GANGSTERS & OUTLAWS > COPS & OTHER CHARACTERS

Jonathan Idema: Our Man in Kabul

Defense of Idema

Again, Scurka defends Idema's version of the events. The way the veteran newsman remembers it, he was wounded by mortar fire while working on the front lines during a battle in Northern Afghanistan and was carried from a foxhole by two fellow journalists, Kevin Sites of NBC and Tim Friend of USA Today. The two administered immediate first aid, and Idema, moments later, re-dressed the wounds. It was only later, while bouncing along a rutted road while Scurka was being evacuated, that Idema noticed that his friend was still bleeding profusely from an exit wound that had gone unnoticed. He dressed Scurka's wound and stanched the bleeding.

Gary Scurka, wounded

"Here's the absolute bottom line," Scurka said. "It was Kevin and Tim that saved my neck on the hill and then later, in the car, while I was bleeding, it was Keith who may have helped [to] save my life during the ride. He was the only one to discover the real nature of the wound. That's the deal."

To friends like Ken Kelch, a former Green Beret and freelance filmmaker who has known Idema for more than a decade, Idema is tough and obnoxious, and he's also the real thing. "Keith is not a guy who likes to operate within the framework of set rules," Kelch said. "Here's a guy who's basically bankrupt, he leaves his wife -- his very beautiful wife -- to go to war, to do his patriotic duty."

And if. while doing his patriotic duty he could collect the $50 million bounty that the U.S. government has placed on Osama bin Laden's head, "if he could make a little money on the side," Kelch said, "so what?"

While much of the confusion over Idema's past might be ascribed to the fog of war, some believe that recently, the most strident voices speaking of Idema have been his detractors, and they have gained more attention now that he's is in trouble again. Big trouble.

Photographer Edward Caraballo

In July, three months after returning to Afghanistan, Idema and two associates - freelance cameraman Edward Caraballo and Brent Bennett, who claims to be a journalist - were arrested during a raid at their rented house in Kabul, charged with running a renegade military operation in northern

Afghanistan

. As part of that operation, authorities allege, Idema ran a makeshift Abu Ghraib-like prison in his home, where, according to Lutfullah Mashal, spokesman for the Afghan Interior Department, Idema and his men held at least eight Afghan prisoners, "torturing them without any legal permission or any contact with the government officers."