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January 04, 2006

Do Not Underestimate Jack or Bloggers That Support Him

Why do I make posts every Wednesday about Jack Idema????

Because I believe that when we send someone in our Military to do a job we should back them up. And we should never leave anyone behind, not ever. We should NEVER use our service members for making deals with other counties as was done in the Vietnam War with American POW’s, nor now in this war on Terror, this war against Islam and it’s terrorists!

Jack Idema has served this country and served it well! He deserves better then he is getting. Proven innocent several times in the court in Afghanistan and yet not free.

His Special Ops and SF background includes more than two dozen SF, Special Ops, police, counter-terrorist and classified courses and schools. He is an expert in counter-terrorism, intelligence asset development, and hostage-rescue, with more than 25 years' experience in all of these. He's currently employed by the Counter-Terrorist Group U.S. (CounTerr Group) as a CT Operator in a direct action capacity against international terrorism, specifically, Al Qaeda and related terrorist groups.

CounTerr, aka CounTerr Group, is an organization based in the US that leads counter-terrorism activites in support of US government initiatives. Counter Group conducts training, organization, direct action, HUMINT, and advisory services to foreign and domestic agencies. Counter Group has been in operation , in various forms, in various countries, for approximately 27 years. Counter Group began deploying personnel to Afghanistan and other countries just weeks after 9/11 as part of the effort to combat Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and other terrorist forces such as the Taliban. Counter Group's foreign operating group and CONUS personnel worked in conjunction with Commander Massoud's Northern Alliance, which were primarily responsible for the liberation of Afghanistan with US Army Special Forces and Special Ops units.

For more than 27 years Jack Idema has defended his country in Latin America, South America, Eastern Europe, Africa, the Mid-East, South East Asia, Central America, and finally, South West Asia. For more than a quarter of a century Jack has worked in counter-terrorists projects and activities which may never be known or written about but which have kept America and its allies free from oppressors and terrorists.

In a letter dated January 7, 1976, Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, School Commandant, who became famous as the Commander of Delta Force, commended Jack on his "perseverance":

" During that selection course you excelled by meeting every requirement set upon you, whether it be arriving at your objective on schedule, navigating across hazardous terrain, evading detection or leading an ambush. The initiative you took and the motivation you showed in attaining every objective of a course that was designed to be impossible to complete reflects greatly upon yourself and Special Forces."
[Signed,] Charlie A. Beckwith
Colonel, Infantry
Director, Special Forces School

.

One of the most galling aspects of the campaign to free U.S. Special Forces soldier Jack Idema and his compatriots, Brent Bennet a journalist Ed Caraballo, from their illegal detention in Afghanistan has been the attitude of big media toward the case. Over the past weeks, I've written a great deal about the failure of MSM and human rights groups to shine a spotlight on either the abuses Idema and his men have suffered, or the fact that he is being held illegally, following an appeal that overturned the original guilty verdict against him.

Certainly, the fact that the media has failed to report Jack's conviction was overturned, or that the ex-judge he detained was, in fact, linked to senior terrorists, or that the witnesses who accused him of torturing them were proved to have lied -- Certainly, these are the most serious failures in big media's reporting of the case. But they're not the only errors MSM have made.

See, if you do a search for 'Idema' over at the BBC, the $6b news organization returns a total of 16 hits all which are filled with references to 'bounty hunters', 'vigilantes' and 'secret prisons'. Over at the Guardian it's the same, with another 16 stories, all concerned with Idema's arrest and trial. This is a pattern that you'll find repeated time and again across almost the whole of MSM. It's as if, prior to his arrest in July 2004, Jack Idema simply didn't exist.

... But why should this be surprising? After all, didn't Jack Idema first come to the media's attention after his arrest? Wasn't the trial in September 2004 the first time anyone outside of the secretive world of Special Ops had heard of him? Well, in a word, no:

In the dusty courtyard outside, Jack, an American special adviser to the Afghan military, treated Afghan injuries, stitching a fresh bullet wound in one man's lower leg. Even without anesthesia the soldier was thankful for the treatment. As the Green Beret wiped the blood splatters from his face a dozen Afghan fighters looked on, they have never had this kind of support in 23 years of war.

This passage, originally written for United Press International during Operation Anaconda, features an early sighting of Idema, hard at work with Northern Alliance troops as they fought the Taliban in 2001. Note that, at this time, the press weren't questioning Idema's credentials --He's correctly identified as an 'American special adviser' and 'Green Beret'. Also bear in mind that most of the stories quoted from today have been quietly disappeared from their original locations -- Were it not for the fact that the SuperPatriots have maintained copies of the material, much of it wouldn't be easy to find on the internet today.

A year later, and another UPI report on the near-capture of none other than Osama bin-Laden again places Jack Idema in the thick of the action:

'I immediately suspected Bin Laden was one of them' says Jack, the American advisor to the Afghan Northern Alliance who was first informed about the location of the fugitives on December 18 while he was on a trip to Jalalabad. 'Only the top of Al Qaida would be protected and treated in that way.'

