If you’re looking for pieces on Jack Idema and his team, please click on this link.

For a little background on why this is so relevant–the hit pieces on Idema, namely, Operation Desert Fraud by Stacy Sullivan, Tin Soldier by Mariah Blake, mentioned Ed Artis and Knightsbridge International by name as one of their “sources”, who, in retrospect, is not even credible as this documentation clearly indicates. Blake writes:

“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.”

Stacy Sullivan in Keith Idema’s Operation Desert Fraud writes:

According to Ed Artis, the former Army sergeant who heads Knightsbridge, Idema curtly announced on his arrival that he wanted “to kill every fucking Afghan I see.”

Notice she calls Artis a “former Army sergeant”. She quotes Artis several times in that piece–apparently she can’t get enough of him, but here’s another little tidbit:

While Idema was thumping his chest in this fashion, officials from Knightsbridge and Partners International tried to warn American authorities that they had a rogue operator on their hands. One letter from Knightsbridge to the chief of public affairs for Army Special Operations Command said that Idema was a threat both to senior Knightsbridge officials and to “the over all mission of the United States and the Coalition” in Afghanistan. Both aid groups say the alarms they raised went unacknowledged.

Well that’s because, according to one of my sources on Artis, Artis is the type of person that will be working to destroy you behind your back, while smiling in your face. Reportedly, he gets almost a sexual pleasure out of publicity and promotion. I just wanted to give you some background on these so-called journalists using Ed Artis as a credible source. According to some other documentation I have managed to obtain, Artis’ Knightsbridge International is associated with another Humanitarian group–a ring of child molesters and pedophiles, and Knightsbridge International has been associated with Humanitarian groups under investigation for charity fraud. Artis’ claims of being the recipient of the Silver Star, the Bronze Star, and numerous other US Military medals for Valor, Bravery, and Courage under fire in Vietnam and the Dominican Republic, a Green Beret, a Navy SEAL, an Airborne Paratrooper with a combat jump, and a highly experienced Combat Medic, a former Master Sergeant–are just about all lies. He admitted it was “bar talk” in a deposition in California.

He has apparently added some things to his resume over the years, but he remains the same unbalanced character–doing whatever he can to destroy people behind their backs.

The above “journalists” also use Joe Cafasso as a credible source claiming the Al Qaeda Videotapes were faked. Joe Cafasso has already been exposed as a fraud–check out “At Fox News The Colonel that wasn’t”.

“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.”

The phony colonel who served only 47 days in the Army as a private–“I told CENSORED]…you should have just used a suppressor and blew him [Jack], blew him away,” Cafasso later said during a meeting in Washington, DC.

Apparently, Cafasso and FOX News were upset that CBS 60 Minutes II had obtained captured al-Qaida training footage from the advisor that Cafasso and FOX News had wanted first. Cafasso was willing to go to any lengths to get exclusive FOX coverage, even through an assassination.

Stacy Sullivan wrote:

In January 2002, as U.S. Forces in Afghanistan were hunting down Al Qaeda suspects, the CBS news show 60 minutes II got its hands on some sensational footage; seven hours’ worth of videotape showing Al Qaeda terrorists training in an Afghan camp.

and this:

Special Forces soldiers, other journalists, and Army Intelligence immediately questioned the tapes’ authenticity.

They also use Tracy-Paul Warrington as a so-called “expert”, who I will cover in a separate post. Tracy-Paul Warrington isn’t all that he represents himself to be, either.

So let’s take a deeper look at the story that these journalists aren’t telling, the claims that the Al Qaeda tapes are fake, and Jack Idema is a fraud, and the sources themselves.

The letter that follows was obtained from a confidential source.

While at first blush you might see a couple of defamatory statements, upon closer examination you will see this man is an honest and avid supporter of Jack Idema.

This letter contains a completely different viewpoint of Jack’s activities than has been covered thus far in the media. Although this man has known Jack personally over a long period of time, what you may not know is he is one of the most highly regarded award winning journalists in Australia and Asia and risked his entire career at ABC Australia to write this. Elizabeth Neuffer’s contacts were none other than the Assistant SecDec So/LIC, General John Keane, and another sensitive high-level source. You can see an article written by Neuffer on the Al Qaeda tapes here.

