James Yee, ex Gitmo chaplain, Obama delegate

You may remember James Yee, the Army Muslim chaplain at the Guantanamo Bay detention center who ran afoul of his commanders after advocating for better conditions for the prisoners there. They accused him of taking classified information from the camp, which turned out to be the names of the prisoners, threw him in jail and threatened to court martial him. Eventually he was cleared, released and given an honorable discharge.

Now he's going to be a delegate to Democratic National Convention in August from Washington state, according to the Olympian newspaper. Yee was elected Saturday at the 9th District convention in Olympia, one of nine congressional caucuses Democrats had throughout the state.

Yee found himself speaking unexpectedly in counterpoint to another celebrity, actor Ted Danson of "Cheers" fame, a backer of Sen. Hillary Clinton. Danson dropped in at the last minute at the behest of Clinton's state campaign to give a speech, but Obama's people were in greater numbers, including Yee.

"I came out and basically reiterated that Sen. Obama is really the only candidate that consistently campaigns on rejecting torture without exception, on closing Guantanamo Bay, restoring habeas (corpus) and adhering to the Geneva Conventions," Yee said Monday.

He added that he sees himself as "living proof that civil liberties have been eroded since 9/11" because of what he calls "fear-mongering politics" led by conservatives.