And, from the same piece, Idema's position in the Northern Alliance is detailed:

General Hazrat Ali and Commander Sami Ali worked with Jack for three years, calling him their greatest ally and friend against al-Qaida and the Taliban. It was those fiercely independent yet loyal troops that had followed Jack into the Kut Tangai mountains after approval from General Mohammed Fahim, Minister of Defense, in search of bin Laden. This was the last time Osama bin Laden was ever spotted.

And again. This time around, UPI are reporting on Idema's involvement in the rescue of high-ranking Afghan officials from a terrorist attack:

"Jack," as the special advisor to the Afghan military is known, managed to rescue the President of Afghanistan's Ariana Airlines, Robullah Amain, who had escaped from the mob and was surrounded in a terminal office. Along with seven Afghan commandos, Jack rescued Amain, Haji Timor the airport manager and five others and escorted them to safety. An ISAF spokesmen claimed that a small team of British soldiers supposedly helped to save the national airline executive from certain death. Ariana President Robullah Amain confirmed that in reality, it was an American Green Beret and his Afghan soldiers.

And, finally, a report on the assistance Idema brought to victims of the Nahrin earthquake in 2002:

Wearing a khaki-and-brown, U.S. flag patch on his shoulder, sporting a beard and carrying an assault rifle, Jack drove through Nahrin in a local van with a translator asking people if they needed help. He'd already bandaged more than 30 children by the afternoon and used up five boxes of field dressings - and quite a few happy-face bandages. Jack, who began visiting the village late last week, stopped in one tent Saturday to see a baby who was born while her mother, Sharifa, was buried under the rubble. Eight months pregnant when the Monday evening quake hit, Sharifa crouched for an hour on her hands and knees under the rubble to protect her newborn until they were rescued. Sharifa asked Jack, who also treated her back injury, to name the daughter: He chose "Suzzana," or "new beginning" in the Dari language [Suzzanaya Viktoria as her full name]. "I thought I was dead and I thought the child was dead for sure," the mother said as Jack tenderly examined the infant to check an eye infection he had treated the day before.

So let's put all this together. Far from being a 'mysterious figure' (as the BBC called him at the time of his trial), Jack Idema is a man who was:
- Well known to the media during the course of his work in Afghanistan.
- Was repeatedly referred to as an 'American special advisor' and an 'advisor to the Northern Alliance' by the media who later denied all knowledge of him.
- Was known to Generals in the Northern Alliance who described Idema as their 'greatest ally and friend against al-Qaida and the Taliban'.Led the hunt for bin-Laden.
- Led Afghan commandos in a rescue of senior Afghan officials.
- Is a hero to the ordinary Afghans he rescued from their earthquake-devastated villages.

So why, when the BBC are called on to write up a profile of Jack Idema, do they introduce him in the following way:

Idema always claimed to be a defender of American values, a patriotic ex-special forces soldier working on the front-line of the US war on terror, with the full backing of the Pentagon. There are plenty of people who never believed him. Others say they did - and now regret it.

And why do so many of the search results for 'Idema' only refer to material from the point of his 2004 arrest onwards?

Well, Idema's arrest and trail made for a good news item; exactly the kind of thing the post-Abu Gharib media were looking for. Here, they had the story of a 'rogue' U.S. soldier 'torturing innocent' Afghans in a 'private jail'. To many left-wing journalists, this must have seemed like a gift from heaven.

But here's the thing: if MSM had told the full story, the one detailing Jack's hunt bin-Laden, his service with the Northern Alliance during Operation Anaconda, his rescue of government officials, his bandaging injured Afghan children as they cheered his name -- If MSM had told that story, well, then, people mightn't have been so quick to swallow the line they were being fed about Idema hanging prisoners upside down in his (non-existent) basement.

More to the point, people might be more willing to listen to those of us who are pleading for Jack Idema and his men to get a fair hearing today.

So what can we do? Well, anyone reading this with their own blog can sign up for the weekly Free Jack Idema Blogburst by emailing Cao and tell her you want to join the Free Jack Idema Blogburst or Rottweiler Puppy for details. I'd urge everyone to do this!!

If you want to know more about the story,
Cao's Blog has a large section devoted to Jack Idema. There's also a timeline here, and of course a huge amount of information if available at  SuperPatriots.US, without whose work done none of us would have learned about Jack's story.

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

Big Dog's Weblog
Cao's Blog
Rottweiler Puppy

You can also contact the following people and make your feelings known:

Posted by Wild Thing at January 4, 2006 02:09 AM

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Comments

Posted by: RightToCarry at January 4, 2006 08:53 PM

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Posted by: Wild Thing at January 4, 2006 10:19 PM

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Posted by: RightToCarry at January 5, 2006 05:05 AM

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