Idema redux — a “no comment” comment

A week ago, I posted on Jack Idema, a phony “counter-terrorism consultant” who, in addition to serving time after being convicted on 58 counts of wire fraud involving military supplies and later making the news for being sentenced to an Afghan prison for running his own private prison, and is wanted now in Mexico for spousal abuse at the very least.  There were hints in the Mexican press of what the U.S. press called “lascivious details” involving forced participation in orgies, and spreading HIV virus to unsuspecting people.

I didn’t find the fact that there was a crazy con-man living in Mexico nearly as intriguing as the possibility that a self-proclaimed “counter-terrorism expert” was possibly a source of weapons for  Zetas, or a U.S. “consultant” feeding at the trough of Plan Mérida funding.

Last night, I received a very long, detailed comment that — because of the extensive number of links — sent directly to my “spam” folder.  Headed “DISTRIBUTION: ALL LAW ENFORCEMENT AND MEDIA” it alleges to detail Idema’s present activities in Bacalar, Quitano Roo, and provides email addresses (and often telephone numbers) of everyone from Idema himself to the state prosecutor to supposed co-conspirators in various shady enterprises.  I decided not to print any of the information because the supposed sender used not their own website as a return “ISP”, but some gay porn site… and the person tried to claim the post was from one of Idema’s alleged victims.  The author did include her “real” on-line name… “Cao”  of Cao’s Blog — an extreme reactionary site given over to “soldier of fortune” type postings, and a lot of pro-Idema posts over the last couple of years.

Cao — who claims to be a “midwestern housewife” — seems to have a thing about gays being part of a communist plot (for real — “Homosexuality, in fact, is one of the things communists are pushing,” write Cao, apparently missing that real commies like Fidel Castro went out of their way to label gays “counterrevolutionary” and were hardly known for their sympathies to sexual minorities) AND Jack Idema (“to say that I’m a paid blogger for Jack Idema is stretching things considerably,” she writes).

Which makes it so weird that “Cao” — claiming to be a female victim of Jack Idema — details in her missive “TO ALL LAW ENFORCEMENT AND MEDIA” so many salacious details about Idema’s sexual activities (including dead links to supposed gay orgy houses for rent).  In other words, the post doesn’t pass the smell test.

With that warning in mind, Cao also posted another Mexico story — one that feeds into my interest in the possible misuse of Plan Mérida funds (or, rather, perhaps the intended use being to prop up U.S. war industries and “consultants”) and/or organized gun runners from the United States.

With her purpose being to “clear Idema’s name” (which makes the comment I’m not posting even stranger) Cao writes:

Mexican police just admitted that American Jeffery Shippey, a former DYNCORP employee… was arrested fifteen days ago for impersonating a special agent of both the U.S. Justice Department and U.S. FBI.

I have no information on Shippey being arrested in Mexico, but I did find reference to him recruiting mercenaries for work in Iraq in Manta Ecuador, when the U.S. maintained an airbase there as part of “Plan Colombia” part of its overall “war on drugs” in an 26 April 2007 post by Cyril Mychalejko in Upsidedownworld:

Jeffrey Shippey, a former DynCorp International employee at Manta created a ghost company, Epi Security and Investigations, and recruited more than 1,000 Colombians and Ecuadorians to work in Iraq. The report noted that the company wasn’t registered in Quito nor with local provisional authorities. NGO’s told the Working Group that the company allegedly was using Chilean instructors and former Colombian military personnel.

Shippey wrote in an advertisement promoting his company at the Iraq Job Center Web Site … that, “These forces have been fighting terrorists for 41 years and…have been trained by the U.S. Navy Seals and the U.S. DEA to conduct counter-drug/counter-terror ops in the jungles and rivers of Colombia.”

Whether Shippey was arrested in Mexico or not — and whether Idema is hanging with a “21 year old local transvestite prostitute who can be found working the highway,” doesn’t much interest me. As it is, the criminal investigation of Idema was for violence against a woman and there was no mention of transvestites or gays in any of the news articles regarding the denunciation.

What bothers me is that two known shady arms contractors are showing up in Mexico — and I’m sure there are many more. Who they are supplying, or who they are ripping off, and what they are doing here… THAT I’d want to learn about.