GLOBE EDITORIAL
The war on Captain Yee
12/7/2003
MILITARY PROSECUTORS are making the US Army look foolish and vindictive. By charging Captain James Yee with adultery and storing pornography on a government computer -- after imprisoning him in a navy brig under harsh conditions for 76 days -- Army prosecutors appear to be inverting a precious principle of American justice. Instead of starting with a crime and then looking for the perpetrator, they seem to have taken the man into custody and then begun looking for a crime.
Until his arrest on Sept. 10, Yee was a Muslim chaplain ministering to foreign Muslims captured in Afghanistan and incarcerated at the detention center on the US military base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Leaks to the press made it seem Yee would be charged with espionage or other grave crimes. On Oct. 10 he was charged with disobeying a general order by taking home classified material and carrying it without its proper container.
Usually the careless mishandling of classified materials does not incur criminal charges. This is what happened in the case of a former CIA director, John Deutch, who lost his security clearance for transferring some of the government's most sensitive secrets to an insecure home computer.
Yee's lawyer, Eugene Fidell, wrote a letter to President Bush dated Nov. 24 in which he evoked this background and asked that Yee be released from pretrial confinement and "restored to normal duty status pending a resolution of this matter." The letter noted that "offenses involving the mishandling of classified information -- if proven (which is not the case here) -- are typically handled nonjudicially and result in a reprimand or the suspension, reduction, or revocation of a security clearance."
On Monday Yee was indeed released. Whether or not Bush, acting as commander in chief, ordered Yee's release, the effect is to restore some fairness to a case that has harmed the Army's and the government's reputation with all who care about civil liberties, especially American Muslims and Asian-Americans.
But on the same day Yee was released, the West Point graduate was charged with adultery and having had pornography on a government computer. Both allegations look suspicious. It is all too common for computer users to receive salacious material that they did not ask for or anticipate, but regardless of what the off-color material was and whether or not it was unsolicited, the presence of such images on a computer hardly justifies 76 days of punitive, high-security incarceration. And there are stringent rules for gaining an adultery conviction under military law. The behavior of the accused must be "prejudicial to good order or discipline."
Army prosecutors do not serve national security by seeking a crime to justify their long, harsh detention of Captain Yee.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
