First, I'd like to thank those who encouraged me to accept the gracious invitation to write here at the National Writers Syndicate. 

First up:  I'll begin with what I believe to be one of the biggest, if not THE biggest story in the war on terror: The story of Jack Idema. 

For those who don't know, Jack Idema is an unsung hero, former special forces soldier, and Green Beret, featured on the cover of the Hunt for Bin Laden by Robin Moore, who has come close to capturing and/or killing Osama Bin Laden at least 7 times.  He has a long history of working in counterintelligence and human intelligence, long before the WoT (War on Terror). 

The WoT made it 'vogue' to be in counterintelligence.  So we find along the way, people like Joe Cafasso, At Fox News, the Colonel Who Wasn't, who tried unsuccessfully to tranform himself into  a military counterterrorism analyst.

Let's begin with this: I've been following this story from my blog, Cao's blog, since September of 2004.  I didn't really pick it up or get in contact with any of the people involved until some time later, but you can see all the posts at my blog on the Jack Idema story here. 

There was an article about Idema that flashed across the news wires on May 29, 2007, which demonstrated that the media is still not only determined to get Idema's story wrong, but completely prepared to outright lie about it. 

The sources who were interviewed for the AP story were either ignored or misquoted and Sidiq was completely contradicted by General Gada. 

There’s a nice little spin on this headline: American convict decides to stay in Afghan jail despite president’s pardon

Don’t you just love it. “American Convict”. How about “political prisoner”? That’s what he is, according to the Afghans. Who exactly is categorizing him as an “American convict”? He wasn’t convicted of anything. As a matter of fact, they still don’t have a copy of what the charges were, even though there were Americans standing as defense counsel present during the first trial. Robert Fogelnest, Ed Caraballo’s attorney, said at an interview at Democracy Now that he’d like to know what those charges were, even though he took that trip to Afghanistan and sat at the trial, nobody knew what was going on, and there was no translation given to the Americans so they COULD understand what was going on. No defense witnesses were allowed to be called, and the evidence was removed from the evidence room, although Skibbie (another of Caraballo's attorneys) embarrassed them to return some of it. In short, it was a sham of a ‘trial’, and they used the news reports as evidence instead of calling witnesses. Now think about how ridiculous that is when you go through the following.