A US citizen in court Wednesday charged with running a private "war on terror" in Afghanistan claimed he and two other Americans were working with the full knowledge of US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
Jonathan Idema, who denies charges he detained and tortured Afghan citizens without US government consent, said they were hunting terrorists under the auspices of the Pentagon and said they had since been abandoned by US authorities.
"The American authorities absolutely condoned what we did, they absolutely supported what we did. We have extensive evidence of that," said Idema, who is on trial with his subordinates Brent Bennett and Edward Caraballo.
US-led coalition forces have disavowed all ties with Idema, while international peacekeeping troops said they were duped into helping Idema's team, who wore US-style uniforms, believing they were legitimate special forces operatives.
Judge Abdul Baset Bahktiari allowed the three men and four Afghan associates on trial with them to delay proceedings for up to 20 days to allow them to prepare a better defence and find adequate translators.
The adjournment came after two Afghan interpreters struggled to translate comments from the judge, prosecution and witnesses, and Idema protested that he and his associates would not be able to get a fair trial.
"It is impossible for us to know what's happening," he said.
US and Afghan authorities allege that Idema's freelance counter-terror cell illegally jailed and tortured eight Afghan citizens without government authority.
The three US men and four Afghans face jail sentences of between 16 and 20 years if found guilty.
Idema said that he had been running a counter-terrorism operation under deep cover for some months and had handed militants he had detained to US-led coalition forces for further questioning on several occasions.
The group had emails, faxes and recordings to prove their links with senior US Defence Department officials, he added.
"We were in contact directly by fax, and email and phone with Donald Rumsfeld's office, with the Deputy Secretary of Defence for Intelligence, and with Kevin Anderson, a four-star rank officer level at the Pentagon."
Idema said that Anderson had offered his group a defence department contract but he had declined. "We did not want to go under contract because that would meant that we couldn't work with the access to Northern Alliance people we were working with," he said.
He claimed to have handed the Taleban intelligence chief of the eastern Afghanistan city of Jalalabad to the FBI for questioning and to have foiled
bomb plots and assassination attempts on senior Afghan government officials.
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