Keith Idema is Dead

[RYP]

RIP: Jonathan “Jack” Idema, Media Con Man
By Mike Hoyt
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In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7.
So began Mariah Blake’s remarkable investigative piece in in the January/February 2005 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. As she would go on to report, Idema took many journalistic outlets for a ride: “A self-proclaimed terror-fighter who has served time for fraud, Idema took a willing media by storm, glorifying his own exploits, padding his bank account, and providing dubious information to the American public.”

He was a treated as an expert on all three networks, was a terrorist hunter on Don Imus’s radio show, a “Northern Alliance adviser” on Fox News, and a key source for Mary Mapes and Dan Rather on 60 Minutes II, among many other media appearances and quotes. He told wide-eyed journalist that there was ample evidence linking Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to Al Queda and September 11. In 2004, he was sentenced to ten years in Afghanistan for “running a private jail and torturing prisoners,” according to The New York Times, after Afghan judges rejected a claim that Idema and friends were working for the Pentagon.

As Blake demonstrated, he was a con man. He sued CJR for saying so, but the suit was dismissed.

Now comes the sad ending to the story. As Graeme Wood reports on his International Herald Tribune blog today, Idema died last weekend from complications of AIDS in Mexico. He was fifty-five. During his final years, Wood writes, Idema was attempting to sell boat tours to vacationers in Mexico. The headline on the column is, “The Death of a Poser.”

[RYP]

Tin Soldier
By Mariah Blake, Columbia Journalism Review

Posted on January 8, 2005, Printed on January 12, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/20930/

In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the plotters, and started trying to clinch a deal with television networks by offering them "direct access" to one of the terrorists who, he said, had agreed to tell all.

Idema, who was paying an Emmy Award-winning cameraman to document his activities, even distributed a sample tape of himself arresting people and interrogating hooded suspects. In one scene he is shown blocking a road and emptying passing vehicles. "Put your fucking hands up or I'll blow your fucking brains out," he screams at a group of men who have shuffled bewilderedly off a bus and are standing with their flimsy tunics whipping in the wind.

In exchange for footage and access, Idema wanted a minimum of $250,000 and prominent play. He asked that ABC send Peter Jennings or Christopher Cuomo to cover the story. Ultimately ABC turned the story down, as did CNN. A CBS spokesperson, Kelli Edwards, says the network "never seriously considered" it, although Idema was regularly e-mailing Dan Rather's office and in June the network sent two employees to Idema's Kabul headquarters to pick up the sample tape.

It appears that Idema still hadn't sold the taxicab story by July 5, when his situation took a turn for the worse. The Afghan police raided his headquarters and discovered eight prisoners, some of them tethered to chairs in a back room, which was littered with bloody cloth. The men later told reporters that they had been starved, beaten, doused with scalding water, and forced to languish for days in their own feces. Afghan authorities determined that none of the detainees had links to terrorism and set them free. Idema, on the other hand, was arrested, along with two other Americans (the cameraman and a former soldier) and four Afghans, and charged with running an unauthorized prison and torturing its inmates. After a cursory trial, he was sentenced to serve 10 years. (This case is on appeal.)

For all its outlandish twists, the saga of the taxicab plot was not extraordinary for Idema, who over the years had fed the press a variety of sensational material that seemed to shed light on the shadowy world of secret soldiers, spies, and assassins. This time the story never ran, but Idema has been a key source for numerous questionable stories that did. A self-proclaimed terror-fighter who has served time for fraud, Idema took a willing media by storm, glorifying his own exploits, padding his bank account, and providing dubious information to the American public.

In January 2002, Idema sold CBS sensational footage, which he called the "VideoX" tapes, that purported to show an al Qaeda training camp in action. The tapes became the centerpiece of the bombshell 60 Minutes II piece, "Heart of Darkness," reported by Dan Rather and touted as "the most intimate look yet at how the world's deadliest terrorist organization trains its recruits." Idema also sold video stills to a number of print outlets, including The Boston Globe. MSNBC, ABC, NBC, the BBC, and others later replayed the tapes. Questions are now emerging about their authenticity, some of which were detailed in a piece by Stacy Sullivan in New York magazine in October.

Idema also served as an expert military commentator on Fox News and was a lead character in Robin Moore's best-selling book "The Hunt for Bin Laden," which was supposed to chronicle the exploits of U.S. Special Forces in Afghanistan. And he fielded hundreds of interviews with major newspapers, television networks, and radio stations, which seemed to take his swaggering claims – that he was an active-duty Green Beret in Afghanistan, an undercover spy, an explosives expert, and a key player in the hunt for Osama bin Laden – at face value. Idema used the platform the media provided to spread dubious information, much of it with crucial implications for national security and foreign policy. For example, he claimed to have uncovered a plot to assassinate Bill Clinton; that bin Laden was dead, and that the Taliban was poisoning the food that the United States was air-dropping to feed hungry Afghans. (In fact, people were getting sick from eating the dessicant packed with the food.)

Idema's career as a media personality reached its peak during the final breathless weeks of the run-up to the war in Iraq. Much of the information he provided during that period echoed the Bush administration's hotly contested rationale for war. He told MSNBC that the link between Iraq and al Qaeda was "common knowledge" on the ground in Afghanistan, and claimed in an interview with WNYC radio's Leonard Lopate that "Iraq has been involved in supporting al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations with money, with equipment, with technology, with weapons of mass destruction." He told other wide-eyed journalists that there was ample evidence linking "Iraq, Iran, and Saudi Arabia to al Qaeda and to the attacks on September 11," and professed to have firsthand knowledge of nuclear weapons being smuggled from Russia to all three members of the "axis of evil" – Iraq, Iran, and North Korea. Few in the media questioned Idema's claims, much to the alarm of some who knew him.

"The media saw this outfitted, gregarious, apparently knowing guy, and they didn't check him out," says Ed Artis, chairman and founder of the humanitarian organization Knightsbridge International, who met Idema in Afghanistan in late 2001 and later tried to warn the government and media organizations that Idema was misrepresenting himself. "They ran story after story that furthered the cachet of a self-serving, self-aggrandizing criminal."

Idema's U.S. office is tucked inside a hulking brick warehouse in Fayetteville, N.C. – home to Fort Bragg, America's largest military base and command center for the U.S. Army Special Operations. There's little to distinguish the building from its industrial surroundings except the dark-tinted windows, and the red "Restricted Access" plaque that clings to the front door. Inside, the cavernous space is cluttered with evidence of Idema's Afghan mission: crumpled boxes of medical supplies, a lime-green presentation board bearing an organizational chart for al Qaeda, a massive topographical map of Afghanistan. Movie posters of scowling, leather-clad action heroes plaster the surrounding walls, including a particularly large one from Men in Black over Idema's desk. It shows two movie stars clutching super-sized guns and reads, "Protecting the Earth from the Scum of the Universe."

The décor reflects Idema's decades-long quest to fashion himself an action hero. He joined the Army in 1975 and qualified for the Special Forces, but his performance was often lacking. In an evaluation report dated July 7, 1977, Capt. John D. Carlson described him as "without a doubt the most unmotivated, unprofessional, immature enlisted man that I have ever known." In 1978 he transferred to a reserve unit where he served until 1981, when he was relieved of his duties, in part for his "irrationality" and "tendency toward violence." His military records indicate that he never saw combat.

After leaving active-duty service, Idema ran a series of businesses related to special operations – including a counterterrorism training school and a traveling special-operations exposition – in partnership with another former Green Beret, Thomas Bumback. During this period, which spanned the 1980s and early '90s, he claims to have been involved in a series of "black ops," or secret military missions.

He was also compiling a long arrest record on charges including bad checks, assault, possession of stolen property, and discharging a firearm into a dwelling. Then, in 1994, Idema was tried and convicted of defrauding 58 companies of about $260,000, according to The Fayetteville Observer. He served three years in prison. It was while awaiting sentencing that Idema launched his first media offensive, trying to sell a story about nuclear material being smuggled out of Russia. Gary Scurka, an investigative journalist and recipient of numerous prestigious awards, eventually produced a 60 Minutes piece based, at least in part, on information Idema had provided.

Over the next decade, Idema continued to court the media with help from a faithful cadre of friends – among them Scurka, the best-selling author Robin Moore, and Edward Caraballo, the cameraman who would later be imprisoned with Idema in Afghanistan. He met with little success, though, until Sept. 11, 2001, when a shell-shocked public, desperate to make sense of the senseless, began groping for information. Idema gladly obliged.

On Sept. 12, 2001, Idema appeared on KTTV, Los Angeles' Fox affiliate, which billed him as a "counterterrorism adviser." He told audiences that three Canadian jetliners might have been hijacked, along with the four U.S. planes. By late October, Idema was in Afghanistan, telling associates that he planned to help two humanitarian groups – Partners International Foundation and Knightsbridge International – distribute food to hungry Afghans, and he brought along a National Geographic film crew, headed by Scurka, to make a film about his efforts. (Both aid groups say he misrepresented his plans in order to get them to cooperate.)

Idema, a stocky man who even in the Afghan hinterlands kept his salt-and-pepper hair died black, quickly adopted a quasi-military look – dark sunglasses, dust-colored fatigues, a black-and-white kaffiyeh draped around his neck. The style reflected his expanding repertoire of roles. Along with the human rights work and the documentary making, he claimed he was offering military advice to the Northern Alliance, which was fighting the Taliban. Meanwhile, he sold a variety of services to reporters, telling them he was Donald Rumsfeld's special representative to the Northern Alliance, or insinuating that he was working for the CIA or the Army Special Forces.

By December, Idema was serving as a commentator for Fox News, which paid him $500 per appearance, and charging journalists $1,000 a head for tours to Tora Bora, the sprawling cave complex where U.S. forces were battling al Qaeda troops. According to reporters, the trips included press conferences with Idema himself. Some of Idema's media schemes showed extraordinary enterprise. In one case, he reportedly lured a local warlord named Hazrat Ali to the Spin Ghar Hotel in Jalalabad for a press briefing and charged reporters $100 each to attend. It later emerged that he had told Ali that the journalists were Pentagon officials.

It's not difficult to understand why Idema – a self-proclaimed government operative with a silver tongue, striking looks, and a love of the spotlight – would appeal to reporters who, in late 2001, poured into war-ravaged Afghanistan desperate for stories. The war was being fought largely by Special Forces soldiers, who call themselves "quiet professionals" and assiduously avoid the press. Lack of information bred a sense of urgency. "The media were in a frenzy," explains Artis of Knightsbridge International. "They were interviewing each other about what they'd interview someone about if they had someone to interview." Idema also seems to have capitalized on the U.S. military's increasing reliance on contractors, and the confusion over who had authority to speak on the government's behalf.

In addition to courting reporters, Idema sometimes threatened them. Tod Robberson of The Dallas Morning News reported that Idema shot at him "point-blank" during an argument. And some journalists were put off by his violent tendencies and overblown swagger. A group of photographers referred to Idema, who adopted the nickname "Jack" in Afghanistan, as Jack Shit.

After only two months in Afghanistan, Idema claimed to have found what would become the lynchpin of his widening media offensive: seven hours of footage that purportedly shows al Qaeda training camps in action. Before long, Idema had sold video stills to several publications and enlisted the William Morris Agency to auction off the first-time U.S. broadcast rights. "The intent is to sell the tapes to the highest bidder at terms that are ultimately satisfactory to Mr. Idema," explained a letter signed by Wayne S. Kabak, chief operating officer of William Morris, and hand-delivered to Fox News' New York offices on Jan. 9 – one day before the auction was slated to take place. The terms included giving Idema "on-air credit as the person who procured these tapes" and the right to refuse any bid under $150,000.

These conditions, along with Idema's dark past, gave some networks pause. NBC Nightly News was put off by the hefty price tag and the lack of signs of authenticity, such as a logo from As-Sahab, al Qaeda's video production house, which appears on the tapes al Qaeda releases to the public. "There was no way to verify them," says Robert Windrem, investigative producer for NBC Nightly News. "It was either you trust Keith Idema or you don't."

CNN backed off precisely because it decided Idema could not be trusted. This was after the network's national security analyst, Ken Robinson, searched Google and LexisNexis and discovered that Idema not only had a criminal record, but also liked to batter his rivals with lawsuits. In addition to turning down the tapes, the network decided to shun Idema as a source. It was the only network to do so.

On Jan. 17, CBS's 60 Minutes II ran a story about the tapes. Dan Rather traveled to Afghanistan to interview Idema and visit the dusty, bullet-scarred compound called Mir Bacha Kot, where the filming had been done. At a time when workers were still sifting through the gnarled wreckage of the World Trade Center, the story reinforced the prevailing sense of panic. Men in camouflaged tunics and ski masks were shown storming buildings, staging drive-by shootings, and laying siege to golf courses. Sometimes the men laughed as they rehearsed maneuvers, which Rather interpreted as evidence that they approached their grim mission with "glee." The footage also contained numerous exchanges in English, "a sign," Rather told viewers, "that they want to take scenes like this to the West."

