Emerging security breaches at the US's top security facility in Guantanamo Bay are a new headache for the Pentagon and raise the spectre of a new backlash against Muslim and Arab-Americans, writes Nyier Abdou Muslims and Arab-Americans in the US military are in the spotlight following the recent arrests of two servicemen and one civilian translator working at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Fears of pervasive security lapses are fuelling an aggressive security crackdown at the US's maximum security facility known as Camp Delta, where some 660 Al-Qa'eda and former Taliban suspects are being held, many since their transfer from Afghanistan in January 2002. The arrests of Muslim military chaplain Youssef Yee, a convert to Islam, and translators Senior Airman Ahmed Al-Halabi and Ahmed Mehalba, both born in the Middle East, turn attention back to the US's contentious detention centre, where prisoners identified by the Pentagon as "enemy combatants" are kept incommunicado. Civil and human rights organisations have assailed the US's policy on the Guantanamo detainees as a violation of international law, suggesting that the prisoners languish in a "legal limbo", but defenders maintain that the preventive detention of enemy soldiers is both legal under the laws of war and necessary in terms of national security. Last Friday, the obsessively tight- lipped International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) -- the only organisation outside the military allowed access to prisoners at Guantanamo -- offered an uncharacteristic public condemnation of the situation at the camp. Upon completion of a visit to the camp, senior Red Cross official in Washington Christophe Girod stated that "One cannot keep these detainees in this pattern, this situation, indefinitely." He added that the ICRC has seen a "worrying deterioration" in prisoners' mental health. Some 32 suicide attempts have been made by 21 detainees. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has insisted that Muslims and Arab- Americans in the military will not be "racially profiled" as the military tightens the screws on Camp Delta, however it seems impossible that an internal revue of security concerns would not focus on those with ties to the Middle East -- something all three suspects share. Still, Hussein Ibish, spokesman for the Washington-based American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), maintains that both the military and government are well aware that the skills of Arabs and Arab-Americans continue to be needed, particularly in situations where Arabic language is crucial. Arguing that the military is "one of the most successfully integrated and non-discriminatory institutions in American society", Ibish told Al-Ahram Weekly that there is good reason to think the military will "resist the siren song of discrimination". "On the other hand, we are in a cultural moment in which fear and suspicion of Arabs and Muslims is very widespread in American society," adds Ibish. "We cannot necessarily expect that the military, or the people who run it, will always be immune to stereotypes and prejudice." Yee, a 35-year-old Chinese-American, converted to Islam during his tour of duty in Saudi Arabia. He left the army to study Arabic and Islam in Syria before rejoining as a Muslim chaplain. He was charged on Friday, after being detained for one month, with disobeying orders relating to classified information. Egyptian-born Mehalba, 31, a naturalised US citizen, was snagged in an apparently random check at Boston's Logan Airport while returning from a trip to see his family in Egypt. After finding a military ID among his things, a thorough search of his belongings reportedly turned up a CD with classified information. Syrian-born Al-Halabi, 24, faces the most serious allegations -- espionage and aiding the enemy are among the 32 charges being brought against him. The subject of an investigation that has gone on for months, Al-Halabi is also accused of improper contacts with the Syrian Embassy. The US military has approximately 1.4 million active-duty personnel. According to the Association of Patriotic Arab-Americans in Military (APAAM), however, only some 3,500 are Arab- Americans. The number of Muslims in the military is a widely disputed figure. The Pentagon estimates the number to be somewhere in the area of 4,000 "practicing" Muslims; ADC estimates 8,000. The American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council (AMAF and VAC), however, puts the number at 15,000. There are 17 "accredited" Muslim chaplains in the military, the first of which was introduced as recently as 1993. Last Wednesday a team of more than 20 investigators were dispatched from the US Southern Command, in Miami, to Guantanamo. Alex Alexiev, senior fellow at the Centre for Security Policy in Washington, told the Weekly that there is "strong suspicion" that radical Islamic groups have been able to gain access to the military and "may be acting as a fifth column to harm American security interests". Muslim military chaplains are endorsed by the AMAF and VAC -- currently under suspicion in government circles for its alleged affiliation with the American Muslim Foundation (AMF), whose founder, Abdurahman Al- Amoudi, was arrested last month (see story, this page). The AMAF and VAC has been at pains to show that the two groups are independent and that the organisation was not founded by Al- Amoudi, as has often been reported. "There is growing evidence that the Muslim chaplaincy programme in the US armed forces has been infiltrated by organisations with close ties to Islamic extremist and terrorist organisations that are hostile to the United States," says Alexiev. The AMF, along with the Graduate School of Islamic and Social Sciences (GSISS), in Leesburg, Virginia, which trained some of the military's serving chaplains, Alexiev notes, "are known to have consistently defended groups designated as terrorist by the US government and have in turn been supported financially by Saudi interests". A 25 September editorial in the conservative Washington Times illustrates the increasing sense of mistrust. The recent arrests, the editorial suggests, "mean the Pentagon will have to tackle the problem of conflicting loyalties. There is no sense of national security if our soldiers cannot even be sure that their brothers with them in the foxhole are on the same side". But Mark Burgess, terrorism project director at the Washington-based Centre for Defence Information (CDI), argues that at this point, it is unlikely that Arabs and Muslims in the military will come under any aggressive scrutiny. "The potential drawbacks of such a witch-hunt -- in terms of public relations, morale or unit cohesion -- outweigh the benefits at this stage," Burgess told the Weekly. Noting that American military brass is "too practical" to make such an error of judgement, Burgess adds: "American politicians are another matter of course. There will no doubt be those who seek such a witch-hunt. I believe, and hope, this will not happen." The Guantanamo arrests are conspicuous because they all involve people with very close access to the detainees. As the open-ended detainment stretches over years, an argument can be made that the longer the suspects remain at Guantanamo, the more there is a likelihood of a security breach -- possibly defeating the purpose of their total isolation. CDI's Burgess admits that over time, those responsible for the captives could develop a bond with them. "Some variant of 'Stockholm syndrome' seems likely in such circumstances," he says, adding that this is even more likely when a captor may already empathise with the captive at a certain level, perhaps because of a shared heritage or religion. "Of course, factors such as the captors' patriotism and disdain for the crimes of which the captives are accused could mitigate against this," he added. Above the issue of how the military looks on its Muslim and Arab members, however, the widely covered cases of Yee, Al-Halabi and Mehalba could cement a lingering association in the collective American consciousness between Muslim and Arab-Americans and terrorism. In many ways, the arrests pose another setback for the image of Muslim and Arab-Americans. Although Yee has only been charged with disobeying orders, the fact that he is a serving military officer and a graduate of West Point Military Academy makes his case particularly problematic, says ADC's Ibish. "It compounds the impression that being a Muslim in and of itself invites disloyalty to the United States under the current circumstances," he said. Conceding that "there are many racist voices who have and will continue to frame these arrests in precisely this manner," Ibish also warns against looking at recent events in any "conspiratorial terms". The association between Muslim and Arab- Americans and terrorism, he notes, is unfortunately reinforced not so much by recent events, but by the continued reality of Al-Qa'eda, "and the fact that it and its politics, or similar politics, are not without support in some parts of the Arab and Muslim world."
