Data, interviews illustrate pursuit
By Tim Golden NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE December 19, 2004
Capt. Theodore Polet Sr., an Army counterintelligence officer at the detention camp for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, had just begun investigating a report of suspicious behavior by a Muslim chaplain at the prison last year when he received what he thought was alarming new information.
The FBI said a car belonging to the chaplain, Capt. James Yee, had been spotted twice outside the home of a Muslim activist in the Seattle area who, years earlier, had been a host for a visit from Omar Abdel Rahman, the militant Egyptian cleric convicted in a 1993 plot to blow up various New York landmarks.
Although it was unclear what the activist had done and whether Yee even had met him, Polet took the report to the Guantanamo commander, Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller, and laid it out in stark terms.
"I said we had found something that connected Yee with a known terrorist supporter in Washington state, and at that point, he got very upset," Polet said. "This became far more serious than a basic security violation."
Documents and interviews show that the case got much bigger than has been revealed publicly, spinning into a web of counterintelligence investigations that eventually involved at least 19 possible suspects, a handful of military and civilian agencies, and dozens of agents in the United States and overseas.
Within less than a year, the investigations into possible espionage and aiding the enemy at Guantanamo Bay grew into a major source of embarrassment for the Pentagon, as the prosecutions of Yee and another Muslim serviceman at the base, Airman Ahmad Al Halabi, unraveled dramatically.
Even now, Defense Department officials refuse to explain in detail how the various investigations originated and what drove them forward in the face of questions about much of the evidence. The officials have defended their actions, emphasizing that some of the inquiries continue.
Confidential investigative documents, court files and interviews show that the military's pursuit of Yee and others drew significantly on questionable evidence and disparate pieces of information that, like the car report, linked him tenuously to people suspected of being Muslim militants in the United States and abroad.
Officials familiar with the inquiries said they also fed on petty personal conflicts: antipathy between some Muslim and non-Muslim troops at Guantanamo Bay, rivalries between Christian and Muslim translators, even the complaint of an old boss who saw Al Halabi as a shirker.
The military's aggressive approach to the investigation was established at the outset by Guantanamo Bay commander Miller.
Ultimately, Air Force prosecutors could not substantiate the vast majority of the charges they brought against Al Halabi, a translator at Guantanamo Bay, who had faced the death penalty.
Al Halabi pleaded guilty in September to four minor charges of mishandling classified documents, taking two forbidden photographs of a guard tower and lying to investigators about the snapshots. He was sentenced to the 10 months of imprisonment he already had served, and is appealing a bad-conduct discharge.
Yee, a West Point graduate who was held for 76 days in solitary confinement, charged with six criminal counts of mishandling classified information and suspected of leading a ring of subversive Muslim servicemen, was convicted of noncriminal charges of adultery and downloading Internet pornography. That conviction was set aside in April, and his punishment was waived.
Another Guantanamo Bay translator, Ahmed Mehalba, has been jailed since September 2003 on federal charges that he lied to investigators about carrying a computer disk containing classified Guantanamo documents on a trip to Egypt. Mehalba has pleaded not guilty.
By Tim Golden NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE December 19, 2004
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