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

Red Hot Cuppa Politics found an interesting little tidbit on Jack originally reported by the Conservative Voice.

Jack Kouri, writes in Conservative Voice:

A nationwide campaign by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents against unlicensed money transmittal businesses and underground “hawalas” has resulted in the arrest of 140 individuals, 138 criminal indictments, and the seizure of millions of dollars in illicit proceeds since the enactment of the USA Patriot Act, which requires such businesses to be licensed and registered.

What’s mind blowing about dragging Idema into this piece about millions of dollars, 140 inviduals and 138 criminal indictments, is that Jack’s alleged involvement amounted to less than $1,500 during a period of time when he wasn’t even in Afghanistan.

To understand a little bit about why the hawala business was so good, Afghanistan deals entirely in CASH. There are no credit cards there–and that is why wire transfers from the States are a common occurrence.

Here’s the definition of hawala from Answers.com:

Hawala (also known as hundi) is an informal value transfer system used primarily in the Middle East, Africa and Asia.

Its origins are not entirely clear, but it is believed to have been used first in the financing of long-distance trade in the early medieval period on trading routes such as the Silk Road, the Eastern Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean. Hawala is mentioned in texts of Islamic jurisprudence as early as the 8th century. In South Asia, it appears to have developed into a fully-fledged money market instrument, which was only gradually replaced by the instruments of the formal banking system in the first half of the 20th century. Today hawala is probably used mostly for migrant workers’ remittances to their countries of origin.

In the most basic variant of the hawala system, money is transferred via a network of hawala brokers, or hawaladars. A customer approaches a hawala broker in one city and gives a sum of money to be transferred to a recipient in another, usually foreign, city. The hawala broker calls another hawala broker in the recipient’s city, gives disposition instructions of the funds (usually minus a small commission), and promises to settle the debt at a later date.

The unique feature of the system is that no promissory instruments are exchanged between the hawala brokers; the transaction takes place entirely on the honor system. As the system does not depend on the legal enforceability of claims, it can operate even in a defunct legal and juridical environment. No records are produced of individual transactions; only a running tally of the amount owed one broker by the other is kept. Settlements of debts between hawala brokers can take a variety of forms, and need not take the form of direct cash transactions.

The fact that Jack’s name was brought up in a piece talking about millions of dollars of transactions amid 140 individuals, should most certainly give a person pause.

What boggles the mind is that the Conservative Voice would report something like this on Idema as relevant without doing any fact checking. The original press release that came out of California didn’t include any information on Jack. But the amended press release that came out of Washington, did. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner was savvy enough to put all that together. That should give you an idea as to what’s REALLY happening here. The only connection, it appears, between the pressuring of Jack’s family and the hawala incident is the same forces are at work to go after him as a ‘convicted felon’ and a fraud….the same kind of rhetoric you’ll find when you see what’s in print about his ‘wire fraud’ conviction for ‘aiding and abetting’ when the principles in the case were let go and were allowed to keep the material! The only thing he did was vouch for those people, he didn’t have anything to do with the alleged “crime” that was committed. The principles cut a deal to testify against Jack, and because they did, they were let go. Put together the facts, and you have a different picture altogether.

If we’re going to talk about Idema and less than $1,500, let’s talk about what that money actually went for, and who it was being sent to, considering that Jack (according to Bumback) is an altruistic individual who isn’t motivated by money, and the additional fact that Jack was in the US at the time this alleged transaction took place.

According to media idiots,

On Friday, May 20, Noor Alocozy, 41, a native of Afghanistan native living in San Francisco, pleaded guilty to federal charges of operating an unlicensed money transmittal business that funneled nearly $1 million to Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere. The investigation by ICE, the FBI, DEA, and IRS revealed that Alocozy’s business had been utilized by Jack Idema, the former Green Beret-turned bounty hunter who is currently imprisoned in Afghanistan for allegedly torturing Afghan civilians. During the investigation, Alocozy provided ICE investigators with copies of business ledgers indicating that Idema used Alocozy’s business to send funds from the U.S. to Afghanistan, presumably in support of his quest to capture Osama bin Laden and collect the $50 million reward.

