Note: Former U.S. Army Muslim Chaplain James Yee in Bay Area; see Calendar for detailsBy: Blue Texan Monday March 24, 2008 |
The Bush Administration has presided over a stain on the nation's honor that will never be removed. James Yee, who was charged by the military with espionage in order to silence him, details just how low BushCo has taken us.
"We say that the war on terror is not a war against Islam, but that's not how it felt most days at Guantánamo," Yee writes in "For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire," his 2006 memoir. The environment at Guantánamo "excused, if not encouraged, open hostility toward Islam."
By almost every measure, Yee's tour at Guantánamo was a nightmare, offending his sensibilities as an American and a Muslim. For 10 months, from November 2002 to September 2003, Yee says, he bore witness to man's inhumanity to man as the Guantánamo prisoners were systematically beaten and humiliated by U.S. military police and interrogators.
Yee says he was horrified to see "religion used as a weapon" against Guantánamo detainees -- as prisoners told him of detainees being forced to bow down in the middle of a satanic circle in an interrogation room and profess that Satan was their god, not Allah. Detainees were mocked during prayer and taunted or teased sexually by American women while chained. At first, Yee thought it an act of compassion that Guantánamo detainees were allowed to keep a Quran in their cells. But the detainees begged Yee to have them taken away, he says, for American MPs took such delight in mishandling the books or breaking their bindings during random searches.
http://firedoglake.com/2008/03/24/james-yee-and-the-nightmare-at-guantanamo/
For more on James Yee, go to http://www.samaralectures.com/jyee.html?gclid=CIf2w9XlqZYCFSAUagodCGESyg .
