See www.captainyee.org or www.j4na.org for the latest developments in the 
Captain James Yee case.

6/6/06 San Francisco Chronicle: Why privacy matters -- the case of Wen Ho Lee, by Helen Zia
    Wen Ho Lee, the former Los Alamos nuclear physicist, finally may be vindicated. Now that the federal government and five media companies have agreed to pay a settlement of $1.6 million, of which Lee will receive $750,000, it is his turn to point a finger.
    After he was accused of espionage, imprisoned, then released with an apology in September 2000, Wen Ho Lee's legal battles continued over the government leaks of his personal information that led to his ordeal. The five media companies -- the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Associated Press, the Washington Post and ABC -- announced in a joint statement that they are making this unprecedented settlement to protect the identities of their confidential news sources, and to protect journalists. More specifically, they feared that the courts would force their reporters to reveal the anonymous sources who leaked Wen Ho Lee's personal information, in violation of the Privacy Act.
    While the defense of journalists is a noble ideal, the actual news reports about Wen Ho Lee tell a far less admirable tale. Lee's lawsuit recounted numerous incidents of government officials manipulating and misleading the news media into producing stories that falsely portrayed the Chinese American as a devious master spy and threat to the American people.
    To cite just a few examples, named and unnamed government sources told the news media that:
    -- Wen Ho Lee had failed a polygraph test about giving secrets to China , proving that he was deceptive, which was prominently reported in the news. This was false -- he had unequivocally passed the polygraph.
    -- Lee's private financial data indicated that he had purchased a ticket to Shanghai , which was prominently reported in the news. This was false -- he had given money to his daughter so she could take a tour of Hong Kong .
    -- He failed to report the names of Peoples Republic of China scientists he met at a conference, as required; this was also false -- he had duly filed the appropriate reports.
    -- He had tricked a Los Alamos colleague into using a computer by saying he wanted to "download his resume" -- this too was false.
    News stories containing such fabrications and distortions were often attributed to anonymous government sources and appeared as regular, indeed headline, news for nearly a year before his arrest, beginning with the New York Times coverage in March 1999. This was well before Wen Ho Lee was charged with "mishandling classified information" -- not with espionage that was "as bad as the Rosenbergs," as characterized by the Times. Nevertheless, Lee was imprisoned for nine months in pre-trial detention, shackled and chained in solitary confinement, largely because he had been portrayed as such a sinister threat to America 's national security. Yet even after Wen Ho Lee and his attorneys proved such stories to be false, the factual stories or follow-up reporting on why disinformation had been planted received little or no coverage.
    Though Lee had been a U.S. citizen for more than 30 years, the fact that he was born in Taiwan and his Chinese ethnicity played into the feverish innuendo from pundits and politicians that Chinese spies were swarming into the United States . Many observers of this case, including many Asian Americans, believe that Lee was singled out because of his Chinese heritage.
    Indeed, because of his mistreatment by the government, Asian scientists virtually stopped seeking employment to the national labs, severely depleting their scientific talent pool.
    It is worth noting that Lee was the first -- and remains -- the only person to be criminally prosecuted and imprisoned for mishandling classified information -- the same charge that Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald is considering in his investigation of the leak of CIA agent Valerie Plame's name to the press.
    What happened to Wen Ho Lee still stands as a cautionary tale for all Americans, especially as untold numbers of people are being detained, without charges or trial, because they too are "threats" to national security. It is not yet known who will be profiled from the immense database the National Security Agency is amassing on everyone's phone calls. Experts are already warning that "false positives" are inevitable. Wen Ho Lee's experience shows how bits of private information can be manipulated into a nightmare.
    When the federal judge freed Wen Ho Lee from prison, he offered an apology, saying what happened to Lee has "embarrassed our nation and each of us who is a citizen of it." It behooves us all to remember why.
    Helen Zia, a writer based in the Bay Area, co-authored Wen Ho Lee's book, "My Country Versus Me" (Hyperion, 2002).  

6/2/06 Associated Press: Wen Ho Lee settles privacy lawsuit,
by Mark Sherman
    Washington Wen Ho Lee, the former nuclear weapons scientist once suspected of being a spy, settled his privacy lawsuit Friday and will receive $1.6 million from the government and five news organizations in a case that turned into a fight over reporters' confidential sources.
    Lee will receive $895,000 from the government for legal fees and associated taxes in the 6 1/2-year-old lawsuit in which he accused the Energy and Justice departments of violating his privacy rights by leaking information that he was under investigation as a spy for China .
    The Associated Press and four other news organizations have agreed to pay Lee $750,000 as part of the settlement, which ends contempt of court proceedings against five reporters who refused to disclose the sources of their stories about the espionage investigation.
    Lee said of the settlement: "We are hopeful that the agreements reached today will send the strong message that government officials and journalists must and should act responsibly in discharging their duties and be sensitive to the privacy interests afforded to every citizen of this country."
    The payment by AP, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and ABC is the only one of its kind in recent memory, and perhaps ever, legal and media experts said.
    The companies said they agreed to the sum to forestall jail sentences for their reporters, even larger payments in the form of fines and the prospect of revealing confidential sources. The companies and their reporters were not defendants in the privacy lawsuit.
    "We were reluctant to contribute anything to this settlement, but we sought relief in the courts and found none," the companies said. "Given the rulings of the federal courts in Washington and the absence of a federal shield law, we decided this was the best course to protect our sources and to protect our journalists."
    The statement noted that the accuracy of the reporting itself was not challenged.
The government agencies did not admit that they had violated Lee's privacy rights.
    Betsy Miller, one of Lee's lawyers, said the payments show "that both the government and the journalists knew that they had significant exposure had this case gone to trial."
    Lee was fired from his job at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico , but he was never charged with espionage. He was held in solitary confinement for nine months, then released in 2000 after pleading guilty to mishandling computer files. A judge apologized for Lee's treatment.
    Two federal judges held the reporters in contempt for refusing to reveal their sources to Lee. The journalists had argued that he could obtain the information elsewhere.
    U.S. District Judge Rosemary Collyer signed an order Friday vacating the contempt proceedings against the reporters, H. Josef Hebert of The Associated Press, James Risen of The New York Times, Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, Walter Pincus of The Washington Post, and Pierre Thomas, formerly of CNN and now working for ABC News.
    CNN, in a separate statement, said it declined to join in the settlement "because we had a philosophical disagreement over whether it was appropriate to pay money to Wen Ho Lee or anyone else to get out from under a subpoena."
    The reporters had appealed the contempt rulings to the Supreme Court. The justices recently delayed a decision on whether to take up the reporters' case after being told a settlement was near.
    Lucy Dalglish, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, called the payment unusual and perhaps unprecedented.
    "I'm certainly not happy about this, but I'm not sure I could have dreamed up a better result," Dalglish said. "On the positive side, it appears that this result will allow these reporters to continue to protect their sources."
    The settlement underscores the need for a federal law that would shield reporters from having to disclose their sources, she said.

12/22/05 San Gabriel Valley Tribune: Legal experts say prosecution bungled espionage case,
By Gene Maddaus
    It's a ploy familiar to anyone who's watched a Mafia movie. When prosecuting two defendants, offer the small fry a deal in exchange for testimony against the big fish. You pocket a partial win and improve the chances for a total victory.
    It should have worked that way in the case of accused double agent Katrina Leung, the San Marino society figure once accused of passing secrets to China .
    Instead, the plea agreement prosecutors struck with Leung's FBI handler and ex-lover, James J. Smith, ended up sinking the Leung prosecution.
    A clause in the agreement spurred the judge to declare prosecutorial misconduct and toss out the case, leading to last week's face-saving denouement. Once considered so dangerous to national security that she could not be given bail, Leung pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI and filing a false tax return. She got probation.
    In retrospect, the case seems to have fallen apart due to what appeared to be a relatively harmless mistake. But legal experts and community leaders also have questioned the government's strategy in pursuing Leung to the exclusion of Smith.