ABC, MSNBC, NBC, and the BBC subsequently paid thousands of dollars to air the training-camp footage, according to Idema's bank records. These records, interviews with Idema's associates and Idema's own e-mails, suggest that money from media activities, including the tapes, helped fund his 2004 operations in Afghanistan.

Along the way, Idema gave varying accounts of how he got the tapes. He told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's Eric Campbell that he bought them from one of his intelligence assets after a series of "back-alley meetings at midnight." In contrast, he told NBC's Today show that he and a group of Northern Alliance fighters "took over" Mir Bacha Kot, then went to the house of the camp's commander, where they found some of the tapes. They then hunted down "soldiers" (presumably al Qaeda recruits) to get the others.

Tracy-Paul Warrington, former deputy commander of a Special Forces counterterrorism team and a civilian intelligence analyst for the Defense Department, believes there's a good reason Idema's story changed. "In a nutshell, the videotapes are forgeries," he says. He explains that the tactics shown in the tapes (such as the way the trainees handle their weapons) were developed in the 1970s but abandoned shortly thereafter, and are not used by modern-day al Qaeda troops. Also, Warrington points out that the tapes depict mostly raids, whereas "al Qaeda almost exclusively uses bombs." Finally, Idema claimed in most accounts to have found the tapes around Mir Bacha Kot, an area that Warrington contends was already under coalition control and had been thoroughly searched by coalition forces. "This man who was convicted of fraud says he finds these tapes where nobody else found them," says Warrington. "That should have set some alarm bells off."

There are conflicting reports about the CIA's stance on the tapes. A retired senior special operations officer with nearly two decades of counterterrorism experience says that while he was on active duty he learned from a CIA contact that the agency had evaluated the tapes. "They did a voice analysis and a technical analysis," reports the man, who spoke on condition of anonymity. "Not only were they staged, but you could single Idema's voice out directly." On the other hand, the CIA public affairs office says the agency "did not conduct voice analysis of the tape or draw any conclusion regarding its authenticity."

CBS employees received the tapes from Idema directly, and vetted them on the ground in Afghanistan at a time when the country was still in shambles and the network's Kabul bureau was operating out of a house with spotty phone service. The network's spokesperson, Kelli Edwards, says CBS nevertheless went to great lengths to ensure the tapes were authentic before airing them. This included "confirming with U.S. military officials that the camp in the video was, in fact, an al Qaeda training camp ... showing the tapes to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of al Qaeda, and to a top U.S. military official in Afghanistan who told us that, in his opinion, the video was authentic." The network says it can't reveal those officials' names because they offered their opinions on condition of anonymity.

Of all the networks, CBS had the longest-standing relationship with Idema. It had used him as a source or consultant on two projects before his arrival in Afghanistan. The first was the 1995 nuclear-smuggling story, called "The Worst Nightmare," which was produced by Scurka and aired on 60 Minutes.

Scurka had initially heard that Idema, who was then awaiting sentencing on fraud charges, had a lead on a hot story about the smuggling that he had picked up while operating his traveling exposition. Idema agreed to share information with Scurka. Scurka, meanwhile, lent a sympathetic ear to Idema's story about an injustice he felt he had suffered. Idema claimed the FBI had framed him on the fraud charges because he had refused to tell the agency where he learned about the nuclear smuggling, fearing leaks could hurt his sources.

The 60 Minutes piece, and a companion story in U.S. News & World Report, won that year's Renner Award from Investigative Reporters and Editors, Inc. Idema never got any credit, though. This came as a blow to Scurka, who has maintained Idema was a key source and that CBS decided to cut any reference to him largely because he was imprisoned for fraud by the time the story aired. Edwards, the CBS spokesperson, suggests Idema's contributions didn't necessarily merit credit, since the final story, which took six months to investigate, was "much different than the story we initially began pursuing."

After "The Worst Nightmare" aired, Scurka and Caraballo started work on a film about Idema, called Any Lesser Man, "the Real story of one lone Green Beret's private war against KGB Nuclear Smuggling, Soviet spies, Arab terrorists, and the FBI," according to promotional materials. Despite years of effort, they were never able to scrape together enough money to complete it.

In 2000, Idema hooked up with CBS again. This time he and Scurka served as consultants to 48 Hours, then anchored by Dan Rather. They worked on an investigative story about Colonel George Marecek, a highly decorated Special Forces officer accused of murdering his wife, Viparet. But the two were eventually fired from the project. "48 Hours determined they had taken on an advocacy role for the defense," explains Edwards of CBS. Indeed, Idema and Scurka had opened a "Free Marecek" office in Wilmington, North Carolina, where the trial was taking place, and one witness alleged that Idema and another man came to his house to harass him the night before he was slated to testify. Idema also told several associates he was detained for impersonating a police officer in an effort to get into a Detroit prison and convince a convicted serial killer to confess to Viparet's murder. Despite concerns about Idema and Scurka's objectivity, in December 2000, 48 Hours ran a story on Marecek, with much of the exculpatory evidence drawn from their research.

After being sacked by 48 Hours, Idema and Scurka launched a Web site called Point Blank Network News, or PBN, where they ran their own version of the Marecek story. The piece won a 2001 National Press Club award for online journalism. Despite the media attention, Marecek was convicted.

If the coverage of the Al Qaeda training camp tapes lent Idema credibility and renown, his old friend Robin Moore further lionized him by making him one of the lead characters of his blockbuster book, "The Hunt for Bin Laden," published by Random House

Moore, a seventy-nine-year-old with clear blue eyes and bushy eyebrows, wears houndstooth blazers and leans on an ivory-handled cane. Like Idema, he has long straddled the divide between the media and military camps. To get access for his first best-seller, "The Green Berets," he went through the grueling Special Forces qualification course, something no other civilian has ever done. He later covered the Vietnam War for Hearst Newspapers, and, because of his combat skills, was allowed to travel with operational detachments that were closed to other reporters. This meant he was sometimes forced to fight. On his living room wall Moore has hung a black-and-white photo of himself gripping the sagging body of a Vietnamese boy he had killed.

It was after seeing The Green Berets, a 1968 film based on Moore's book, that twelve-year-old Keith Idema decided he would join the Special Forces. But it wasn't until years later, when he was peddling special operations equipment, that he actually met Moore. Over time, a deep bond developed between the two men. "Robin is . . . not only my friend," Idema wrote Scurka while he was imprisoned on fraud charges. "He is my idol, almost my creator in a way."

Idema got involved in "The Hunt for Bin Laden" book project in July 2002, not long after returning to the United States. Moore said he asked Idema to help with the book because at the time he was one of the few people in the United States with up-to-date knowledge about the situation on the ground in Afghanistan. Idema, he says, was only supposed to help ensure the book's accuracy. But he soon started adding information.

According to Moore, Idema wrote only select sections of the book. Marianne Strong, the agent who represented Moore on "The Hunt for Bin Laden," tells a different story. "Jack wrote the book," she says. "Robin Moore started the book, but Robin Moore couldn't write the book, for a number of reasons" – among them a case of Parkinson's disease so advanced that he has difficulty signing his name. Idema, in fact, gets a credit line on the cover of the British version, and has filed a claim with the Library of Congress for sole copyright on it and on the American version. He also receives a portion of the royalties. A review of a manuscript draft of "The Hunt for Bin Laden" provided by Moore and dated June 1, 2002, just before Idema returned from his first trip to Afghanistan, suggests that the truth lies somewhere in between Strong's and Moore's accounts. Idema doesn't appear to have written the whole book, but the manuscript did change dramatically after he got involved.

"The Hunt for Bin Laden" was published on March 3, 2003, and within weeks it was number four on The New York Times bestseller list. To date, it has sold nearly 150,000 copies. The book portrays Idema, by turns, as a superhuman warrior, undercover spy, and rough-and-tumble cultural ambassador. He rescues injured children, removes bullets from "dozens" of Northern Alliance soldiers, and embarks on intelligence-gathering missions that the CIA shuns because they're too dangerous. Armed with a Russian assault rifle, he holds a band of hostage takers off for hours. He also uncovers a plot to assassinate former President Bill Clinton, nearly nabs Osama bin Laden, and captures a trove of documents detailing the al Qaeda leader's "terrorist plans."

Some of the heroic scenes don't match eyewitness accounts. This includes a detailed description of Idema rescuing his longtime friend Gary Scurka, who was hit by shrapnel in a Taliban artillery attack. The book describes Idema taking command of the chaotic situation, fixing the sloppy bandage applied by journalists Tim Friend and Kevin Sites, and whisking Scurka to safety. Others who were present – including Friend and a former Special Forces soldier, Greg Long – describe a different scene. They say Sites, Friend and Long applied a proper dressing. Friend, in fact, had worked as a surgical technician for six years. But when Idema arrived he ripped off the bandages and put on new ones, as the National Geographic cameraman recorded his every move. "It was only in retrospect that I realized he was acting for the camera," Friend says.

Moore had collaborated with Idema on several projects before "The Hunt for Bin Laden," and even secured an agent for a book, "Any Lesser Man," about Idema's life. He also contributed $2,500 to the film project of the same name. During that period, Moore, highly respected by Green Berets, started getting warning e-mails from members of the Special Forces community. "Mr. Idema is not near the man/hero that he is being made out to be," wrote retired Capt. William J. Adams in August 1999. "Lots of information provided by him doesn't wash according to eyewitness accounts and his demonstrated performance on active duty."

In the media push that followed the release of "The Hunt for Bin Laden," Idema became its spokesman. This period, which marked the crescendo of his career as a media personality, came during the run-up to the Iraq war, and in the dozens of interviews Idema fielded, he often doubled as an expert on the looming conflict.

Many of Idema's claims, such as the Iraq-al Qaeda connection, have since been discredited by the 9-11 Commission and UN weapons inspectors, but by billing him as a government official, the media lent them credence. NPR called him a "U.S. intelligence operative," while Northeast Public Radio dubbed him "the longest-serving Green Beret in the Afghanistan war." Others implied that Idema was working in an official capacity by saying he played an "integral" role in the hunt for Osama bin Laden and that he fought "alongside" U.S. Special Forces, or by calling him as a "former Green Beret who served in Afghanistan."

As Idema was blazing a trail through the talk show circuit, Ed Artis, who felt that Idema's actions in Afghanistan had put his employees in danger, went on a fax and e-mail blitz to alert the media that there were questions about Idema's credibility. (Idema has since filed suit against Artis.) Several shows canceled interviews after receiving the warning, something Strong, the book's agent, resents. "'The Hunt' would have made it to number one if it weren't for that," she says.

Around the same time, Wayne Lawley, then the president of the Special Forces Association, a fraternal organization for past and present Green Berets, sent an e-mail to association members about the book saying: "The knowledgeable reader may be irritated by fiction used to fill in research and outrageous claims by Keith Adema [sic], one of the book's advisors." The message was far more measured than some of the replies it prompted. Idema "is doing all he can to besmirch the name of Special Forces, and all we stand for," wrote Billy Waugh, a former Green Beret and CIA operative, who has detailed his own experience in a 2004 book called "Hunting the Jackal." "This man has lied to the nth degree, and all for self-aggrandizement." Gradually, Moore came to see Idema in a similar light. "He wants to be the hero of every story," Moore says. "He tries to portray himself as a hero, even if he has to lie."

A series of events caused the shift in Moore's opinion. A "Hunt for Bin Laden" web site registered to Idema began advertising an upcoming Robin Moore book about Idema entitled "An Army of One." Moore said the site was unauthorized and that he never planned to write such a book. Idema also charged about $10,000 worth of books to Moore's account at Random House. Moore says Idema did this without his permission and that Idema also slipped the names and post office boxes of two groups into a list of charities that appear in the back of the British version of the book (because a percentage of the royalties were to be directed to these groups). One of the addresses was for U.S. Counter-Terrorist Group (Counterr), the umbrella organization for Idema's own Afghanistan operations. (At least one reader sent a donation to Counterr, according to Idema's bank records.) The other address was supposed to be for a charity that helped the families of killed or wounded Green Berets, but North Carolina's postal inspector determined that the post office box was actually controlled by Idema, and was investigating him for mail fraud before his Afghan arrest.

Moore eventually submitted a host of corrections that he wanted made to "The Hunt for Bin Laden," based largely on input from Special Forces contacts, but many were never incorporated. Carol Schneider, Random House's spokesperson, said the publisher made all changes that it received in time, but a number of them came after the deadline had passed. Then, in late October, Robin Moore gave Random House a proposal for a scathing second book on Idema, "Smoke and Mirrors: Jonathan Keith Idema and his Great Media Swindle," but Random House turned it down. "I'm not going to do this," Bob Loomis, vice president and executive editor for the publisher, said to Moore, as CJR's reporter sat listening over a speakerphone in Moore's living room. "It's too negative on Jack. It reflects badly on "The Hunt" because of his role in it."

Idema headed back to Afghanistan in mid-April 2004, accompanied by Caraballo, who would claim after their arrest that he was a journalist working on an independent documentary. But according to bank records, Idema was paying him.