This letter is irrefutable proof that Ed Artis was the source and driving force behind this, and all of the stories which were done to discredit Idema. The woman it is written to has stated in a conversation that Robert Morris provided all the documents and information and was a confidential source for the story and worked together with Ed Artis.

In view of that, I found it interesting that Col. Bob Morris left a comment here saying, in part,

LEAVE ME OUT OF THIS.

Why? All evidence that I’ve examined indicates you’re deeply involved in this.

The public record to include the media articles on the matter are clear.

That is about to change. Enter: Exhibit A.

Lt. Colonel Robert Morris is the Active Duty Army officer who was helping to pull strings behind the scenes. Lt. Colonel Bob Morris is a psyops guy, and unfortunately, he was a friend of Jack’s before Jack discovered his illicit dealings with NGOs. Funny what money and greed can do to a person…Bob Morris was a Lt. Colonel, charged and arrested for defrauding the US Government out of millions for his phony humanitarian aid company, Partners International, using it to siphon millions from the U.S. government (and by extension, taxpayers like you and me). He was in business with Ed Artis, and an associate of Joe Cafasso. The three of them are running other websites to slander Idema and team. They tried to blackmail Idema’s wife, extort her, and repeatedly threatened her, hiring a felon “PI” to help harrass her. Morris was connected with Jalali and offered him bribe money to destroy Idema and the Northern Alliance. Is it any wonder why Lt. Colonel Bob Morris is carrying his portable hard drive around with him?

****************

FOX News provided a FOX memo/report written by Joe Cafasso and Bob Morris which concluded that the Al Qaeda tapes were fake. This report was reviewed and ABC Australia’s board of directors was informed that the Cafasso’Morris/Fox report was a complete lie.

Fox News lawyers met with Artis and Morris during an Army award ceremony for Fox’s Linda Vester, during this time they discussed how best to discredit Idema and how to establish the tapes were fake and made to defraud Fox and others. This was to be one of their defenses in the case against Fox and others. This letter is perhaps one of the most important pieces of evidence not just in Idema’s case against news agencies, but in Idema’s defense against allegations that he’s a fraud.

**************

Anne Delaney
Story Editor
Media Watch
ABC TV

Dear Anne,

I am puzzled as to where this is heading. Last week you were preparing a story based on the claim that the al-Qaeda tapes were faked. I gave you considerable detail pointing out how I concluded beyond doubt that the tapes were genuine. Moreover, I pointed out the logistical impossibility of them being faked either while the village was under Taliban control or after the Taliban and their Arab allies fled.

You now appear to be trying to piece together some other story based on my dealings with someone who was typical of the characters journalists have to deal with in war zones.

I take my reputation seriously, and will certainly take you and your program to task for any errors of fact or defamatory imputations against me.

I put you and other staff on notice to keep all research material related to this story, including all emails and notes of phone conversations.

To answer your questions in order:

1. Did you or the ABC give any undertakings to Jack Idema to broadcast the tapes?

No.

2. Can we see the contract signed by the ABC to use the Idema material? If not, why not?

I can’t show you this contract because I don’t have it. The only document I signed related solely to rights usage, giving the ABC unlimited rights to broadcast the material but not to on-sell it.

3. Other media claim that Jack insisted on being used as talent in any story that featured the tapes. Did Jack Idema make that part of the deal with the ABC?

No. And your assertion is not correct. The BBC did not use Jack.

4. Were you aware that Ed Artis from Knightsbridge International was warning people about dealing with Idema? If so when did you become aware of these warnings?

No. I had never met him or heard of him.

5. Did you know that your working script was used by Idema’s agents to market the tapes? How did they get hold of those scripts?

No, and I still don’t know. I have never had any communication with Jack’s agents.

6. You told us that you regarded Jack Idema as “basically a nut”. Why did you use him as a serious commentator and “counter terrorism expert” in your stories?

