Federal Treason Suspect Has Leesburg Ties
Teresa Brumback
Sep 29, 2003 -- The Islamic U.S. Army chaplain who is being held on suspicions of treason and espionage first obtained formal approval of his overseas religious training credentials by an Islamic school in Leesburg that trains chaplains for the U.S. military.
The chaplain, Capt. James Yee, is accused of aiding captured Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to whom he ministered at the Guatanamo Bay, Cuba, military prison, according to the Seattle Times and other news accounts.
Federal agents found sketches of the facility and documents concerning the captured fighters and their U.S. interrogators, according to the Times article.
In April 2000, Capt. James Yee delivered a letter to the Army from the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences stating that his religious training from Syria was equivalent to that of a “master of Islamic practice,” Raul Duany, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, told Leesburg Today. Yee completed courses at the “Islamic Foundation Religious Institute for Guidance and Calling to Islam,” an institution in Damascus, Syria.
The Leesburg school directed questions to its lawyer, Donna Scheinbach of Washington, DC. “It’s not something we want to comment on,” she said. “He did not take any classes” at the Leesburg school, she said. “He was not certified or endorsed by them in any way. They never met him.”
She did confirm, however, that the school was asked to look at courses he took overseas. “There’s much more than the transcripts,” she said. “They look at moral character, background.” She declined to provide information on other criteria the school uses to assess prospective chaplains.
Meantime, the Center for Security Policy, a pro-military group, and reportedly some senators in Congress are calling on the Pentagon to tighten security review for Muslim chaplains in the military.
Nine of the 14 Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military have been trained by the Islamic school in Leesburg since it opened in 1995.
“We think that the U.S. should take a very close look at any entity funded by foreign money and any foreign organization that train our people who go into the military,” said J. Michael Waller, a researcher for the Center for Security Policy.
“Certain favored religious groups have gotten off the hook,” Waller said. “In this case, Captain Yee left the Army to go to Syria, spent four years in Syria, which is recognized by the U.S. government as a state sponsor of terrorism, then comes back, rejoins the Army and is commissioned as an officer. Then he is certified by a school and becomes a chaplain. Any foreign organization that wants to penetrate the U.S. is going to do that through ethnic religious or cultural organizations or through individuals who share something. It’s something we need to expect. To have these individuals complaining that we are picking on them because of their ethnicity is fallacious.”
Waller said his center has called upon the Pentagon for the two years prior to the Sept. 11 attacks to beef up security review for Muslim chaplains to no avail.
Yee was apprehend last week in Jacksonville en route to Fort Lewis. He is being held under the Uniform Code of Military Justice in a military brig in South Carolina, but has not been charged. The military has up to 120 days to charge him before he must be released by law.
The Army sent Yee to the Cuban prison 10 months ago to serve as a chaplain to the Muslim detainers, according to the Seattle Times, which interviewed Yee two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, and several articles on him since then.
According to The Washington Times, the Air Force has arrested a second Guantanamo staffer, Senior Airmen Ahmad al Halabi, and charged him with 32 criminal offenses centering on espionage.
The two Pentagon-approved groups that endorse military Muslim chaplains are the American Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council and the Islamic Society of North America. The Islamic-society approved chaplains are often trained at the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg.
The Leesburg school has trained nine of the 12 Muslim chaplains in the U.S. military. Yee, 35, the son of Chinese immigrants from Springfield N.J., is a 1990 West Point graduate. According to the news reports and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer which has done extensive articles on Yee and interviewed him two weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Yee left the military soon after his graduation to undergo Arabic and religious training. During those years he converted from Lutheran to Islam and met his Syrian wife. Then he became a chaplain with the 29th Signal Battalion at Fort Lewis. He was there during the Sept. 11 attacks. At the base, he was called upon to teach others about Islam and to speak about the relationship between soldiering and spirituality. “What happened (Sept. 11) is un-Islamic and categorically denied by a great majority of Muslim scholars around the world,” the Seattle Post Intelligencer quoted him as saying.
The Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences in Leesburg, and other Northern Virginia Muslim institutions and homes were raided in March 2002 by agents with the FBI, the U.S. Customs Service and others. Under Operation Green Quest, they were investigating possible money laundering schemes being used to funnel funds to the al Qaeda terrorist regime. Also raided was the home of its director, Dr. Taha Jabir al-Alwani, a top Islamic scholar who denounced the raid as an attack on persons of faith and denied any connections to the radical, militant form of Islam espoused by terrorist Osama bin Laden.
No arrests have been made since the raid.
On Friday, Debra Weirman, spokesman for the FBI Washington field office, refused to confirm or deny whether the investigation is still continuing into the school or its activities.
This week, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) cited Yee’s arrest in a letter to the Pentagon, asking for an update into the investigation of the Leesburg school as well as the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, according to the Seattle Times. Spokesmen for Schumer’s office were unavailable Friday.
“It is disturbing that organizations with possible terrorist connections and religious teaching contrary to America pluralistic values hold the sole responsibility for Islamic instruction in our armed forces,” Schumer wrote in is letter, according to the Seattle Times report.
Through a spokesman, military defense lawyers for Lee declined comment in response to calls from Leesburg Today. A spokesman for the America Muslim Foundation in Alexandria said it is not answering press inquiries. |