Idema's lawyer, John Edwards Tiffany, says that by the end of April Idema had arrested his first prisoner, whom he turned over to U.S. officials on May 3. But two months later the man was released after the United States Central Command determined that he was not the high-ranking Taliban official Idema had claimed he was. The command began to investigate Idema, and shortly thereafter Wanted posters for Idema went up in Kabul. He and his cohorts nevertheless made a series of arrests in June, according to Tiffany. It wasn't until July 5 that Afghan police finally nabbed him, along with Caraballo, the former U.S. soldier Brent Bennett, and four Afghans who were working with them. At the time, the Abu Ghraib scandal was raging. Idema claimed he was working with the knowledge and approval of the U.S. government (something the Central Command and the State Department adamantly deny) and presented some evidence to support this claim during his trial. But none of it seems to point to definitive links to the Afghan or U.S. governments. Among the material is a video of meetings between Idema and two Afghan ministers. But both reportedly said they met with Idema to discuss his claims about the taxi-bomb plot only because they believed he was a member of the U.S. military. Tiffany also played tape-recorded conversations of Idema purportedly talking to officials in Deputy Undersecretary of Defense William G. Boykin's office. In one of the conversations, recorded after the Wanted posters for him went up, Idema threatens to give some unidentified material to the press. "Someone's got to do something within twelve hours or I'm going to e-mail this fucking thing to Dan Rather," he warns. "Do you think I would rot in prison if there's a problem?"

Most of the evidence, though, is one-directional communication, with Idema offering information or asking for assistance. There may be a reason for this: According to Bumback, and Idema's own e-mails, Idema had been trying desperately to secure a Pentagon contract, but hadn't been able to do so. Bumback says that's why Idema largely relied on the media to fund his operations. "Somebody had to replenish the till," he says. "Uncle Sam wasn't doing it."

Despite his problems, including a December shootout in his cell block, Idema continues to hatch ever-more creative schemes to ensure that history portrays him as a swashbuckling hero. From his jail cell he is telling associates that he plans lawsuits against Tod Robberson of The Dallas Morning News and the freelance journalist Stacy Sullivan, two reporters who have written investigative pieces about him since his arrest in Afghanistan. Idema made it clear in a recent letter to one of his attorneys (who was instructed in the letter to distribute it to other members of Idema's inner circle) that his goal was to influence future coverage. "Whatever we sue them for doesn't matter," he wrote. "It puts all the others on notice that 1) we will and can sue; 2) I still have fangs, and lawyers, even from an Afghan prison cell; 3) other people better check their stories ... ." Idema is also apparently trying to sway coverage by making reporters sign detailed contracts in order to get an interview with him. Tiffany, Idema's attorney, says at least one journalist has already done so. Idema wouldn't speak with cjr because the magazine refused to sign such an agreement.

Meanwhile, Idema is negotiating with an agent regarding a film about his exploits. And Strong, Moore's former agent, recently received a 12,000-word installment of Idema's book, which she said she has already discussed with dozens of publishers. Its working title: "Army of One."

Perhaps these developments explain the optimism pouring out of Idema's Afghan prison cell. "When Caesar crossed into Italy with his legion ... he said, 'let the dice fly high,'" he wrote in a recent letter. "Well, we did, and although we are down, I know I will prevail in the end."

© 2005 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
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http://www.alternet.org/story/20930/

[RYP]

Kudo's to "Media" who first spotted Idema's slime trail on the Flag back in 2005

"he made it such a circus. He tried to take the tape out of my camera,he refused to take his sunglasses off when he was interviewed,wanted us to call him "Mr. X" ON AIR mind you!, insisted on giving interviews that made no sense and nobody wanted, made threats to local news journos(i.e.me).

When I walked out on his bs he went into a rage, ran in front of the door telling me I was wrong. That he really was a CIA op.
Oh it got bad from here, I mean I am deep down a good ole Georgia boy! Dont fuck with me.
He tried to take my news camera DVCPRO ajd700p away and run back inside with it. I as habit always put my foot thru the strap when I put it down on the ground. I looked at him with the news van door open grabbed a leg to a broken tri pod about to go barry bonds on his ass and New Hannover Co. Sheriff dept shows up. Another habit when I was approached by whom ever was giving me shit(crack head in the projects,child molestor,dirty car dealer ect..) I would key my mic so the assignment desk would hear what was going on. We had radios like cops and with the assignment everyone knew where I was and I might be in trouble. In this case the desk had called the cops.

Fucking Idema ran away from them back inside. I knew the cops so the fact I had a metal pipe in my hands was forgotten. Idema kep calling out ststion wanting to do an "exclusive" about who really killed this poor woman. One theory was a drug dealer in Thailand who was working for the CIA had done it..Anyway CBS bought into it and even went over there. They had to salvage something to go on air because they had spent so much money."

[RYP]

And good old Mike the Hack spotted this story about money coming TO Idema via a Hallwalla

ea pizza joint tied to mercenary in Afghanistan
Hayward man wired money to U.S. bounty hunter who ran a torture camp
By Matt O'Brien, STAFF WRITER

HAYWARD — A bounty hunter on a rogue quest to kill Osama bin Laden received illegal money transfers wired through a Hayward pizza parlor, a federal agency revealed Friday.

Local restaurateur Noor Alocozy, owner of Liberty Pizza on West A Street, illegally transferred $1 million out of the country between 2002 and 2003, some of which reached Jonathan "Jack" Idema, a jailed American mercenary accused of running his own private interrogation camp in Afghanistan.

"(Idema) was a customer. He was one of this man Alocozy's clients," said Virginia Kice, spokeswoman for the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, which spent two years investigating Alocozy's Hayward-based money transmitting business, Noor Money Transfer, which operated out of the pizza parlor.

"These kinds of financial establishments don't operate within the rules. They don't approve the transactions as licensed operators are supposed to," Kice said. "That makes them an attractive option for people who are trying to move large sums of money around that don't want to be in law enforcement's radar."

Alocozy was unavailable for comment Friday, and employees at his pizza shop said he would not be available until next week.

He pleaded guilty in May in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, to illegally transferring money to unidentified individuals in Afghanistan, Pakistan and elsewhere. He will be sentenced in August.

His lawyer, Stephen Shaiker of San Francisco, says the 41-year-old Hayward man, a native of Afghanistan, became mixed up in a business he did not quite understand. Alocozy was unaware that the various people who gave him money, which he then sent out by wire transfer to Afghanistan, could have sent it to individuals such as Idema, Shaiker said.

Meanwhile, Idema's lawyer, John Tiffany of New Jersey, when asked about the allegations that Idema received money from Alocozy's transfer service, said he believes ANG Newspapers is "being used" by federal agents running a smear campaign to discredit Idema.

"This is bull——," Tiffany said, yelling into the phone. "If the American public knew what was going on, there would be a revolution. It's outrageous ... This is nothing more than an attempt to assassinate the character of my client."

Idema, a former Green Beret,claimed to be working on a counterterrorism mission in Afghanistan in concert with the U.S. government before he was convicted by an Afghan court in September of charges that included running a private torture camp.

He is presently jailed with two other Americans at the Afghan prison of Pul-e-Charki.

Tiffany said he could not comment on any specific allegations unless the government releases the records showing that Idema received money from Alocozy.

"Is that a mistake, or is that a fact?" he asked. "And if he does appear in the records, to what degree of proportionality?"

Kice said she could not say how much, out of the $1 million Alcozy tranferred, went to Idema.

"I don't know how much money he received," she said. "But basically, he was a client, and he did receive money."

ICE officials say the case shows the importance of the 2001 USA PATRIOT Act, which strengthens the government's ability to crack down on unlicensed money transmittal businesses. The businesses now must be registered with the federal government and licensed by state authorities.

If Alocozy knew that, he would not have been involved in the business in the first place, said Shaiken, his lawyer.

"He didn't know he needed a license from the state," Shaiken said. "He only became aware of this when Bank of America sent him a letter saying he was not in compliance. So he closed down his business."

Shaiken said Alocozy has been completely honest with investigators, meeting with representatives from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies.

"He has no intention of going back into the money remittance business," Shaiken said.

Alocozy's money transfer business was officially licensed by Alameda County until 2003, when he closed it down, according to records. The pizza shop, at the corner of West A Street and Garden Avenue in unincorporated Hayward, remains an active business.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/oaklandtri ... ci_2810022

[RYP]

And to Cold who say the Sam Kiley/Idema money shot and realized that he was a "deluded bisexual"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8ceiZXSL7A

[Kurt]

And cartoonist Ted Rall met him when he was in Central Asia after 9/11.

http://www.rall.com/rallblog/2012/01/30/jack-idema-rip

I remember reading Rall's travelogue but I do not remember him mentioning Idema. The stuff that is coming out now that he is dead seems to say "He who is dead can no longer sue". I think that in spite of all that was written about him being con-man it will turn out that he did a really good job of getting people to keep their mouths shut about him.

[RYP]

the best single source on Idema was a long multi part series done by a American in Romania called Flogging the Simian. I think he got up to #24 and then his stuff vanished.


ack Idema grandstands, Bennett remains silent, Caraballo looks pensive

This is part 12 of the series. If you're looking to catch up - Part 11 - Part 10 - Part 9 - Part 8B - Part 8 - Part 7 - Part 6 - Part 5 - Part 4 - Part 3 - Part 2 and Part 1.

First, a correction: I erroneously reported Idema was convicted of "wiretapping". Actually, he was convicted of wire fraud. My bad!

Idema and the Super Patriots appeared in court on Monday and were granted a seven-day extension. For coverage of the trial, I'm relying on the commercial media: BBC, The Age (Australia), Pak Tribune, Reuters, Al-Jazeera (dot info), New Zealand Herald, World Crisis Web, Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), Chicago Tribune, Soldier of Fortune, Dallas-Ft. Worth Star Telegram, New York Newsday, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, AFP (via Spacewar), World Today (Australia), Poughkeepsie Journal, Der Spiegel (via New York Times), Bellaciao, New York Times, WRAL North Carolina, Independent (UK), Channel News Asia and the Washington Post (via CNA).

With all those sources, you'd think there were 500 journalists at the trial :)

Just when you think Idema's defense is running on pure bullshit, he pulls a rabbit out of his hat. Idema had been alleging that the FBI had seized important evidence and was withholding it from both the Afghan prosecutors as well as the Super Patriots.

It turns out that Idema was right, but the save goes to Michael Skibbie, Caraballo's American lawyer. It was Skibbie who put the pressure on the Afghan authorities, who admitted that the FBI had only turned over the seized evidence to the Afghan authorities just 10 minutes before Monday's afternoon hearings. Skibbie had apparently been promised access to this evidence by the American Embassy earlier but the American Embassy refused to give a statement concerning the matter, which I find a little ominous.

It also was revealed that this evidence was physically stored at the American Embassy. Supposedly, the trial against Idema is being prosecuted by Afghan authorities for breaking Afghan laws and this acknowledgement of intereference by the American government casts some serious dispersions on the "independence" of the Afghan judicial system in this trial.

Despite Judge Abdul "Angela" Baset Bakhtiari's irritation with Idema, the trial was postponed for 7 days to let the Super Patriots review the returned documents and prepare their defense.

It seems the FBI had signed some sort of paper receipt of the evidence, which was the proof that the defense offered that the FBI had custody of the evidence. This evidence seems to be hundreds of videotapes, papers, faxes, emails and audiotapes both of the interrogations that the Super Patriots conducted as well as communication between the Department of Defense, the CIA and FBI and the Super Patriots. Idema seemed desperate to keep the press from seeing these documents but swore that they would prove that the Super Patriots were employed by the FBI and worked for the American military and CIA:

“If I had my 500 documents given back to me by the US Embassy — it doesn’t want the press to see them, that’s for damn sure. If I had those documents given back to me I could show every bit of this — I have documents from the Pentagon, back and forth with senior officials at the Pentagon, the CIA, FBI — and of everything else this court would need to know.”
The American military has denied emphatically any connection with Idema but the FBI and CIA so far have not. Idema furthermore repeated the claim that he had been in daily contact with the American government, which knew everything the Super Pats were doing. That's quite an allegation and I can't imagine Idema is making this up out of thin air. Clearly, he believes that the withheld evidence will show this although I don't know why he doesn't want the press to see it.

Idema's American lawyer, John Tiffany, who has been unable to raise enough funds to fly to Kabul (hard to defend someone long-distance!) has made similar claims that there is documentary evidence but so far has refused to show the press anything substantial.

We also learn part of the story of how Idema came to the attention of the Afghan authorities, who arrested the Super Patriots and released 8 Afghan prisoners after a shootout at the Honeycomb Hideout. Two factors seem to be emerging: one is that the non-American NATO troops (known as ISAF) complained to the American military after providing bomb detection services for the Super Patriots on three separate occasions. I cannot imagine that the NATO troops would have provided this level of support without some kind of authorization and documentation, which should emerge as the trial continues.

