Dum Pendebat Filius

Here’s a link to a good article you should read if you’ve got the time:

“The Strange Case of Chaplain Yee,” by Joseph Lelyveld, in the 2005/12/15 NYRB

Actually, it appears, all Captain Yee had to do to attract suspicion was to intercede repeatedly at Camp Delta on behalf of the prisoners, as their chaplain, when he saw their guards being unnecessarily—and, he came to feel, deliberately—provocative: in handling Korans during cell searches, for instance, or taking detainees out of their cells in shackles for interrogation just as the hour arrived for prayer. [...]

In the claustrophobic circumstances of the American military enclave, Captain Yee’s evening gatherings and services could be construed as alien, suspicious, not with the program, even mutinous. … Eventually Yee became such an object of suspicion that military policemen took to calling out “Chaplain on the block!” to warn guards inside that an intrusion was about to occur in the person of a US Army captain, or bar him till they were good and ready to let him in, even though his orders gave him complete access to the prison and he outranked the enlisted men who stood in his way. [...]

Finally, on September 10, 2003, a day before the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Yee found himself taken into custody by agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, shortly after landing in Jacksonville on leave. After five days in solitary confinement, he was shown a memo signed by General Miller charging him with espionage. “Chaplain Yee is known to have associated with known terrorist sympathizers,” it said. He was also said to have classified documents hidden away in his quarters at Guantánamo, along with a ticket to London, suggesting that he’d been preparing to flee. None of this turned out to be true.

This is profoundly creepy stuff.