    Smith, after all, continued his affair with Leung for a decade after learning of her illicit contacts with Chinese intelligence agents, according to FBI affidavits. He also continued to work as her handler, using her to gather information on China , and continued to provide her with classified information, documents show.
    Many in the legal community were surprised when Smith was allowed to take a plea deal with no jail time in exchange for his testimony against Leung.
    "This was a rather significant betrayal by an FBI agent," said attorney Stanley Greenberg, who defended Richard W. Miller, the first FBI agent ever accused of espionage. "It's one thing to have a dipsy woman on the outside trying to play off both sides who has a bunch of friends in China . To me, the greater harm is the betrayal by the FBI agent."
    Some, including Leung's lawyers, see it as a clear-cut case of discrimination. Leung's attorneys argued in an early motion that the decision to grant Smith bail was the result of "unintended sexism and/or racism." In their motion to dismiss the case, the defense argued that Smith's plea deal was "unsavory" because it perpetuated the "gross and unfair disparity in treatment between Mr. Smith and Ms. Leung."
    In her order dismissing the case, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper all but agreed, calling Smith's plea a "sweetheart deal."
    Though legal observers discounted the idea that Leung's gender or ethnicity played a role in the government's pursuit of her, some community leaders noted that the case was laden with familiar stereotypes.
    "I'm concerned about the continuing string of allegations against Asian-Pacific Americans regarding espionage that crumble into minor plea deals," said Assemblywoman Judy Chu, D-Monterey Park .
    "It challenges the loyalty of Asian-Pacific Americans without generating any apparent benefit to national security."
    Others wondered whether Leung's gender was the operative factor.
    "It probably goes back to Adam and Eve," said Diana Peterson-More, a candidate for Assembly who has long worked on feminist causes. "We women are somehow the evil ones that cause the men to fall from grace."
    Cooper dismissed the case in January because of an unusual clause in the Smith plea agreement that prevented him from speaking with Leung's defense lawyers as they prepared for her trial.
    Though unlikely to have had any practical effect - Smith almost certainly would not have talked to Leung's lawyers with or without the clause - Cooper found it to be unethical and grounds for dismissal.
    Legal experts saw the clause as unnecessary.
    "I've been in dozens of cases where people have entered into plea agreements," Greenberg said
    "And nobody has ever put in a plea agreement that you can't talk to the defense. It's understood that if you're sleeping with the government, you're not having extramarital affairs with the defense. ... It's either unspoken, or spoken verbally but not put in writing. So why did they put it in writing?"
    The government maintained that the language was misconstrued, and that prosecutors merely wanted to prevent Smith from disclosing classified information.
    Greenberg speculated the clause was added because of "micromanaging from Washington ."
    Bruce Merritt, a former federal prosecutor who worked on an espionage case, agreed that the clause was ill-advised, but said he was "unsettled" by Cooper's decision.
    "The sanction of dismissing the case does seem to be a little severe," he said.
    Prosecutors appealed, but lacking absolute confidence of victory, U.S. Attorney Debra Yang worked simultaneously with Leung's lawyers to negotiate a resolution.
    "I think the government realized that their best argument was, `Even if we engaged in misconduct, there wasn't real prejudice,"' said Loyola Law School professor Laurie Levenson. "That's not the strongest position to be in - to say `We got caught, but it didn't really damage the case."'
    Leung and her defense team could not be completely confident either. She was under a separate investigation for tax charges, and may have thought that Cooper's dismissal order was just a lucky break - unlikely to be granted by most judges and vulnerable to being overturned.
    The deal announced last Friday provided that Leung's sentence would be identical to Smith's.
    At last, she got parity.
    "It looks like both sides gave up something but got something," Greenberg said. "The government gave up the more serious charge but got the face-saving conviction. She has to be a felon for the rest of her life, but she put this all behind her without serving any jail time."
    Leung's attorneys declared victory. Merritt said that prosecutors, on the other hand, will label it a "failed case."
    "These espionage cases are about as high-profile as cases get in the federal system," he said. "You don't generally surface a case like that, and let the media wallow in it, unless you think (A) it's sufficiently serious to warrant prosecution and (B) the case is sufficiently strong to be a probable winner. In this particular case, they got egg on their face."
    Left unanswered, because there was no trial, is just how culpable Smith and Leung may have been. Did she, as court papers allege, pass state secrets to China ? Was Smith an unwitting dupe or a willful accomplice? Or was the whole thing, as the Leung defense maintained, "much ado about nothing"?
    "I know that in the (defense) statement issued on Friday, they complained that Ms. Leung was never going to be able to tell her story," said U.S. Attorney's spokesman Thom Mrozek. "It's fair to say the government, by virtue of how this case moved along, was never able to tell its side of the story either."  

12/16/05 Sacramento Bee: Former FBI informant in China-linked case makes plea deal,
By Linda Deutsch
    Los Angeles (AP) - A woman once accused of being a Chinese double agent while having a long love affair with an FBI agent, pleaded guilty Friday to making a false statement to the FBI and filing a false tax return in a surprise ending to a complex case in which implications of sex and intrigue overwhelmed suggestions of spying.
    Katrina Leung, 51, admitted she lied to the FBI about her intimate relationship with her FBI handler, James J. Smith, and that she failed to include all her income on her tax returns for the year 2000.
    Leung, a socialite who lives in the wealthy suburb of San Marino , stood between her attorneys as she addressed U.S. District Judge Florence Marie Cooper.
    "I want to say that it's great to be an American. I love America . I love American values," Leung said.
    "I'm looking forward to putting this behind me and continuing on in this beautiful country," she said. "God bless America ."
    Leung, who already spent three months in jail and 18 months in home detention, agreed to be immediately sentenced. The plea deal provided for no more time in custody, three years of probation, 100 hours of community service and a $10,000 fine. She agreed to government debriefings, including use of polygraph devices.
    Leung acknowledged that when she was questioned by the FBI about Smith she told them that he was "just a good family friend" and that she had never traveled with him abroad. In her plea she said she traveled with him to Hong Kong and England and they did have an intimate relationship.
    She said she concealed $35,000 in payments from the FBI and $16,389 in rental income on her tax return.
    The tax return was filed for her and her husband. The judge said the plea agreement relieves him of all further tax consequences as well. Her husband, Kam Leung, sat in the front row of the courtroom as she entered the plea.
    Smith pleaded guilty in connection with the case and was sentenced earlier this year to probation and a fine of $10,000. He admitted that he had lied to the FBI about his affair with Leung.
    Leung, a naturalized citizen, was recruited to work for the FBI, gathering intelligence during frequent business trips to China . Smith was her FBI handler and vouched for her trustworthiness during briefings with his superiors.
    Prosecutors claimed Leung began working for China as a double agent around 1990. An indictment contended she had access to classified documents from Smith's briefcase which she copied with the intent of using them to benefit a foreign nation. But neither she nor Smith was ever charged with espionage.
    Smith was charged with gross negligence for allegedly allowing her access to the classified material. He ultimately pleaded to a single count of making a false statement about their affair.
    The case against Leung virtually collapsed early this year when the judge rebuked prosecutors for "deliberate misconduct" and dismissed all charges.
    The judge said prosecutors purposely kept the defense from contacting Smith as they prepared for Leung's trial and, in so doing, violated her due process rights to a key witness.
    The government appealed to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to reinstate the charges and that appeal was pending when the plea bargain was announced.
    Outside court, Leung was asked why she decided to plead guilty with the government appeal still pending.
    "I pled guilty today because I want to put this all behind me and let the past be the past and move forward," she said.
    Defense attorney Janet Levine said the outcome was "vindication for Katrina and Kam Leung."
    Co-counsel John Vandevelde said, "It takes a strong individual with a strong family and resources to fight this kind of case. The government has incredible power, especially today."
    Leung was paid a total of $1.7 million by the FBI for her information as an intelligence asset code-named "Parlor Maid." Both she and Smith were married during their affair and their respective spouses have stood by them.