If I told you Jack was “basically a nut” it was in the context of him being the kind of person who goes to wars looking for something to do. War zones are full of them. However, I also gave you a copy of the chapters I wrote about Jack that give a broader and more considered description of the many complexities and contradictions of his character. In short, I made perfectly clear to you that I regard Jack as far more than “basically a nut”. That you disingenuously focus on this gives me further reason to conclude you are trying to selectively fit facts to a pre-conceived notion.

There were certainly aspects to Jack’s character that I would call crazy or nutty. In some ways he was also intelligent and gifted. He could be aggressive and obnoxious, as well as boyish and obsessively loyal. At times, he displayed a breath-taking cynicism. At other times he was astonishingly innocent. This may not fit with the simple profile you seem to be looking for, but unlike the commentators you’re relying on I actually knew him.

One thing Jack knew about in stultifying detail was weapons and military tactics. It was his passion in life as well as his expertise and he buried us stupid with his descriptions of it.

He had not only served in the US Special Forces, he had also run a private security training school int he US and had been hired by the Lithuanian government to train their new security forces. He was also training Afghan soldiers to protect convoys of journalists and aid workers from terrorist attacks.

I worked closely with several journalists checking out the tapes and Jack’s background and qualifications. One of my colleagues was Elizabeth Neuffer, an experienced and highly regarded correspondent with the Boston Globe. She had impeccable contacts in the US military, and volunteered to check out his credentials to comment on the tapes. Her conclusion was that he was a highly unsavoury character but was “one of the best people in the world to be talking about this.” Elizabeth was later killed in Iraq, but the articles she wrote about the tapes and about Jack attest to her conclusions about him.

I chose to include Jack in the stories as he had been central to obtaining the tapes, he had viewed them in their entirety, he had the expertise to comment on them and his dealings with the Northern Alliance gave him a good sense of the military situation in Afghanistan and the activities of foreign militants.

To state the obvious, the conclusions Jack drew from the tapes…that al Qaeda was training militants for kidnapping foreigners and conducting urban warfare…has turned out to be perfectly correct in Iraq, something the “expert” quoted in the Columbia Journalism Review chooses to ignore. You mentioned you were going to check out his qualifications for asserting that the tapes were faked, and ask him whether he had considered the logistical impossibility of an American filming a staged video with Arab extras in a village under Taliban control. Could you tell me what you found? (If not, why not?)

As to whether or not he was “serious”, Jack had a blind and passionate belief in the rightness of the US cause. I argued with him several times over this, but he had an unshakeable conviction that he was hunting down “the bad guys”. He was utterly serious and sincere when he talked about the danger he believed the tapes revealed and the need to continue persuing the militants who appeared in the tapes.

In short he had a typically American tendency to make black and white assessments, rather like the commentators on whom you appear to be relying.

7. You have told us that you heard that Jack Idema had been previously convicted two weeks before your story was broadcast. Did that information alter your view of his credibility? If not, why not? Why was his conviction not disclosed in your stories?

As I attempted to explain to you, this was a war zone. Afghanistan had been at war for 23 years. In war zones, particularly Afghanistan, the people you deal with and from whom you glean information are very often mass murderers, rapists, thieves and charlatans who also happen to generals, ministers and governors. On that scale, dealing with someone convicted of business fraud in the US eight years earlier was not something to be unduly shocked by.

When you report wars you work on the assumption that everyone is running some agenda and could be mixing truth with fiction. The job of a journalist is to try to separate the two. This is something people who have never worked in war zones may find hard to comprehend. But its’ the reality you deal with.

Jack’s fraud conviction, as well as his occasionally bizarre behavior, obviously made me and the other journalists working on the story look harder at the authenticity of the tapes. But we established that authenticity beyond doubt. We also established the certainty that Jack was an advisor to the Northern Alliance and that he was qualified to comment on military training techniques. From that point on, Jack’s past business dealings in the US were irrelevant to the story. As in any stories with time constraints, I presented the most important information in the limited time available.

8. In the stories you describe Jack Idema as “a special forces veteran”. What was your understanding then of Idema’s special forces record?

