Americans sentenced

last updated 8 January 2015

Kabul

An Afghan court sentenced two Americans to 10 years in prison last week for illegally holding and torturing Afghans. The two, former Green Beret Jack Idema, 48, and former Army serviceman Brent Bennett, 28, said they were part of a secret Pentagon counterterrorist group. Edward Caraballo, 42, a journalist who said he was filming a documentary about the counterterrorist operation, was sentenced to eight years. “This can only have been staged by the U.S. government,” said Caraballo. “We were an embarrassment.” At the trial, the men were not allowed to play most of Caraballo’s videotapes, which appeared to show their conversations with aides to Gen. William Boykin, a top Pentagon intelligence official. A Pentagon official acknowledged that Idema had contacted several Pentagon offices, including Boykin’s, seeking to pass along intelligence information. But the official said the Pentagon neither directed nor encouraged the operation.