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Afghan police found three men hanging from the ceiling by their feet when
they raided a house in Kabul that had been turned into a prison by "former"
U$ Green Beret Jonathan Keith "Jack" Idema and at least two other Amerikans.
All eight prisoners in the house showed signs of having been beaten.(1)
Mr. Idema claimed to be a member of a secret Special Operations group called "Task Force Saber."(2) The Amerikan military quickly tried to distance itself from Idema and his goons, but because espionage is by definition secret warfare, there is plenty of room for reasonable doubt in this case and others like it. Indeed, Idema looked so much like the real thing that NATO troops helped him on several raids. NATO bomb squads found evidence of explosives at several sites after Idema had raided them and tipped off authorities--raising the suspicion that Idema himself planted the explosives. "[Our] personnel believed that he was what he purported to be, which was a special operations agency," said a spokespersyn for the occupation forces. "Therefore they believed they were providing legitimate support to a legitimate security agency."(3) Nor were NATO troops the only ones who accepted Idema's credentials. The Amerikan media embraced Mr. Idema as an "Al Queda expert." MSNBC interviewed him; so did CBS and National Public Radio. He told the New York Daily News he wanted to "punch out" Geraldo Rivera for allegedly compromising the security of anti-Taliban fighters.(4) The New York Post reported he had discovered "handwritten plans" to assassinate then-President Bill Clinton. (5) He was the centerpiece of the best-selling book "The Hunt for Bin Laden: Task Force Dagger."(6) And he supplied FOX News with a video purportedly showing Al Qaeda fighters training to attack Amerikans.(7) Descriptions of the video--played over and over on FOX and earnestly discussed by Dan Rather in early 2002--make it sound suspiciously like campy anti-Communist dreck like 1984's "Red Dawn." "The footage shows a terrorist cell infiltrating a golf course. ... Weapons are hidden in golf bags. And then comes the attack."(8) The video also purports to show "heavily armed al Qaeda thugs ... storming a school, shooting children and taking hostages." "We found little desks with bullet holes in them," Idema told the New York Post; however, an FBI spokesman quotes in the same article says there is "no credible evidence of a specific threat to American schools."(9) The senior Amerikan commander in Afghanistan at the time "watched the ... tape carefully twice, but said he could not comment."(10) There's more. According to the New York Times, somebody named Mohammed Ashimey was feeding Western media reports about a "supersecret group" of "renegade Green Berets." "In breathless prose, the article said the former commandos, frustrated by American government inaction, had ... arrested 13 people suspected of terrorism since arriving in Afghanistan three months ago. The article, which sounded like it could have been written by an American, included an accurate description of the illegal arrests that led to Mr. Idema's detention and a fawning description of his work. "'Driving beat up old SUVs, wearing low-slung holsters like Clint Eastwood, long hair, beards and Afghan scarfs, the Green Berets operated the way they did on the 2001-2002 war, with no rules, no oversight, and no plan...' "Local Afghan journalists said they had never heard of Mr. Ashimey..."(2) There is no way to spin this story to exonerate either the Amerikan government or the Amerikan media. Any way you look at it, both are complicit in Idema's torture ring. If Mr. Idema is just some crusader yahoo, then the Amerikan media let themselves be suckered by a con-man who was selling the pulp fiction they wanted to buy: a shoot-em-up cowboy story with Osama Bin Laden playing the really really bad dude in the black hat. If Mr. Idema is just some heavily-armed mercenary nutcase, the Amerikan military let him tramp through Afghanistan starting in 2001, when he reportedly served as military advisor to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance. Idema and wackos like him thrive in Afghanistan: the Amerikans have created a Wild West atmosphere there, in part by offering $340 million in bounties for information leading to the capture or killing of top "terrorists." "Whatever Idema's credentials are," writes the British Independent, "the fact remains that he and others like him are common sights in Afghanistan. They have an eye for bounty... There are also claims that some are involved in heroin trafficking--in the country that produces three-quarters of the world's supply..."(11) Heroin production has soared 20-fold since the U$ invasion.(12) Nor are these "unofficial" thugs the only ones abusing Afghans. "David Passaro, a former Green Beret who arrived on a CIA security contract, is currently under arrest, accused of beating a 28-year old Afghan detainee to death."(10) So much for "liberating" the people of Afghanistan. Of course, Jack may have been working for the Amerikan military, the CIA or some other Amerikan spy agency at some point in the last three years. In that case, the Amerikan media are not off the hook: they still let themselves be played, just this time by a clandestine government agent. The military may have been using Idema both to do its dirtiest work and feed propaganda to the media. Now, perhaps because he had gone independent or perhaps because he got caught in the middle of a nasty job, the Amerikan government wants to distance itself from him officially--and maybe unofficially, by leaking unflattering reports through the likes of the Times and the Independent. The imperialists are addicted to war, and a necessary consequence of that addiction are nasty spy games like the ones Idema played at in Afghanistan. The official denunciation of Idema is exceptional; usually governments will not admit or deny an individual is a spy.(13) Cases like these raise the suspicion that any journalist or tourist is spying and that poisons the relationships between peoples. In both Iraq and Afghanistan, the imperialists are showing they have no solution to the problem of violence. Their "policing" approach has not reduced violence in either country. Indeed, given the Amerikans' notorious frontier dog-eat-dog mindset, they've arguably made things worse. A real solution to the problem of violence requires international economic cooperation to meet basic humyn needs, not profit.
Notes: 7. As it turns out, one of the men arrested with Idema was Edward Caraballo, a videographer who directed "The J Keith Idema Story," about Jack's supposed exploits in Lithuania (google Idema and Caraballo and check out the cached pages). Idema and Caraballo also worked with Gary Scurka at Point Blank Network News. Scurka produced "The J Keith Idema Story" and covered the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq for National Geographic Explorer-- to "present a U.S. Marine view of the war" (http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/04/0410_030410_iraqjournalist.h tml; http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/05/0516_030516_iraqreporter.html ). National Geographic, by the way, is adept at getting Amerikans into geopolitical hotspots such as Afghanistan or the region of Colombia controlled by the FARC under the guise of humyn interest reporting. So Idema possessed the technical knowledge and local contacts needed to make a fake "training video," if he wanted.
8. CBS News, 16 January 2002.
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