|
Taylor paid protection money to Foopie
Former Liberian president Charles Taylor sold conflict diamonds to known al-Qaeda operatives that may have been used to finance the September 11 attacks on the United States, according to a confidential report from the UN-backed war crimes court in Sierra Leone. "It is clear that al-Qaeda had been in west Africa since September 1998 and maintained a continuous presence in the area through 2002," said the document, produced by the office of prosecutor David Crane.The document, gleaned from press reports, witnesses to sightings of al-Qaeda operatives in Liberia and interviews with a single, unnamed source, is the latest effort to link the global terror network to conflict diamonds mined during the civil war that ravaged the west African state for a decade. But more tellingly, according to Washington Post reporter Douglas Farah, who first revealed many of the links between Taylor and the terror group, it shows the flagrant intelligence shortfalls in truly understanding al-Qaeda's connections to Africa. "The United States has not perceived itself to have a strategic interest in sub-Saharan Africa on the terrorism front until very recently," Farah said in a 5 August interview with allAfrica.com. "The development not only in Liberia of a functioning criminal state is not a secret to anyone who has been to the region or who lives in the region. The whole scenario is part of the neglect by the outside world." What it is not, said former US ambassador to Sierra Leone Joseph Melrose, is a smoking gun. "You can't say it hasn't happened, but you can't prove evidence in court because it is circumstantial evidence," he told AFP by telephone from Pennsylvania. "But there is a long tradition in the diamond sector (of shady dealings) and they have to acknowledge that some of these blood diamonds could be terror diamonds." Posted by: Dan Darling 2004-08-24 |
| http://www.rantburg.com/poparticle.php?ID=41383 |