GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Jonathan Idema: Our Man in Kabul

Tiptoe to My Window

Within three weeks of landing in Afghanistan, Idema said, he rounded up the first of his targets, the man he believed to be linked to Osama bin Laden and the Al Qaeda plot to topple the provisional Afghan government, and handed him over to the U.S. Army's Task Force 180. Before they did, however, Idema and his men interrogated the cleric. In his report, Idema contends that he used what he would later describe as his standard interrogation techniques, including deception and sleep deprivation with the unusual twist of blaring "high-volume Melissa Etheridge music," as well as "the threat of allowing Afghans to do the interrogation."

Idema has repeatedly denied that he tortured any of the detainees and that he was particularly sensitive to the issue in the wake of the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. "Quite frankly...any M.P. to have them on a leash and have them walking around like...pets deserves to be in prison."

Alleged torture victim, Sheer Jan

But that doesn't mean that he believes in coddling his captives.

"If you want to take that guy and beat the hell out of him, or drown him to find out when the next bomb attack is, drown the mother... because we're not dealing with normal people here, OK?" Idema told Stuff magazine in the weeks before his arrest. "You don't cut their fingers off or shoot them in the leg. But there are other ways of torture that doesn't affect them physically. Three days you keep them up with sleep deprivation, they'll tell you anything. They just want to get it over with. You know what? I have found that everything they tell us turns out to be true."

Perhaps.

U.S. authorities say they determined that Idema had captured the wrong man, and released him.

But Tiffany says he suspects that the U.S. Army may be telling only part of the story. He acknowledges that the American forces did release the man, but only after he was interrogated for several weeks at several different locations in Afghanistan. "They could have let him go because he was not a terrorist," Tiffany said. "But who knows, they could have let him go because he was a terrorist and he turned double-agent."