I am wronged. It is a shameful thing that you should mind these folks that are out of their wits.
—Martha Carrier, tried for witchcraft in Salem, hanged August 19, 1692
In February 1692, a group of young women near Salem, Massachusetts, became strangely ill. They complained of fever, dashed about, and became hysterical. Among the girls were the daughter and niece of the local minister. When questioned about their fainting and babbling, the girls claimed they were bewitched by other community members and possessed by the devil. Accusations followed quickly: The town beggar (a woman disliked by the Puritans) and a Native American slave were among the first to be charged with witchcraft. The notorious Salem Witch Trials began in June, and allowed for “spectral evidence”—testimony based on dreams or visions about actions done by the accused witch’s spirit. By the time the witch hunt was finished in September, twenty innocent people had been executed. The royal governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips, finally ordered an end to the trials after his own wife was accused of being a witch.
Witch-hunting in America has taken different forms since the Salem Witch Trials. During World War II, the “Jap peril” resulted in 120,000 Japanese-Americans being rounded up, dispossessed, and dumped into internment camps. In the 1950s, there was the “Red Menace,” in which Senator Joseph McCarthy led a crusade to rout out his political enemies from public life. Under the guise of anticommunism, the United States secretly backed wars in Southeast Asia and Central America from the 1960s through the 1980s. In the late 1990s, Chinese spying was briefly trumpeted. At the start of the twenty-first century, it is terrorism, especially from Muslims, that has become the new bogeyman.
The targets change, but the tactics have remained the same for centuries: Political leaders cite an external threat, the mass media inflates the charges and fans the flames of hysteria, and people, often ethnic minorities, are victimized. Civil liberties are trampled as the latter-day witches are brought to “justice.”
Stealing the “Crown Jewels”
“A scientist suspected of spying for China improperly transferred huge amounts of secret data from a computer system at a Government laboratory, compromising virtually every nuclear weapon in the United States arsenal, Government and lab officials say.”1
So began a terrifying article in the New York Times on April 28, 1999. Conjuring images of an impending Armageddon and reviving Cold War hysteria about marauding foreigners threatening the American way of life—all leavened with a dash of spy intrigue— the Times article had all the necessary ingredients for whipping the nation and lawmakers into a frenzy.
Every ingredient, that is, but one: the truth.
The Times article was one in a series of purported exposés of Taiwanese-born nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee. Beginning on March 6, 1999, veteran Times reporters James Risen and Jeff Gerth revealed shocking details about lapses in security at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the center of the American nuclear weapons program. The first article, “Breach at Los Alamos,” referred darkly to “the main suspect, a Los Alamos computer scientist who is Chinese-American.”2 Two days later, Lee, a shy, 60-year-old man who had worked at the Los Alamos lab for over two decades, was fired from the lab on orders from U.S. Secretary of Energy Bill Richardson. In a wholesale violation of Lee’s privacy, his identity was leaked and revealed in the Times, along with the news that he had been fired. Thus was launched the exhaustive smear campaign against him. In the course of the following year, Risen and Gerth penned dozens of articles for the Times about the Wen Ho Lee espionage case. With sensational Times articles, based on a steady stream of leaks about Lee’s supposed criminality, stoking public hysteria about the case, and politicians in Washington fanning the flames about the threat of Chinese espionage, federal prosecutors ultimately threw Lee into pre-trial solitary confinement for nine months.
The case against Wen Ho Lee has come to represent what can go wrong when the media and government work together to target an individual. The gist of the Times articles was that Dr. Lee, a modest man who spoke in heavily accented English, had stolen blueprints for America’s most advanced nuclear weapon and given or sold them to the Chinese. That would explain how China was able to copy the technology for miniaturized nuclear warheads, which are on the cutting edge of America’s weapons technology.
The charges against Lee were being championed by the Department of Energy’s director of intelligence, Notra Trulock III, a Soviet analyst during the Cold War.3 He made his charges in a secret congressional investigation headed by California Republican Rep. Christopher Cox. The Cox Commission had been established in July 1998 at the urging of then House Speaker Newt Gingrich to investigate whether there was an illegal connection between contributions to President Clinton’s 1996 reelection campaign and the export of military technology to China. The commission expanded its investigation to include Chinese espionage. The Cox Commission report was completed in January 1999 and was promptly leaked to the Times. The newspaper seized on Trulock’s sensational charges and reported them as if they were fact.
