Scott Forbes follows up on a suggestion from a commenter at Billmon’s Whiskey Bar weblog: Connecting the dots. It concerns James Yee, the US Army chaplain who was arrested with certain mysterious documents after returning from Guantanamo, paraded through the media for a few days with lurid charges that suggested he was some kind of al Qaeda mole, and then had the charges against him suddenly dropped for “national security” reasons.

The conspiracy theory offered by the Whiskey Bar commentator is that Yee might have been carrying documentation of prisoner abuse at Gitmo. The whipsawing he received, followed by the abrupt dropping of charges (and the accompanying gag order against him), which seemed so weird at the time, and begged so strongly for some other shoe to drop, would then make perfect sense as a heavy-handed bit of intimidation intended to keep his story under wraps.

I know the universe isn’t obligated to twist itself into knots just to make my paranoid fantasies of a global conspiracy of right-wing evil-doers come true. But this particular fantasy does a really good job of explaining a lot of otherwise-discordant facts. And it’s consistent with other truths that have emerged since then. Taken together, all this has the needle on my “hidden truth” detector twitching.

Maybe one day we’ll know. For now, though, I guess it’s just really, really suggestive.

This entry was posted by jbc on Sunday, May 9th, 2004 at 9:09 am and is filed under the_usa. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.