12/15/05 The New York Review of Books: The Strange Case of Chaplain Yee,
By Joseph Lelyveld            1.
    Each time the Muslim prisoners held in open-ended preventive detention at the Guantánamo naval station in Cuba have to be moved from their cells to interrogation rooms, they're fitted in what their military police guards sardonically term "a three-piece suit," which consists of shackles attached by chains to a heavy belt: one shackle for each ankle, the third for the wrists. Captain James Yee, a 1990 graduate of the US Military Academy at West Point, witnessed innumerable such fittings during the ten months he was a daily presence as a Muslim chaplain inside the cages of Camp Delta where supposed al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists were dumped as a way of holding them beyond reach of any US court. This might have prepared him for his own fitting in a "three-piece suit," which occurred at the naval brig in Jacksonville, Florida, shortly after his arrest in September 2003 on what he was eventually advised were charges of mutiny, aiding the enemy, and espionage, on any of which prosecutors could have demanded the death penalty.
    Al-Qaeda, anonymous investigators suggested to the press, had infiltrated Guantánamo in the person of this West Point graduate, a third-generation Chinese-American from New Jersey who had made his first profession of faith as a Muslim at a Newark mosque, three months after completing his officers training.
    James Yee's spiritual journey over the next decade, which eventually brought him to Cuba as the fourth Muslim chaplain assigned in less than a year to Camp Delta 's detainees, seems to have begun almost casually. At first, his conversion "did not feel particularly momentous," he tells us in his memoir For God and Country. In his description, it sounds more like a consumer than a theological choice: accepting the "simplicity" of Islam's belief in one God didn't require trading in Jesus for Muhammad, as he saw it, but putting them more or less on a par as prophets. Although he had been raised as a Lutheran to believe in the Trinity, he had never considered religion to be a major factor in his life and didn't see why it had to become one as a consequence of his conversion. Islam, at this stage, was a more comfortable creed, not a way of life.
    To his apparent surprise, its claim on his attention gradually deepened, particularly when he was assigned to Saudi Arabia , after the first Gulf War, as an air defense artillery officer in a Patriot missile crew. Setting an example of religious tolerance that, needless to say, went unreciprocated, the American command allowed its troops to frequent a Saudi "cultural center" at King Abdul Aziz air base where non-Muslims were quietly proselytized- Yee claims that large numbers of Americans converted during the Gulf War-and Muslim servicemen could sign up for bus excursions to Mecca. Yee, who professes to have felt entirely at home in the relatively homogeneous New Jersey suburb where he'd grown up as a member of an ethnic minority, found a kind of liberation in the "diversity" of Islam. This was real multiculturalism, all those Asians, Africans, Iranians, and Turks mixed in with Arabs and praying on a footing of equality; this was indeed "momentous." Mecca , as he experienced it on this first of three trips (the first a mere visit, the second two a proper Hajj), was what his father had always taught him America was supposed to be. "The diversity of Islam," he writes, "was incredible.... I'd never seen anything as truly diverse as this."
    So moved was he that within two years he'd resigned from the army with the aim of pursuing Islamic studies to qual-ify as an imam and immersing himself in Arabic; within three years, this Chinese-American West Point graduate from New Jersey was enrolled in Abu Noor University in Damascus where he stayed four years, returning home with a Palestinian wife who kept herself covered and spoke only limited English. Captain Yee's story is remarkable even before he was recruited back into the army as a Muslim chaplain, even before he was sent to Guantánamo. His story up to this point, before it turns really dark, has strong interest as a narrative of one American's quest in the mall of religions, faiths, and cults that this country becomes for so many of its denizens. One would like to see what a novelist with a taste for American tales of improbable self-invention and cultural mutation, T.C. Boyle, perhaps, would do with it. To tell the rest of Captain Yee's story would require Joseph Conrad.
    Its subsequent episodes display the US military's profound confusion about Islam: its self-congratulation and religiosity, which lead it to boast that it provides Korans, chaplain services, and an opportunity to pray in the direction of Mecca to those it detains indefinitely as "terrorists"; while its overriding devotion to its mission leads it to interfere with the religious practice of those same detainees in order to pressure them psychologically, squeeze them for intelligence they may or may not have held back, and, generally, show them who's in charge. It's asking a lot of the individual military policeman, not to mention the individual major general, to draw a fine line between the war on terror and a war on Islam, when Islam and their own misery are all that unite the inmates in the wire-mesh cages of a high-security prison. In this case, the major general was General Geoffrey Miller, who had been dispatched by Donald Rumsfeld to Camp Delta- and later Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq -with the specific charge of improving the "harvest" of what's known as "actionable intelligence."
    Into this storm of cultural confusion and ruthless resolve walked the naive James Yee in November 2002, rendered even more so by his head-turning success in his first posting as a chaplain at Fort Lewis, Washington, where he'd won the warm approbation of his commanders who thus reinforced the conviction he'd formed in Mecca that there could be no conflict between service to Allah and service to America. In Yee's eclectic theology, American values like religious freedom "are inherent in Islam and were a large part of what had led me to embrace this religion." In the immediate aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the newly minted chaplain had initiated at Fort Lewis a series of "sensitivity training" sessions on Islam for officers and enlisted men, in which he earnestly argued that terrorist attacks on innocents were inimical to the teachings of the Koran. "This work was fulfilling," he declares in For God and Country, written "with" (or perhaps by) a journalist, Aimee Molloy. "It was why I had become a chaplain." Soon he was being sent to other military installations to make the same presentation and army publicists were arranging for him to be interviewed on National Public Radio and MSNBC. "I had become the US military's poster child of a good Muslim," he says.
    He was so prized during this period that no one in the military seems to have raised questions about his long stay in Damascus, a line on his résumé that might have rung some bells during a security vetting, if there had been such a thing for chaplains assigned to Guantánamo. It seems there wasn't, at least in the case of the one Muslim chaplain with a West Point diploma. If his Syrian connection was ever noted, it would have been only later when a cloud of suspicion had already settled over the heads of all the Muslim servicemen with access to this remote and heavily guarded prison. Then the fairly striking (but easily explained) fact that he had tried placing phone calls from Guantánamo to Damascus-where his wife and daughter had gone for the duration of his stay in Cuba, in order to be with her family-may well have been added to the dossier being assembled for General Miller that depicted James Yee, grotesquely and implausibly, as an al-Qaeda ringleader.
    Before the case against Chaplain Yee collapsed, Senators Charles Schumer of New York and Jon Kyl of Arizona , the columnist John Leo, as well as an array of conservative and Christian bloggers would seize on his arrest as evidence that radical Islamicists had taken control of the recruitment of Muslim chaplains into our armed forces. They offered no evidence bearing on his recruitment back into the army, however; by his own telling, Yee was first approached by a Muslim African-American, an ex-marine, at a Ramadan banquet at that hotbed of Islamic ferment, that notorious madrasa, the Pentagon.
    Yee had scant opportunity to offer a public rebuttal of the charges he faced, or the portrayal of him as a traitor by anonymous government leakers, or the further allegations the charges and leaks inspired. First he was held in solitary confinement; then, on his release, placed under a gag order. "Speech that undermines the effectiveness of loyalty, discipline or unit morale is not constitutionally protected," he was warned. The gag order stayed in force until his separation from the military-on a hard-won honorable discharge-early this year. His book thus tells a story that reporters who followed his case never got to hear from the accused.
