Now that he's no longer considered spy material, who will be the first to apologize to U.S. Army Capt. Jim Yee?

He's the man who defied racial profiling: a Chinese-American Muslim military chaplain who ministered to suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at Guantánamo Bay -- until he was thought to be a terrorist himself.

So, who will tell Yee's 4-year-old daughter, Sarah, why her father was arrested and forced to spend 76 days in solitary confinement?

And who will help mend the relationship with Yee's wife, Huda Suboh, who heard in open court the details of her husband's affair with a female soldier and his predilection for pornography?

As a family guy, I kept thinking about those questions when I heard the news that the army had dropped all charges against Yee -- now that they've destroyed his life in the name of national security.

Last year, Yee faced accusations that he was part of a spy ring at Guantánamo Bay, where the government keeps suspected terrorists. Officials were ready to charge him with espionage and sedition -- charges that could have brought the death penalty.

But by September, the charges against Yee for spying never materialized. Instead, the case was whittled down to mishandling of classified documents.

In November, the military added the spicy kickers: adultery, and storing pornography on a government laptop, both violations of the U.S. Uniform Code of Military Justice.

On Friday, however, the army punted and dropped the whole thing.

But not without employing the standard fig-leaf defense to disguise just how miniscule a case the government actually had against Yee.

"The case could have jeopardized national security if the information [under question] had been released or it came out during the proceedings," Col. William Costello, spokesman for the U.S. Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo Bay, said in The Washington Post.

It's all about protecting national security when you blow a case as bad as you blow the Yee one.

Who wants to admit to the paranoid logic that led the military to turn the life of a West Point grad upside down?

Yee left the military in the '90s to study Arabic in the Middle East but came back to the army before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

In 2002, he was sent to the naval prison at Guantánamo Bay to act as the Muslim chaplain.

But, little by little, accusations came out. U.S. Homeland Security Department officials said Yee had maps of the prison and notes on detainees at Guantánamo, where the United States is keeping more than 600 suspected Taliban and al Qaeda fighters.

As it turns out, there was nothing substantive to indicate espionage, at which point the military turned to character assassination, bringing up the adultery and pornography charges.

Yee has claimed all along that as Guantánamo's resident clergyman for Muslims, he merely counseled the prisoners. The man wasn't a terrorist. He was a humanitarian.

The Yee debacle may be an even worse blunder than the Wen Ho Lee case was.

Lee, you'll recall, who worked at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, was arrested and accused in December 1999 of stealing secrets on nuclear-weapons design.

At the time, the United States and China were engaged in a little saber rattling. So, Lee, a naturalized American, was profiled, his loyalty questioned largely because of his race.

The charges outraged members of the Asian-American community, many of whom could not understand why the U.S. government would think Lee, an immigrant from Taiwan, would have loyalties to the Beijing government.

As that case evolved -- or, rather, disintegrated -- the espionage charges never surfaced.

Instead, after spending nine months in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, Lee accepted a plea bargain on one felony count of downloading classified data.

That gave the government a somewhat better fig leaf. But not by much.

The government claimed here, too, that the deal made with Lee was for the sake of national security. And it did get a felony count against him.

But many see the deal as a virtual exoneration, considering the fact that prosecutors embarrassingly dropped 58 counts against him.

Even the judge who heard the case suggested an apology to Lee was in order for what he had been put through.

Lee's family and supporters have also asked for an official apology from the government. But nothing has come.

Maybe things will be different for Yee.

Even military-justice observers were shaking their heads on this case.

An apology might make sense here. It would also be a perfect opportunity for our commander in chief.

Especially in an election year.

A recent national poll of Chinese Americans put Bush's support at a mere 15 percent -- a staggering figure, considering that Asian Americans (of which the Chinese are the largest population) were the only minorities to support Bush by a majority in 2000.

A Bush show of largesse would send a strong signal not just to Asian Americans but also to anyone who has felt a heightened sense of government oppression since 9/11.

In the meantime, I hope Yee and his family can piece together their lives after being terrorized by the military.

"We still have suffering from this bad experience," Huda Suboh told her hometown newspaper, The Olympian, in Olympia, Wash., where the family is now based. "I think they should be more careful when they want to charge somebody with spying and espionage next time, because I don't want anybody else to go through an experience like we had."

Unfortunately, it will likely happen to somebody again.

Our Asian-American population is expected to triple to 33.4 million by 2050, according to the most recent U.S. Census projections.

With that kind of growth rate, you can see why the army might have been puzzled in the case of Yee.

If only the military had a Department of Stereotypes to keep up with all the new profiles out there.

Maybe, then, it could have updated the Asian-American cliché list, which includes old stand-bys such as "Good at math, bad at driving" and "Males do karate, women do TV news," to include "Chinese-American Muslim chaplains."

Instead, Yee defied all known stereotypes. And, when he didn't fit into any category anybody understood, the army went paranoid and trumped up charges until its case fell apart.

Yee is part of a new diverse America. If there were a real acceptance of that fact, maybe we wouldn't be wondering now who will be the first to apologize to Yee.