YAMAHA_Jim
07-12-2004, 07:10 PM
This one is very long but its still good reading.I dont think that bin laden is in Afghanistan.I dont think he was in Afghanistan during 9-11-01 either.
The Murky World Of Afghanistan's Soldiers Of Fortune
By Nick Meo
The Sunday Herald - UK
7-11-4
They hang out at Kabul's Mustafa Hotel, muscles and automatic weaponry on display, guzzling beer and flirting with the giggling Thai girls flown in to staff the hotel's new massage parlour and beauty salon.
The American ex-soldiers who have flocked to Afghanistan tend to be men of mystery, their ranks dominated by laconic Southerners.
They are to be found in the Irish bar of the Mustafa, a former secret police detention centre hurriedly converted into a hotel after the fall of the Taliban and now run by an Afghan-American car dealer from New Jersey.
Over expensive glasses of Jack Daniel's, they swap hair-raising tales, compare weaponry and joke with the massage parlour girls who dress in camouflage waistcoats.
In reality, the most exciting it gets for most of these macho men is guarding Western businesses for several hundred dollars a day, and usually they cause little trouble ñ even in the bar.
Last week, however, Afghanistan's most flamboyant soldier of fortune was seized by Afghan security forces with two American and four Afghan sidekicks at a private torture chamber he was running in the basement of a Kabul house.
What the Afghan police found when they stormed in after a brief shoot-out was as surprising as it was disturbing.
Eight terrified men with long beards, showing signs of beatings, were imprisoned, three of them hanging upside down, their feet tied with ropes.
Exactly what information former-Green Beret Jonathan K Idema was trying to extract from them was not clear.
But the incident has turned a spotlight on Afghanistan's murky world of private security men and freelance bounty hunters, men who inhabit a world of shadows and live lives straight from the pages of airport thrillers.
Or fantasise about doing so, at least. Idema, however, is the real deal. Afghan officials said after arresting him that the former Special Forces soldier turned bin Laden-hunter was an anti-terrorist vigilante and "rebel".
He was hurriedly renounced by the US authorities in a press release that claimed he had been masquerading as an American government representative.
American sensitivities to the Idema torture case have been heightened by the US military's own ongoing Afghan prison abuse scandal, which mirrors the one in Iraq, with claims that prisoners died under interrogation.
The most popular theory about Idema speculated that the prisoners were being tortured to provide information on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts. Idema is thought to be chasing the $25 million (£13.4m) bounty on the al-Qaeda leader, as well as avenging 9/11. Or possibly the victims were business rivals in the illegal gems-smuggling or antiquities trades, which some say the American is involved in.
Idema, known as "Jack", turned up in Afghanistan as a freelance advisor to the Northern Alliance with no official link to the US military. He claims to have killed Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north to Kandahar in the south, and says he tracked down Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora during the campaign which almost snared al-Qaeda's leader.
Individuals such as Idema are usually thought to be CIA operatives, but unlike the agency's retiring types, Idema loves publicity and has wooed the news media, offering videos he said he found in terrorist camps which showed al-Qaeda members training.
Idema was a major source for a best-selling book, Taskforce Dagger: The Hunt For Bin Laden. Although it was a hit with armchair warriors, the Special Forces soldiers it lionised ñ intelligent men who speak several languages and can plan intricate military campaigns in the most difficult circumstances ñ found the book a disappointment, too gung-ho and bloodthirsty for their sophisticated tastes. The book made Idema out to be one of the great unsung heroes of the campaign to get rid of the Taliban.
The New Yorker magazine even called him Afghanistan's Colonel Kurtz, after the deranged soldier in Francis Ford Coppola's classic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now, who wages a bloody campaign against communists in Cambodia. Idema, however, believes he is more George Clooney than Marlon Brando, who played Kurtz in Coppola's film.
Since his seizure it has emerged that Idema is also involved in a $130 million legal action, claiming that he was the inspiration for Clooney's character in the thriller The Peacemaker, about a maverick Special Forces officer who saves Manhattan from a terrorist nuclear bomb. Idema claims, as Clooney's character does, to have saved the US from terrorists ñ he did so by intercepting uranium in Lithuania which was about to fall into the clutches of a terrorist group.