    Actually, it appears, all Captain Yee had to do to attract suspicion was to intercede repeatedly at Camp Delta on behalf of the prisoners, as their chaplain, when he saw their guards being unnecessarily-and, he came to feel, deliberately-provocative: in handling Korans during cell searches, for instance, or taking detainees out of their cells in shackles for interrogation just as the hour arrived for prayer. He had also begun to meet regularly with the forty or so Muslim servicemen on the base, for he was their chaplain, too. Since the mess halls didn't provide halal food, some of them found it convenient to gather in the captain's quarters for meals. Among these American-born or naturalized Muslims were some who brought back stories of prisoner abuse from the interrogation rooms, where they were assigned as interpreters but which were off-limits to the chaplain, who soon began keeping a "personal journal of the atrocities that I was hearing about in the interrogation rooms and on the blocks." Some of this abuse the interpreters not unreasonably took to be abuse of Muslims as Muslims-for instance, wrapping prisoners in an Israeli flag, or playing a compact disc of verses from the Koran to set the scene for an interrogation session, only to drown it out with screeching rock music. The prisoners were also left chained in a fetal position for hours.
    In their second year of confinement, a significant proportion of the prisoners began to exhibit symptoms of depression. Some went mute; others seemed to be regressing to patterns of childish behavior, singing to themselves in thin high-pitched voices. About a third, Yee says, were on antidepressants; at any given time, roughly twenty were kept in a psychiatric ward.
    In the claustrophobic circumstances of the American military enclave, Captain Yee's evening gatherings and services could be construed as alien, suspicious, not with the program, even mutinous. We now know that the captain's quarters were searched. We don't know if they were ever bugged, a possibility that Yee doesn't raise in these pages. But it stands to reason that they may have been, in which case the investigators-inexperienced reservists who thought they were uncovering a plot-may have heard resentful talk that they took to be conspiratorial. Such suspicions were apparently fanned by interpreters from non-Muslim backgrounds (who mostly learned Arabic in the military, where they would have achieved a level of proficiency that didn't begin to match that of native speakers). The idea that Camp Delta had been infiltrated by al-Qaeda was far-fetched from the start, but the prison was on a war footing since the day it was set up, patrolled as if attack from the sea by the nonexistent al-Qaeda navy were a real possibility; infiltration from within was not the least-plausible threat imagined by the command in training exercises designed to keep the prison's guards on constant alert.
    Eventually Yee became such an object of suspicion that military policemen took to calling out "Chaplain on the block!" to warn guards inside that an intrusion was about to occur in the person of a US Army captain, or bar him till they were good and ready to let him in, even though his orders gave him complete access to the prison and he outranked the enlisted men who stood in his way. But this didn't happen until many months had passed. And, as a result, Yee is now able to give us the most coherent and detailed account that we've had of conditions inside the Guantánamo cages; he can also provide the context and narrative for bits of information about abuses of prisoners that had emerged earlier in a fragmentary way as a result of discovery motions brought by civil liberties lawyers. For instance, he makes it clear that an epidemic of suicide attempts in the summer of 2003 was an organized protest, not a collective nervous breakdown. He was often present when the prisoners erupted in fury, banging on the cages, shouting, and spitting at the guards.
    2.
    Newsweek appears to have got it wrong last year when it reported that a Koran had been flushed down a toilet at Camp Delta (not an easy thing to accomplish, if you think about it). But abuse of the holy book that the command had so proudly installed in every cell, like a Gideon Bible in a hotel room, was a chronic issue, providing the kindling for most of these flare-ups. What he calls "the worst incident I was aware of" occurred in late July 2003 when, he tells us, an interrogator threw a detainee's Koran on the floor, "stepped on it, and kicked it across the room." When word of the incident spread through the cages, as it inevitably did, the prisoners tried to go on strike by vowing not to speak at all in the interrogation rooms.
    That didn't get them the apology from General Miller they were seeking so they escalated their protest, orchestrating a series of suicide attempts. It started with a detainee using his bed sheet to hang himself from the wire mesh in his cage while prisoners nearby raised a storm of noise. The guards then came stomping into the cell to cut him down, holler for medics, and transfer him in shackles to the infirmary. No sooner was this done than another prisoner would be found hanging by a sheet and the same cycle, with all the yelling, banging, and stomping, would be repeated. Over several days, twenty-three prisoners tried to hang themselves in protest over the incident and the general hopelessness of their situation.
    The struggle over Koran abuse reached such a pitch that the Muslim chaplain actually recommended to his superiors that the books be removed from the cells and placed in the prison library for safekeeping. He'd gotten the idea from detainees with whom he'd been speaking, but the colonel who served as Camp Delta 's warden wouldn't consider it. "Every cell gets a Koran," he's quoted as saying. "That's not an option." In effect, the chaplain was being told that we would respect Islam in our own way, giving as much offense to its practitioners as we wanted.
    In an effort to end this ugly farce, Captain Yee drafted a military SOP (standard operating procedure) on how to avoid incidents over the Koran that was accepted by the command and read out to the prisoners in Arabic, on General Miller's order, over the public address system. Guards were told never to touch the book and to call on the chaplain or a Muslim interpreter to handle it if they felt one had to be moved or searched. If Muslim servicemen were not readily available, the guard was to put on clean gloves. Surgical masks were provided to each cell to serve as little hammocks in which Korans could be safely deposited, high off the floor and away from toilets.
    The surgical masks proved to be no solution. On their daily inspections, Captain Yee says, MPs would not infrequently manage to tug on the masks so that the Korans fell out. According to him, the 344 MPs Company from Connecticut stood out for its adeptness at mask tugging. They knew they weren't supposed to touch the Korans, its members told him when he remonstrated with them, but they'd been instructed that the masks were not off limits. Finally, to his disgust, the use of force was allowed to resolve the issue. A detainee who refused to accept a Koran in his cell would be subject to what was known as "a forced cell extraction" by an IRF (for "initial response force")-six to eight MPs in riot protection gear (plastic masks, chest protectors, shin guards, shields) who would burst in on a cell to subdue a problem detainee in what was commonly known as an IRFing. Here is Yee's description of these stampedes:
     After they suited up, they formed a huddle and chanted in unison.... Then they rushed the block, one behind the other.... The sound of their heavy boots hammered down the steel corridor and their chants ricocheted off the tin ceiling.... The IRF team stopped at the detainee's cell.... The team leader in front drenched the prisoner with pepper spray and then opened the cell door. The others charged in and rushed the detainee.... The point was to get him to the ground as quickly as possible, with whatever means necessary.... When it was over, there was a certain excitement in the air. The guards were pumped.... They high-fived each other and slammed their chests together, like professional basketball players...an odd victory celebration for eight men who took down one prisoner. 
    Once "extracted," the recalcitrant prisoner was placed in isolation in an MSU (for "maximum security unit") until he was ready to accept a Koran. What are we to make of this struggle in which alleged Islamic "terrorists" refuse to accept Korans from their insistent captors until they've been pounded into submission?[*] And how, the chaplain rightly asks, was it "good for the mission?"
    James Yee couldn't easily ignore the fact that Muslim servicemen were becoming objects of hostility and suspicion; he was a little slow to recognize that he himself was now regarded as a suspicious case. (Perhaps he derived a false sense of security from his obvious usefulness, for he was still being trotted out for visiting congressmen and journalists to give a rosy picture of all that was being done to attend to the spiritual needs of the detainees.) He'd heard that Muslim servicemen had been collectively nicknamed "Hamas" by members of the Joint Task Force responsible for interrogations. And once General Miller himself, on a visit to Camp Delta, took the chaplain for a stroll on the gravel path inside the fence; the general said friends of his had died in the attack on the Pentagon and confided that he'd sought counseling from a chaplain to deal with the anger he felt against "those Muslims" responsible for the attack. "I appreciated his candor," Yee says, "but sensed ...there was a subtle warning behind his words."
    At about the same time, he noticed plainclothesmen on the periphery of services he conducted and wondered if they were FBI agents. Several Muslim enlisted men, he heard, had been detained on their return to the mainland. Finally, on September 10, 2003, a day before the second anniversary of the September 11 attacks, Yee found himself taken into custody by agents of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, shortly after landing in Jacksonville on leave. After five days in solitary confinement, he was shown a memo signed by General Miller charging him with espionage. "Chaplain Yee is known to have associated with known terrorist sympathizers," it said. He was also said to have classified documents hidden away in his quarters at Guantánamo, along with a ticket to London , suggesting that he'd been preparing to flee. None of this turned out to be true.
