Afghans Seize 4 Men Claiming to Be With U.S. Special Forces
Carlotta Gall
NYT, July 8, 2004
... Four men claiming to be Americans and posing as Special Forces commandos were arrested Monday by Afghan security agents in a raid on a house here, NATO and Afghan officials said Wednesday. At least eight men being held prisoner in the house and four Afghan interpreters were also detained, the officials said.
The four foreign men had sometimes posed as American soldiers and sometimes as peacekeepers for the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force in Kabul, an Afghan police officer said ...
... One of the men detained, identified as Jonathan K. Idema, was known to the military and had apparently been under surveillance. He was the subject of a media advisory by the United States military press center several days ago, which warned that he was an imposter pretending to be a member of the American military.
"U.S. citizen Jonathan K. Idema has allegedly represented himself as an American government and/or military official,'' the e-mail notice said. "The public should be aware that Idema does not represent the American government and we do not employ him." A military spokesman, Maj. Jon Siepmann, denied all knowledge of the arrests, but another American official said Mr. Idema was among those arrested ...
... "At least two are saying they are Americans and they give different names each time,'' Commander Henderson said. "There are two other foreigners but it is not clear if they are Americans." he said. The police also found four Kalashnikov rifles and some clothes with blood on them, he said ...
http://www.nytimes.com/pages/world/asia/index.html Al Qaida may have tried to kill Clinton
Martin Arostegui
UPI, February 6, 2002
... "The documents clearly list how presidential protective details are structured, what they do and what vulnerabilities to look for," said J. KEITH IDEMA, an American civilian adviser to the Afghan United Front, also known as the Northern Alliance, one of the members of the Afghan Interim Administration. IDEMA has analyzed captured al Qaida records, including graphic terrorist training video tapes recently aired on CBS' "60 Minutes" television program.
"Al Qaida studied the strong points and weak points of Secret Service protection, concluding that streets and open areas are the best locations for a presidential assassination," added the former member of the U.S. Army's elite special forces. An al Qaida assassination manual includes a study of U.S. presidential protection.
"Bodyguards always watch the crowd around the principal, instead of watching him," said one passage that concluded a relaxed, open setting would be the ideal environment for an attack. Another part of the text analyzes the sequence of vehicles in presidential motorcades, noting the heavily armed reaction teams go behind the presidential limousine.
"The terrorists could decide to take out the reaction team's vehicle first in order to isolate the president's car," IDEMA said.
High-level assassinations using mock-ups of city streets and golf courses were among the operations most frequently practiced at the Shomali camp, which was discovered virtually intact following the collapse of the Taliban regime. The 4-square-mile compound, where al Qaida's most hardened teams trained in urban guerrilla tactics borrowed from Israeli, British and American special forces, was never hit by U.S. airstrikes because satellite intelligence apparently failed to identify it.
IDEMA observed al Qaida did not train with sniper rifles or silenced weapons, preferring the shock effect of an ambush using heavy-duty weapons, like rocket launchers and machine guns. Their preference for spectacular assaults was demonstrated Sept. 11 when the terrorist network crashed hijacked airliners into the New York World Trade Center and the Pentagon ...
http://www.upi.com/print.cfm?StoryID=04022002-082828-8434r