From the very first Times exposé, a strange caveat was woven through the articles: In spite of Trulock’s dark warnings, backed by countless column inches laying out the damning evidence of espionage against Wen Ho Lee, the FBI insisted that it didn’t have enough evidence to arrest him. There were qualifiers such as these, which ran in the first story: “Investigators did not then have sufficient evidence to obtain a wiretap on the suspect, which made it difficult to build a strong criminal case.”4 This and other red flags (wiretaps require a relatively low legal threshold, yet authorities in this case could not clear it) were cited as proof for another hypothesis: that a cover-up of a major security breach was under way.
Early 1999 was no ordinary time in American politics. Republican rage against President Bill Clinton had culminated in his impeachment in December 1998 and his Senate trial two months later. Clinton’s relations with China had become a focus of partisan ire. There were charges that China had funneled money into Democratic campaigns in 1996, and accusations that Clinton was trying to bolster political and economic ties to China in 1997.
In this politically poisonous atmosphere, the Times took sides by anointing a new hero right in its first article: “In personal terms, the handling of this case is very much the story of the Energy Department intelligence official who first raised questions about the Los Alamos case, Notra Trulock. Mr. Trulock became a secret star witness before a select Congressional committee last fall.”5
Notra Trulock was an old Cold Warrior whose antipathy to Clinton and the Chinese was widely known among his colleagues. The Times championed his version of events, and took it further, imbuing it with an apocalyptic gloss: “At the dawn of the atomic age, a Soviet spy ring that included Julius Rosenberg had stolen the first nuclear secrets out of Los Alamos. Now, at the end of the cold war, the Chinese seemed to have succeeded in penetrating the same weapons lab. ‘This is going to be just as bad as the Rosenbergs,’ [CIA chief spy hunter Paul] Redmond recalled saying.”6
What followed was a political and media witch hunt the likes of which hadn’t been seen since, well, the Rosenbergs. After Lee was fired, he was interrogated relentlessly and repeatedly polygraphed. Finally, in December 1999, he was indicted on fifty-nine counts— but none of them were for spying. He was accused of having improperly downloaded classified information. A trial was set, but in a rare move, a federal judge agreed to the government’s demand that Lee be kept locked up in solitary confinement. He lived in a cell with a light burning round the clock, and was allowed out to exercise for one hour per day, often in shackles.
The Times was doing a symbiotic dance with the government. The hysterical Times coverage drove the government investigation, and vice versa. David Kitchen, the head of the FBI’s Albuquerque office, even suggested to agent Carol Covert (yes, that really is her name) that she bring up the Rosenberg case because the Times article had referred to it. Covert began her interrogation of the bewildered scientist by telling him—falsely—that he had failed a polygraph test. Covert then picked up where the newspaper left off:
“Do you know who the Rosenbergs are?” Ms. Covert asked.
“I heard them, yeah, I heard them mention,” Dr. Lee said.
“The Rosenbergs are the only people that never cooperated with the federal government in an espionage case,” she said. “You know what happened to them? They electrocuted them, Wen Ho.”7
The government and the press were in an echo chamber. There was no room for skepticism or questioning the fundamental assumptions of the case—namely, was Wen Ho Lee really a spy? Did the case have any merit?
As it turns out, the FBI had been winding down the investigation into Lee several months earlier. David Kitchen, now retired from the FBI, recounted in 2001 to the Times, “We couldn’t understand how [DOE] came to the conclusion they came to, specifically about how Lee was the main suspect.” Kitchen decided in late 1998 to close the Lee investigation. “We worked the case for quite a while, and what did we have to show for it?”8
The problems with the case were many. For one, the nuclear “secrets” that China was alleged to have obtained were available from hundreds of sources, not just Los Alamos, and many of them were in the public domain. And despite Representative Cox charging that “the crown jewels of our nuclear arsenal” had been stolen, the theft, if it ever happened, occurred in the 1980s, and there was no evidence linking either Los Alamos or Lee to that case.9
In January 1999, the Wall Street Journal first published an article revealing that the FBI was investigating a leak of nuclear weapons secrets at Los Alamos. But it wasn’t until the series of Times stories began two months later that the focus turned to Lee. Indeed, after the first Times article appeared, FBI agents confronted Lee and shoved the article at him. “Basically that is indicating that there is a person at the laboratory that’s committed espionage, and that points to you,” FBI Agent Covert told him.
“But do they have any proof, evidence?” Dr. Lee asked.