    But before the military prosecutors started to backtrack, they put Captain Yee through many of the experiences his fellow Muslims had endured at Camp Delta . Not only was he shackled and held in solitary confinement, he was strip-searched and made to wear blackened goggles and earmuffs as he was shifted from the naval brig in Jacksonville to the one in Charleston , South Carolina . This was where the authorities stashed terrorist suspects who could advance some slight claim to ordinary legal rights, where Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla-two "enemy combatants" with US citizenship, whose right to due process was now being contested by the government- were held. "Was I in fact being considered an enemy combatant?" Captain Yee wondered. The obvious answer was yes, even if no such formal classification had been made.
    But a month after his arrest, the charge of espionage and other ser-ious charges were abruptly dropped. Though Captain Yee had been branded a traitor and was still being held in solitary, a navy lawyer said the government lacked the "prosecutorial resources" to continue the case; also, the lawyer said, it needed more time to investigate his "misconduct." Nothing more was ever heard of that investigation. The only interpretation that fits the known facts is that the military lawyers assigned to the case found that there was nothing there to support the extreme charges. So now Captain Yee was left to face two relatively minor counts of mishandling classified documents. (He insists he never had any.) Still, he was held in solitary confinement for seventy-six days and shackled whenever he was taken from his cell.
    As the charges against him dwindled to nothing, the conduct of the prosecution became, if anything, more relentless, vengeful, and ugly. Yee's wife had returned to their home in Olympia , Washington , where she was visited by a female Defense Department investigator who showed her pictures of the chaplain with other women, and told her that he'd been having affairs. When, finally, the prosecution was unable to produce any evidence of his ever having possessed classified documents, let alone of having mishandled them, the criminal case collapsed. Far from acknowledging a miscarriage of justice, the prosecution said it couldn't disclose its evidence because of national security concerns. And still Yee wasn't in the clear. With the criminal charges erased, the chaplain was made to face administrative charges of adultery and downloading pornographic matter onto his laptop.
    Someone's obsession was driving this vendetta. Circumstantial evidence points to General Miller, the commander of the Camp Delta operation, who showed up to personally conduct the administrative hearing in Arlington , Virginia , on the adultery and pornography charges he had set in motion. Not surprisingly, he ruled against Yee, who then appealed to the US Southern Command. There General James Hill, the commander, took the remarkable step of throwing out another general's ruling but then, gratuitously, blamed Captain Yee for "misconduct." The chaplain was getting off on all charges, the general said, only because he'd suffered enough-not so much in solitary confinement in navy brigs as at the hands of the press, which had reported sensational charges that Hill's own subordinates had made and couldn't support with evidence.
    Even before the prosecution invaded Chaplain Yee's private life- and by doing so, he acknowledges, wrecked his marriage-this was a sordid tale in the sordid saga that has unfolded at Guantánamo. James Yee arrived believing he could be useful to the military's mission by showing a concern for the well-being of detainees who were held in small cages that they never got to leave for days on end unless they were summoned by an interrogator. He then concluded that the mission was actually to break their spirits, that his mediation was at best tolerated and more often resented. He made himself even more suspect when he addressed supposed "terrorists" as "brethren" and withdrew from the social circle of his fellow officers into the fellowship of other Muslims.
    It's heartening that several senior officers from Fort Lewis and Guantánamo supported him, writing to General Miller on his behalf. But what is telling is that there hasn't been a Muslim chaplain assigned to Camp Delta 's detainees over most of the two years since Yee's arrest and there is none now. A spokesman for the Joint Task Force that runs the prison assured me that a chaplain is "on call"; and that the commanding general now has an "Islamic adviser" on his staff, an Arabic speaker originally from the Middle East who sometimes talks to the prisoners. The guards, said the spokesman, are "sensitive to all the detainees' religious practices."
    Of course, this is the same line that Guantánamo spokesmen have been offering since the first prisoners landed in shackles in early 2002, and in all these months and years no independent observers, no journalists, no outsiders have been allowed inside the cages to make their own assessments, with the exception of representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, whose continued access depends on their keeping their findings confidential. The official line sounded slightly more plausible when there was a Muslim chaplain on hand, rather than "on call," to vouch for it. Now who gets to make the call? Certainly not the five hundred or so prisoners remaining where once the masterminds of the "war on terror" expected to open new cellblocks that would enable them to raise the capacity to more than two thousand. Now the emphasis is on scaling back the number of prisoners by persuading their home countries to take them and, on grounds that they are actual or potential terrorists, keep them out of circulation. By early November this year 256 had been phased out in this way.
    Next year will be the fifth for those who remain. The Supreme Court ruled last year that federal courts do have some jurisdiction over detainees, after all. But no court order has affected the life of a single prisoner and now-in view of the moves underway in the Senate to limit the jurisdiction of the courts in Guantánamo cases-it's far from clear that any ever will. Nor has any detainee been convicted of anything, by a military commission or anyone else. We didn't need Chaplain Yee to remind us that Guantánamo has become an embarrassment. What this former insider shows us is that it's a place of misery day in day out, year in year out.
    We shouldn't be surprised. But we can be sure the prisoners still have their Korans.
    For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire, by James Yee with Aimee Molloy. Public Affairs, 240 pp., $24.00.
    Note    [*] In small doses, medical studies have shown, pepper spray causes a burning sensation and extreme pain. Pepper spray in large doses has been reported to result in coughing, gagging, even respiratory or cardiac arrest. None of these are effects Yee mentions in his description of cell "extractions" at Camp Delta . It's difficult to tell whether the use of the verb "drenched" is a writer's flourish or the result of careful, firsthand observation.

[Unlike Wen Ho Lee or Captain James Yee, white guy not held in shackles or in 
solitary confinement]
12/13/05 Los Angeles Times: Ex-Official Admits Wrongdoing, Not Espionage: 
Donald W. Keyser pleads guilty to charges related to his interaction with a 
Taiwanese intelligence officer while he was with the State Department,
By Josh Meyer
    Washington A former top State Department official pleaded guilty Monday 
to possessing classified information and concealing an improper relationship 
with a Taiwanese intelligence officer, but authorities stopped short of alleging 
that he was guilty of espionage.
    Donald W. Keyser, the former No. 2 official in the department's Bureau of 
East Asian and Pacific Affairs, pleaded guilty to unlawfully removing classified 
U.S. documents from the State Department and making false official statements.
    In court documents released Monday by the U.S. attorney's office in Alexandria, 
Va., authorities disclosed that Keyser, 62, had removed thousands of documents 
from the department from 1992 until his arrest in 2004, including documents 
classified as top secret and some classified at an even higher level, containing 
what is known as secure compartmented information.
    "Numerous additional classified documents were found on a laptop computer 
and on floppy disks in Keyser's home," the plea agreement says. "In all, Keyser 
had over 3,600 documents in either hard copy or electronic form."
    The court papers do not say whether Keyser had given any documents to 
foreign officials.
    Keyser is scheduled to be sentenced Feb. 24; he faces a maximum of eight 
years in prison and $500,000 in fines. He is also disqualified from holding a 
government post, the documents say.
    Authorities arrested Keyser on Sept. 15, 2004, after he met with a Taiwanese 
intelligence officer, Isabelle Cheng, and a second official from Taiwan 's national 
intelligence agency, at a suburban Washington restaurant, according to U.S.  
officials, court records and news reports.
    State Department officials and Keyser's lawyers could not be reached for 
comment late Monday. The Justice Department disclosed the plea agreement 
shortly before 7 p.m.
    Keyser, who worked 33 years at the State Department before retiring last year, 
has not commented in detail on the case or on the specifics of his relationship with 
Cheng, 34.
    But federal authorities said in the lengthy plea agreement and supporting court 
papers that Keyser had admitted to having an undisclosed personal relationship 
with Cheng that could have made him "vulnerable to coercion, exploitation or 
pressure from a foreign government."
