In April 2004, a former U.S. Special Forces soldier named Jonathan Keith Idema started shopping a sizzling story to the media. He claimed terrorists in Afghanistan planned to use bomb-laden taxicabs to kill key U.S. and Afghan officials, and that he himself intended to thwart the attack. Shortly thereafter, he headed to Afghanistan, where he spent the next two months conducting a series of raids with his team, which he called Task Force Saber 7. By late June, he claimed to have captured the plotters, and started trying to clinch a deal with television networks by offering them "direct access" to one of the terrorists who, he said, had agreed to tell all.
http://www.cjr.org/issues/2005/1/blake-soldier.asp
The story of Keith Idema is the twisted tale of a guy who watched too many Chuck Norris 'Braddock: Missing in Action' movies in the 1980's, joined the real military and found out that there were actual
rules in the real army, and afterwards thought he could 'engineer' his dream of 'life as a living Mack Boland pulp fiction novel'. He had his life almost scripted out in strategic stages of climbing the media ladder with 'Army of One' media stunts waging his own one man War on Terror. Golan and Globus would have been proud to have him writing screenplays for them back in the 80's. But there is a big difference between fantasy and reality. Right now, Idema lived real life as a bad action movie fantasy, and the resulting reality is that he is sitting on his ass in a hellhole prison in Afghanistan.
What is particularly jarring about this confidence man is how easily he managed to dupe so many news media outlets and companies into punching his ticket to stardom. He was an ex-soldier, with a lot of bullshit stories to tell, and no evidence to back a single one of them up. Yet, time and time again, he was given work as a media military and counterterrorism expert alongside the usual sea of retired old farts. A young face with a fresh voice to balance the older voices of men who hadn't seen action since Korea but were suddenly experts in the dogma of 'containing radical islam via the long tried and true guarantee of success that is fighting landwars in Asia'.
Considering that he had already burned people in the news media, who's networks then payed him for new nonsense months later anyway, as if the earlier busts had never happened... this man thought he had it made.
He didn't.
This story in the Columbia Journalism Review tells the tale.