All the FBI had was a hunch—and the knowledge that the nation’s most powerful newspaper had declared this flimsy case to be the most significant spy hunt in a half century. That was sufficient to plunge Lee into a long nightmare.
The Times extended the dark cloud of suspicion over Lee’s wife, Sylvia, who worked as a secretary at the Los Alamos labs. On March 9, 1999, the Times reported, “Energy Department officials also said co-workers questioned why she frequently invited herself to gatherings at the lab with visiting Chinese delegations. FBI officials said she was not a target of their investigation, but said it is possible that others were involved in the theft of data. They have not yet identified any other suspects.”10
What the Times didn’t mention until six weeks later was that Sylvia Lee was an FBI informant from 1987 to 1992.11
Other newspapers, including the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, and Wall Street Journal, reported on the case. But the New York Times pursued it as if it were prosecuting the case on its own. Which, in many ways, it was. In explaining the peculiarities of the case to its readers, the London Independent noted, “In government and political circles [the Times] wields a degree of influence that is unmatched in the U.S. media. When the New York Times names a suspected spy, it is not just another newspaper scare: the Establishment takes notice.”12
Only a handful of reporters protested the newspaper’s witch hunt at the beginning. Robert Scheer of the Los Angeles Times wrote a dozen columns decrying the miscarriage of justice in the case, including this view in October 1999: “It’s a sad day for American journalism when the New York Times, one of the leading news organizations in the country, so uncritically publicizes inflammatory charges of spying against a U.S. citizen based on scandalous leaks from a congressional committee. But even worse was the behavior of the administration, which panicked in the face of these charges and fired Lee without a hearing in order to placate those calling for his scalp. Apologies to Lee are in order.”
Instead of apologies, the government handed down its indictment in December 1999. The decision to prosecute was ultimately made at a meeting in the White House situation room on December 4, 1999. Among those attending the meeting were National Security Advisor Sandy Berger, Attorney General Janet Reno, FBI Director Louis Freeh, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson, and CIA Director George Tenet.13
It was a desperate face-saving move by the Justice Department and the FBI to cover for their failure to actually pin the crime—if indeed there had even been one—on someone, preferably a Chinese-born someone. The charges carried a life sentence.
Wen Ho Lee, a naturalized American citizen, charged that he was being targeted simply because he was ethnic Chinese. Asian-American groups decried his treatment and rallied to his defense. The Asian Pacific Americans in Higher Education and the Association of Asian American Studies passed resolutions urging all Asian-American scientists to boycott jobs at federal laboratories. But the government was unbowed. In early September 2000, in response to demands that the government justify Lee’s continued solitary confinement, government lawyers declared that Lee’s release would risk “hundreds of millions of lives.”14 The judge nevertheless demanded thousands of pages of documents from the government to assess whether it had prosecuted Lee based on his ethnicity.
Suddenly, the government’s house of cards came tumbling down. The lead FBI agent recanted key testimony that he had given. In mid-September, the government abruptly dropped fifty-eight of the fifty-nine charges against Lee. The scientist pleaded guilty to a single count of mishandling secret information.
On September 13, 2000, after Lee had endured 278 days of solitary confinement, Judge James A. Parker, a conservative Reagan appointee, had had enough. Judge Parker released Wen Ho Lee from prison, and in an unusual statement from the bench, he rebuked the government and apologized to Wen Ho Lee. “I believe you were terribly wronged,” began Judge Parker, describing Lee’s imprisonment in “demeaning, unnecessarily punitive conditions. I am truly sorry that I was led by our Executive Branch of government to order your detention last December.”
It is rare for a federal judge to criticize top elected officials, but Parker was unbowed. “Dr. Lee, I tell you with great sadness that I feel I was led astray last December by the Executive Branch of our government.” The judge said that “top decision makers in the Executive Branch, especially the Department of Justice and the Department of Energy and locally . . . have embarrassed our entire nation and each of us who is a citizen of it.”
Judge Parker concluded, “I might say that I am also sad and troubled because I do not know the real reasons why the Executive Branch has done all of this.”15
As for Notra Trulock, the government spook who was obsessed with finding a fall guy for Chinese weapons advancements, he wound up being a key cause of the case’s collapse. Wen Ho Lee’s charge that he was the victim of racial profiling was borne out by testimony from Trulock’s colleagues, who described him as a racist.
