Does the United States have to take him back?
Why can't we just leave him in Afghanistan?
Operation Desert Fraud
How
Keith Idema marketed his imaginary Afghan war.
By Stacy Sullivan
Jonathan
Keith Idema, awaiting his verdict outside an Afghan court.
(Photo: Reuters/Ahmad Masood/Landov)
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. The source of the tapes, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan
Keith Idema—known familiarly as Keith—was more than a little dubious.
Idema claimed to be working as an adviser to the Northern Alliance, but he was also an ex-con who had served three years in federal prison for wire fraud and had a criminal record in three states. He was, in addition, a serial litigator who had once sued CBS. But the tape’s content—featuring masked men in a bullet-scarred compound training to assassinate and kidnap world leaders—proved a TV producer’s dream.
It may have also proved too good to be true. Mary Mapes, who famously vouched for the documents purporting to show that George W. Bush was given preferential treatment by the Texas Air National Guard, was the producer of the segment. CBS News arranged for Dan Rather to fly to Kabul for an interview with
Idema. 60 Minutes II touted its footage with the promise that it was “the most intimate look yet at how the world’s deadliest terrorist organization trains its recruits and what it wants them to do to the West.”
Special Forces soldiers, other journalists, and Army Intelligence immediately questioned the tapes’ authenticity. Tracy-Paul Warrington, formerly a chief warrant officer with U.S. Special Forces who now advises American police forces on counterterrorism, says the tapes are not an intimate look at anything—except clumsy military playacting. “Eighty-five percent of terrorists’ attacks in the last decade have been bombings,” Warrington says. “In this film we see raids. This was a method that went out in the seventies, when
Idema was in the Army. I was looking at seven hours of tape of something that Al Qaeda doesn’t do.” Another retired Special Forces soldier, and a longtime acquaintance of
Keith Idema’s, contacted CIA sources and learned the agency had similar concerns about the tapes’ authenticity. “The CIA ran voice analysis on the tapes and concluded they were staged,” he says, adding that the agency didn’t publicize its findings because it “didn’t want to waste its time on someone it considered harmless.” Contacted about this claim, CBS spokeswoman Kelli Edwards said the network “showed the tape to three former British Special Forces officers, who verified the tactics being practiced in the video were consistent with those of Al Qaeda, and to a top U.S. military official in Aghanistan, who told us that, in his opinion, the video was authentic.” In the terror-charged atmosphere of early 2002, in any event, there was no public outcry over the piece’s authenticity.
That could well change soon, as many things concerning the life and career of
Keith Idema already have. Among other things, it is now clear that
Idema was anything but harmless: On September 15, an Afghan court sentenced
Idema to a ten-year prison term on charges of entering the country illegally, running a private prison, and torture.
Idema had been accused of operating a detention–cum–interrogation center in concert with another former U.S. soldier and a TV cameraman, who were sentenced alongside him the same day. When Afghan police arrested the trio on July 5, they said they saw a smaller-scale version of the gruesome prisoner-abuse photos from the Baghdad interrogation cells in Abu Ghraib. Early press reports indicated that three prisoners found in Idema’s custody during the raid were blindfolded and beaten and strapped to the ceiling by their feet; five others were tied to chairs with rope in a small, dark room down a hall that was littered with bloodied clothing. All of the prisoners in Idema’s custody were subsequently released; none was shown to be connected to Al Qaeda.
Intelligence experts analyzed the CBS tapes and “determined they were staged,” one source says.
http://nymag.com/nymetro/news/people/features/10121/
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