My understanding then was the same as it is now…that he became a Green Beret (a title soldiers continue to use in retirement), spent three years training in Special Forces and continued in the SF as a reserve.

9. Did Idema tell you he had been working for the US embassy, the Pentagon, the CIA or any other unit within the US Department of Defense? If so, did you accept those claims at the time of your stories?

Jack told me he came to Afghanistan under the auspices of the humanitarian aid group Partners International to carry out a civilian project for the Pentagon, namely finding out why Afghans were falling sick from eating food parcels. He never pretended to me that he was anything other than a civilian. He never mentioned anything about working for the CIA or the US embassy.

I didn’t see any reason to doubt his story about the food parcels. But since he not longer claimed to be involved with the project by the time I met him and it had nothing to do with the stories I was looking at, I really didn’t give it much thought.

You should take the time to read the chapter “Holy and Other Warriors” in the book “The Lion’s Grave” by the respected New Yorker writer Jon Lee Anderson. (I can lend you a copy). He was with me on the trip Jack took us on to Tora bora and wrote about Jack in great detail. His observations about Jack, including about the food parcels story, were similar to mine. If you know anything about international correspondents, you would be foolish to dismiss Jon as naive or gullible.

Here’s an excerpt.

Jack asked to see the palms of the men’s hands and concluded that they both were fighters. “This is from holding a Kalashnikov,” he said, pointing to Faiz Muhammad Ahmed’s calluses.

I asked if either of them had seen Osama bin Laden. Faiz Muhammad Ahmed said no, but Nassir Abdel Latif said that he had: “He was in Tora Bora for a long time and he was receiving a lot of visitors. Osama bin Laden told us; ‘Believe in us, believe in Allah, believe in me, in this jihad, we will win in the end.’ “ Nassir Abdel Latif stared at me directly with his pale brown eyes. “We did not come here to fight Afghans, we came here to fight Americans, and we will keep fighting until we destroy them totally.”

That seemed to make Jack happy, and Faiz Muhammad Ahmed tried to qualify things. “Most of us who were on Tora Bora wanted to fight Americans,” he said, “but not all Americans. Just those who are fighting Muslims.” I asked him if Osama bin Laden was still alive. “God only knows,” he said. And then our meeting was at an end. Jack raised his hand and wagged a finger at them. “America will come and get you,” he said. They didn’t reply.

Jack’s corps of Afghan bodyguards was an unruly group. They squabbled among themselves or with Jack over food and money, and once some of them threatened to kill Jack’s irritating young interpreter for trying to order them around. Jack told the boy to keep his mouth shut and to stick to translating what he said. But problems cropped up every day, and after some altercation with the fighters Jack turned to me and remarked, “Compared with the Afghans, the Haitians were fuckin’ easy. You just told ‘em, ‘Do this, motherfucker!” and they said ‘ok!” but not these guys.” He shook his head.

Jack was extremely critical of the way the U.S. military had handled things at Tora Bora. They had allowed undisciplined, untrained, and ill-equipped Afghans to carry out the bulk of the fighting while they remained in the background. “If we don’t fucking send some American advisers here we’re gonna be right back to where we were five years from now,” he said. “We failed the Afghans after the Russians left. We didn’t do any demobilization and normalization. There’s tens of thousands of soldiers and commanders with guns in this country! What’re you gonna do with ‘em? Instead of sending in five thousand British peacekeepers, we should send in a hundred instructors to teach them how to do it themselves. All these guys need is professional training. The less training an army has, the more dangerous it is.”

Jack said that he was born in upstate New York and the he lived now in Fayatteville, North Carolina. He was forty-six and had joined the Green Berets in 1974, when he was nineteen. “I spent twenty-five years in Special Operations in one form or another,” he said. “Except for a brief period in which I was trying to be a cop.” Was he still active duty, or was he retired? “I have no official relationship to the U.S. government,” he said, as if by rote. We played cat and mouse on this question, but Jack told me some of the places he had been as a U.S. military adviser. “I trained the U.S. Marine security mission in Haiti in 1980,” he said. He spent time in El Salvador, as well. “I was in Vilnius, Lithuania, during the coup in January ninety-one; also at the Moscow coup in August ninety-one. I was just there as assistance to pro-U.S. forces—with the Alpha group teams in Moscow. They were on the good guys’ side, the anti-Communists.” He had been involved in the Gulf War, as well. A couple of years ago, he’d resigned his Special Forces commission. “I was getting too old to carry a rucksack, and I had broken my back and my neck.”