Robert Vrooman, the head of counterintelligence at Los Alamos, declared in a sworn statement, “The racial issue surfaced explicitly in comments made by Notra Trulock, the head of DOE’s Office of Counterintelligence, who told me on November 20, 1996, that ‘ethnic Chinese’ should not be allowed to work on classified projects, including nuclear weapons.”16 Vrooman testified repeatedly in early 1999 in closed-door sessions before the House and Senate Intelligence committees, as well as to several investigative review boards, that no espionage had occurred. He insisted that Lee had been unfairly targeted because he was Chinese-American. In response, Energy Secretary Bill Richardson officially reprimanded Vrooman in August 1999 for failing to assist the FBI in its Chinese espionage investigation.17
Then there was the damning statement of Charles Washington, DOE’s acting director of counterintelligence: “Based on my experience and my personal knowledge, I believe that Mr. Trulock improperly targeted Dr. Lee due to Dr. Lee’s race and national origin.”
In a final twist, Mr. Trulock himself became the subject of an FBI investigation for improperly disclosing classified information.18 He went on to work as associate editor of the right-wing Accuracy in Media Report. (For an idea of AIM’s political leanings, headlines from its Web site include: “Looney Clooney Smears Senator McCarthy,” “Hollywood Surrenders to Terrorists,” and “New York Times Aids al Qaeda.”)
This was the man whom the Times dubbed a “star witness.” The Times championed Trulock’s view, delighting Republican leaders who were eager to club the Clinton administration for being lax on nuclear security.
The total collapse of the government’s case against Wen Ho Lee forced public officials to explain their actions. President Clinton said that he was “quite troubled” by the fact that Lee had been denied bail. Clinton said in September 2000, “It’s very difficult to reconcile the two positions, that one day he’s a terrible risk to the national security, and the next day, they’re making a plea agreement for an offense far more modest than what had been alleged.”19 Meanwhile, White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart blamed “near-hysterical investigative reporting” for creating a crisis atmosphere around the issue of nuclear weapons security.20
Two weeks after Lee was released from jail, the New York Times published a sixteen-hundred-word editor’s note, “The Times and Wen Ho Lee.” Now, finally, was the time to come clean. But the Times blinked. “On the whole, we remain proud of work that brought into the open a major national security problem of which officials had been aware for months, even years,” the editors wrote. “But looking back, we also found some things we wish we had done differently in the course of the coverage to give Dr. Lee the full benefit of the doubt.” The Times concluded that “the blame lies principally with those who directed the coverage.”21
Two days later, it was the turn of the Times editorial page to search its soul. It largely defended its actions in running numerous editorials that vilified Lee. It was a non-apology that merely allowed that “we too quickly accepted the government’s theory that espionage was the main reason for Chinese nuclear advances and its view that Dr. Lee had been properly singled out as the prime suspect.”22
Wen Ho Lee has continued his crusade for justice. Asian-American groups have demanded a presidential pardon for Lee. And Lee sued the government, charging that top officials violated his privacy by improperly disclosing information about him that destroyed his reputation. As part of that suit, Lee demanded that four journalists—James Risen of the New York Times, Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, H. Josef Hebert of the Associated Press, and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now of ABC—reveal who their confidential sources were that provided this information. The journalists declined to reveal their sources, and were ruled to be in contempt of court.
Robert Scheer concluded appropriately, “Freedom of the press is presumably for the benefit of the readers in general and of victims of government abuse in particular. Yet the Times, like many media outlets these days, has perverted that freedom to justify its willful participation in government manipulation of the news.”23
In arguing for the reporters to reveal their sources in both the Wen Ho Lee and Valerie Plame cases, the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) declared, “The First Amendment exists so that the press can be a check on government abuse of power, not a handmaiden to it.”24
In June 2006, Wen Ho Lee achieved victory: The federal government and five media organizations—AP, New York Times, Washingon Post, Los Angeles Times, and ABC—agreed to pay him $1.6 million to settle his privacy lawsuit, with the government paying $895,000 and the media groups paying $750,000. The unprecedented joint payment was fitting recognition of how the government and journalists had worked together to take down the scientist.
In September 2005, Bill Richardson, the former secretary of energy under Clinton who later became the Democratic governor of New Mexico, spoke to Democracy Now! He fired Wen Ho Lee in March 1999. In July 2005, Federal Judge David Sentelle stated that Richardson was the probable source of the leaks about Lee. Richardson has denied this. Has Richardson, who helped lead the crusade against Lee, learned anything from this sorry chapter? Clearly not. “I stand behind everything that I said and I did before in that case,” he declared. “This was a man that was convicted on several counts of tampering with classified information. . . . I stand behind the very strong actions that I took to protect our nuclear secrets.”
