Our man in Kabul Torturing Afghanis with Fox News’ celebrity mercenary

On 8 July, three Americans were arrested at a clandestine private prison in Kabul. There, the Afghan police found eight Afghanis in various stages of "interrogation". Four of them were hanging by their heels from the ceiling.

The leader of the group was former Green Beret sergeant Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema, a US bounty hunter and mercenary popularised by Fox News and right-wing publisher Random House. The other two turned out to be Edward Caraballo, a TV producer working on a documentary by Idema, about Idema, and Brent Bennett, a former US soldier who was apparently assisting Caraballo.

Of all the misfits, sociopaths and loonies thrown up by the War on Terror, Jack Idema is surely the most flamboyant, but he’s symptomatic of a sprawling network of contract killers, special forces soldiers and zone-of-silence types let loose upon an unsuspecting world by US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Now Jack Idema has form, as we say in the industry. He first came to public notice in 1992 when he was congratulated by the Pentagon for information on weapons-grade nuclear material from old Soviet stocks being shipped to terrorists. He supposedly extracted this information from friendly KGB contacts, but when the CIA and FBI asked him for his contacts, he refused. This may or may not have had something to do with a subsequent six-year spell in prison for fraud. Whatever. In October 2001, Idema moved to Afghanistan as a mercenary "advisor" to the Northern Alliance. He became a media star, appearing frequently on Fox News, where he was fond of asserting that everybody "on the ground" in Afghanistan knew Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda.

It was in this period that Idema supplied what may have been his greatest service to the neo-conservatives’ imperial ambitions with his "discovery" of a lurid "al-Qaeda" video which purported to show terrorists training to take school kids hostage. At the time, the video raised suspicions, but it was eagerly seized by Washington and the pro-war media as a propaganda tool. To their shame, even Australia’s ABC aired it.

It now turns out that Jack Idema owns the Point Blank News Network (PBN) of Fayetteville, North Carolina, the folk you have to pay if you want to screen the al-Qaeda training video. The point here is that Idema had both the knowledge and the crew to fake the al-Qaeda video for Donald Rumsfeld.

These days, not everybody in Washington is happy with Rummy, his odious deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, or their neo-conservative agenda. In fact, within the US bureaucracy, there’s a virtual civil war between the neocons and the others, and the arrest of Idema is certain evidence of that struggle.

Upon news of the arrests, a US spokesman in Kabul denied that Idema, whose men had been swaggering around Kabul for months, was anything to do with the US. His had apparently been a private anti-terrorist campaign fuelled by the US$25m reward for Osama Bin Ladin. The spin-doctor pointed out that a wanted notice for Idema was already in circulation when his private prison was raided. But within days the US military admitted they had previously taken into custody at least one prisoner turned over to them by Idema’s Task Force Sabre 7 group.

The day after Idema’s arrest, a story in the Washington Times, based on leaks from the US State Department — never close to the neo-cons — said the department was "restricting the roles of some special operations troops who have been assigned secretly to US embassies to gather intelligence on al Qaeda and other Islamist terror groups". The report went on to say that the Pentagon had been placing Green Berets and other "special operations forces" in embassies, under diplomatic cover, "to enhance the … ability to locate al-Qaeda cells and prepare to attack them."

In other words, these people were becoming a diplomatic embarrassment and the department was taking a stand against the crazies Rumsfeld had billeted on them. It isn’t hard to see that in closing down Jack Idema’s contract operation, the State Department was drawing a line in the sand.

When, on 22 July, Idema and his buddies got their day in the Afghan court, Idema told reporters he was working under direct orders from the Pentagon and he threatened to produce the evidence. He named as his contact Heather Anderson, director of security for Stephen Cambone, who’s Rumsfeld’s Undersecretary of Defence Intelligence.

You can read all this in vivid detail at the very well-informed Flogging the Simian blog (www.weblog.ro/soj), but one small thing caught my attention: according to a message on an obscure chat site for ex-US special forces soldiers, Jack Idema was, in May this year, working as a contract interrogator in Iraq. That’s right, in Iraq. That was during the "missing month" between Nick Berg’s disappearance and the discovery of his decapitated body in Baghdad; the month when the notorious "orange jumpsuit" execution video was filmed.

Finally we have a suspect with all the right credentials.

http://www.brushtail.com.au/july_04_on/our_man_in_kabul.html