Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - *PREVIEW* The Insane Story of Jonathan Idema

Episode Date: November 5, 2025

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It's been a while since we've talked about a guy, like the Mount Rushmore of guys that we have on the show. I don't know if this guy's on the Mount Rushmore, but I will say with full confidence, he's the best con man we've ever talked about. Oh, hell yeah. We talked about a few, so. And I don't mean best as in good. I need to point that out here because this made his pure fucking evil. Today we're going to talk about a man who might be well known for some. Nate, I'm almost sure you've heard of this guy.

Okay. But certainly, in my opinion, not nearly enough people know about him. a man who failed at virtually everything he ever did all the way up until he ended up in a prison. A man who decided that just because the U.S. military intelligence apparatus didn't want anything to do with him that would not stop him from creating a freelance torture prison in the mountains of Afghanistan. A man so steeped in flim flammery and fraud that Wikipedia has him simply labeled as a con man. Today we are talking about Jonathan Edema. I've never heard of this guy.

I have heard of this guy, yeah. Yeah, he's legendary in a very, very, I guess infamous. Because it came out of nowhere that there was a news story all of a sudden. There was a guy that was like completely freelance independent running like detainee facilities in Afghanistan. And they're like, wait, what? And it came out like a couple weeks after the Abu Ghraib scandal. Yep. So it kind of got swallowed up.

So it's Uber Abu Ghraib then. This is, okay, this is nearly as bad as that. But it's bad in a different way. See, in Afghanistan, you had theater internment facilities, one in Bogerman. one in Kandahar that were like prisons where it was like nominally under the control of the Afghan government, but actually it was the U.S. Department of Defense running them and like these places had all of the bad things you can think of. Like when you were at Bagram, you were just on one of the stops on the bus route around Bagram was the fucking Bita, the Bogram Theater and

there was also a polycharchy prison. Yeah, polycharky prison was a civilian prison and similar situation, but that was run by the Afghans entirely. But the army or the military didn't need to lean on freelancers and private contractors to do this. They were doing it themselves. And I mean, it's all really, really grim stuff. But like, yeah, Abu Ghraib obviously was the one people know about the TIF. I think after Abu Ghraib, they were like, let's like make sure that no one's taking pictures on their fucking Sony Mavikas. And then like, that's why people don't know much about it. I really hate having to send a follow up email to the freelance torture prison about my late invoice. Hold that thought. Oh, fuck. Oh, man. I should point out here before we get started that a lot of

Edema's life is pretty murky. For starters, as we'll get into, Edema is a serial compulsive liar to the point that you can't trust anything that's ever left his mouth to the point that he was such a thorough liar that many of his family and friends aren't even aware of his actual life as an adult. And as far as anyone can tell and Adema himself, it's kind of had to been put back together after this story by journalists. Also, sometimes Jonathan went by several different names. Jonathan is his birth name. He also went by Keith, which is his middle name. And sometimes he just went by

Jack for funsies. I'm just going to call him Adema or Jonathan. I'm not going to call him by the name he prefers. Listen to here, Jack. You're not detaining enough prisoners and torturing them. You got to get those invoices paid, Jack. But don't make me send corn pop in there. He also at one point

went by Blackjack, but that was more of like a fake pirate name, but we'll get to that point. He was born in May of 1957 in Pookeepsie, New York. a town that exists, I assume, to prove to everyone that England does not have a monopoly and stupid town names. Yeah, Poughkeepsie is up near, it's in the Hudson Valley, I think. It's up near West Point-ish. Yeah, it's just one of those places that exists. You know, New York's a big

state that one really knows very much about. And yeah, so a lot of, I'm trying to think of people who come out of Poughkeepsie, like anyone that I know, and I immediately defaulted to Billy Joel, who's not from anywhere near there. He's from Long Island. But for some of that shows, I lived in New York, and that shows you how much I know about New York. Yeah, Poughkeepsie. is famous because Billy Joel is not from there. He's the torture, Billy Joe. He's a song, you're the torture man. He's singing us a song.

It's a waterboard. I will say he's probably one of the more famous people that come from Pukipsi, so you guys get that. Is there anyone else? I don't know. No one important. I don't give a fuck. This is not the history of Pukipsey podcast. You're going to find out of every, like all of the members of the cars are from fucking Pekipsey

or something like that. But yeah, I don't know. I really genuinely. All I know is I've seen Pekipsey the stop on Metro north of the commuter rail in New York City. His father was a World War 2 veteran and according to his father John wanted to join the army at the age of 12 after watching the John Wayne propaganda film

The Green Berets. Of course. And I mean, look, I would say that this doesn't normally chart the life of a person because they're 12. I was 12. I wanted to be a Pokemon master. You know, we believe in dumb shit. But I will say

Jonathan Edema is the most green beret fan that's ever existed. John Wayne would fucking love this guy. I'm trying to think what I actually wanted to be when I was 12 and I have no idea. I don't think back on it. Like, I guess I wanted to either work for Square Enix or be Cloudstripe.