Idema joined the Green Berets in 1975 aged 18, just missing the Vietnam war. He claims to have trained extensively in anti-terrorist operations with the SAS at Hereford.
He says that in 1992 he retired from the army and set up his own business, and it is not clear whether he ever actually saw combat before arriving in Afghanistan. Since his arrest, however, it has been claimed that he served only three years full-time in the army. Other reports have said he spent three years in a US jail for fraud.
Task Force Dagger describes him, ambiguously, as one of the most controversial soldiers ever to serve in Special Forces, and quotes TV journalist Dan Rather, who met him during the brief war to topple the Taliban. Rather described him as "politically incorrect, abrasive, unconventional, and unquestionably heroic".
On September 12, 2001, Idema answered the patriotic call to duty, a sort of living embodiment of George Bush's "Dead or Alive" rhetoric and an avenging latter-day Wild West figure on the trail of al-Qaeda.
Not all the Western security men in Kabul see him as a hero, however. One said: "What this guy was doing was not exactly heroic, unless you are an admirer of the SS. What the hell was happening in this torture chamber?
"This kind of thing could cause problems for us all."
Others think of him more fondly. Afghan shopkeeper Mohammed Shah said: "He's a friendly guy and he always wants to stop and chat. He is very interested in the history and culture of Afghanistan."
Idema seems to have vanished for some time before his arrest, perhaps going on the run, and in the Mustafa Hotel nobody claims to have seen him recently.
He is not Kabul's first mercenary to land himself in trouble. Freelance ex- military men seem to play a significant role in the secret intelligence war against terrorists in Afghanistan, perhaps because they have more freedom of action than serving soldiers and they cause less of a political problem if things go wrong.
That was the claim made by ex-SAS man Colin Berry after he was involved in a shoot-out in his Intercontinental Hotel room which left two Afghan arms dealers dead.
Berry was accused of murder and thrown into one of the capital's stinking jails, only released last summer after nearly a year in jail and with many questions still unanswered. He maintains his innocence, claiming the men had been killed by his CIA handlers who left him to take the blame.
Before his arrest he was gathering information on the opium trade and trying to buy back stinger anti-aircraft missiles sold to anti-Soviet guerillas in the 1980s, which it is now feared could be used against coalition aircraft.
The arms dealers were selling weapons to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he said, describing them as the "scum of the earth" and claiming they were involved with Iranian intelligence.
His CIA contacts had decided it was time to assassinate them, Berry says, and they asked him to lure the two men to a lonely mountain road but he refused. Instead, the CIA men tried to arrest the Afghans in Berry's Kabul hotel room where they became violent and shot him in the stomach. Then they were blasted to death by the Americans in a cowboy-style shootout.
Berry says he was warned to remain silent but recounted his tale to bemused Afghan investigators only after he was abandoned in jail by the CIA, who had promised to get him out.
"I was basically hung out to dry," is how he put it, although the British embassy poured cold water on his story.
He is back home in Essex writing a book which threatens to blow the lid off the intelligence war. His account promises to fill in what is, in effect, a blank space. Hardly anything is known about how Special Forces and spooks operate in Afghanistan, although they played a decisive role in the Taliban's fall by directing warlords and air strikes, and are still thought to be the most effective weapon against surviving terrorists.
It does seem, however, that the military professionals sometimes have problems with the freelancers ñ perhaps the true cause of Idema's and Berry's troubles.
Rumours of ex-soldiers-turned-bounty-hunters in Afghanistan or in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province are widespread, but such individuals keep a low profile if they really exist. They would be competing with the world's biggest military, and face formidable problems operating in dangerous tribal territory.
But there are plenty of CIA and SAS veterans of the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign who are familiar with Afghanistan's languages and culture.
They may be able to take short-cuts not open to their military ex- colleagues, such as torturing suspects.
And for some bored retired soldiers, the lure of adventure and bounty at the ends of the earth may prove irresistable.
