MILITARY BUNGLING AGAIN

Military justice is often rough and ready and leads to injust treatment of its own personnel

Army Capt. James Yee had just arrived at the U.S. prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay when he got his first hint of trouble. The man Yee would replace as Muslim chaplain showed him around the high-security base on the eastern edge of Cuba, and gave him a warning. ''This is not a friendly environment for Muslims, and I don't just mean for the prisoners,'' Yee recalled hearing from the outgoing chaplain. ''You need to watch your back.'' The exchange, which Yee recounts in a new book on his experiences at Guantanamo, would prove to be prophetic.

The new chaplain soon grew increasingly disturbed by the treatment of prisoners and what he perceived as military hostility to Muslim personnel at the base. Yee's biggest shock came later, when he was arrested on suspicion of espionage and held in solitary confinement for 76 days. The case unraveled and authorities eventually dismissed the charges. Yee received an honorable discharge from the service and now lives in Washington state, but he was left with deep concerns about the treatment of prisoners and anger over his own treatment at the hands of military authorities.

''What happened to me was a gross miscarriage of justice,'' he said Tuesday in a phone interview from New York, where he was promoting his book, For God and Country, which went on sale this week. ''I don't want what happened to me to ever happen to anyone else.''

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