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Americans Sentenced in Afghan Torture By STEPHEN GRAHAM Associated Press Writer Three Americans - led by a former Green Beret who boasted he had Pentagon support - were found guilty Wednesday of torturing Afghans in a private jail and were sentenced to prison. After a 7 1/2-hour session in a stuffy Kabul courtroom, the three-judge panel was unanimous in convicting the former soldier, Jonathan Idema, and his right-hand man, Brent Bennett, on charges of entering Afghanistan illegally, making illegal arrests, establishing a private jail and torturing their captives. They were sentenced to 10 years. Edward Caraballo, a cameraman who said...

Rachel Maddow - Creepy Jack Idema

KABUL, Afghanistan, July 10 - Journalists remember him as Jack, an eccentric, heavily armed and at times, it seemed, dangerously unbalanced, middle-aged former American Special Forces soldier, who appeared in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001. Surrounded by armed Afghan guards and rumors that he worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, he quickly rose to prominence. In the next two years, he was interviewed by Fox and CBS News, helped write a book called "The Hunt for bin Laden" and said he had discovered evidence in Afghanistan that linked Iraq to Al Qaeda. This week, Jack, a convicted felon...

Former CBS News anchor Dan Rather is teaching an online course in journalism called “finding the truth in the news” at UDemy. Now, he’s taken to Facebook to say that the media, the American people, and the political class has to call out President Trump on his lies. No, this isn’t the Onion.“These are not normal times. These are extraordinary times. And extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures,” wrote Rather. “What can we do? We can all step up and say simply and without equivocation. "A lie, is a lie, is a lie!" And if someone won't say it, those...

PHOENIX (CN) - The Arizona Department of Corrections said it will replace its for-profit prison health care company with another profit-seeking firm, after a federal class action that claimed the state provides "grossly inadequate" medical care to prisoners. Corizon Inc., of Brentwood, Tenn., "will be responsible for the provision of health care to inmates at the Arizona Department of Corrections' ('ADC') state-run facilities" beginning March 4, according to a filing in the pending court case. Corizon will replace Pittsburgh-based Wexford Health Sources. The ACLU, which filed the class action nearly a year ago, was not impressed.

KABUL, Afghanistan - An American jailed for two years in Afghanistan on charges of torturing alleged terrorists in a makeshift jail was freed two months early on Sunday after a government decree. Edward Caraballo, 44, from New York, waved to reporters at Kabul's international airport as he arrived in the back of a four-wheel drive vehicle accompanied by heavily armed American security personnel. A U.S. Embassy official said an American consular officer accompanied Caraballo to the airport from the Pol-i-Charki prison, where he had been held since July 2004. He later caught a flight to Dubai, United Arab Emirates, on...

The US military today acknowledged it held an Afghan man for a month after receiving him from three American counter-terror vigilantes who have since been arrested on charges of torture at a private jail they ran in the Afghan capital. The American military has tried to distance itself from the group, led by a former American soldier named Jonathan Idema, insisting they were freelancers working outside the law. But spokesman Major Jon Siepmann acknowledged that the military had received a detainee from Idema’s group at Bagram Air Base, north of Kabul, on May 3. Siepmann said Idema had appeared “questionable”...