The Murky World Of Afghanistan's Soldiers Of Fortune
By Nick Meo
The Sunday Herald - UK
7-11-4
They hang out at Kabul's Mustafa Hotel, muscles and automatic weaponry on display, guzzling beer and flirting with the giggling Thai girls flown in to staff the hotel's new massage parlour and beauty salon.
The American ex-soldiers who have flocked to Afghanistan tend to be men of mystery, their ranks dominated by laconic Southerners.
They are to be found in the Irish bar of the Mustafa, a former secret police detention centre hurriedly converted into a hotel after the fall of the Taliban and now run by an Afghan-American car dealer from New Jersey.
Over expensive glasses of Jack Daniel's, they swap hair-raising tales, compare weaponry and joke with the massage parlour girls who dress in camouflage waistcoats.
In reality, the most exciting it gets for most of these macho men is guarding Western businesses for several hundred dollars a day, and usually they cause little trouble ñ even in the bar.
Last week, however, Afghanistan's most flamboyant soldier of fortune was seized by Afghan security forces with two American and four Afghan sidekicks at a private torture chamber he was running in the basement of a Kabul house.
What the Afghan police found when they stormed in after a brief shoot-out was as surprising as it was disturbing.
Eight terrified men with long beards, showing signs of beatings, were imprisoned, three of them hanging upside down, their feet tied with ropes.
Exactly what information former-Green Beret Jonathan K Idema was trying to extract from them was not clear.
But the incident has turned a spotlight on Afghanistan's murky world of private security men and freelance bounty hunters, men who inhabit a world of shadows and live lives straight from the pages of airport thrillers.
Or fantasise about doing so, at least. Idema, however, is the real deal. Afghan officials said after arresting him that the former Special Forces soldier turned bin Laden-hunter was an anti-terrorist vigilante and "rebel".
He was hurriedly renounced by the US authorities in a press release that claimed he had been masquerading as an American government representative.
American sensitivities to the Idema torture case have been heightened by the US military's own ongoing Afghan prison abuse scandal, which mirrors the one in Iraq, with claims that prisoners died under interrogation.
The most popular theory about Idema speculated that the prisoners were being tortured to provide information on Osama bin Laden's whereabouts. Idema is thought to be chasing the $25 million (£13.4m) bounty on the al-Qaeda leader, as well as avenging 9/11. Or possibly the victims were business rivals in the illegal gems-smuggling or antiquities trades, which some say the American is involved in.
Idema, known as "Jack", turned up in Afghanistan as a freelance advisor to the Northern Alliance with no official link to the US military. He claims to have killed Taliban from Mazar-e-Sharif in the north to Kandahar in the south, and says he tracked down Osama bin Laden at Tora Bora during the campaign which almost snared al-Qaeda's leader.
Individuals such as Idema are usually thought to be CIA operatives, but unlike the agency's retiring types, Idema loves publicity and has wooed the news media, offering videos he said he found in terrorist camps which showed al-Qaeda members training.
Idema was a major source for a best-selling book, Taskforce Dagger: The Hunt For Bin Laden. Although it was a hit with armchair warriors, the Special Forces soldiers it lionised ñ intelligent men who speak several languages and can plan intricate military campaigns in the most difficult circumstances ñ found the book a disappointment, too gung-ho and bloodthirsty for their sophisticated tastes. The book made Idema out to be one of the great unsung heroes of the campaign to get rid of the Taliban.
The New Yorker magazine even called him Afghanistan's Colonel Kurtz, after the deranged soldier in Francis Ford Coppola's classic Vietnam movie Apocalypse Now, who wages a bloody campaign against communists in Cambodia. Idema, however, believes he is more George Clooney than Marlon Brando, who played Kurtz in Coppola's film.
Since his seizure it has emerged that Idema is also involved in a $130 million legal action, claiming that he was the inspiration for Clooney's character in the thriller The Peacemaker, about a maverick Special Forces officer who saves Manhattan from a terrorist nuclear bomb. Idema claims, as Clooney's character does, to have saved the US from terrorists ñ he did so by intercepting uranium in Lithuania which was about to fall into the clutches of a terrorist group.
