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

It is indeed puzzling to think that an American Green Beret could be sitting in a prison in Afghanistan for having fought the Taliban and for being active in the hunt for Bin Laden. Fighting terrorism, after all, is what we were lead to believe we were achieving in both Afghanistan and Iraq. But now a different picture has emerged in spite of the propaganda that’s being circulated by the MSM, and it is troubling.

Consider that Jack and his men in the original Taliban farce of a trial were accused of a) illegal entry into the country, and b) torture by Taliban appointees of the Karzai government and c) running a private prison.

All of these accusations, in retrospect, are laughable when you consider there were at this time, around 40 of these safehouses where terrorist subjects were questioned by the Northern Alliance and others, before they were turned over to Bagram AFB, at the time of Idema’s arrest.

Caraballo’s attorney makes the point at an interview at Democracy Now:

ROBERT FOGELNEST: And if you just look at it slightly below the surface, how does somebody get Shim’s and Boykin’s private numbers at the Pentagon? What do you do? Do you call information and say “I’d like to talk to general Shim.”? He was calling direct. And if they were merely making contacts — let’s say Amy decided to call and say, “I have captured a terrorist”. Do you think that the Pentagon would then call Bagram base and say, “go meet Amy out in the middle of the desert! She’s going to turn a terrorist over to you.” I mean, it’s with the slightest bit of evaluation, their statements are nonsense. Perhaps that’s why they wanted it tried in an Afghan court where there wouldn’t be any sort of scrutiny?

That’s right, sir. It’s obvious when you look at the evidence that Jack had contacts and phone numbers inside the inner sanctum of the American government and the military that some slick New Yorker scamming catch-me-if-you-can guy simply wouldn’t have had privy to, no matter how “slick” he was. This is simply called rendering. The only problem is, people are complaining about rendering terrorists rather than the rendering of American citizens. These are the same people who compare terrorists with George Washington and “freedom fighters” and look down on the Northern Alliance (our true allies against the Taliban) and guys like Jack, calling him a “mercenary” and a “hired gun”, and using the term ‘militia’ as if it’s a dirty word. If that is not upside-down, backwards and totally anti-American, I don’t know what is. Who are these guys again?

Gettysburg

But people representing our founders’ ideals today like Jack Idema are instead described as ruthless barbarian mercenaries rather than the true heroes they are, and THIS GUY is the “freedom fighter”, instead.

At Democracy Now, they have a transcript of some interesting evidence with regard to Idema’s ‘illegal entry’–here is Ed Caraballo’s attorney.

ROBERT FOGELNEST: Ed, who was doing a documentary, documents the entire thing on video, including handing over passports, filling out disembarkation forms; the head of the airport, a man named Haji Timor, hugging and greeting them; Jack Idema going up to the huge picture of Masood, the great Northern Alliance leader who was assassinated two days before September 11, and kissing the poster; Baba Jan, the chief of the national police and Kabul police being there and hugging Jack, if I remember correctly on the tape. Now, in the proceedings that occurred before John Tiffany and I arrived in Kabul, Baba Jan was sitting in the audience for, I’m told, three sessions, watching what was going on and sitting silently as the prosecutor was claiming that they snuck in with false Indian passports into Afghanistan. If it weren’t so serious, if these men were not currently confined in an eight by six cell that’s filthy, sleeping on the floor with six other men, many of whom are al-Qaeda terrorists themselves, and if their lives weren’t in danger, this would be hysterically funny, but it’s not. It’s very serious.

Their arrest was based on completely false charges, and their subsequent torture at Saderat extreme interrogation facility actually lived up to what the Taliban appointees had accused them of.

Here’s Jack himself in the transcript from the recent Mike Levine show:

Jack:Zorro was electrocuted, he was tortured, he was beaten, he was chained. Another one of my guys, a Major in the United Front- he was electrocuted for 5 days we heard him scream-I had both of my retinas detached, my collar bone broken, my rotator cuffs in my shoulders both torn out, 5 broken ribs. John still saw how beat up I was when he got there a month and a half later. When this occurred, this was in the Saderat the extreme interrogation facility in Kabul, there were FBI guys in the hallway and they were laughing about it.

