Anti-War Movement
George
Bisharat
Right of Return
Ray
McGovern
Nothing to Preempt
Brian Cloughley
Enron's Beady-Eyed Sharks
Conn
Hallinan
Nepal, Bush & Real WMDs
Kurt Nimmo
The Murderous Lies of the Neo-Cons
Phillip
Cryan
Media at the Monterrey Summit
Christopher
Brauchli
A Speech for Those Who Don't Read
John
Holt
War in the Great White North
Mickey
Z.
Clueless in America: When Mikey Met Wesley
Mark
Scaramella
The High Cost of Throwing Away the Key
Tariq Ali
Farewell, Munif
Ben
Tripp
Waiter! The Reality Check, Please
Poets'
Basement
LaMorticella, Guthrie, Thomas and Albert
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