    "Those who are trusted to handle classified documents must not allow such 
material to be compromised in any way," said Paul McNulty, U.S. attorney for the 
Eastern District of Virginia.
    Keyser initially denied having an improper relationship with Cheng, but later 
confirmed to State Department investigators and the FBI that the two had had "an 
undisclosed personal relationship" from 2002 to September 2004.
    The court documents say Keyser communicated regularly with Cheng, met 
privately with her on numerous occasions and occasionally traveled with her, 
without ever reporting those contacts to the State Department as required.
    Between Sept. 3 and Sept. 6, 2003, Keyser met Cheng in Taiwan and then lied 
about the trip to authorities, the plea agreement says.
    Upon his return to the United States , he submitted a customs declaration form 
that falsely stated he had visited only China and Japan .
    Almost a year later, the court papers say, Keyser told an investigator with the 
department's Bureau of Diplomatic Security that he did not have a relationship 
with Cheng "when, in fact, he had."
    Keyser was commissioned as a foreign service officer in 1972 and specialized 
in East Asia . He became an expert on China for the State Department's Bureau 
of Intelligence and Research, later served at U.S. embassies in Tokyo and Beijing , 
then returned to top management at the State Department in 1993.
    In February 2003, Keyser was promoted to principal deputy assistant secretary 
for East Asian and Pacific affairs. For much of that time, he held a top-secret 
security clearance, prosecutors said.
    Court papers filed in the case detail how, in meetings in Washington, Keyser 
allegedly passed documents to Cheng and the other Taiwanese intelligence agent.
    The papers do not say that Keyser took money, and they offer no motive for his 
actions. But they disclose that FBI agents found that during his unauthorized stay in
Taipei , Keyser had made $570.01 in credit card purchases at a Christian Dior 
boutique.

11/17/05 Los Angeles Times: New Spy Case Prompts Skepticism: Some in the 
Southland's Chinese community see parallels to earlier arrests involving Katrina 
Leung and Wen Ho Lee,
By Jia-Rui Chong, Times Staff Writer
    Southern California's Chinese community is watching another spy scandal 
developing in its backyard, and some have a sense of dj vu.
    The latest case involves four people arrested last month on multiple charges of 
stealing U.S. military secrets from an Orange County aerospace firm for the People's 
Republic of China .
    Federal authorities initially accused Chi Mak, wife Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, Tai Wang 
Mak and his wife, Fuk Heung Li, of the theft of government property, conspiracy, 
transporting stolen goods and aiding and abetting.
    But when a federal grand jury returned indictments Tuesday, three were charged only 
with failing to register as agents of a foreign government; all charges were dropped 
against Fuk. One reason for the reduced charges, officials said, was because the data 
the defendants allegedly passed along turned out not to be classified.
    The case has generated much discussion in the Chinese community, but the 
decision by the prosecutors to drop some of the more serious charges has underscored 
the feeling of some that there is more smoke than fire in the U.S. effort to crack down on 
Chinese spying.
    When Lisa Yang, a local developer and president of the Chinese American Citizens 
Alliance, heard about the spy case, her first reaction was "Uh-oh, here it comes again. 
I just hope the FBI really has a case, not like with Katrina."
    "Katrina" is Katrina Leung, the prominent Chinese American activist and 
businesswoman who was charged with being a double agent for the Chinese 
government. But a federal judge ended up dropping all charges against her.
    Yang said she was relieved that the case turned out not to be as far-reaching as 
some initial reports suggested. But she is also disappointed.
    "I'm sad for the FBI and for what the government prosecutors have done to these 
Chinese Americans," she said. "I'm sad because you make other people think you 
abuse the power."
    Cat Chao, 39, who is host of a Mandarin-language talk show at evening rush hour, 
plans to talk about the most recent spy case tonight.
    She said many in the community talk about any news of Chinese American espionage 
with a heavy dose of sarcasm.
    "It's a cultural thing to always believe authority whatever teacher says is always right," 
Chao said. "Then we found out Wen Ho Lee is totally innocent. It was humiliating for our 
Chinese community and Taiwanese community."
    Wen Ho Lee, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist, was accused of stealing 
nuclear secrets for China in 1999. Lee later pleaded guilty to a lesser charge of 
mishandling classified computer files but not spying. The Lee case became something 
of a rallying cry for many Chinese Americans who felt he was unfairly treated by the 
government.
    The latest spying case shocked some in the Chinese American community because 
the defendants seemed to have long-standing ties in Southern California . The FBI 
originally alleged in an affidavit that Chi Mak, a lead project engineer on a contract to 
develop a quiet electric-drive propulsion system for U.S. Navy submarines, transferred 
information about the system to his home computer.
    The affidavit alleged that his wife helped him copy the information onto CDs and then 
Tai Mak, a broadcast and engineering director for a Chinese cable network, and Fuk 
planned to take the information to China .
    The charges were changed for a number of reasons, some of which cannot yet be 
divulged, said Thom Mrozek, a spokesman for the U.S. attorney's office in Los Angeles .
    Even if the information copied was only sensitive, not classified, Mrozek said, 
transmitting sensitive information is inappropriate.
    While some of the information on the submarine propulsion system might have been 
discussed at a conference, discussing this kind of information with military applications 
at a meeting of American scientists is not the same as handing it over to foreign power, 
he said.
    "These are serious charges they've been indicted on," Mrozek said. "You have people 
you believe are intelligence operatives for another country and taking information of a 
military contractor to another country. Should we let them go with it?"
    He said that some of the evidence the FBI had presented in the original charges 
showed that the three people were working for China . Federal agents who searched Chi 
Mak's trash found a document written in Chinese that "lists a number of military 
technologies that were sought."

11/16/05 Los Angeles Times: Conspiracy Charges Dropped: Three who had been 
accused of a plot to steal military secrets now face lesser charges,
by H.G. Reza
    Three people who had been arrested on multiple charges of conspiring to steal 
U.S. military secrets for the People's Republic of China were indicted Tuesday by 
a federal grand jury on the sole charge of failing to register as agents of a foreign 
government.
    When arrested by the FBI last month, defense plant engineer Chi Mak, his wife, 
Rebecca Laiwah Chiu, and his brother, Tai Wang Mak, were accused of theft of 
government property, conspiracy and transporting stolen goods. Those charges 
were dropped Tuesday.
    Tai Mak's wife, Fuk Heung Li, was also arrested in October and similarly charged. 
But she wasn't named in Tuesday's indictment by the grand jury in Santa Ana , and 
U.S. attorney spokesman Thom Mrozek said all charges against her were dropped.
    The defendants each face up to 10 years in prison if convicted of failing to 
register as foreign agents.
    Mrozek said prosecutors decided not to press the initial charges against the 
defendants because the information about submarine technology they possessed 
wasn't classified.
    "It's sensitive but not classified. Some of the stuff they had is talked about openly 
at conferences," said Mrozek.
    Nevertheless, the data seized is banned from export to certain countries, 
including China .
    Defense attorney Ronald Kaye, who represents Chi Mak, said his client was 
innocent of all the charges. Tai Mak's attorney declined to comment, and Chiu's 
attorney could not be reached.
    Chi Mak, 65, is the lead project engineer on a contract to develop a quiet electric-
drive propulsion system for U.S. Navy submarines at Paragon Power in Anaheim . 
He and Chiu, 62, are Downey residents who are originally from China . They became 
U.S. citizens in 1985.
    Tai Mak, 56, is a broadcast and engineering director for a Chinese cable network 
based in Hong Kong . Prosecutors alleged in court last week that he is a member of 
the Chinese military.
    Chi Mak allegedly transferred information about the propulsion system to his home 
computer, according to an FBI affidavit filed in the case.
    Tai Mak and Fuk allegedly planned to carry a CD encrypted with that information 
to China .