During Monday's hearing, Idema read from a printed email between he and an unnamed Swedish ISAF officer that purportedly backed Idema's raids. I note that the NATO troops are actually commanded by a French general but I do not know the nationality of the troops that participated in Idema's raids.
"I have this document between the Department of Defense and me. It clearly proves the ISAF is lying ... the Army is lying when it says we were not working for them, and the Department of Defense is lying when they say they didn't know we were here," Idema said.
It also seems that a local radio station in Afghanistan broadcast a story back in June that claimed Idema was torturing his prisoners:

Idema said the US government severed its links with him after Afghan radio broadcast a report saying he had tortured Afghans.

"As soon as the word 'torture' hit the Afghan airwaves the US government said, 'Woo-hoo, we don't want anything to do with these guys'."
What are the actual charges against the Super Patriots? According to prosecutor Muhammad Naeem "Supreme" Dawari, the Super Patriots are charged with:

• Entering the country illegally,

• Running an illegal jail,

• Operating with illegal weapons; and

• Illegally imprisoning people
You'll notice that torturing the prisoners does not seem to be one of the charges against the group despite earlier testimony from some detainees who said they had been beaten, hung up from their feet and doused in scalding and freezing water. Ironically, Idema has never refuted interrogating the prisoners but denies using any torture:

Idema denied accounts by witnesses in pretrial hearings that he had tortured detainees. "No one was hung up by their feet; no one's fingers were cut off; no one's head was beaten," he said. "We used very standard interrogation techniques."
Idema specifically said they were not the techniques "like Abu Ghraib". The prosecutor said that Afghan police had found "torture equipment, bloody clothing, handcuffs, blindfolds and stored water" at the Honeycomb Hideout and that all the Afghan detainees were "innocent". However, other sources (including Judge Bakhtiari) report that most of those detainees are still in Afghan custody.

I haven't been able to find any reference to this in the American media, but several international news agencies are reporting that Idema said some of these prisoner interrogations took place with FBI agents present.

Combine that allegation with the FBI's admission that it seized evidence against the Super Patriots makes it look like something extremely fishy is going on. Earlier, Idema claimed his group had turned over Taliban members to the American military. This was originally denied by the American military but was later retracted saying they had accepted "at least one" prisoner from the Super Patriots.

Caraballo earlier tried to "split" the trial, wanting a separate court proceeding for himself because he's a journalist and non-combatant but his request was denied. During Monday's hearings, Caraballo said that based on "high-level meetings" between both American AND Afghan authorities and Idema, he (Caraballo) thought that the Super Patriots mission was legitimate:
Mr. Caraballo, a freelance journalist who has won four Emmy awards for his work, said he had come to Afghanistan to document on film "that Afghanistan is America's best Muslim ally." In a statement he read to the court, he said he had come to Afghanistan with Mr. Idema because of his extensive knowledge of the area and his experience fighting alongside the anti-Taliban resistance in 2001.
I think this is a vast simplification of what was going on but it is a smart defense strategy for Caraballo and that's a credit to Mr. Skibbie. Some people have written to me saying there might be a legal difference between a "journalist" and a "cameraman for hire" so we'll have to wait to see how that pans out. Believe it or not, I have some of the documentation that Caraballo and Idema are referring to and I will share it with you shortly.

The charge of illegally entering the country needs to be fully addressed here, which the commercial media has not done:

Despite repeated requests from the judge to answer the question of how he entered the country and under what authorization he had been operating, Idema answered neither question directly. He showed flashes of contempt and anger at the proceedings, complaining about poor translation and microphones.

"I can't defend myself like this," he said. "Just give me 15 years and let's get it over with. Or hang me and let the others go free."
We already know that Idema entered Afghanistan the last time via India. From my own investigation into the photograph of the Super Patriots, man #5 is Vivek Katju, the Indian ambassador to Afghanistan. I think it's clear that Katju facilitated the Super Patriots entry into Afghanistan. Furthermore, Katju has long-established ties (pre-September 11, 2001) with the Northern Alliance, particularly the warlord Mohammed Fahim, now the Defense Minister.

We must remember that the current Afghan government was not elected - it was "installed" directly by the American government. The country is not under any kind of central control, the Taliban continue to fight in the southeast, there have been rebellions in the west and north and powerful warlords such as Gelbuddin Hekmatyar operate with relative impunity. Kabul is regularly shelled and there have been several assassination attempts against Hamid Karzai, the American-installed puppet president. Let's also not forget also that Karzai's bodyguards are American security contractors rather than native Afghans.

Nationwide elections for president are scheduled for October 9, 2004. Karzai is the favorite son of the west but faces serious challenges by Yunus "George Clooney" Qanuni and Abdul Rashid "Kill 'Em All" Dostum (a war criminal if there ever was one). Karzai's original pick for vice president was none other than Mohammed Fahim. Fahim however jumped ship and now is running for VP with Qanuni.

Idema earlier claimed extensive connections with both Qanuni and Fahim, saying he had foiled assassination attempts against both men. Idema said that Qanuni's brother, Haji Ibrahim, was present during one of the three raids that the ISAF provided support for and later claimed they were bamboozled. In earlier testimony, Ibrahim denied being present during the raids but did not deny that Idema had foiled an assassination attempt against Qanuni. It is also expected that Idema will call Qanuni to testify for the defense during the trial.

Although the western media "neglected" to report this, Judge Bakhtiari admitted Idema did in fact save Qanuni's life:

“You have saved the life of Minister Qanooni, and the people you have arrested were terrorists and Al-Qaeda, but what we want you to prove first is the legitimacy of your operation in Afghanistan,” he told Idema.
Could the case against Idema be a frame-up by Karzai forces against the warlords who support Idema? It very well could be so.

Another omission from most of the western news articles is that one of the Afghani members of the Super Patriots, Abdul Wahid, stated he had joined the group on the explicit orders of Atta Mohammed, another powerful warlord from the Northern Alliance. Wahid was hired as an interpreter for Idema and testified on Monday that he had accompanied the Super Patriots during a meeting with Mohammed Fahim. I think it's a criminal shame that most western reports only state that Wahid worked for an "Afghan commander" without naming him. Shame on you!

Caraballo also apparently has an Afghan lawyer, a woman named Najiba Rahmanzadi, who stated that the Super Patriots arrived in Kabul via India and were greeted by Massooh Khalili and the airport's director. Khalili is another member of the powerful Northern Alliance as well, which adds substantial credence to Idema's claim that he was working under the authorization of at least some members of the Afghan government. Wahid further testified that he himself had not committed any crimes:

Wahid, 19, said he had worked as an interpreter for Idema but had committed no crime. He said he had seen prisoners kept in bathrooms, tied in chairs, covered with hoods and immersed in cold water until they started choking. "The first time I saw this, I was shaken and shocked," he said.

Standing in the dock with the other defendants, Wahid also apologized to the religious judge Idema had arrested -- a turbaned, bearded man who sat in the second row of the courtroom.

"I was rude to him as a clergyman," Wahid said. "I told him to put up his hands. I hope he forgives me."
Since one of the detainees was an Afghan Supreme Court (religious) judge, I think Wahid is making the smart move by apologizing here. Idema apparently kept interrupting Wahid's testimony, which didn't endear him to the judge. Idema stated that his group had used "standard techniques" in interrogating the prisoners but did not elaborate whether or not that included the cold and hot water dunking method.

One of the Super Patriots prisoners, a Kabul shopkeeper identified as "Sakhi", stated he had given up the name of an unidentified Education Ministry official after Idema used beatings to try to extract names of people in photographs Idema showed him. Sakhi said he did not know any of the men in the photographs and only gave the name to try to avoid further beatings. Remember that Qanuni is the Education Minister, so this might have been Qanuni's attempt to find moles or traitors under his command.

Idema's lawyer, Tiffany, stated earlier that Idema maintained "ongoing contacts" with the Karzai government, perhaps referring to the Education (Qanuni) and Defense (Fahim) Ministers. "He's been working with their full knowledge and cooperation". When the Honeycomb Hideout was raided by Afghan authorities, a list of "Missions to Complete" was found tacked on the wall. Items #2 was listed as "Karzai".

Besides the radio broadcast alleging that Idema was torturing detainees, a report appeared in an Afghan newspaper by an unknown journalist:

"Driving a beat up old SUVs, wearing low-slung holsters like Clint Eastwood, long hair, beards, and Afghan scarves, the Green Berets operated the way they did on the 2001-2002 war, with no rules, no oversight, and no plan... They seem to appear and disappear at will… A 'super-secret group' of 'renegade Green Berets' had decided to break up a major terrorist plot in Kabul without United States support and without government funds. The former commandos, frustrated by U.S. government inaction, had called themselves Task Force Saber and had arrested thirteen people suspected of terrorism since arriving in Afghanistan three months ago."
Since 8 men were found in the Honeycomb Hideout and one was earlier turned over to the Americans, this means four prisoners are still unaccounted for.

It seems that a combination of Idema's contacts with Heather Anderson of the DOD (which prompted her office to contact the FBI), the NATO troops' complaint and the Afghan radio and newspaper reports led to the BOLO that the American military posted around their facilities shortly before the raid on the Honeycomb Hideout. Some analysts believe that the newspaper article was actually written by an American. If so, this could be a result of the fallout between Karzai and Qanuni (and Fahim) and would lend credence to Idema's claims that he was operating under authorization from some members of the Afghan "government".

Since Defense Minister Mohammed Qasim "The Dream" Fahim maintains his own private army of 10,000 men complete with 300 tanks, this is certainly possible. Karzai chose Fahim as defense minister precisely because he feared Fahim would use his troops to overrun Kabul and sweep him from power. It's also worth noting that both Qanuni and Fahim are ethnic Tajiks while Karzai is an ethnic Pashtun.

Only one source is reporting this, but it seems Idema either left behind or accidentally dropped one of his business cards during a raid. A NATO soldier recovered the business card, which led to his identification. At least one AP reporter saw the business card which had "Jack" written in Dari language on it. Dari is the language spoken by many members of the Northern Alliance and is the second language of Afghanistan (after Pashtun).

During Monday's hearing, Idema complained both about the poor quality of translation as well as the fact that the indictment against the Super Patriots had not been rendered into English. Several bilingual Afghans in the audience shook their head "in surprise" at the poor quality of the translation during the hearing so it seems Idema's complaint is valid in this regard. Idema repeatedly shouted at the judge, accusing the court of everything from holding a sham trial to calling the process "crazy" and "insane" and a "classic case of an unfair trial". As quoted earlier, he also sarcastically asked the court to go ahead and "hang him" or give him 15 years if he was not going to get a fair trial.

Personally, I think it's interesting hearing Idema's courtside performances especially since he is defending himself and is a long-time veteran of the American court system. While it seems he is getting little sympathy from the Afghan judge and prosecutor, most of his outbursts were directed towards the western media members in the audience. The judge at one point warned that he would ban the media from the courtroom if the outbursts continued.

Idema also said that the Super Patriots had not received even untranslated copies of the charges against him. He also said the Super Pats had been regularly beaten in prison until the prosecutor put a stop to it.

Bennett did not speak during Monday's hearings and it seems he is waiting for Tiffany to arrive in Kabul to defend him. I am not sure that Tiffany will do this but the Bennett family has apparently given money to Tiffany for travel and legal expenses.

In some non-trial news from the cited sources, we learn a few interesting tidbits:

• The Mustafa Hotel in Kabul, where most western security men (including Idema) congregate, has a drink called "Jack's Tora Bora Sunset" named after Idema.
• The film Caraballo was recording was supposed to be an autobiography of Idema. Some, if not al,l of the interrogations of Afghan prisoners was recorded.
• Idema, with or without the Super Patriots, provided security for some western journalists in Afghanistan. I believe this occurred earlier in his Afghan career (2001-2002) rather than during his latest adventures (2004).
• Some of the prisoners at the Honeycomb Hideout said the Super Patriots tortured them by playing "ear-splitting" pop music. This may have been intentional or it may be that they enjoy listening to music which sounded awful to the prisoners. I've heard Pakistani music and some of it sounds pretty terrible to my ears so this may be the result of cultural differences.
• From earlier parts in this series, we learned that Idema had been arrested by the North Carolina State Patrol for impersonating a law enforcement officer. Now we learn that he had identified himself as a "federal agent". Could Idema have similarly identified himself as a federal agent in Afghanistan? I think it's highly possible.
• Idema earlier issued a handwritten 11 page statement to journalists from his jail cell. I haven't seen a copy of this statement (if you have, please send it to me!) but he alleged that the Super Patriots were "unpaid volunteers". He also stated they had "accepted" supplies such as radios, handcuffs and water supplies. I think this might be stuff that Bombeck and other Counterr Group members sent him.
• Idema has claimed that he provided security in 1986 when President Reagan appeared at a dedication ceremony at the State of Liberty in New York.
Everything that follows from this point is from confidential correspondence from readers. I have received a lot of email from people who say that commercial journalists have been offered some of the same material but have declined to publish it. My own research into this story indicates there is a serious bias from most of the American commercial journalim sources, who seem to be pushing the angle that Idema is nutty and all of his claims are baseless. Several key pieces of evidence (such as naming Heather Anderson and Wahid's testimony) have been either withheld or distorted in American articles.