As for Judge Sentelle implicating Richardson in leaking Lee’s name, Richardson was adamant. “He is totally wrong.”
Richardson was also dismissive of Judge Parker’s rebuke. “Well, that’s his opinion. I believe that we acted properly in safeguarding our nuclear secrets. He was convicted on several counts. There were some mistakes in that case. It involved the entire federal government, and I stand behind everything that I did.”25
Wen Ho Lee was not, as Richardson claimed, “convicted on several counts.” He pleaded guilty to a lone charge of improperly downloading classified documents. Lee’s attorney contrasted his treatment with that of former CIA director John Deutch, who downloaded far more sensitive national security secrets onto his home computer. The Pentagon inspector general described Deutch’s action as “particularly egregious.”26 The Justice Department initially declined to prosecute Deutch, then opened an investigation. Deutch pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor in January 2001 and was pardoned by President Bill Clinton on his last day as president.
The New Bogeyman
In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, government witch-hunters are working overtime.
James Yee learned this the hard way. Yee, a third-generation Chinese-American, was born in New Jersey and graduated from West Point military academy in 1990. Shortly afterward, he converted from Christianity to Islam and underwent religious training in Syria. Yee was one of the first Muslim chaplains commissioned by the U.S. Army. After the 9/11 attacks, Yee became a frequent government spokesman, helping to educate soldiers about Islam and build greater religious tolerance in the military. In November 2002, he was selected to serve as Muslim chaplain at Guantánamo Bay. At that time, nearly 700 detainees were being held by the government for suspected terrorist activities. Yee’s duties as chaplain gave him unrestricted access to the detainees.
Yee threw himself into his duties. As the only Muslim chaplain on the base for ten months, he led the detainees in daily prayer, tended to their dietary needs, and chastised guards for disrespecting the Koran and interfering in other Muslim rituals.
In the xenophobic and abusive environment of Guantánamo Bay, a place that President Bush has insisted is beyond the reach of regular laws, military colleagues began to question the loyalties of the Muslim chaplain. Their suspicions came to a head less than a year after Yee began serving there.
On September 10, 2003, Captain Yee stepped off a plane from Guantánamo Bay at a Florida naval base and was secretly arrested. He was supposedly in possession of classified documents, including a list of detainees and a drawing of where their cells were located. The implication was that Lee might be planning a massive jailbreak of terrorists from Guantánamo—or something like that.
Ten days after Yee’s arrest, military officials leaked the story to the conservative Washington Times, which ran an article on September 20, 2003, about Yee. The newspaper revealed that Yee was being charged with sedition, aiding the enemy, spying, espionage, and failure to obey a general order.
“Captain Yee had almost unlimited private access to detainees as part of the Defense Department’s program to provide the prisoners with religious counseling, as well as clothing and Islamic-approved meals,” reported the Washington Times. The article hinted darkly, “The law-enforcement source declined to say how much damage Capt. Yee may have inflicted on the U.S. war against Osama bin Laden’s global terror network. The source said the ‘highest levels’ of government made the decision to arrest Capt. Yee, who had been kept under surveillance for some time.”27
A senior Bush administration official told the Washington Times the following day, “If the list of detainees got out, then you have a whole lot of al Qaeda cells go to ground.” This source said both the Pentagon and the White House were involved in the decision to make the arrest.
It was a stunning fall from grace for an Army officer who had been held up as a poster boy of American patriotism (“When I go into the field,” he told a reporter, “I have a copy of the Koran, and next to it, a copy of the U.S. Constitution”28) to being cast as a foreign-born traitor and threat to American security. The media went on a feeding frenzy. Chaplain Yee was vilified on the airwaves and on the Internet as a traitor and a mole inside the Army. All the important ingredients—foreign, Muslim, al Qaeda—were stirred together into a toxic brew to poison the atmosphere and ensure pretrial conviction.
“The government is engaging in overkill and is creating an atmosphere of hysteria around this case,” said Yee’s attorney, Eugene Fidell.29 Indeed, hysteria was crucial to the case against Yee, since, as Fidell pointed out, the offenses with which he was charged—taking home classified material and carrying classified documents without proper coverings—were common infractions in the military that resulted in minimal penalties, if they were even prosecuted.
