Plea deal signals trouble with case against translator By Shelley Murphy, Globe Staff | January 8, 2005 A former Arabic translator at the federal prison camp at Guantanamo Bay has agreed to plead guilty Monday to taking classified material from the base and lying to investigators, under a deal with prosecutors that would make him a free man in a few months. Ahmed Fathy Mehalba, 32, an Egyptian-born US citizen, will be sentenced to 20 months in prison if US District Judge Douglas P. Woodlock accepts a plea agreement that federal prosecutors filed in US District Court in Boston yesterday. The resolution of Mehalba's case would mark the end of a series of high-profile prosecutions of translators and military officers at Guantanamo Bay that began with accusations of espionage and treason and ended with far lesser charges or none at all. Mehalba, a civilian translator, was one of four men arrested in summer and fall 2003 amid separate investigations into whether they had links to Muslim militants or were leaking information about interrogations or detainees at the camp, where the US government has detained hundreds on suspicion of links to Al Qaeda or the ousted Taliban regime in Afghanistan. But no charges of spying or having terrorist ties remained against any of the four. In Mehalba's case, he will plead guilty to everything he was ultimately charged with: having taken information off the base he should not have had and lying about it. ''He's not a terrorist, not a spy," said Boston lawyer Joseph Savage, one of Mehalba's attorneys. ''We think the agreement we're proposing is the right result." Mehalba's lawyers have argued in the past that he was taking material with him to work on translation. US Attorney Michael J. Sullivan declined to comment on the case yesterday. Because Mehalba would get credit for the time he's been jailed since his Sept. 29, 2003, arrest at Logan International Airport, he would be released within the next few months under the agreement. Mehalba worked at Guantanamo from January to July 2003 as a linguist for San Diego-based Titan Corp., which has a contract with the Department of Defense. He took an emergency leave in July 2003 to visit his family in Egypt and was married during the trip. Mehalba had just arrived in Boston on a flight from Cairo when a Customs and Border Protection officer found that he was carrying a computer disc with 368 documents marked ''secret" or ''secret/noforn," meaning that no foreign government should look at them. The secret documents were among 725 documents, totaling about 2,000 printed pages, that were found in one file on the disc. Some originated with the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Justice, according to court papers. At the time, the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force launched an investigation to try to track where Mehalba had traveled, besides Egypt, with the classified documents and whom he had met with. But the plea agreement suggests that the government never found anything linking him to anything more serious. Mehalba's plea agreement also states that the government and defense were recommending a sentence that is less than called for under federal sentencing guidelines, because he suffered from ''significantly reduced mental capacity" at the time of his crimes, didn't use violence, and had no prior criminal record. ''The resolution proposed reflects an acknowledgement by the government that this is not a case about espionage," said Michael C. Andrews, another of his lawyers. Kevin J. Barry, a retired military judge from Virginia and co-founder of the National Institute of Military Justice, criticized the government's handling of the cases, saying: ''The government leapt way, way off the deep end. Before they had done any investigation they concluded they had this huge problem." Barry said the climate at Guantanamo Bay, where prisoners aren't accorded the rights of prisoners of war, created an intense sense of secrecy that fueled mistrust and suspicions of espionage. ''Nobody can go in, nobody can come out, and all the rules are being made in secret," Barry said. ''Then you get somebody with something that you might think might be classified leaving the base, and the response . . . is to think the sky is falling." Another Arabic translator at Guantanamo Bay, Senior Airman Ahmad al-Halabi, 25, a naturalized American citizen born in Syria, was arrested in July 2003 when he arrived at a naval base in Jacksonville, Fla., with classified documents from the federal camp. Initially, Halabi was accused of espionage, aiding the enemy, and slipping food to detainees, and was warned he could face the death penalty. But an investigation cleared him of spying, and the Air Force acknowledged that only one document he had when he was arrested was classified. In September, espionage charges against Halabi were dropped, and he pleaded guilty to mishandling classified documents and other lesser charges and was sentenced to the 10 months he'd already been in custody. Captain James Yee, 36, a Muslim chaplain at Guantanamo Bay, was arrested Sept. 10, 2003, after he left the federal camp for a one-week leave and Customs officials in Jacksonville seized documents from his suitcase. He was found guilty of noncriminal charges of adultery and downloading Internet pornography, but those convictions were set aside last April and his punishment was waived. He was honorably discharged from the military, effective yesterday. © Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company ------------------------------------------------------ Chaplain honorably discharged By Melanthia Mitchell, Associated Press | January 8, 2005 SEATTLE -- A Muslim chaplain imprisoned for 76 days as part of an espionage investigation by the government has received an honorable discharge from the Army. Although Captain James Yee has been cleared in the investigation, he resigned in August, saying officials never apologized to him. His discharge was effective yesterday, said his civilian defense lawyer, Eugene R. Fidell. "As a West Point graduate, he leaves the Army with great sadness," Fidell said in an e-mail. After he was exonerated, Yee returned in April to his home base of Fort Lewis, about 40 miles south of Seattle, and resumed his duties as a chaplain. An official announcement of Yee's discharge was not expected. Yee was taken into custody after the military initially linked him to a possible espionage ring at the prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where suspected terrorists are housed. The military charged Yee in 2003 with mishandling classified material, failing to obey an order, making a false official statement, adultery, and conduct unbecoming an officer. All criminal charges were dismissed in March 2004, but Army officials found Yee guilty of the noncriminal charges of adultery and downloading pornography. The reprimand he received was thrown out.