While I do fully concede that Idema and his "wife" are convicted felons and that Idema has had a history of bogus claims of Special Forces experience and missions, that doesn't necessarily invalidate his claims about his latest adventures in Afghanistan. It seems incontrovertible that Idema had high-level support from at least two ministers of the Afghan government, which is in itself an illegitimate puppet entity created by the United States. Those ministers are dedicated longtime enemies of the Taliban and their Pashtun supporters and it is very reasonable to believe they would be happy to have an American privateer (Idema) and his men seize and interrogate their enemies.

Furthermore, Idema's group initiated contact with the American authorities in Kabul, even turning over "at least one" prisoner to their custody. This is hardly the action of a man operating in secret. Secondly, Idema calling on NATO troops to provide backup support for his raids is another bold move for someone who supposedly had no authorization or legitimacy. Idema's Afghan interpreter was employed by a Northern Alliance warlord and testified that the Super Patriots held high-level meetings with Afghan ministers.

It's not hard to imagine how Idema got to be a bee in someone's bonnet, especially with his brash and in-your-face style of braggadocio and tales of derring-do. I think someone had an axe to grind with Idema in Afghanistan, which led to the radio and newspaper reports about him.

The Americans, fearing the taint of the T-word (torture), called on the Afghan authorities to raid the Honeycomb Hideout. Since the warlords (American puppets) in power today in Afghanistan are just men who defeated the last warlords (the Taliban) who in turn were in power after defeating the previous warlords (Soviet puppets), it is quite believable that Idema thought or was led to believe his actions were legitimate. There is not much "rule of law" in Afghanistan today.

With hundreds of millions of dollars of bounty money at stake, there are probably many American and western (predominantely British and South African) ex-military units trying to get a piece of the action. Indeed, the American authorities in Afghanistan have admitted they receive Taliban and Al-Qaeda prisoners from "many sources".

After some research, I have learned that the "Isabeau-Dakota" corporation that owns Viktoria and Idema's pet hotel and "Bat Cave" in Fayettesville, North Carolina is owned by Idema's elderly father. There are reports that the physical assets were transferred to Idema's father's shell corporation in order to protect Idema from having his assets seized. Idema still owes 270,000 dollars from his conviction on wire fraud.

I have also been told the name of the corporation is based on characters from two movies (Ladyhawke and Cybermaster). It is believed that Viktoria's false last name of "Running Wolf" (legal last name is Robertson) may have chosen her name from fantasy movies like those as well.

I've also received reports that Idema may have used cocaine in the past and has physically attacked Viktoria on occasion. Considering Idema keeps photos of his old girlfriends on his desk and Viktoria's passive behavior, this may be true. We know Idema has quite a temper (shooting at journalists in 2002) so this is possible but take this with a grain of salt until it can be verified.

More corrections: Robin Moore did not write the book "The Hunt for Bin Laden" based on Idema. He wrote the book based on the accounts of several people. During the beginning of 2002, the authors were looking to speak to someone who had been in Afghanistan and that's when they met Idema (via Captain Harrington I believe). Although Idema's picture appears on the cover of the book, I wanted to clear that up.

I've also been in contact with some of the people on Caraballo's defense team and I am told that the mainstream media coverage of what's going on is more or less accurate. I'm still trying to get a statement from them that I can print on Flogging the Simian :)



This is a photograph of the Super Patriots having a meal somewhere in Afghanistan. The numbers are from the original photograph of the Task Force Saber 7 and were added by myself.

I have been asked not to disclose his name, but I have identified man #1. I will use the initial "D". Apparently, he was an ex-soldier who was in Afghanistan working on "telecommunications" projects and briefly joined Idema's group. I have been told "D" withdrew all association from the group several months ago and now is back in the United States.

Man #4 may be Wahid, the 19 year old interpreter for the group, although I am not sure about this.

I have also received actual photographs of Idema and his group interrogating prisoners. I have been asked not to publish them so I will just describe them for you:

In photograph #1, Idema is sitting near a video camera on a tripod but the camera operator is not visible (I'm assuming this would be Caraballo). Seated across from Idema is a Long Beard prisoner. He is blindfolded and his hands are tied together with what looks like a thin rope or cord. He is wearing traditional Afghan long white clothes and the arm of his shirt appears to be red and stained.

Sitting on the floor next to Idema is man #4 from the photographs (who may be the interpreter) as well as man #7, who is holding a rifle in his hand that is not pointing at the prisoner. There are at least two Pepsi cans visible, which seem to be the drink of choice (see dinner photograph above). There is also an open pack of cigarettes near Idema (during Monday's hearing, Idema denied torturing prisoners with cigarette burns). Man #7 has an open can of juice near him.

The room itself is very primitive and definite looks primitive. The chair on which the Long Beard prisoner is sitting is of a very old metal and wood design that doesn't look American. The prisoner is barefooted and has a thick beard. Idema has a pen in his hand and looks like he is writing down notes on what the prisoner is saying. Man #4 is smoking a cigarette in the picture and has his head cocked like he is listening to what the prisoner is saying. There is a detailed physical map on a nearby table as well as a red folder with a title I cannot make out.

I also received a second photograph showing a fully dressed American soldier (not one of the Super Patriots) arresting a Long Beard. It appears to be nighttime in the shot and the photograph was taken outdoors. The prisoner's feet are bound by the same kind of cord or rope visible in the other photograph. Most ominously, the prisoner has a substantial gut (belly) and looks almost exactly like the same man being interrogated in the first photograph. Considering most Afghanis are quite thin by American standards, this seems to be the same man.

Two other American soldiers are partly in the frame with weapons drawn. The prisoner is blindfolded in the same maner as the first photograph. I'm just speculating here, but this looks like the man that Idema and company turned over to the American authorities earlier. The only person's face clearly visible is the arresting American soldier, but so far I have been unable to identify him.

Finally, I have been in contact with Brent Bennett's mother as well as many of the people who know him. I will report more on this later but I will say at this time that she is extremely worried about her son and does not believe he would have been engaged in anything immoral or illegal. She wanted me to give a big "thank you" to all the people who have come forward with information about her son and the case.

That's it for now folks. I didn't even get to develop more of the back story of Idema's 2001 and 2002 (mis)adventures in Afghanistan so those will have to be put on hold for now. Please be patient and keep sending me those links!

[RYP]

They get better....from a former army who knew him:


http://weaponsman.com/?p=701
26 JAN/12


Keith Idema, whom we've known for some decades, is reported dead. Idema is a former member of the 10th and 11th (Army Reserve) Special Forces Groups. He left both units under a cloud, which was how most of his relationships with humans and institutions ended. He died -- if he is truly dead -- alone, hiding from the law in Mexico, his reputation long ruined, suffering from diseases brought on by his own character deficiencies.

We could tell many tales of Idema, but will just tell two.

In the Special Forces Qualification Course, he was caught stealing food from teammates' rucksacks, but managed to charm his way out of the normal dismissal for character problems. This is same kind of hollowness of character that led to his troubles in 10th and 11th Groups, and in many other places, and the same kind of manipulative charm gave him many a fresh start. That's one. The second will take longer.

In late 2001, he journeyed on his own to Afghanistan, seeking Osama bin Laden, the reward, and above all celebrity. All the Special Forces vets he contacted declined to join him, but he picked up a TV produce and an impressionable young vet of the 82nd. He wound up giving interviews to Fox News and various newspapers, claiming he was a CIA agent (they're actually CIA "officers," and Idema was never one) and that he was a "Delta" operator (Idema was never a member of any special operations unit except the two groups mentioned above, both of which he left in disgrace with radioactive NCO evaluation reports).

Hot tip for the general public: in military special operations, failure is not a ticket to the next tier up.

On his return from this trip to Afghanistan, Idema befriended elderly, ill (with Parkinson's), decent old writer Robin Moore, who had been given unprecedented access to the officers and men of Task Force Dagger, the men who liberated Afghanistan. Moore's manuscript was finished, and Idema offered to review it. Instead, Idema rewrote it, making himself the hero of the piece (he had no connexion with Task Force Dagger or any other official effort, and made no contribution to the victory). He capped this fraud by deleting a reference to a charity that Moore wanted to support, and adding donation information for two nonexistent "charities" that paid into his own account. Nice.

But he still wasn't done. Recently, taking his version of the manuscript, he reportedly put it in the Amazon Kindle store -- minus any credit to Robin Moore, who has died. Meanwhile, the few who have seen the pre-Idema version of the manuscript cringe over the damage Idema did to the reputations of both Robin Moore and the 5th Special Forces Group . Fortunately, both have reputations which will allow them to be remembered with honor long after Idema is forgotten. And that's the second window into Keith Idema's character, in all its twists and turns.

The Fayetteville Observer.has the following report:

Notorious former Special Forces soldier Jonathan "Jack" Keith Idema has died at his home in Bacalar, Mexico, according to several sources.

Idema, a former Fayetteville resident who was sentenced to prison in Afghanistan on torture charges in 2004, had been sick with AIDS, said his former girlfriend, Penny Alesi of Connecticut.

Idema was a controversial figure whose high-profile antics were the subject of scorn by former soldiers, some of whom considered him a fraud. Those who knew him say Idema's polarizing nature left him with few friends at the end.

There's quite a bit more at the link, strangely balanced despite the reporter's inability to find anyone who'd say an unqualified good word about Keith.

A Mexican news site also contains a story about Idema."'El Rambo"'is dead: victim of AIDS, in his home in Bacalar; US embassy notified."

For you Spanish speakers, a taste:

Víctima del Síndrome de Inmunodeficiencia Adquirida (Sida) falleció en su domicilio en Bacalar, Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema, ex boina verde del ejército de Estados Unidos y caza recompensas, quien en agosto de 2010 fue denunciado por violencia intrafamiliar, violación, privación ilegal de la libertad personal y peligro para la salud de las personas, en agravio de su entonces pareja sentimental Penny Alesio, además de tener cuentas pendientes en su país por fraude. La muerte de esta persona fue reportada al número de emergencias 066, debido que sus amigos y familiares dejaron de frecuentarlo.

¿Inglés, por favor? (bear in mind, this is a weapons man's translation. Well, OK, an 18F too).

Victim of Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS) perished in his home in Bacalar, Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, ex Green Beret in the US Army and bounty hunter, who was charged [in Mexico] in 2010 with domestic violence, rape, illegal deprivation of personal liberty and threatening harm to personal health, relating to his then-girlfriend Penny Alesi, in addition to outstanding charges of fraud in his own country. His death was reported in a call to 066 (note: Mexican "911"system) [some time after his passing], since his friends and relatives were no longer visiting him.

There is más at the website.

Not everybody tries to be balanced about it. An anti-Idema website is openly crowing (ignore the date on the site, it's an error). And then they sing "Ding Dong, the Witch is Dead." No, seriously. It starts off over the top and goes wherever "over the top" is from there:

The American traitor Jack Idema died this morning in Mexico from AIDS.

A news report from Mexico confirms that Idema is dead.

A confidential informant reports to this writer that Idema died a very painful death and was abandoned for the last week of his life by his Mexican lackeys when the money ran out.

The Casa Arabi resort that was owned by Idema, and where he died this morning, was said to have been looted and stripped of anything valuable, while Idema lay dying on a filthy blood stained bed vainly begging the looters for food, drink and pain killers.

Idema weighed 98 pounds at death, covered with purple lesions (Kaposi's Sarcoma) and had pus sores (herpes) all over his genitals and thighs. It was his heroin supplier who found him dead in bed with vomit and feces around him.

It is not clear what happened to the body, but there are unconfirmed reports that it has been thrown into the street and was eaten by wild dogs.

There is much, much more there. Just keep scrolling. Most of this stuff can't be true, but then again, just the stuff we know about him is bad enough.

In looking for an offsetting, pro-Idema slant, we were trying to find the blog of one of his last remaining supporters, a middle-aged Illinois woman blinded by a crush on him. She called her blog "Cao's Blog," but while the site is still there it redirects to a Russian malware site.

Update: "Cao" has a new blog, having given up on the old one. We believe this post -- no words, just two music videos -- is her farewell to Keith. One more person impressed by his charm, maybe the only one still believing at the end. It would be easy to pity her if one forgot the vitriol she piled on his victims for years and years.

Can you speak worse of a man, than that his passing leaves the world a better place?

[RYP]

The Economist weighs in sort of limp-wristed english way

Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema
Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema, American fortune hunter and confidence trickster, died on January 21st, aged 55
Feb 4th 2012 | from the print edition


NOBODY who met Jonathan Keith “Jack” Idema could doubt his self- belief. It hit you as forcefully as his rocky good looks, his patriotism and his prickliness. But who was the self he believed in?