    Tai Mak and Fuk, who live in Alhambra , were arrested Oct. 28 at Los Angeles  
International Airport as they awaited a flight to China . The couple, both Chinese 
citizens, are legal residents who arrived in the United States in 2001.
    Chi Mak and Chiu were arrested at their Downey home the same day. Chi and Tai 
Mak were ordered held without bond. Chiu's bond was set at $300,000. Fuk, who was 
also being held without bond, will be released as soon as possible, Mrozek said.

8/13/05
    The Asian American Journalists Associations National Conference next week 
(August 17-20) in Minneapolis will open its doors to the general public for a special 
Town Hall Forum on Thursday, August 18, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. at the Hyatt 
Regency Minneapolis, 1300 Nicollet Mall, Minneapolis .
    The August 18 town hall meeting will allow community members, leaders and 
journalists to examine the relationship between Asian American and Pacific 
Islanders, justice and the media. An esteemed panel will explore recent examples 
of Asian Americans that have been unfairly tried in the media.
    The AAJA convention has a long history of hosting lively, important town hall 
meetings and this year is certainly no exception, states Neal Justin, convention 
chair and TV critic for the Minneapolis Star Tribune. "This is a great opportunity for 
the Twin Cities community to come together and converse with national 
newsmakers and have an impact on journalists from across the country.
   The event will be the first major public appearance this year by former Army Capt. 
James Yee, a West Point graduate and Muslim chaplain who was unjustly 
accused of espionage while on duty at Guantanamo Bay Cuba , detained and 
eventually released with all charges dropped and no apologies.
    The event will explore Capt. Yee's ordeal and several other high-profile stories 
involving AAPIs who have made national headlines.
    Capt. Yee will join a panel discussion with Minnesota State Sen. Mee Moua,
Bill Ong Hing, Professor of Law and Asian American Studies, University of  
Calif. Davis, Jaideep Singh, Sikh Mediawatch and Sikh American Legal Defense 
and Education Fund.
    Journalists on the panel will include Steve Montiel, director, Institute for Justice 
and Journalism, USC Annenberg School for Communication, and Tram Nguyen, 
executive editor, Colorlines Magazine, and author of We Are All Suspects Now: 
Untold Stories from Immigrant Communities. Rekha Basu, columnist, Des Moines 
Register, will moderate the discussion.
    The event coordinator is Helen Zia, the journalist and author who exposed the 
injustice in Detroit in the Vincent Chin murder, as well as unscrupulous labor 
practices with Asian Americans in the Alaska canneries.
    Issues expected to be brought up for discussion include recent reports of 
anonymous tips to Homeland Security with claims of Chinese "dirty nuclear bomber 
terrorists" entering Boston . Wire services immediately identify four suspects and 
post artist renderings of them and the alert becomes national headline news; 
although the tip later proves to be hoax, no apologies are offered to the accused or 
those who might have been subject to their "profile."
    A local example will include Chia Vang, a Hmong hunter charged with shooting 
six people and wounding two in a hunting altercation in near Hayward , Wis. The 
initial media coverage implied and in some cases expressed a direct link with the 
shooting to the suspect's cultural heritage, and fear the coverage has hurt his 
chances for a fair trial.
    With the perception that these cases and other are tried in the media through 
their coverage, the Town Hall will explore several issues: What are the hurdles to 
justice that AAPIs face? Is there a presumption of guilt when AAPIs are accused 
of certain crimes? How has the Patriot Act and the War on Terrorism affected 
AAPIs and what does the news media need to know to ensure fair and balanced 
coverage of the increasing numbers of such cases?
    The convention will also feature speakers such as former Vice President Walter 
F. Mondale and Sharshi Tharoor, award-winning author/writer and United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
    With more than 2,300 members, AAJA is the nations largest professional 
organization for Asian American and Pacific Islander journalists. AAJA encourages 
young people to consider journalism as a career, develops managers in the media 
industry, and promotes fair and accurate news coverage.
    For information and to RSVP call 1-877-570-9285 or aajatownhall@gmail.com. 
Visit the AAJA website at www.aaja.org.

July 11, 2005 Santa Fe New Mexican: Richardson could take prominent position 
in Wen Ho Lee lawsuit,
    Santa Fe (AP) - Gov. Bill Richardson could play a prominent role in the lawsuit 
filed by former Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist Wen Ho Lee against the 
federal government.
    Lee claims government officials leaked classified and personal information 
about him to the media. Richardson was secretary of the Department of Energy 
at the time.
    After The Santa Fe New Mexican covered the story on Thursday, The 
Albuquerque Journal reported in Sunday editions that Richardson and several 
others were again identified in a recent federal court ruling as likely sources for 
the leaks in 1999 that identified Lee as a suspect in an FBI investigation into 
the loss of nuclear secrets to China .
    The governor has denied in sworn testimony that he was the source.
    The U.S. Court of Appeals recently upheld a lower court ruling that journalists 
from The Associated Press, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and a 
former CNN corespondent were in contempt of court for failing to reveal their 
government sources.
    A spokesman for Richardson said the governor does not comment on pending 
litigation.
    "He does believe the court decision will have a chilling effect on the First 
Amendment and a reporter's right to protect confidential sources, a fundamental 
tenet of our democracy," spokesman Billy Sparks said.
    Brian Sun, Lee's attorney, said the journalists in Lee's lawsuit "still have a few 
more appeals they can exhaust" before they must reveal their sources or face 
possible fines or jail time.
    Richardson 's involvement in the case is on some political radars as he 
considers a run for the White House.
    Lee was arrested and indicted on 59 felony counts of mishandling classified 
information in 1999. He was exonerated of all but one of the felony counts in 2000.
    His lawsuit against the DOE, Department of Justice and FBI alleges they 
violated privacy laws.
    After questioning more than 20 government officials, Lee's attorneys were 
unable to find the source of the leak and began pressing for the media to identify 
the source or sources.

May 2005
COMING IN OCTOBER FROM PUBLICAFFAIRS
FOR GOD AND COUNTRY
by James Yee, former Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay
with Aimee Molloy
    In 2001, Captain James "Yusuf" Yee was commissioned as one of the first Muslim chaplains in the United States Army. After the tragic attacks of September 11, 2001, he became a frequent government spokesman, helping to educate soldiers about Islam and build understanding throughout the military. Subsequently, Chaplain Yee was selected to serve as the Muslim Chaplain at Guantanamo Bay , Cuba , where nearly 700 detainees captured in the war on terror were being held as "unlawful combatants." 
    In September 2003, after serving at Guantanamo for ten months in a role that gave him unrestricted access to the detainees--and after receiving numerous awards for his service there--Chaplain Yee was secretly arrested on his way to meet his wife and daughter for a routine two-week leave. He was locked away in a navy prison, subject to much of the same treatment that had been imposed on the  Guantanamo detainees. Wrongfully accused of spying, and aiding the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Yee spent 76 excruciating days in solitary confinement and was threatened with the death penalty. After the government determined they had made a grave mistake in their original allegations, they vindictively charged him with adultery and computer pornography.  In the end all criminal charges were dropped and Chaplain Yee's record wiped clean. But his reputation was tarnished, and what was a promising military career was left in ruins.
    A third-generation Chinese-American and a 1990 graduate of West Point, Chaplain Yee served in the U.S. Army for 14 years, including a tour in Saudi Arabia during the aftermath of the first Gulf War.  His spiritual conversion to Islam in 1991 guided his travels to Damascus , Syria , where he studied for four years. He twice traveled to Mecca to make the Haj, the sacred Muslim pilgrimage. 
    Depicting a journey of faith and service, Chaplain Yee's FOR GOD AND COUNTRY is the story of a pioneering officer in the U.S. Army, who became a victim of the post-September 11 paranoia that gripped a starkly fearful nation. And it poses a fundamental question: If our country cannot be loyal to even the most patriotic Americans, can it remain loyal to itself?