So why was he in Afghanistan? “I just said I was goin’ one way or another, to some people in DOD”—the Department of Defense-he replied. His first mission was to provide ground assistance to the air drops of U.S. humanitarian aid rations. He had also conducted an investigation into the rumors circulating among Afghans that the rations were poisoned.

“I found out who did it,” Jack said, “and it was not Al Qaeda or the Taliban. And there wasn’t any poison. The people were eating the desiccant” –the preservative drying agent—“that comes in little packets in each ration pack. It says “Do Not Eat” in English, French, Spanish and Chinese. But not in Farsi or Pashto. They thought it was spices! So there were some severe injuries and several presumed deaths. One guy who died ate the Handi Wipes, the desiccant—everything. These people, I mean they don’t even have napkins, how do they know what a Handi Wipe is? I gather he thought it smelled good, so he ate it.” Other people had become ill, Jack found, because many of the ration packs had exploded on impact, and the food inside had been exposed and become contaminated. Jack said that he wrote a report that was sent to DOD, and about a week later the problems were sorted out.

“When that was over,” Jack said, “I went back to doing what I normally do, which is to advise foreign armies.”

Jack was often trying to contact people from the Pentagon to share information, and certainly had contact with the US Army Counter-Terrorism Group (I saw emails he sent and received) but it was always on the basis of being a civilian working with the Northern Alliance.

10. In the story you described Idema as an adviser to the Northern Alliance. What was the basis for that claim?

It is not a claim, it is a fact, unlike the speculative assertions from the distant and ignorant sources you seem to be relying on. I spent more than five weeks with the man in Kabul, Jalalabad, Tora Bora and Bamiyan. I saw the work he did, the people he mixed with and the resources he was given. I spoke at length to his soldiers and to his main liaison with the Northern Alliance, Syed Idris and had no doubt he was a formal soldier and senior advisor.

How exactly do you imagine an American civilian gets assigned more than a dozen Panjshiri soldiers under his direct command? How does he get lodgings in the Northern Alliance military barracks? How does he have daily meetings with Northern Alliance officials, who Jack claimed and his soldiers confirmed included the Defence Minister Mohamed Fahim and the Interior Minister Yunnis Qanuni? How does he get to know and be welcomed by the Northern Alliance’s most powerful commanders including the chief of the Eastern Shura, Hazrat Ali and the Hazara leader, Karim Khalili? How does he know to take us to a residence of Osama bin Laden’s before it has even been searched by the US military (the New Yorker writer, Jon Lee Anderson, describes this in great detail in “The Lion’s Grave”.)

Osama bin Laden and his men, of course, flourished during the Taliban’s tenure, only to retreat to their old haunts in the mountains near Jalalabad when the Taliban collapsed. They holed up in caves and bunkers in the Tora Bora mountain range and for more than two weeks fought off several ground offensives by local Afghan mujahideen. They were bombed by US warplanes and hunted down by American, Australian, Canadian, and British commandos. Then, suddenly, the Al Qaeda men had stopped fighting back, and vanished, presumably fleeing through the high mountains into Pakistan. The American bombing campaign was suspended, and together with their mujahideen allies, U.S. Special Forces soldiers began a ground search in Tora Bora’s snowy ridges for enemy survivors.

