Ten months after serving as a chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, James Yee found himself on the other side of the bars – he was thrown in the back of a truck, chained up and shipped off.
He served 76 days of solitary confinement.
“You might call me one of the casualties – in this War on Terror,” he told about 230 Northwestern students and community members Thursday night in Ryan Family Auditorium.
He wasn’t always considered one of the enemies.
Yee served as an officer in the aftermath of the first Gulf War and then as a Muslim chaplain in the Cuba-based prison camp for suspected terrorists.
In 2003, he was arrested and falsely accused of espionage, possessing classified documents and leaking information to al-Qaeda.
The U.S. Army eventually dropped the charges, but Yee resigned anyway.
The speech – the final event of Islam Awareness Week – was sponsored by NU’s Muslim-cultural Students Association and aimed to highlight the flaws of the War on Terror, said McSA co-president Malika Bilal, a Medill senior.
“The threat is terror, but the way (the War on Terror) is being implemented now is too vague, and it’s punishing the wrong people,” she said.
The event began with a recitation from the Quran by Music freshman Zeshan Bagewadi.
The recited passage conveyed hope in a time of darkness to match Yee’s experiences, he said. Audience members listened silently, their eyes fixed on Bagewadi.
Yee, a third-generation Chinese American, said he converted from Christianity to Islam after his education at the U.S. Military Academy.
A pilgrimage to Mecca during his service in the first Gulf War helped him fully understand the faith.
“I had this Malcolm X-like experience where I saw people of all different races and colors all believing in one God,” he said.
After Sept. 11, 2001, and in the beginning of the War on Terror, he spoke to American troops about Islam and started working as a Muslim chaplain in the Guantanamo Bay prison camp for detainees. He said his job was to advise the camp command and uphold religious freedom.
Yee described degradation of Islam and extensive prisoner abuse in the camps.
He said at one point guards threw prisoners’ copies of the Quran into buckets that were used for toilets.
He said one prisoner who attempted to lock three guards in a cell was brutally beaten with a radio.
“I saw in that pool of blood what I thought were perhaps chunks of that prisoner’s flesh,” Yee said.
Then Yee experienced some of the abuse firsthand.
He said his ride in the truckbed reminded him of the way prisoners were transported from Afghanistan.
He said he could not make any sudden movements in prison, fearing that guards would shoot him and later claim he had attempted to flee.
His race and religion made plenty of enemies for him at Guantanamo Bay, he said.
“Who the hell does this Chinese Taliban think he is trying to tell us how to treat our prisoners?” Yee said he heard someone at the camp say.
Yee said he felt he was targeted because he prayed and practiced Islam like the prisoners.
He noted the irony of protecting prisoners’ rights and having his own compromised.
“My faith was under fire,” he said.
Students lingered after the event to speak with Yee and chat amongst themselves.
Some audience members spoke to a U.S. Army recruiter from Evanston who attended.
“It’s really good to hear a live source who was assigned (to Guantanamo Bay) just to make sure that everything we hear in the news is basically the truth,” McCormick junior Muteb Alshathri said.
Reach Lauren Pond at [email protected].