Was it Jonathan, the rather spoilt single child from Poughkeepsie, fond of fast cars and prone to collecting speeding tickets, who was inspired by John Wayne in “The Green Berets” to join the American special forces? Was it Keith, the ex-soldier who went into business selling paintball equipment and then military clothing, before being convicted of defrauding 59 companies and sentenced to six years in prison? Was it Jack, the tough guy who rocked out to Afghanistan in 2001 after the September 11th attacks to do humanitarian stuff, capture Osama bin Laden and work undercover, he said, for the Pentagon? Or was it Black Jack, the swashbuckling captain of a tour boat in Mexico who, before he succumbed to AIDS, saw himself as Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean”, flew a pirate flag from a minaret, held constant orgies and liked to play the score of “Apocalypse Now” and Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”?

No doubt it was all these selves, and others too, for Mr Idema was a man of many parts, and his lack of self-doubt helped him both to ignore setbacks and to gain the confidence of those who should have seen through him. The real and the imaginary were as one to him, just as right and wrong were. And he moved in a world peopled by others with as many fantasies, as few scruples and plenty of motives for inventing tall stories.

Some of the stories made Mr Idema seem almost lovably heroic. He preserved genetic material from his dog, for example, so that he could later be cloned. Sarge was, after all, no ordinary dog but a Tibetan shepherd that would jump out of aircraft with his soldier master and help sniff out bombs (when not scuba diving). Other tales cast Mr Idema in a more Bond-like guise. Thus in 1991 he told the FBI that among the detritus of the Soviet Union he had discovered a Russian mafia gang bent on smuggling suitcase-sized nuclear weapons out of Lithuania; no details could be revealed, though, because the FBI was riddled with KGB agents.

He could be a victim, too. Was he not the object of a vendetta by the FBI? And had his story not been stolen by Steven Spielberg for George Clooney in “The Peacemaker”? He sued Mr Spielberg, and others who had crossed him: journalists, an aid worker, a colonel, even his father.

Then there was his discovery of an al-Qaeda plot to kill Bill Clinton at a summit in Malaysia (the president wisely stayed away) and two other planned assassinations in Afghanistan. He claimed, too, to have fought with the Northern Alliance, America’s anti-Taliban allies in Operation Enduring Freedom. He had also secured a video of al-Qaeda and Taliban terrorists undergoing training, which he sold to CBS and several other broadcasters.

Oh, what a lovely war

Journalists were not alone in being conned by Mr Idema, especially after he formed Task Force Sabre 7, a freelance group of American and Afghan vigilantes-cum-fortune-hunters who operated with impunity for a while after the Americans had ousted the Taliban in 2001. Afghanistan at this time was an adventure playground for thuggish American ex-servicemen employed or masquerading as security guards. They hung around the Mustafa hotel, wearing wraparound sunglasses and camouflage fatigues, drove about in big Toyotas and carried a small arsenal of weapons. They were not so much the dogs of war as the coyotes, dingoes and hyenas. Mr Idema was one of them.

Some of these people operated with the complicity of the American authorities, who had contracted out so many of the tasks once performed by soldiers. No wonder that on three occasions in 2004 Mr Idema found it easy to con the NATO force into providing him with support for raids on compounds. He even conned the Americans into taking into custody a captured Afghan alleged to be a Taliban loyalist. He was nothing of the kind.

Far more serious was the private prison run by Mr Idema and his friends. When it was discovered, complete with torture chamber and eight captives, bound and hooded, some hanging by their feet, the Afghans said Mr Idema was trying to extract information that would lead to bounties. He said it had all been okayed by the Pentagon, even by Donald Rumsfeld. But he was tried nonetheless and given ten years. After three, spent in extraordinarily comfortable conditions in the notorious Pul-e-Charkhi jail, he was inexplicably pardoned by President Hamid Karzai.

By this time, though, Mr Idema was beginning to look less plausible, his luck less inexhaustible. His loyal wife, Viktoria Runningwolf, had been abandoned, along with the Ultimate Pet Resort that he had helped her set up in Fayetteville, North Carolina. And his past, including 36 arrests (though no convictions) in the 1980s and 1990s, had come to light. He was still wanted in North Carolina for impersonating a policeman and, despite claims to “superblood”, he was to contract AIDS. His life ended in a haze of vodka and cocaine, the self-belief perhaps slightly dented, the self-delusion as strong as ever.

[RYP]

NYTimes goes for its third Obit on knucklehead. Aren't these starting to sound like they are all using same cliches and ripping each other off?

How ‘General Jack’ Lost His Swagger
By MARK MCDONALD | January 31, 2012, 9:10 PM3
F
HONG KONG — In the early spring of 2004, three American adventurers rented a pleasant, gated house in a leafy suburb of Kabul. In the front room they had satellite TV. In the back, they had a torture chamber.

By that summer, however, they had been arrested and put on trial in the Afghan capital, accused of setting up their own private prison and torturing eight Afghan men whom they believed were with the Taliban.


But even standing there in the dock, in the sweltering and chaotic courtroom in Kabul, caught dead to rights, the group’s leader, Jack Idema, was one cool customer.

Idema died recently in Mexico, reportedly from AIDS, and my colleague Douglas Martin has written a detailed and intriguing obituary.

Idema had been roaming around Afghanistan in 2004, trying to score the U.S. government’s $50 million bounty for capturing Osama bin Laden. He told me at the time that he was working at the behest of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

“Call Rumsfeld’s office,” Idema insisted to me during a break in the trial in Kabul. Then he gave me the name of a Rumsfeld aide, a military officer, and he recited her U.S. phone number from memory. I reached the woman at that number; she denied any government connection to Idema or his activities.

One witness at the trial, a Muslim cleric from Kabul whom Idema had abducted, said he and his fellow captives had been kept in black hoods for seven days and nights. They were shackled, starved and deprived of sleep. One man became so disoriented that when Idema poured ice water on him, he thought he’d been set on fire.

The presiding justice at the trial, Abdul Baset Bakhtiari, called the indictment “the clearest case I have seen in my 20 years as a judge.”

Known around Kabul as “General Jack,” Idema and his followers were quickly convicted. Idema received a 10-year sentence but was pardoned after three years (without explanation) by President Hamid Karzai.

At the time, there was a moderate peacekeeping force of U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan — about 13,000 in all. There was also a Wild West frontier feel to the capital: In addition to regular military troops, there were plainclothes CIA operatives, Special Forces guys, security contractors, private bodyguards and swaggering adventurers like Idema.

The contractors and the wanna-be’s favored desert camouflage fatigues, wraparound Oakleys and military-style high-and-tight haircuts. They drove Toyota Land Cruisers and did their nighttime carousing at the seedy Mustafa Hotel. Most of them carried weapons in the open, and Idema usually had a Russian Makarov pistol strapped to his thigh. He often traveled with his own coterie of Afghan bodyguards.

“If you’re blond or a Westerner and you’re wearing black sunglasses, carrying a pistol in a leg holster and driving a car without a license plate, nobody would ever question who you are,” Qais Asimy, a Kabul businessman, told me at the time. “People just assume you’re CIA or Special Forces or someone dangerous. People stay away from you.”

[Kurt]

That Video is interesting since it has some classic bullshitter / con-man moves. Like asking "do you really think I ..." in Idema's case it was asking if the person thought he was a prisoner because he was sitting in prison, but he used that in an attempt to sway the topic back to how the obvious was not really as it appeared and to assure the person that he, the imprisoned con-man was really the one in control.

The other one where he kept on claiming to be employed by "The United States" and then when asked three times, he finally said "Government" allowed us to see lawsuit & loophole Jack, but he has to go with the lie when the reporter was not going to back down and insisted he either say "US Government" or nothing at all. That reminded me of the story I was told about my Uncle when he pretended he got married to my aunt (after an extended pretend engagement) and he said "Its official! We are married now." and then when asked "official as in you went to a justice of the peace and got married and there is paperwork to prove this" he said "yep, just have to get the paperwork cleared..which might take a while." What this really meant is he had to quickly lay on the charm hard and fast and get married to my aunt so his scheme would not fall apart.

One positive thing this guy left us was past behavior to help prevent people from falling for this kind of guy again. But, people will fall for it again anyway.

[RYP]

Profile of the Sociopath

This website summarizes some of the common features of descriptions of the behavior of sociopaths.


Glibness and Superficial Charm

Manipulative and Conning
They never recognize the rights of others and see their self-serving behaviors as permissible. They appear to be charming, yet are covertly hostile and domineering, seeing their victim as merely an instrument to be used. They may dominate and humiliate their victims.

Grandiose Sense of Self
Feels entitled to certain things as "their right."

Pathological Lying
Has no problem lying coolly and easily and it is almost impossible for them to be truthful on a consistent basis. Can create, and get caught up in, a complex belief about their own powers and abilities. Extremely convincing and even able to pass lie detector tests.

Lack of Remorse, Shame or Guilt
A deep seated rage, which is split off and repressed, is at their core. Does not see others around them as people, but only as targets and opportunities. Instead of friends, they have victims and accomplices who end up as victims. The end always justifies the means and they let nothing stand in their way.

Shallow Emotions
When they show what seems to be warmth, joy, love and compassion it is more feigned than experienced and serves an ulterior motive. Outraged by insignificant matters, yet remaining unmoved and cold by what would upset a normal person. Since they are not genuine, neither are their promises.

Incapacity for Love

Need for Stimulation
Living on the edge. Verbal outbursts and physical punishments are normal. Promiscuity and gambling are common.

Callousness/Lack of Empathy
Unable to empathize with the pain of their victims, having only contempt for others' feelings of distress and readily taking advantage of them.

Poor Behavioral Controls/Impulsive Nature
Rage and abuse, alternating with small expressions of love and approval produce an addictive cycle for abuser and abused, as well as creating hopelessness in the victim. Believe they are all-powerful, all-knowing, entitled to every wish, no sense of personal boundaries, no concern for their impact on others.

Early Behavior Problems/Juvenile Delinquency
Usually has a history of behavioral and academic difficulties, yet "gets by" by conning others. Problems in making and keeping friends; aberrant behaviors such as cruelty to people or animals, stealing, etc.

Irresponsibility/Unreliability
Not concerned about wrecking others' lives and dreams. Oblivious or indifferent to the devastation they cause. Does not accept blame themselves, but blames others, even for acts they obviously committed.

Promiscuous Sexual Behavior/Infidelity
Promiscuity, child sexual abuse, rape and sexual acting out of all sorts.

Lack of Realistic Life Plan/Parasitic Lifestyle
Tends to move around a lot or makes all encompassing promises for the future, poor work ethic but exploits others effectively.

Criminal or Entrepreneurial Versatility
Changes their image as needed to avoid prosecution. Changes life story readily.
Other Related Qualities:

Contemptuous of those who seek to understand them
Does not perceive that anything is wrong with them
Authoritarian
Secretive
Paranoid
Only rarely in difficulty with the law, but seeks out situations where their tyrannical behavior will be tolerated, condoned, or admired
Conventional appearance
Goal of enslavement of their victim(s)
Exercises despotic control over every aspect of the victim's life
Has an emotional need to justify their crimes and therefore needs their victim's affirmation (respect, gratitude and love)
Ultimate goal is the creation of a willing victim
Incapable of real human attachment to another
Unable to feel remorse or guilt
Extreme narcissism and grandiose
May state readily that their goal is to rule the world

(The above traits are based on the psychopathy checklists of H. Cleckley and R. Hare.)


NOTE: In the 1830's this disorder was called "moral insanity." By 1900 it was changed to "psychopathic personality." More recently it has been termed "antisocial personality disorder" in the DSM-III and DSM-IV. Some critics have complained that, in the attempt to rely only on 'objective' criteria, the DSM has broadened the concept to include too many individuals. The APD category includes people who commit illegal, immoral or self-serving acts for a variety of reasons and are not necessarily psychopaths.


DSM-IV Definition

Antisocial personality disorder is characterized by a lack of regard for the moral or legal standards in the local culture. There is a marked inability to get along with others or abide by societal rules. Individuals with this disorder are sometimes called psychopaths or sociopaths.

Diagnostic Criteria (DSM-IV)

1. Since the age of fifteen there has been a disregard for and violation of the right's of others, those right's considered normal by the local culture, as indicated by at least three of the following:
A. Repeated acts that could lead to arrest.
B. Conning for pleasure or profit, repeated lying, or the use of aliases.
C. Failure to plan ahead or being impulsive.
D. Repeated assaults on others.
E. Reckless when it comes to their or others safety.
F. Poor work behavior or failure to honor financial obligations.
G. Rationalizing the pain they inflict on others.

2. At least eighteen years in age.

3. Evidence of a Conduct Disorder, with its onset before the age of fifteen.

4. Symptoms not due to another mental disorder.


Antisocial Personality Disorder Overview (Written by Derek Wood, RN, BSN, PhD Candidate)

Antisocial Personality Disorder results in what is commonly known as a Sociopath. The criteria for this disorder require an ongoing disregard for the rights of others, since the age of 15 years. Some examples of this disregard are reckless disregard for the safety of themselves or others, failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors, deceitfulness such as repeated lying or deceit for personal profit or pleasure, and lack of remorse for actions that hurt other people in any way. Additionally, they must have evidenced a Conduct Disorder before the age of 15 years, and must be at least 18 years old to receive this diagnosis.