Osama bin Laden had several wives and several houses that, for security reasons, among others, he moved in and out of. One of the houses is in the village of Naji Mujahid, on desert plain just south of jalalabad. The house has high mud walls and metal gates. It and a gaggle of similar compounds form a dusty, trash-strewn pit stop strategically located on the jeep track leading to the Tora Bora foothills. Bin Laden’s compound is nondescript, a haphazard welter of mud patios and small square houses with Spartan rooms and alleyways leading to other cubicles. There were no flower beds, no decorations, and no furniture by the time I arrived. All that had been looted by the local mujahideen. Bin Laden had evidently had plenty of time to gather up his more valuable possessions before he left, and also to burn things he didn’t want left lying around. In several places there were blackened swatches of ground and heaps of charred paper.

There were also some unburned papers, and I picked up a page from an English-language Turkish defense magazine with the specifications for an electronic siren and public address system sold by Military Electronics Industries, Inc., of Turkey; an advertisement from the Swedish arms companyFFV Ordnance for a tank-busting rocket warhead, an operator’s manual for a portable radio transceiver made by Kachina Communications, Inc,; a tax-free shopping receipt for several digital multimeters that cost one hundred and seventy-three deutsche marks, purchased from Conrad Electronic in Munich on May 6, 2000. I also found an article from the November 1989 edition of Modern Electronics, entitled; “More on How To Detect Ultraviolet, Visible Light and Infrared,” the second of two articles on the subject of radiation.

While I was poking around the compound, accompanied by Jack and a platoon of mujahideen, a sharp-faced young Afghan man and several children wandered in to watch. The man, whose name was Redwarullah, said the he was a neighbor, and he confirmed that until a few weeks earlier the vaillage had been the home of a community of Arab families including that of Osama bin Laden. I asked Redwarullah if he thought bin Laden had masterminded the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. He said that he didn’t think so. “People here thought he was a very nice Muslim,” he said. My mujahideen escorts interrupted our chat and led me out of Osama bin Laden’s house. They explained that the inhabitants of Naji Mujahid were Al Qaeda supporters, and that it was best not to stay there too long. The next day, we drove up the jeep track beyond the village into a dramatic panorama of ravines and steep, rocky hills covered with scrube oaks and fir trees. Trails led through the diminishing tree line toward the jagged, snow-covered peaks of Tora Bora. It was there that bin Laden’s trial had gone cold.

The Afghan mujahideen militias who had been enlisted by the United States to launch the ground attacks at Tora Bora drove their pickups and Russian tanks purposefully around the flanks of the mountains, but there was no action taking place. The Western journalists who had come to witness the much-hyped last stand of al Qaeda were beginning to pull out of the area. Geraldo Rivera had moved on. The tent city erected for the press on a windblown lower ridge of the mountain was littered with satellite dishes, plastic bottles, cans, and wrappers of imported foodstuffs. It looked like a climbers’ base camp in the Himalayas, but it was shrinking, a process that had been hastened by a number of assaults and robberies perpetrated by the increasingly unruly mujahideen.

Up in the mountains, some Afghan fighters and a handful of reporters wandered cautiously around the site of a bomb-blasted Al Qaeda training camp. There were still Al Qaeda men in the vicinity, by all accounts. Some had attacked this very spot in broad daylight a couple of days earlier, sending mijahideen and journalists scattering for cover. Most of the trees that were still standing had been literally peeled, their branches shorn of twigs and bark by explosions, and what had been caves and underground bunkers was now an uncertain welter of mounds and holes. There was also the confused refuse left behind by human beings; pieces of ripped camouflage clothing, sleeping bags, hundreds of tin ammunition boxes with Chinese lettering, the yellow tags of unexploded cluster bomblets, and bits of paper. Here and there lay sections-huge ones-of American bomb casings. In the distance I could see an Afghan man chopping up the ravaged trees with an ax, preparing to cart the kindling away. The next day, a scavenger was blown in half by a partially buried bomblet.

I picked up a bull’s-eye that had been used for target shooting; some handwritten notes about ammunition supplies; an instruction sheet for Negram, a medicine for urinary and intestinal infections; and an English-language phrasebook for Arabic speakers. The phrasebook was illustrated with cartoonlike scenes people with men wearing suits and homburgs. Their faces had been inked out. Looking through the book, I wondered about the utility of some of phrases bin Laden’s warriors had learned; “It is nice to listen to good music on the radio.”; “Plenty of brushing improves your hair”; I am trying to keep the room clean, but he keeps putting things on the piano”; “Please don’t speak to my dog unkindly.”