The witch hunt against Muslims at Guantánamo expanded. Following Yee’s arrest, it was revealed that Ahmad Halabi, a Muslim and an Arabic translator in the U.S. Air Force who worked at Guantánamo, had been arrested in July and held secretly. Halabi was also charged with taking home classified documents and, like Yee, was accused by some Guantánamo colleagues of having “made statements criticizing U.S. policy with regard to the detainees and . . . the Middle East.”
A month after Yee’s arrest, the Washington Post reported:
Officials eventually suspected that Yee’s allegiance shifted from the military to the 660 prisoners there as he complained that they had no release from the stress in their lives, which was partly created by the uncertainty over whether they will ever be released, numerous sources said.
“The fear was that he was in a quagmire as to how to handle this, and that he had started mixing his loyalties,” one military official said. “It apparently was a challenge to him.”
A second military official described Yee’s belief that detainees were being treated too harshly as “ludicrous. . . . Yee was way out of line.”30
Captain Yee was held for seventy-six days, much of it in solitary confinement in an eight-by-ten-foot cell, manacled and in leg irons. Yee was held in a Navy brig in South Carolina, along with Jose Padilla and Yasir Hamdi. At the time, the Bush administration had declared Padilla and Hamdi to be enemy combatants who could be held forever without trial.
The military postponed Yee’s trial five times. Then, in March 2004, on a Friday evening, the Army announced that Yee was being released, and his charges reduced. The one-time superspy was now accused of adultery and downloading pornography on his computer. Yee denied the charges, and they were later thrown out.
“It was just a very shabby attack on Yee,” said Gary Solis, a former Marine prosecutor who now teaches law of war at Georgetown University. “They said, ‘Hey, our case has turned to crap, but oh wait, we have this.’ They picked something to embarrass and humiliate him that was entirely unrelated.”31
A few months later, Airman Ahmad Halabi, who had faced thirty espionage-related charges, was released after nine months in jail. The case against him also fell apart: Twenty-six charges were dropped, and the four that remained were relatively minor infractions. It was the third time the military had backed away from sensational allegations of spying against employees at Guantánamo in less than a year.32
As the real story has unfolded, James Yee infuriated his colleagues at Guantánamo Bay because he spoke out about the treatment of detainees. In October 2005, he described on Democracy Now! what he witnessed inside America’s gulag:
“One of the most emotional things that I might say that I saw down there was the conditions and how they deteriorated within the time frame that I was there, the emotional and mental conditions of the prisoners themselves. I recall seeing, for example, two detainees permanently residing in the detainee hospital who had become so depressed, so despondent, that they no longer had an appetite and stopped eating. They had to be force-fed with a tube that is inserted through their nose medically into their stomach and force-fed in that manner. And I witnessed this tube in the hospital being put in the prisoner’s nose—who didn’t want it in his nose, of course. And it’s a very painful experience. The prisoner had to be shackled down with handcuffs to both sides of the bed. A guard had to come back and hold the prisoner’s head back, and then the medic or the nurse would come and put petroleum jelly on the end of this plastic tube, in his nose, so this tube slides down. As that happens, you hear the detainee scream out in pain.”
The U.S. military has continued to use this method of force-feeding and has acknowledged that it is aimed at breaking hunger strikes. The number of hunger strikers at Guantánamo dropped dramatically from eighty-four in December 2005 to four in February 2006. UN human rights investigators declared in February 2006 that the force-feeding amounted to torture, and called for the closure of the Guantánamo prison.
The chief medical officer at Guantánamo, Capt. John S. Edmondson of the Navy, stated that his staff was not force-feeding any detainees but “providing nutritional supplementation on a voluntary basis to detainees who wish to protest their confinement by not taking oral nourishment.” In January, Captain Edmondson left Guantánamo for a new post. Before he left, the Army awarded him a Legion of Merit Medal for “inspiring leadership and exemplary performance.”33
Chaplain Yee, who has written about his ordeal in a book, For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire, reflected on Democracy Now!: “If it could happen to me—a third-generation Chinese-American who graduated from West Point, patriotically serving his country, being praised and awarded and recognized for great contributions—[if I] could land in prison for seventy-six days with these huge death penalty charges, it could happen to any one of us. And this is why we have to stand up for justice.”
The media should be a check against the abuse of government power. But too often, journalists’ coziness with those in power make them instruments of the abuse. When the reflex of journalists is to simply trust those in power, justice can be long in coming.
It’s been three centuries since the Salem Witch Trials. But as Wen Ho Lee and James Yee can attest, witch hunts are just as likely to spiral out of control today as they were when young girls claimed to be possessed by demons.