Yeah right. Tell me another one. Idema is a “bounty hunter”? What proof is there of this? The “Hunt for Bin Laden”? That makes just about as much sense as calling him a “mercenary”. Both of those accusations paint a picture of a guy who’s ‘in this for the money’–when in actuality, he has never asked for a dime from anyone since 9/12/2001. As his friends and associates have told me, he either a) wouldn’t be eligible to collect the reward or b) would give it all away to help the Afghan people. As unbelievable as it is to leftists who tally up the value of their homes, what kind of car you drive, how much money you’re investing, to determine how successful you are–this guy doesn’t think in terms of how much money he’s going to make off of something, his motivation is to do the next right thing. He sends money from the States to friends who are asking for his help because their families are starving. There aren’t too many folks like that in the world, and the journalists who are doing the reporting certainly don’t have any frame of reference for that philosophy whatsoever.

My question is, if Jack was “in it for the money”, why would he be sending his own money over to Afghanistan, and why is this paltry amount of less than $1,500 newsworthy? Notice they don’t even reference the amount, or where it went. This is again a cherry picked news report to paint Idema in a negative light. And what is the date of this hawala transfer? I can’t seem to find that anywhere. Alcozy ran his business from July of 2002 to October of 2003, so you could safely assume that this alleged transfer occurred within that time frame.

Frau Budgie also was astute enough to find the News14 in S. Carolina, item that talks about Idema’s wife Viktoria and friends and how they are being pressured to help gather evidence against him. Note that news item is dated January of 2005, so it’s old news (but not as old as the hawala story). The time frames for these two pieces are not even remotely connected. They’ve ALREADY been questioning his friends and associates, they’ve been doing it since they were declared innocent last year. The News 14 piece is dated January 2005. What follows is what actually happened in JANUARY OF 2005. Friends and associates of Idema have been going through this for AT LEAST a year now.

Viktoria was arrested by law enforcement at the behest of the FBI and was questioned without her attorney present, illegally, without a legal warrant for her arrest, based on an alleged 6?-year-old probation violation (have to research how old that was). It was a trumped up charge in order to put pressure on Viktoria to give up Jack’s sources when the men were declared innocent and the FBI assumed he would be returning to the country, and they wanted to make damned sure they had something on him when he got back. Are these people crazy enough to think that Jack would be talking Counterterrorism with his wife? Guess so. Up until this point, I have tried to keep Viktoria out of this, in order to respect her privacy, considering the terrible things that have happened to her as a result of all this. My apologies, Viktoria.

Look at this page at Superpatriots.

when the fbi couldn’t break jack and his guys and get them to reveal their intelligence sources inside al-qaida, they took the next logical step- they went after jack’s wife. Hey, get a good look at this guy on the left- this is what your tax dollars are paying for- 6 dozen Dunkin Donuts a day- you think maybe the Marshals and FBI could spend some of that doughnut money on training agents how to check warrants and read an NCI check before they kick a door down? On the other hand, they knew the arrest was illegal before they did it.

This might sound hard to believe, but believe us when we tell you that this is STANDARD FBI procedure– always go after the wives and families to coerce people into cooperating. If you watch The Sopranos you probably know this, but still think it’s just the movies. Well, it’s not. The FBI trains their agents at Quantico on exactly how to use wives and children to force “targets” into cooperating. The thing that is really egregious about this is that Jack and his guys were, and are, fully cooperating with other intelligence agencies and with the DOD and several foreign intelligence groups against al-Qaida– they just didn’t want to work with the FBI and get their (Jack’s) guys killed. Unable to coerce Jack and the others to cooperate, the FBI decided to pull a Soprano’s move. In early January 2005, the FBI directed the US Marshals Service to arrest Jack’s wife on a phony warrant.

They arrested her in the early morning, storm-trooping Captain Bennett’s house in Fayetteville. The FBI didn’t do it themselves, they sent the US Marshal’s Violent Felony Fugitive Task Force to hit the house, and five fat sloppy donut eating gun pointing “Marshals” went in on a 117 pound girl who walked dogs for a living. The Marshals handcuffed bystanders, threatened a US Army Master Sergeant (who has been taking care of Brent’s house while he is away) with arrest, and threatened to shoot Jack and Viktoria’s dogs with their Glock Pistols.