It was hard to imagine an Al Qaeda volunteer living up in this bleak mountainscape, praying devoutly five times daily, medicating himself against stomach ailments while learning how to shoot properly, and in his free moments, boning up on his English so that, presumably, he would at some future date be able to negotiate his way into a Western country like England or the United States to carry out an atrocious mission in which he would most likely die.

On the way down the mountain, Jack, who was armed and wearing full combat regalia, clambered onto one of the mujahideen tanks with a tin of white paint and a brush. He wrote, “N.Y.P.D.” on the tank’s green steel carapace. The mujahideen smiled obligingly and asked to borrow his paint. In lacy Farsi script they added the words “Dear Massoud, we will follow your way.”

11. Were you surprised when you heard that Idema had been caught running a torture centre in Afghanistan?

As I mentioned in my book, I was surprised and appalled to learn last year that he had been running a private prison, though he denied press reports of torture and from my reading of the case no hard evidnece of this was presented in court.

I was also shocked by the farcical nature of the trial, and the cynical way in which the US embassy abandoned him to his fate, distancing itself from any possible further scandal in the wake of Abu Ghraib. (The US government also made blatant attempts to discredit him and appears to have pressured the Afghan government to falsely deny any connections to him…assertions some gullible journalists have taken as fact.)

But what exactly does that have to do with stories I did nearly three years earlier? I was no more in a position to judge what Jack might do in the future or how Afghanistan might effect him than I could predict some Special Forces soldiers would return from Afghanistan and shoot themselves or their wives, as has happened frequently.

Afghanistan literally had hundreds of private prisons run by Afghan commanders and entrepreneurs, many of them senior figures in the Northern Alliance funded by the US government. At the time I knew Jack I did not believe he was the sort of person who could sink to that level.

In order to give proper consideration to your response and to meet our production deadlines we would appreciate your response by 5pm Friday 4th March 2005.

I presume this means you have already made the decision to run this story (on Monday) before even hearing my response, suggesting you have pre-determined your angle without checking the facts. That is extraordinary given that the initial angle you were taking proved to be false and that you appear to be sailing into similarly shallow waters regarding Jack’s association with the Northern Alliance.

Your sincerely,

*signed*

Eric Campbell

***************************

This is the story that ABC Australia ran. The quotes are cherry picked in order to paint a negative picture of Idema, and the documentation was provided by Col. Robert Morris. Ed Artis is also used as a credible source. One of the pictures was represented as evidence that Jack was torturing Afghans, when, in fact, this was a dangerous man who was captured by Jack and tried to escape, injuring one of Jack’s men. This man was captured in May and his name was Sarajan who had nothing to do with Gulumsaki and the events in Jack’s safehouse that lead up to the arrests of July 6. Sarajan was turned over to Bagram AFB.

Eric Campbell, Jon Lee Anderson and Elizabeth Neuffer are three journalists worth noting who had personal experience with Jack Idema and his work in Afghanistan. They all have won prestigious awards for their reporting–unlike Mariah Blake of Columbia Journalism Review, Tod Robberson of Dallas Morning News, or Stacy Sullivan at New York Magazine. See the bios below. These people were in Afghanistan, knew Jack Idema, and witnessed the work he was doing there personally–first hand.

Eric Campbell began his life as a journalist at The Sydney Morning Herald. A series of career changes saw him languish in the backwaters of television, covering travel stories for a few years, but he fought his way out, eventually landing a job as the ABC’s Moscow correspondent in 1996. He spent the next seven years covering the former Soviet Union, Central Asia, the Balkans and China. He has reported for The 7.30 Report, Lateline and Foreign Correspondent. In 1999 Eric won a New York Television festival award for environmental reporting and was a finalist in the Australian Walkley Awards for his coverage of the war and humanitarian crisis in Kosovo. Last year his stories on al-Qaeda in Afghanistan won a Logie for best news coverage. Eric is married to journalist Kim Traill and they sometimes live in Sydney with their young son.