People with this disorder appear to be charming at times, and make relationships, but to them, these are relationships in name only. They are ended whenever necessary or when it suits them, and the relationships are without depth or meaning, including marriages. They seem to have an innate ability to find the weakness in people, and are ready to use these weaknesses to their own ends through deceit, manipulation, or intimidation, and gain pleasure from doing so.

They appear to be incapable of any true emotions, from love to shame to guilt. They are quick to anger, but just as quick to let it go, without holding grudges. No matter what emotion they state they have, it has no bearing on their future actions or attitudes.

They rarely are able to have jobs that last for any length of time, as they become easily bored, instead needing constant change. They live for the moment, forgetting the past, and not planning the future, not thinking ahead what consequences their actions will have. They want immediate rewards and gratification. There currently is no form of psychotherapy that works with those with antisocial personality disorder, as those with this disorder have no desire to change themselves, which is a prerequisite. No medication is available either. The only treatment is the prevention of the disorder in the early stages, when a child first begins to show the symptoms of conduct disorder.


THE PSYCHOPATH NEXT DOOR (Source: http://chericola57.tripod.com/infinite.html)

Psychopath. We hear the word and images of Bernardo, Manson and Dahmer pop into our heads; no doubt Ted Bundy too. But they're the bottom of the barrel -- most of the two million psychopaths in North America aren't murderers. They're our friends, lovers and co-workers. They're outgoing and persuasive, dazzling you with charm and flattery. Often you aren't even aware they've taken you for a ride -- until it's too late.

Psychopaths exhibit a Jekyll and Hyde personality. "They play a part so they can get what they want," says Dr. Sheila Willson, a Toronto psychologist who has helped victims of psychopaths. The guy who showers a woman with excessive attention is much more capable of getting her to lend him money, and to put up with him when he strays. The new employee who gains her co-workers' trust has more access to their chequebooks. And so on. Psychopaths have no conscience and their only goal is self-gratification. Many of us have been their victims -- at work, through friendships or relationships -- and not one of us can say, "a psychopath could never fool me."

Think you can spot one? Think again. In general, psychopaths aren't the product of broken homes or the casualties of a materialistic society. Rather they come from all walks of life and there is little evidence that their upbringing affects them. Elements of a psychopath's personality first become evident at a very early age, due to biological or genetic factors. Explains Michael Seto, a psychologist at the Centre for Addiction and Mental health in Toronto, by the time that a person hits their late teens, the disorder is almost certainly permanent. Although many clinicians use the terms psychopath and sociopath interchangeably, writes psychopath expert Robert Hare on his book 'Without Conscience', a sociopath's criminal behavior is shaped by social forces and is the result of a dysfunctional environment.

Psychopaths have only a shallow range of emotions and lack guilt, says Hare. They often see themselves as victims, and lack remorse or the ability to empathize with others. "Psychopaths play on the fact that most of us are trusting and forgiving people," adds Seto. The warning signs are always there; it's just difficult to see them because once we trust someone, the friendship becomes a blinder.

Even lovers get taken for a ride by psychopaths. For a psychopath, a romantic relationship is just another opportunity to find a trusting partner who will buy into the lies. It's primarily why a psychopath rarely stays in a relationship for the long term, and often is involved with three or four partners at once, says Willson. To a psychopath, everything about a relationship is a game. Willson refers to the movie 'Sliding Doors' to illustrate her point. In the film, the main character comes home early after just having been fired from her job. Only moments ago, her boyfriend has let another woman out the front door. But in a matter of minutes he is the attentive and concerned boyfriend, taking her out to dinner and devoting the entire night to comforting her. All the while he's planning to leave the next day on a trip with the other woman.

The boyfriend displays typical psychopathic characteristics because he falsely displays deep emotion toward the relationship, says Willson. In reality, he's less concerned with his girlfriend's depression than with making sure she's clueless about the other woman's existence. In the romance department, psychopaths have an ability to gain your affection quickly, disarming you with words, intriguing you with grandiose plans. If they cheat you'll forgive them, and one day when they've gone too far, they'll leave you with a broken heart (and an empty wallet). By then they'll have a new player for their game.

The problem with their game is that we don't often play by their rules. Where we might occasionally tell a white lie, a psychopath's lying is compulsive. Most of us experience some degree of guilt about lying, preventing us from exhibiting such behavior on a regular basis. "Psychopaths don't discriminate who it is they lie to or cheat," says Seto. "There's no distinction between friend, family and sucker."

No one wants to be the sucker, so how do we prevent ourselves from becoming close friends or getting into a relationship with a psychopath? It's really almost impossible, say Seto and Willson. Unfortunately, laments Seto, one way is to become more suspicious and less trusting of others. Our tendency is to forgive when we catch a loved one in a lie. "Psychopaths play on this fact," he says. "However, I'm certainly not advocating a world where if someone lies once or twice, you never speak to them again." What you can do is look at how often someone lies and how they react when caught. Psychopaths will lie over and over again, and where other people would sincerely apologize, a psychopath may apologize but won't stop.

Psychopaths also tend to switch jobs as frequently as they switch partners, mainly because they don't have the qualities to maintain a job for the long haul. Their performance is generally erratic, with chronic absences, misuse of company resources and failed commitments. Often they aren't even qualified for the job and use fake credentials to get it. Seto talks of a patient who would get marketing jobs based on his image; he was a presentable and charming man who layered his conversations with educational and occupational references. But it became evident that the man hadn't a clue what he was talking about, and was unable to hold down a job.

How do you make sure you don't get fooled when you're hiring someone to baby-sit your child or for any other job? Hire based on reputation and not image, says Willson. Check references thoroughly. Psychopaths tend to give vague and inconsistent replies. Of course the best way to solve this problem would be to cure psychopaths of their 'illness.' But there's no recipe for treating them, say psychiatrists. Today's traditional methods of psychotherapy (psychoanalysis, group and one-on-one therapy) and drug treatments have failed. Therapy is more likely to work when an individual admits there's a problem and wants to change. The common problem with psychopaths, says Sets, "Is they don't see a problem with their behavior."

Psychopaths don't seek therapy willingly, says Seto. Rather, they're pushed into it by a desperate relative or by a court order. To a psychopath, a therapist is just one more person who must be conned, and the psychopath plays the part right until the therapist is convinced of his or her 'rehabilitation.'

Even though we can't treat psychopaths effectively with therapy, it doesn't mean we can't protect ourselves, writes Hare. Willson agrees, citing the most important factor in keeping psychopaths at bay is to know your vulnerabilities. We need to "realize our own potential and maximize our strengths" so that our insecurities don't overcome us. Because, she says, a psychopath is a chameleon who becomes "an image of what you haven't done for yourself." Over time, she says, "their appearance of perfection will begin to crack," but by that time you will have been emotionally and perhaps financially scathed. There comes a time when you realize there's no point in searching for answers; the only thing is to move on.

Taken in part from MW -- By Caroline Konrad -- September 1999

THE MALIGNANT PERSONALITY:

These people are mentally ill and extremely dangerous! The following precautions will help to protect you from the destructive acts of which they are capable.

First, to recognize them, keep the following guidelines in mind.

(1) They are habitual liars. They seem incapable of either knowing or telling the truth about anything.

(2) They are egotistical to the point of narcissism. They really believe they are set apart from the rest of humanity by some special grace.

(3) They scapegoat; they are incapable of either having the insight or willingness to accept responsibility for anything they do. Whatever the problem, it is always someone else's fault.

(4) They are remorselessly vindictive when thwarted or exposed.

(5) Genuine religious, moral, or other values play no part in their lives. They have no empathy for others and are capable of violence. Under older psychological terminology, they fall into the category of psychopath or sociopath, but unlike the typical psychopath, their behavior is masked by a superficial social facade. 

If you have come into conflict with such a person or persons, do the following immediately!

(1) Notify your friends and relatives of what has happened.

Do not be vague. Name names, and specify dates and circumstances. Identify witnesses if possible and provide supporting documentation if any is available.

(2) Inform the police. The police will do nothing with this information except to keep it on file, since they are powerless to act until a crime has been committed. Unfortunately, that often is usually too late for the victim. Nevertheless, place the information in their hands.

Obviously, if you are assaulted or threatened before witnesses, you can get a restraining order, but those are palliative at best.

(3) Local law enforcement agencies are usually under pressure if wealthy or politically powerful individuals are involved, so include state and federal agencies as well and tell the locals that you have. In my own experience, one agency that can help in a pinch is the Criminal Investigation Division of the Internal Revenue Service or (in Canada) Victims Services at your local police unit. It is not easy to think of the IRS as a potential friend, but a Swedish study showed that malignant types (the Swedes called them bullies) usually commit some felony or other by the age of twenty. If the family is wealthy, the fact may never come to light, but many felonies involve tax evasion, and in such cases, the IRS is interested indeed. If large amounts of money are involved, the IRS may solve all your problems for you. For obvious reasons the Drug Enforcement Agency may also be an appropriate agency to approach. The FBI is an important agency to contact, because although the FBI does not have jurisdiction over murder or assault, if informed, they do have an active interest in any other law enforcement agencies that do not follow through with an honest investigation and prosecution should a murder occur. Civil rights are involved at that point. No local crooked lawyer, judge, or corrupt police official wants to be within a country mile if that comes to light! It is in such cases that wealthy psychopaths discover just how firm the "friends" they count on to cover up for them really are! Even some of the drug cartel biggies will scuttle for cover if someone picks up the brick their thugs hide under. Exposure is bad for business.

(4) Make sure that several of your friends have the information in the event something happens to you. That way, an appropriate investigation will follow if you are harmed. Don't tell other people who has the information, because then something bad could happen to them as well. Instruct friends to take such an incident to the newspapers and other media.

If you are dealing with someone who has considerable money, you must realize that they probably won't try to harm you themselves, they will contract with someone to make the hit. The malignant type is a coward and will not expose himself or herself to personal danger if he or she can avoid it.

[RYP]

I remember Arizona Dan and the telecom mercenary. The Mustafa was a dump but the foreigners stayed there

The strange story of Tora Bora Jack
Christina Lamb
8 August 2004
The Sunday Times
(c) 2004 Times Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved

A man is arrested in Afghanistan with eight prisoners in his house, some hanging from the ceiling. He says he is a US agent: America brands him an impostor. Christina Lamb unravels the bizarre background of the ‘torturer’ of Kabul

The reinforced door with a large combination dial and armed guard looks like the entrance to a bank vault in a movie. Instead, it opens into a bar with mirrored ceilings and pink marble walls. From one wall, a bronze sculpture of the four horsemen of the apocalypse protrudes alarmingly.

Men with cropped hair and beards, black bulletproof vests, thickly muscled forearms and Glock pistols strapped to their thighs sit around, alternating vodka shots with “green grenades”, the local term for cans of Heineken.

Female company is scarce but is sometimes provided by slinky-skirted waitresses from the nearby Thai restaurant.

The bar at Kabul’s Mustafa hotel has become the gathering place for the flotsam of war. Bounty hunters, gem dealers and renegade militiamen mingle with aid workers, private security guards, war correspondents and special forces operators. Drink flows heavily and tempers rise. It is not uncommon to see someone slam a pistol onto the table.

Often holding court in the bar until recently was a thick-shouldered 48-year old from Poughkeepsie, New York, with a tanned face, black beard and dark shades.

Jonathan Keith Idema was known to everyone in Kabul as simply Jack.

A former Green Beret, Idema was a larger-than-life figure -at least in his own opinion. He claimed to have trained with the SAS in Herefordshire. He was both a co-writer and the hero of Task Force Dagger, an American bestseller about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden.

Pictured on the cover striding through the Afghan desert with his Kalashnikov slung across his bare chest, he claims in the book to have been involved in a number of special forces operations.
One of those was the failed attempt in early 2002 to capture Bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora, the last known hiding place of the Al-Qaeda mastermind.

Afterwards Idema began calling himself Tora Bora Jack.

Dressed in a uniform with the stars and stripes on the sleeves, he owned a selection of weapons that he let excitable journalists pose with. He became such a well-known local figure that Kabul’s first cocktail bar named a cocktail after him: $10 buys a Jack’s Tora Bora Sunset, made of vodka and pomegranate juice.

Tora Bora Jack has now achieved fame beyond his dreams; but it comes at the cost of notoriety and a possibly crushing jail sentence. On Thursday he will make his second appearance in a Kabul court since Afghan police raided his house last month and found eight Afghan captives, whom he had allegedly been torturing. Some were said to be hanging upside down from the ceiling.

Idema insists he was working with American and Afghan authorities in a secret counterterrorism operation, but both governments strongly deny this.

Arrested along with him were two Americans, one of whom was apparently filming a biopic: Tora Bora Jack’s Story -the Movie.

He could never have imagined such a twist in the plot, but the fact is that Idema’s story is in many ways a saga of modern-day Kabul.