Gene Taft
Director of Publicity
PublicAffairs
212-397-6666 ext. 234
http://www.publicaffairsbooks.com

1/22/05 Associated Press: Tipster Possibly Lied About Immigrant Terrorists,
By Denise Lavoie
    Boston (AP) -- Gov. Mitt Romney said he has become "less concerned, not more concerned" about a potential terrorist threat against the city of Boston . The FBI, meanwhile, is exploring possible theories for the reports - including a possible revenge motive.
    FBI agents have been looking into an uncorroborated tip that 16 people might be planning an attack on the city. Those allegedly involved in the plot include 13 Chinese nationals, two Iraqis and a man identified on the FBI's Web site as Jose Ernesto Beltran Quinones, whose nationality was not given.
    But the tipster who told federal officials about the alleged conspiracy may have fabricated the story out of revenge, a federal law enforcement official said Friday. The law enforcement official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the tipster may have been angry because a group of illegal immigrants had failed to pay for smuggling them into the country.
    That scenario is one of many being examined in the case, said the official in Washington , who declined to describe other theories being explored.
    The original tip was received by the California Highway Patrol, according to another federal law enforcement official in Washington who also spoke on condition of anonymity.
    The tipster claimed four of the Chinese - two men and two women - entered the United States from Mexico and were awaiting a shipment of "nuclear oxide" that would follow them to Boston .
    Several radioactive compounds take form as oxides and could be used in a dirty bomb, said Charles Ferguson, a science and technology fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations in Washington. Plutonium and americium oxides, in the right amounts, would be dangerous to human health, while uranium oxide would be less so, Ferguson said.
    Security was increased in Boston, where two of the planes were hijacked for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

1/7/05 Los Angeles Times: Spying Case Tossed Out: Federal judge scolds prosecutors in her dismissal of criminal charges against a woman accused of working as a Chinese double agent,
By David Rosenzweig, Times Staff Writer
    Charging prosecutors with willful and deliberate misconduct, a federal judge on Thursday dismissed all criminal charges against a former FBI informant accused of serving as a Chinese double agent.
    In a sharply worded ruling, U.S. District Judge Florence-Marie Cooper blasted the U.S. attorney's office for "conduct unbecoming a prosecutorial agency."
    Attorneys for Chinese American businesswoman Katrina Leung had accused the government of illegally and unethically exacting a commitment from her former FBI handler that barred him from talking to the defense.
    The pledge was contained in an agreement that retired agent James J. Smith reached with the government last year, allowing him to plead guilty to a reduced charge of failing to report his 20-year-long sexual affair with Leung.
    Under long-established rules, prosecutors are prohibited from obstructing a defendant's access to witnesses.
    At a hearing before Cooper last month, Assistant U.S. Atty. Michael Emmick disavowed any intent to prevent Smith from speaking to Leung's defense team. He blamed "inartful" language in Smith's plea agreement.
    But Cooper cited a Nov. 18 e-mail message to Emmick from Robert Wallace, senior trial counsel in the Justice Department's counterintelligence section in Washington, saying that the wording was aimed at "preventing Smith from being interviewed by Leung's counsel because he is a repository of classified information."
    "In the face of that e-mail," Cooper wrote, "anything short of an admission and apology on the part of the government is hard to imagine. Mr. Emmick did neither. Rather, he chose to ignore the e-mail."
    The plea agreement clause in dispute specified that Smith would engage in "no further sharing of information relating to this case with Leung, counsel for Leung or the employees of counsel for Leung."
    Cooper said the evidence was abundantly clear that the clause was intentionally placed in the agreement to prevent Smith from talking to the defense. And to make matters worse, she said, the prosecution subsequently engaged in a series of explanations and denials that "compounds the problem by undermining the court's confidence in the integrity of the process."
    She accused the prosecution of misrepresenting to the court its true intentions in drafting the "no-further-sharing" clause.
    "While a certain amount of shading of the truth may be tolerated, even in judicial proceedings, prosecutors are subject to constraints and responsibilities beyond those which apply to other lawyers," the judge wrote.
    "In this case, the government decided to make sure that Leung and her lawyers would not have access to Smith. When confronted with what they had done, they engaged in a pattern of stonewalling entirely unbecoming a prosecutorial agency."
    U.S. Atty. Debra W. Yang issued a statement denying any prosecutorial misconduct. "I stand behind the work of the prosecutors of this case and I know that they have conducted themselves ethically," she said.
    Yang said her staff was analyzing the ruling and would consider an appeal.
    Leung's lawyers, John D. Vandevelde and Janet I. Levine, said in a statement that they were gratified by the dismissal.
    "Katrina Leung's nightmare is over," they said. "The courts have again made sure that truth and justice are not mere platitudes."
    They described their client as a loyal American who dedicated her life to serving her adopted country for 20 years. "She looks forward to moving on with her life as a loyal and patriotic citizen."
    Leung, a naturalized citizen, was recruited by Smith during the early 1980s to gather intelligence for the FBI during her frequent business trips to China , where she ingratiated herself with high-ranking government officials.
    But starting about 1990, prosecutors said, she began working for the Chinese as well, feeding sensitive, unauthorized information about the FBI to her handler at the Chinese Ministry of State Security.
    Smith, who had an extramarital affair with Leung for two decades, learned about her activities but covered it up and continued to vouch for her reliability, he admitted in his plea deal.
    Leung was not charged with espionage but with illegally copying and possessing classified documents that she could have used to harm the interests of the U.S. government. The documents were seized during a search of Leung's San Marino home.
    According to an FBI affidavit, Leung allegedly lifted the papers from Smith's briefcase during his many visits to her house.
    Through her attorneys, Leung denied any wrongdoing and insisted she had acted at all times at the direction of Smith and other members of the FBI's counterintelligence squad.
    An FBI spokesperson declined to comment on the ruling Thursday.
    Smith, who retired from the FBI in 2000, was initially charged with gross negligence in handling classified documents and faced a possible 10-year prison term. Under terms of his plea agreement, the prosecution could recommend that he receive no time in jail.
    In her ruling Thursday, Cooper said that Smith still has "everything to lose" by talking to the defense.
    "Suspended over his head, like the proverbial Sword of Damocles, is the sure knowledge that if he violates any of the terms of his plea agreement, the deal is canceled and his future returns to its former bleak state."
    Consequently, the judge said, Leung has suffered substantial prejudice as a result of the prosecution's due-process violation.
    Reaction to the dismissal among leaders in the Chinese American community was marked by a mixture of relief and continuing concern.
    Assemblywoman Judy Chu ( D-Monterey Park ), who knew Leung well and had worked with her, said: "I am glad for Katrina, certainly. But I am terribly disturbed by the prosecutorial misconduct involved in the case. Katrina's life has been turned upside down. And I fear that the outcome was anticlimactic, compared to the charges that were leveled against her."
    "The community asked for a fair trial and restrained its judgment when this case first broke," Chu said. "I am glad that the justice system worked in responding to that request."
    David Ma, chairman of the Chinese American Rights Organization in Monterey Park and a sometime critic of Leung, said the case had damaged the image of Chinese Americans regardless of the dismissal.
    "The legal part is one thing, because you need to prove 100% that she is guilty," he said. "From the point of the view of a loyal Chinese American, I feel very painful about this incident, because people like Katrina are taking advantage of this country."
    Stewart Kwoh, president of the Asian Pacific American Legal Center of Southern California, said: "This is a very unfortunate matter that really required a fair trial to find out the truth." With the dismissal, he said, "we may never know what really happened."
    Lily Lee Chen, former mayor of Monterey Park , said: "It would have been better if we knew exactly what had happened. The damage has been done not only to herself, in terms of her reputation, but for the Asian American community."
    Loyola University law professor Laurie Levenson said Cooper's decision contained a clear message for prosecutors: "Candor to the court is Job 1."
    Levenson, a former federal prosecutor, noted that Cooper dismissed the case on two grounds that there was a constitutional violation, and under the court's inherent supervisory powers.
    Given that, she said, the government will face "an uphill battle" if it appeals.