Elizabeth Neuffer’s career as a journalist had taken her to hotspots around the world including Afghanistan, Rwanda and Bosnia. She was known as a savvy, determined and fearless reporter who was relentless in her pursuit of a story.

She began her distinguished career with The Boston Globe in 1988. Over the years, she was a federal courts reporter, covered the Persian Gulf War in 1991, reported on the fall of the Soviet Union and the resignation of Mikhail Gorbachev, worked in the Globe’s Washington bureau where she covered the Clinton Administration’s efforts to reform health care, served in Berlin as the paper’s European correspondent, and mostly recently worked as the paper’s United Nations correspondent and roving foreign correspondent. Most recently, she reported extensively from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Iraq.

In 1997, Neuffer won the SAIS-Novartis Prize for Excellence in International Journalism for “Buried Truth,” a 10-part series of articles on war crimes in Bosnia and Rwanda. Paul Wolfowitz, then dean of the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) and now deputy defense secretary in the Bush administration, said at the time that the series demonstrated “exceptional qualities of reportorial perseverance, courage and commitment and brought important, unresolved issues to the public’s attention.”

Her reporting from Bosnia and Rwanda earned her a Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women’s Media Foundation in 1998.

As European bureau chief for The Boston Globe, Elizabeth Neuffer reported from some of the world’s most dangerous hot spots. She was menaced by gun-toting rebels, subjected to death threats, abducted by soldiers, robbed and threatened with rape. In 1994, Neuffer was one of only a few reporters in Sarajevo when a bomb exploded in a marketplace and killed 68 people. She helped pick up the bodies and then wrote her story.

During a 1996 interview with a Bosnia Serb commander about the execution of the Bosnian men of Srebrenica, the commander told her she was “asking too many dangerous questions,” and added, “too much truth is a dangerous thing.” Neuffer’s personal philosophy about truth is far different. As she sees it,

“The truth may be hazardous to those who tell it, but truth is not dangerous, disinformation is. As I saw in Bosnia and Rwanda, it is propaganda that fans the flames of hatred.”

Neuffer was an Edward R. Murrow Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and wrote a book about war crimes and post-war justice in Bosnia and Rwanda, “The Keys to My Neighbor’s House.”

She was killed in a car accident on May 9, 2003 while on assignment covering the aftermath of the war in Iraq.

In Elizabeth’s honor the Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship was created. Administered by the International Women’s Media Foundation (IWMF), this Fellowship is designed to provide an opportunity for a woman journalist working in the print, broadcast or Internet media to spend an academic year in a tailored programme that combines access to Boston-area universities and two media companies, The Boston Globe and The New York Times.

To honour her memory the UNCA media awards were renamed the UNCA-Elizabeth Neuffer Memorial Awards.

Jon Lee Anderson is a staff writer for The New Yorker.

One of America’s most respected foreign correspondents, Jon Lee Anderson is the author of “The Fall of Baghdad” (2004, ISBN 1594200343), an eyewitness account of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. Anderson is also the author of “The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches from Afghanistan” (2002), a riveting account of recent events in that war-ravaged country. Anderson’s 1992 book, “Guerillas,” features conversations with members of five guerilla movements: Afghanistan’s mujahedin, Burma’s Karen movement, El Salvador’s FMLN, the Polisario of Western Sahara, and the Palestinians of Gaza. “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life” (1997) is the book that established Anderson’s reputation as one of the great foreign correspondents of his time. The monumental 800-page biography draws upon interviews with people who had never before spoken publicly, as well as previously secret documents from Cuban archives. The “Sunday Times” of London called the book, “a masterly and absorbing account….”

The son of a U.S. diplomat, Jon Lee Anderson was raised and educated in South Korea, Colombia, Taiwan, Indonesia, Liberia, England, and the United States.

In the The Lion’s Grave: Dispatches From Afghanistan there is a chapter regarding Jack Idema called “Holy and Other Warriors” and Jon reports firsthand his observations of Jack and his work, who he was dealing with, and the dessicants in the food parcels story.

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