Both of those are, both of those are fair. I mean, you did end up becoming sad. Well, yeah, I mean, I wasn't a special. I was, hopefully the, the, the special operations units that you join have cooler names than Soldier, but, uh, Avalanche is all right. Avalanche is pretty good. Yeah. Is Cloudstripe, an employee of

Squared Nix. Answer in the comments. I feel like he's at least that he's an independent contractor, right? Byron is actually the receptionist. Oh, you know, I always say this is a side note. I remember reading video game magazines, like literally at the library because they had subscriptions when I was 12 and people were talking about, you know, Final Fantasy 7's upcoming release and like somebody said like, you know, it's great to see that, you know, video games are actually being, you know, it's not just, you know,

blonde-haired, blue-eyed heroes, you know, they're actually like, you see a character like Barrett and Final Fantasy 7. And then Final Fantasy 7 came out and was like, Oh, the dialogue. Whoops. Whoops. At least they fix that in the redo. They made a lot of other things worse,

but they made Barrett better. And in 1975, he does go and listen to the U.S. Army with the goal of becoming a Green Beret. And I should stop and point out here. I think we've talked about it before on the show before, but Green Berets in 1975, towards the end of the Vietnam War,

are not the Green Berets of today. Standards were lower. There were more of them. They weren't thought of some kind of like super soldiers or anything of like that kind. Their job was to train local. loyal Vietnamese groups in Cambodian and Laotian

and Laotian groups and act as advisors in combat operations. They're what's known as a force multiplier. So back in those days, the Greenberry course was pretty short. It was more comparable to like Ranger's school where like you could just go and it wasn't like a job change.

Special forces units they actually had like kind of distributed out. It wasn't like a special forces regiment. And also, yeah, what you're describing what they call it doctrinally is either foreign internal defense or unconventional warfare depending on like if you're training a militia for like a friendly government or, to overthrow a not friendly government.

Sometimes both. But yeah, like, I remember meeting people who were, who had done the training before and we're surprised when we're like, oh, yeah, we're in the officer's course for the green berets. And it's like two years long because like for them, it was like 10 weeks. Yeah, that was it. Yeah. So it was just different. It was like being like the way that being a army ranger is different now that it was back

then. So it's just, yeah, like the special hat and such was the same. But like, yeah, it's a completely different world now. Dima was born. Like, he would fit in a lot better with green berets today is what I mean. Um, and before anybody thinks, I'm whitewashing the reputation of the U.S. Army Green Berets here.

You should also know they probably committed more war crimes in Vietnam than any other conflict since then. I'd also say, too, I was going to be one and then was so disgusted by what it actually was that I quit. So I know it pretty well although I was never in the special forces, you know, regiment. But I passed

election and I was about halfway done with the qualification course and then I was like, the dining facility at Camp McCall is just covered in John Wayne Green Beret propaganda shit. And I was just like, I want to kill myself. I don't do this ever again. I really wish this is the last time I would have to bring up the green berets but that will come up

I'm not the group but the movie, the book and the song are all going to come up later. Fighting soldiers from the sky. God, I'm happy John Wayne is dead. In 1975, the war in Vietnam is pretty much over. The army is slowly winding down

and it's once a massive special forces footprint is getting smaller but that didn't mean they didn't need new people. But what it did mean is that there were less people who wanted the job. Generally speaking, the kind of guy who signs up for shot in special forces

is a guy who wants to see as much combat as humanly possible. First criteria, are you insane? Do you likely want to die? Something also that this didn't change until after September 11th, but in the olden days, there wasn't a way to just enlist

and become a Green Beret right away. You had to be in the regular army first. And so you basically had to go in and then apply to try out and if you got selected, then go through and do it. But like, it didn't seem to be that difficult. Like, Edema was in the army for a couple months. That's funny. Then maybe I'm completely wrong.

I remember a friend of the show, Timothy McVeigh did this, but it took him a while to actually... My friend, Jimmy. Yeah, and then he's like, he didn't break in a pair of boots before going to selection and then immediately failed. Timothy McVeigh fought in the Gulf War as a 19 Delta Cavalry Scout.

Fun fact. He went to basic training and AIT the same base I did.