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 that virtually everything he ever did all the way up until he ended up in a prison.

A man who decided that just because the US 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 flimflammary

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 isn't nearly as bad as that. Okay. But it's bad in a different way. See, in Afghanistan, you had theater internment facilities, one in Boggerman and 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 Bogram, you were just on one of the stops on the bus route around Bogram was the fucking the beatiff, the Bogram Theater and Turin. There was also a polycharchy prison.

Yeah, Poliarky prison was a civilian prison in similar situation, but that was run, 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 B-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 off. 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 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 a dema 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

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