Idema didn't know it at the time, but the series of dramatic raids he had conducted had brought Afghan authorities a little closer to nabbing a man that some coalition officials had come to view as a very real threat to stability in the region. They had even put out a wanted poster for Idema, urging anyone with information about his activities and whereabouts to contact authorities.

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Less than 10 days later, on July 5, in a raid reminiscent of Idema's own operations, Afghan authorities kicked down the door of Idema's rented house in Kabul, arresting Idema and his two associates, freelance cameraman Edward Caraballo and aspiring American journalist Brent Bennett, and their four Afghan aides. Afghan police led them out in flex cuffs. Presumably the Afghans did not have to borrow them from the Swedes.

Inside, they found a makeshift prison housing eight men - among them the men whom Idema's "Task Force Saber 7" had captured in June.

The Afghan prisoners, who were held by Afghan officials for up to six days while authorities sorted out their identities, have all denied any link to terrorist organizations, and have since testified that they were hooded and held without food or water. Some said they were doused with boiling water while others, authorities alleged, had been hung upside down and beaten. Evidence collected from the scene, including computer records and videotapes taken by Caraballo, were handed over to the FBI, which spent nearly three weeks reviewing the evidence.

It was enough to land Idema and his fellow Americans in an Afghan courtroom, where they faced up to 20 years on charges that included illegally entering the war-torn country, running an illegal jail, and illegal imprisonment of the eight Afghan nationals. As Lutfullah Mashal, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Department, put it in an interview with Stuff, they were also on trial for "torturing them without any legal permission or any contact with the government officers."

Days after the raid on Idema's Kabul headquarters, Idema's jailers released all eight of Idema's captives. In a barely disguised jab at the self-styled warrior, Deputy Interior Minister Mashal declared that investigators had concluded that "none of them were linked to Taliban or Al Qaeda...but the reasons that Idema might have thought that they might be terrorists is that they had long beards and...the turban."

The arrest of Idema and his cohorts was front-page news all over the world, coming on the heels of reports that American soldiers had tortured and abused prisoners at the notorious Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, and disclosures that other abuses had allegedly occurred at the hands of Americans, not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan as well.

Almost immediately, American officials tried to put as much distance as possible between themselves and Idema. At a press conference within hours of the raid, State Department spokesman Richard Boucher declared that the U.S. Government does not "employ or sponsor" the men.

Major Rick Peat, a spokesman for the U.S. military in Kabul, told Stuff, "Mr. Idema has never been employed by the combined Coalition Forces Command-Afghanistan." Peat acknowledged, however, that American-led forces did accept one prisoner from Idema's team, a man Idema had identified as a leader in the plan to assassinate key Northern Alliance leaders. "We took custody of him," Peat said. "Subsequently, we found out he was not the man Idema identified him as, and we released him," but only after holding him at a variety of locations and interrogating him for nearly two months.

Although officially, the U.S. government has remained neutral about the case, though Idema's supporters have said privately that they believe that American officials, perhaps seeking to distance themselves from any taint of torture in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal in Iraq, had urged the Afghan authorities to be as harsh as possible on the Americans.

But Idema continued to insist, as he had since he first returned to Afghanistan in April, that the top military officials both in Afghanistan and in Washington knew about his operation. In interviews with Stuff, however, Idema never claimed that he was under contract to the coalition. As he put it in an interview in June, "the Pentagon knows how I operate and they don't impede me at all."