Idema takes a fall in
Afghanistan By Ramtanu Maitra
On September 16, Jonathan Idema was convicted in
Afghanistan on charges of torture and other crimes.
Idema was arrested after Afghan police found eight men
tied up or hanging in his private prison in Kabul.
Idema, a former member of the US Special Forces, claimed
that he was acting at the behest of sections of the
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the US Defense
Department, including deputy under secretary of defense
for intelligence General William Boykin.
The
conviction of Jonathan "Jack" Idema was a foregone
conclusion. To begin with, Idema, a paid mercenary, is
dispensable. Second, by all accounts he was - despite
denials - assigned to do the job by Boykin, who in turn
reports directly to the under secretary of defense for
military intelligence, Stephen Cambone. Had the charges
been reviewed in depth at a fair trial, Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld and even Vice President Dick
Cheney could have been implicated. While the high-ups
condone and protect the methods applied by the lower
ranks, but stay aloof from incriminating details, both
Boykin and Cambone are certainly more vulnerable.
Not another Abu Ghraib But that could
not have happened. After the Iraqi prison abuses in Abu
Ghraib became public, and the Pentagon went into full
swing to control the damage before it reached the top,
the Idema case was a non-starter. Already the stench of
prison abuse and the torture and death of detainees in
Afghanistan had begun to make the rounds. Washington
found it necessary to shut down the Idema-run operation,
put him to trial in a kangaroo court in an occupied
country, and send him to jail for 10 years.
The
Human Rights Center at the University of California,
Berkeley, has made an account of prison abuses by the
Americans in Afghanistan available online. The report,
albeit unpublished, was prepared by Afghan military
investigators, and includes a separate memorandum by
officials of the United Nations Assistance Mission in
Afghanistan, several other official Afghan documents,
and interviews with a number of people with direct
knowledge of the story. The story tells about the arrest
of eight Afghan soldiers by US Special Forces on March
1, 2003, at a checkpoint in a remote mountain pass in
southeastern Afghanistan in detail.
Although
they were allies, they were suspected as Taliban or
al-Qaeda. They were subsequently taken for interrogation
to Gardez. Seventeen days later they were released and
handed over to the Afghan police. They had been severely
beaten and tortured, and one was dead. Whether the
Pentagon will ever carry out an investigation of this
sordid affair is anyone's guess. But even if they do,
the bureaucratic machine can easily bring such an
inquiry to a standstill, at least until the US
presidential election campaign is over in November,
without determining who is to blame.
The Idema
case was different for various reasons. Unlike those
unnamed US Special Forces operating in remote areas of
Afghanistan, Idema was a former Green Beret who used to
hang around Fort Bragg in North Carolina for assignments
from the Special Forces. Reports indicate that in 1991,
when the Soviet Union fell apart, Sergeant Jonathan
Keith Idema was sent to Lithuania to gather information.
At the time, one columnist pointed out that "Idema's
admirers claim Keith wowed the Lithuanian KGB guys by
out-shooting them at the firing range and out-drinking
them in the officers' club afterwards".
The
Big Kahuna The next year, 1992, Idema became the
star at a Pentagon briefing by delivering the startling
news that since the Soviet breakup, weapons-grade
nuclear material had been not leaking, but pouring into
the hands of the international terrorist underworld.
After the Pentagon briefing two men approached Idema and
said, "Great work, sergeant. We're FBI [Federal Bureau
of Investigation] and CIA. Give us your sources over
there and we'll continue your great work."
It is
evident that Idema is part of a network, referred to as
black ops, that functions in the shadows. As far as
Idema is concerned, he has perhaps never functioned
within legal parameters in his entire life. He is a
cutthroat mercenary who gets paid on oral contracts and
is left out in the cold to chill when things do not work
out right and sensitive issues get exposed. That he did
not get a fair trial should be no surprise because he
worked for those who have the power to protect
themselves.
On the other hand, despite
railroading the case and stonewalling the evidence, the
Pentagon left behind enough documents to make clear why
Idema needed to be silenced. With the presidential
elections a few weeks up the road and the Bush
administration's role in Iraq and Afghanistan getting
more negative attention than before, any exposure made
by Idema could affect the US electorate in a bad way.
During the trial, Idema's lawyer, John Tiffany,
began to play a videotape - shot by Edward Caballero,
one of the two other Americans convicted and who was
making a documentary to establish a connection between
Idema and the Pentagon - of Idema's conversations with
Boykin's office. The judge cut the presentation off
summarily, however, and ended the trial. He refused to
accept any of the defense's documents into evidence.