Idema joined the Green Berets in 1975 aged 18, just missing the Vietnam war. He claims to have trained extensively in anti-terrorist operations with the SAS at Hereford.
He says that in 1992 he retired from the army and set up his own business, and it is not clear whether he ever actually saw combat before arriving in Afghanistan. Since his arrest, however, it has been claimed that he served only three years full-time in the army. Other reports have said he spent three years in a US jail for fraud.
Task Force Dagger describes him, ambiguously, as one of the most controversial soldiers ever to serve in Special Forces, and quotes TV journalist Dan Rather, who met him during the brief war to topple the Taliban. Rather described him as "politically incorrect, abrasive, unconventional, and unquestionably heroic".
On September 12, 2001, Idema answered the patriotic call to duty, a sort of living embodiment of George Bush's "Dead or Alive" rhetoric and an avenging latter-day Wild West figure on the trail of al-Qaeda.
Not all the Western security men in Kabul see him as a hero, however. One said: "What this guy was doing was not exactly heroic, unless you are an admirer of the SS. What the hell was happening in this torture chamber?
"This kind of thing could cause problems for us all."
Others think of him more fondly. Afghan shopkeeper Mohammed Shah said: "He's a friendly guy and he always wants to stop and chat. He is very interested in the history and culture of Afghanistan."
Idema seems to have vanished for some time before his arrest, perhaps going on the run, and in the Mustafa Hotel nobody claims to have seen him recently.
He is not Kabul's first mercenary to land himself in trouble. Freelance ex- military men seem to play a significant role in the secret intelligence war against terrorists in Afghanistan, perhaps because they have more freedom of action than serving soldiers and they cause less of a political problem if things go wrong.
That was the claim made by ex-SAS man Colin Berry after he was involved in a shoot-out in his Intercontinental Hotel room which left two Afghan arms dealers dead.
Berry was accused of murder and thrown into one of the capital's stinking jails, only released last summer after nearly a year in jail and with many questions still unanswered. He maintains his innocence, claiming the men had been killed by his CIA handlers who left him to take the blame.
Before his arrest he was gathering information on the opium trade and trying to buy back stinger anti-aircraft missiles sold to anti-Soviet guerillas in the 1980s, which it is now feared could be used against coalition aircraft.
The arms dealers were selling weapons to al-Qaeda and the Taliban, he said, describing them as the "scum of the earth" and claiming they were involved with Iranian intelligence.
His CIA contacts had decided it was time to assassinate them, Berry says, and they asked him to lure the two men to a lonely mountain road but he refused. Instead, the CIA men tried to arrest the Afghans in Berry's Kabul hotel room where they became violent and shot him in the stomach. Then they were blasted to death by the Americans in a cowboy-style shootout.
Berry says he was warned to remain silent but recounted his tale to bemused Afghan investigators only after he was abandoned in jail by the CIA, who had promised to get him out.
"I was basically hung out to dry," is how he put it, although the British embassy poured cold water on his story.
He is back home in Essex writing a book which threatens to blow the lid off the intelligence war. His account promises to fill in what is, in effect, a blank space. Hardly anything is known about how Special Forces and spooks operate in Afghanistan, although they played a decisive role in the Taliban's fall by directing warlords and air strikes, and are still thought to be the most effective weapon against surviving terrorists.
It does seem, however, that the military professionals sometimes have problems with the freelancers ñ perhaps the true cause of Idema's and Berry's troubles.
Rumours of ex-soldiers-turned-bounty-hunters in Afghanistan or in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province are widespread, but such individuals keep a low profile if they really exist. They would be competing with the world's biggest military, and face formidable problems operating in dangerous tribal territory.
But there are plenty of CIA and SAS veterans of the 1980s anti-Soviet campaign who are familiar with Afghanistan's languages and culture.
They may be able to take short-cuts not open to their military ex- colleagues, such as torturing suspects.
And for some bored retired soldiers, the lure of adventure and bounty at the ends of the earth may prove irresistable.