“I’ll blow that dog’s fucking head off,” the 300 pound slob said pointing his weapon at her dog. Now it wasn’t like these were Rotweilers or Pit-bulls or something. They are well-behaved extremely well-cared for lap dogs that were cowering behind Viktoria in her pajamas. And there was no doubt that Viktoria was cowering– she had no idea of whether they were there to arrest her, kill her, beat her, or might kill her dogs, which are basically her whole life now. Jack managed to reach one of the Marshals on the phone as they were searching the house (without a search warrant we might add) and promptly informed them he was going to “sue the shit out of” them (and apparently a few other choice comments).

The Marshals later claimed it was only a “cursory search.” It was an illegal search nonetheless. Of course nothing illegal was found. But, we’re surprised that they didn’t plant something– that would have been standard FBI procedure. According to a source inside the Marshals Service, when the Marshal’s “Fat Boy” Squad found out the real story and why they had been sent there, the Marshals turned her over and immediately left pissed off at being used by the FBI (they weren’t smelling doughnuts, they were smelling a lawsuit– good nose).

The FBI then attempted to interrogate Viktoria for three hours even though they had been informed by Viktoria and multiple lawyers that she was not to be questioned without an attorney present, she only had about a dozen representing her by then. The FBI ignored the lawyers and threatened her with ten years in jail if she didn’t cooperate and tell them everything she knew about Jack’s Afghan missions, his intel assets inside al-Qaida, and who he was “working for or with at the Pentagon.” One of the interrogators was Bob Burda, an agent that had repeatedly visited Viktoria’s Pet Resort during the year before and repeatedly asked her out to lunch. Now Agent Bob was claiming she was a violent, high-risk armed and dangerous felon. So just for clarification purposes, ask yourselves this; why would an FBI agent who was a prime culprit behind Viktoria Idema’s arrest, not arrest her months before, knowing she was supposedly this “high- risk armed and violent felony offender,” not to mention that it was not even her they wanted information about, but Jack– (big surprise coming for Burda- he was taped on surveillance cameras during these prior visits and rumor has it that Jack’s lawyers now have the tapes). Meanwhile, two attorneys in Texas were working overtime on a Friday night to sort things out, and by the end of the evening, Texas had confirmed that there was NO LEGAL warrant for ANYTHING. We should also note that this woman was a stockbroker who was arrested for white collar financial crimes during the Michael Milliken era 15 years ago and has not gotten even a parking ticket since.

The Cumberland County Sheriff’s Office, where she was being held during FBI interrogation, promptly notified the FBI that the was no valid warrant and they were releasing her immediately, apologizing to her, and escorting her home. The Sheriff and the Under-Sheriff jumped through hoops to protect her, and for that they should be commended. A lieutenant in the Sheriff’s Office also provided testimony about what the FBI had done, and allegedly called the FBI agents “a bunch of fucking assholes.” We can’t agree more.

Bumback was also questioned by the FBI, and his account of it was that they were “fishing” for something to get Idema on, because they know he’s going to be released, and they want to nail him on something (no matter how idiotic it is) when he gets back into the country.

Anyone remember Randy Weaver’s wife Vicki? The FBI killed her, and paid $3 million dollars to Weaver’s family to keep a jury from hearing the details of that case. Quite frankly, it’s amazing that Viktoria and her dogs are still alive.

If this isn’t grounds for a Congressional investigation what is? Are soldiers and DOD contractors serving in Iraq and Afghanistan going to start having to worry about what the FBI will do to their wives, mothers, and daughters if they run afoul of FBI policy or refuse to work for the FBI? Because that is the bottom line. Private jails, torture, illegal counter-terror operations is all a bunch of hype and bullshit. Jack refused to work for the FBI, and the bottom line is that if Jack started working for the FBI tomorrow, he would be free, all his guys would be free, and Jack would be getting medals. Welcome to Post 9/11 and the Patriot Act, fellow Americans.

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