In the video, Idema spoke with a Pentagon
employee named Jorge Shim who promised that someone from
the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) would call Idema
back on his cellular phone. Subsequently, Shim told the
media that he had spoken to Idema on more than one
occasion.
Boykin in the background In
one conversation, Idema is heard telling Shim that he
was close to rounding up a whole cell of terrorists. The
aide responds: "I told General Boykin that you called. I
gave him the information and to the DIA." Idema says:
"There are more bombs and more bombers, and we are
hitting them in five hours."
The aide replies:
"Five hours? Jack, I'm going to have someone from the
DIA contact you on your cell number, so give me a few
minutes." A set of the videotapes that were presented as
evidence but were not allowed to be played is now in the
hands of the organization Democracy Now. The group
contacted Pentagon spokesperson Lieutenant-Colonel
Christopher Conway to clarify the connection between the
Pentagon and Idema. "We did not employ, sanction or
sponsor Mr Idema," he told the group.
While
Conway claimed that the relationship between Idema and
the Pentagon was largely one-sided, lawyers for Idema
have released a video that appears to show Idema making
arrangements with a Pentagon official about handing over
a suspected terrorist he had caught. Democracy Now asked
Conway about this, and he confirmed that Idema had
indeed helped the Pentagon capture a suspected
terrorist. But he again denied any formal relationship
between Idema and the Pentagon.
The Pentagon was
clearly anxious to protect both Boykin and his boss,
Cambone. As Seymour Hersh wrote in his article "The Gray
Zone" in The New Yorker in May, Cambone was unpopular
among military and civilian intelligence bureaucrats in
the Pentagon, in essence because he had little
experience in running intelligence programs; instead, he
was known for his closeness to Rumsfeld. In 1998,
Cambone had served as staff director for a committee,
headed by Rumsfeld, that warned of an emerging
ballistic-missile threat to the United States.
Cambone's name came up prominently during the
Abu Ghraib investigations. He was recorded as saying
that Boykin had briefed him on a report, which was
prepared by Major-General Geoffrey Miller, on ways to
improve intelligence-gathering at Abu Ghraib, that said
Military Police (MPs) should help set conditions for the
"successful exploitation" of detainees. Cambone went on
to say that neither he, Miller, nor Boykin thought the
report was "tantamount" to asking MPs to engage in
abusive behavior.
Boykin, for his part, is a
former commander of Delta Force. He goes way back to the
aborted attempt to free American hostages in Iran under
president Jimmy Carter, which sank Carter's re-election
campaign in 1980. He was part of the commando unit that
failed in the attempt to rescue the hostages held at the
US Embassy in Tehran.
Boykin's fangs
show Boykin was also involved in Somalia, and a
variety of hot spots around the world, including the
first Gulf War in 1991. He is one of the most
experienced special-operations commanders in the US
military. It is not unlikely that he knows Idema at a
personal, as well as at a professional, level.
More than his background as a man in uniform,
what has drawn attention to Boykin is his virulent
Christian fundamentalist views targeted against Islam.
On the record, he has said that terrorists are trying to
destroy the US because it is a Christian nation. He told
a Muslim warlord that his own god was a real god, and
the Muslim warlord's was an idol. Rumsfeld, Boykin's
boss, defended him, saying the comments were made in a
"private capacity". He also praised Boykin's
"outstanding record", which spans 30 years in the US
Army's Delta Force, Special Forces and the CIA.
There are many who agree that Boykin should have
been removed from his post after his religious views
came to light last fall. "I'm amazed, given that we have
such horrible press overseas and are spending hundreds
of millions of dollars for propaganda, that President
[George W] Bush would keep somebody who is definitely
anti-Muslim and who possibly is in charge of
interrogations," said Yvonne Haddad, a professor at
Georgetown University.
In the chain of command,
Boykin ranks above military intelligence officers in
Iraq, some of whom have been implicated in the prison
abuse scandal. His name briefly surfaced at a Senate
hearing when discussion turned to a report that
recommended that Military Police work closely with
military intelligence officers in getting information
from detainees that could be used to fight the
anti-American insurgency. MPs should be "actively
engaged in setting the conditions for successful
interrogation and exploitation" of prisoners, the report
said.
With the help of his "protectors", Boykin
weathered the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse charges. And now
the Idema case has been dispensed with. For the time
being, Boykin is in the clear. As for Idema, there is no
reason to shed crocodile tears. He will continue to
function in the shadows, and will have no difficulty in
understanding why Boykin cut him loose.
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