The Afghan capital has become a town where nobody knows if anyone is really what he (or she) claims to be. Many of the regulars at the Mustafa have nebulous jobs involving some combination of the words “communications”, “adviser” and “security”.

Conversely, what seem the most bizarre of cover stories often turn out to be true.

The short New Yorker who claimed to be a correspondent for a magazine called Cat Fancy, writing about the plight of cats in post-Taliban Kabul, could not be genuine -until he faxed me his surprisingly moving articles. I discovered he really did have a rescued kitten in one of the rooms upstairs in the Mustafa. He had named her Queen Soraya.

Then there was the Finn setting up a sheep bank in Taliban-plagued Kandahar. And the eccentric Englishman who wanted to import hair dyes into Afghanistan and who now runs the country’s first package tours.

The spider at the centre of Kabul’s strange web of mysterious characters and wide-eyed innocents is the Mustafa hotel’s owner, Wais, a fast-talking neurotic Afghan-American from New Jersey who knows everybody. Americans call him the Fonz of Kabul.

Convinced that the Northern Alliance are trying to poison his food, Wais keeps his desk always covered with bottles of vitamin pills and spends much of his time mooning over his doomed love affair with a German girl.

In warmer months he holds famous Thursday-night barbecues on the hotel roof where guests can sit on the looted seat of a Russian MiG fighter jet and down Polish vodka shots overlooking central Kabul.
In the street below, four-wheel drives with tinted windows and blank numberplates speed through the dust, while Chinook helicopters thrum out the rhythms of Apocalypse Now above.

Afghanistan has long had a romantic allure. Back in the 1960s it was the main destination on the hippie trail. Today it attracts a different kind of adventurer, attracted less by high-grade drugs and more by rewards ranging from $50m for Bin Laden down to $5m for lesser-known bad guys.

The US State Department is offering a total of $340m for the 30 most-wanted terrorists. It says $57m has already been paid out. Idema was one of the bounty hunters chasing this money.

My first encounter with “Jack” was in the Mustafa in December 2001, not long after the Taliban had been ousted from power by the Americans.

The hotel had been in the process of being converted into a gem dealers’ market, but when the Taliban fell it was hurriedly changed back into a hostelry to cash in on all the arriving journalists. Instead of walls, the rooms still had glass partitions and iron security grills.

The Mustafa had no bar then and only very occasional electricity, but Pounds 100 could secure a bottle of Scotch from the nearby Chelsea supermarket where Bin Laden and his Arab cohorts used to shop.

With a 9pm curfew, a shortage of women and an excess of testosterone, there was nothing to do but drink by the light of hurricane lamps -and fight. Idema, whom even his friends described as “highly volatile”, was frequently a participant in these brawls.

There was a sentimental side to him too. He had featured in an article in The New York Times about pet owners who think their pets can be cloned. He said he had saved some genetic material from Sarge, a dog he used while serving as a soldier. He added that the dog had parachuted out of planes with him and sniffed out bombs.

Among the many escapades Idema recounted on long Kabul nights were his key roles in just about every conflict of the past 20 years from Bosnia to Haiti. He also casually let slip that he was suing Steven Spielberg’s company DreamWorks for allegedly basing the hero of one of his movies on him. The 1997 film, The Peacemaker, stars George Clooney as a maverick American colonel who tracks down a Russian smuggling team.

Idema told us that he had come into Afghanistan with the Northern Alliance, the Taliban’s enemies, and claimed to have saved hundreds of Afghan lives with his special forces’ medical training. The alliance was unsure who he was.

“We saw him; he seemed to have lots of money but we didn’t know who he was working for,” said Muslim Hayat, a senior Northern Alliance commander who is now defence attache at the Afghan embassy in London. “He was certainly not hired by us.”

For a while, during the run-up to the war in Iraq, Idema disappeared from the Mustafa, perhaps to write his book. This year he re-emerged at the hotel’s newly fitted bar (which had briefly been co-run as an Irish pub until Wais fell out with his business partner in a fracas over a boy).

Although Idema had rented a house and was no longer staying at the hotel, he would appear most evenings with his dark sunglasses and an Arafat-style black-and white chequered scarf around his neck -as favoured by most American special forces.

Usually he was with a friend called Dan from Arizona who said he worked in security for telecommunications and carried an AK-47 sprayed with camouflage paint.

Paul Vickers, a BBC radio producer, was with them at the bar a few months ago when Dan decided to give an impromptu knife display. “He pulled a flick-knife from his belt and did a Jackie Chan kind of flailing demonstration,” remembers Vickers. “It was quite a scary moment.” From then on regulars knew the Arizonan as Dan, Dan the Scary Man.

Another of Idema’s drinking buddies was David, who worked in satellite communications for the Americans and who had set up one of the prettiest Thai waitresses in a beauty salon at the Mustafa.

Often with them was a square-bearded Belgian cameraman who excitedly told people he had hired a Soviet Mi-8 helicopter in Islamabad to film the capture of Bin Laden, which he believed Idema was poised to carry out.

After a couple of green grenades, Idema would tell people that he was leading a group called Task Force Sabre 7, which he said was involved in a secret mission reporting directly to the office of the US secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld. “We’re closing in on the last terrorists,” he would whisper dramatically.

Was he a bounty hunter? A conman fantasist? The leader of a team of freelance anti-terrorism vigilantes? Or was he really on a top- secret Pentagon mission?

“I was suspicious from the word go,” said Vickers. “They seemed odd and kind of showbizzy, what with their uniforms and the fact they called themselves Task Force Sabre 7, which is like an SAS moniker. I’ve been with real SAS and my experience is they don’t tell you things like that.”

But given that there really were secret operations involving US special forces and FBI officials reporting to Rumsfeld’s office -and there were also plenty of undercover agency people wandering around Kabul with briefcases of dollars -nobody could be sure what Idema and co were actually up to.

Afghan security forces are forbidden from asking for identification from the many bearded Americans speeding around Kabul in unmarked vehicles. And not all US operatives seem to know about each other.

Earlier this year I was at the residence of Hazrat Ali, the army chief in Jalalabad, when an inter-agency row broke out that almost led to a fist fight. I heard a local CIA agent demand from an arriving defence department group: “What are you doing here? This is our patch.”

Whatever Idema was up to, it was always entertaining to listen to his stories of “black ops” and derring-do around the world, and he generally found an attentive audience. With more than a third of the country declared a no-go area by the United Nations, few journalists or aid workers ventured out of Kabul and they loved to hear his stories. He in turn adored conspiracy theories; he was a keen reader of The Da Vinci Code.

His favourite tale was of being involved in operations uncovering “backpack nukes” in Lithuania in 1992. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, weapons-grade nuclear material had been pouring into the hands of international terrorists who were developing a nuclear backpack that could destroy 40 city blocks when detonated. Idema claimed to have gained the confidence of the Lithuanian KGB by outshooting them at the firing range then out-drinking them in the officers’ bar afterwards.

Every so often he would disappear from the Mustafa on a “top- secret mission”. Vickers saw Idema and Dan head off on one such adventure and then come back with lots of photographs.

“They were complete with kneepads, elbow pads, M16s, RPGs, grenades, AKSUs, radios, the works. What they did I don’t know, but it involved hiring camels and lots of photo opportunities firing weapons.”

Then a month ago a strange e-mail was sent out to journalists by the press office of the American-led coalition forces in Kabul. It declared: “US citizen Jonathan, Keith or Jack Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official and the public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him.”

Wanted posters began appearing all over Kabul, describing him as “armed and dangerous” and accusing him of “interfering with military ops”.

On July 5, after a drunken punch-up outside the Mustafa, his home was raided.

Someone had betrayed him.

Inside the green-painted house in a run-down suburb of Kabul, Afghan police were astonished to find a private prison.

There was an office with two clocks, one showing the time in Kabul and the other the time in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where the US special forces have their headquarters. A piece of paper pinned to the wall was headed “Missions to Complete”. Number two was “Karzai”. Number four was “Pick up Laundry”.

Idema was arrested with two other Americans, Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo, and four Afghans working as cook, guard and translators. Caraballo is a film-maker. All of them are currently being held in the jail of the Afghan national directorate of security. They are in cells 15ft by 10ft, sleeping on pallets on the floor.

The prosecutor in the case, Mohd Naeem Dawari, said after visiting Idema that he found him crying. “I don’t think he is crazy,” he said. “He is a proud person.”

Tora Bora Jack now faces his most serious mission to date: to avoid conviction in an Afghan court for running his own personal Abu Ghraib. He faces five charges: taking hostages, having a private jail, torture, robbery of vehicles, and entering the country without a visa. If convicted, he could receive a sentence of up to 20 years.

At his first court appearance two weeks ago he turned up in his usual outfit of desert boots, khaki combat pants, dark glasses and a shirt with American flags on the shoulders.

“We were working for the US anti-terrorism group. We were working with the Pentagon and some other federal agencies,” he told reporters crowded round the dock. “We were in direct contact with Rumsfeld’s office five times a day, every day.”

The Pentagon denied it. A Defence Department spokesman said Idema had been discharged from the US military in 1984 and had had no connection since. “This group of American citizens does not represent the American government and we do not employ or sponsor them,” the spokesman said.

But Idema’s lawyer, John Tiffany, said he had video evidence, audiotape and e-mails that “go to the highest levels” to prove his claims of being part of a covert anti-terrorist outfit.

Robert Fogelnest, lawyer for one of the other two Americans arrested, claimed all three were being made scapegoats to divert attention from the recent uncovering of the abuse of prisoners by American military in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Idema admitted detaining prisoners in his house but said they were Taliban and Al-Qaeda suspects whom he intended to hand over to US and Afghan authorities.

His captives told the court they had been held for days in shackles. They claimed they had been kicked and beaten, had had scalding water poured on them before being dunked in ice water, and at times had lost consciousness.

Abdul Baset Bakhtiari, the lead judge on the three-member panel, told me he had personally inspected the prisoners and witnessed the evidence of torture. “They do not belong to Osama Bin Laden and he beat them,” he said. “I have seen their bodies. There were red marks on their wrists and they were burned.”

American and Afghan officials are still investigating how many other Afghan citizens Idema may have detained, and whether any have been harmed.

The story does not end here. Last week embarrassed officials from the Nato-led peacekeeping force admitted that they had assisted in three of Idema’s raids this spring. They said his uniform, with its American flags, had duped them into thinking he was military.

Equally embarrassingly, the US military has itself admitted that it had dealings with Idema as recently as May. Idema claims he handed over a Taliban intelligence chief after single-handedly breaking up a plot to assassinate members of the Afghan cabinet. The military confirm that they did receive a prisoner from Idema, but he was not a top Taliban official.

Idema’s military records are perhaps the best indication of the truth. They show that he spent three years in the US 10th Special Forces Group as a radio operator until 1978 and then six more years in the reserves. Although some special forces members have been called back from retirement since 9/11, it seems unlikely someone who had not seen active service for so long would be recalled.

In fact the only kind of combat Idema had definitely been involved in over the past 20 years is paintball. He once ran a magazine called Paintball Planet and produced equipment such as combat helmets.

Court records show that he also notched up a string of convictions and charges, including assault and resisting arrest. In 1994 he was convicted in Fayetteville, North Carolina, of wire fraud and faking credit reports to keep alive his sinking company. He spent four years in prison, claiming all the time that the FBI had stitched him up because he had refused to reveal his sources in the Lithuanian KGB.

Some believe that given the failure of the 20,000 US forces on the ground in Afghanistan to find the distinctively tall Bin Laden or even the Taliban’s one-eyed former leader, Mullah Omar. in the past three years, characters such as Idema should be encouraged rather than tried.

But among his strongest critics are serving members of the special forces. They claim plans are already in place for him to be extradited to Fort Bragg and prosecuted.

“We are fed up with all these adventurers,” said one. “No Afghan is going to trust us that we are who we say after this. And if he really is working for the Pentagon, then it looks like he is going to fall on his sword.”

The Afghan judge supervising Idema’s case in Kabul is in a quandary: he finds himself admiring the mystery man.

“I’d like to be like Jack, because he is a very brave man,” said Bakhtiari. “I understand he had fought terrorism and I’m sorry he has been arrested. I feel the government of Afghanistan could have done more with him.”

Bakhtiari added: “The reason I can say nice things about him is because when I met him he was very courteous and understood our customs.”

He said Idema had told him privately that he did not work for the government or any organisation but received money from wealthy people to fight terrorists.

“I see the future of Jack as very dark,” said Bakhtiari. “I know he is a good man but at that time he was bad and that is what is so disappointing. Until the government or the CIA says he worked for them I don’t know what to think.”

(C) Times Newspapers Ltd, 2004

[gnaruki]

Man, these idiots can spin some yarn. But it's so transparent.

fukken false prophets, the whole lot of 'em.

EDIT: how is that pronounced? idea-mah? IN-DEMA? EYE-DEE-MA? what was his mothers maiden name?

[nowonmai]

Some of you lot are obsessed with him. Can't think why.