While as Michelle Malkin points out, the British moonbats are in a tizzy over out-sourcing “torture” in Uzbekistan, amazingly, both sides here in the States are silent about Jack and his two American friends, Ed Caraballo the journalist and Captain Brent Bennett. The media, and even bloggers overall are mum about the tail of the Americans tortured at the hands of the NDS in Afghanistan.

Now this is something I have a difficult time wrapping my mind around. You mean–the Americans were accused by the Taliban Karzai appointees of something that the NDS actually did to them? The answer, sadly, is yes. What is worse, is NDS was acting as American FBI proxies. Sadly, the American public doesn’t know about it. The media crucified these men during their Taliban trial, and celebrated their sentencing one year ago this past September.

Idema and his men had video footage and picture evidence to clearly demonstrate what they were doing at their safehouse, the officials they were in contact with, and CBS was also there documenting it. The fact that the officials that Jack was in touch with on both sides (both Afghans and Americans) backed off when the ridiculous allegations against him and his men came out, is not only shocking, it’s despicable. The fact that CBS hid what they knew is equally so. The FBI took much of this video and picture evidence at trial, that they could have used to defend themselves, and returned some of it in front of the media, yet the media reported nothing about it.

Jack was honorable enough to declare that the second trial should be held in secret so as not to expose certain high level officials in both governments. Doesn’t this demonstrate that he wasn’t in this for a media extravaganza, for self promotion, and all the other things they say about him? He was honestly looking to do what was best not only for the Afghan people, but for the American government, as well. Just the fact that he has America’s best interests at heart reflect poorly on those who would call him a “mercenary”. A “mercenary” is someone like Victor Bout, who doesn’t care where the money comes from or what side he is supporting as a result. Victor Bout is an individual who only cares about the money. But you can’t say that about Jack Idema, that theory is not supported by the facts. In addition, the MSM has been completely silent about the results of the second trial; where they found the original judge and accusors players were “former Taliban” (can someone ever be FORMER Taliban?), that the “torture” allegations were completely false, and they were declared innocent. INNOCENT!

Jack has said on radio talk shows that he realizes that he’s “expendable”. Sadly, that’s precisely how the government is treating him after years of representing special forces, and training foreign armies on behalf of the American government.

I supposed it’s the job of a Green Beret that has people baffled; it’s not something that a normal soldier is trained to do. But Green Berets are the cream of the crop; they’re brilliant and often speak many languages. They’re trained to adapt to a foreign country’s culture, and to emerge after being dropped behind enemy lines, with a fully- trained indigenous fighting force.

Karzai and others have offered him literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to stand by them and protect them from the forces which could rise and kill them, yet Jack has turned them down. He doesn’t work for Blackwater or any number of other American companies whose employees actually serve in the ‘merc’ capacity, so this is yet another reason why the “mercenary” moniker just won’t stick.

Certainly at a time when a new government is going through its growing pains, where men who killed one another on the battlefield sit tensely side by side for the first time in over 20 years of war, it’s conceivable that you would have some assassination attempts, and the men who fear those attempts should protect themselves.

Take a look at this picture and the story behind it.

PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI’S Chief of Anti-Terrorism standing with Jack during one of the raids and getting briefed on the operation (Picture courtesy of the ISAF Liaison Team). According to the Police Chief and ISAF personnel present, Karzai’s Chief then called Karzai on site to tell him of the operation’s success in finding the explosives which would be used for their assassination plot. Only problem? Karzai thought it was a plot against him. When Karzai found out the plot was against his political opponents, he wanted support withdrawn, as did American Pashtun Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.

BUSTED! So is this the reason why Jack and his men are now in prison–that he foiled a Taliban assassination plot? That would have clearly made way for the Taliban to rise again? And what of America’s complicity in this? Embarrassing for the State Department! What about what the American public has been lead to believe about this fight in the war on terror and all the blood and treasure it has cost thus far? While this past year was the bloodiest year in Afghanistan since 2001 when we were fighting the Taliban alongside the Northern Alliance, I think “somebody’s got some ’splainin’ to do.”

We should be asking many serious questions of our elected representatives, not the least of which, is why are the Americans still being held when they were declared innocent of the original charges in December of 2004?

PLEASE NOTE: The SuperPatriots and Jack images on this site are used with WRITTEN COPYRIGHT PERMISSION and any use by any third party is subject to legal action by SuperPatriots.US

jack idema
afghanistan
Technorati Search
for Jack Idema

Thanks to Mudville Gazette, Outside the Beltway