Reply #181: More on the Viktor Bout affair from The Yorkshire Ranter

[starroute]

http://yorkshire-ranter.blogspot.com/2004_07_01_yorkshire-ranter_archive.html#108868790667161931

The Financial Times reports that US counter-terrorist efforts in West Africa are being strengthened after increased scrutiny of the former Liberian dictator Charles Taylor's alleged links with Hezbollah and al-Qa'ida. Reportedly, more staff have been assigned to help in financial investigations there, and a further legal attache (a FBI representative) is to be appointed. The September 11th commission surprised various people when it decided that al-Qa'ida did not finance itself through the illicit diamond trade, especially, it seems, the FBI itself and the Congressional committee that watches it:

A Federal Bureau of Investigation team this year found "pretty definite" evidence of a link between al-Qaeda operatives and the smuggling of Sierra Leonean diamonds, according to the head of the House of Representatives subcommittee that oversees the FBI. In an interview, Frank Wolf, chairman of the House commerce-justice-state and the judiciary appropriations subcommittee, expressed surprise at the September 11 committee's scepticism about the tie and said he would check that it had access to FBI reports on the issue.

<snip>

This may yet reveal important facts on the Viktor Bout scandal, as reported here back in May. To recap, it emerged that the well-known arms trafficker had been working for the US in some connection with Iraq, as well as his more usual clients (Charles Taylor, UNITA, various Congolese factions, Rwanda, the Taliban). The big question was the why, of course, which remains mysterious. The new development is the suggestion that Charles Taylor, whose regime in Liberia was pretty much dependent on the Bout organisation to export diamonds and timber and import armaments for its numerous wars, had links with the US of a nature that could have led to a blind eye being turned to terrorist-related activities there.

"Alex Yearsley, of London-based Global Witness, alleges that the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor, the ousted Liberian leader who played a main role in West Africa's insurgencies and blood diamond trade, Yearsley said. Taylor received CIA payments until January 2001, Yearsley claimed in a telephone interview."


Or as Iris DeMent so memorably put it in "Wasteland of the Free":

We got preachers dealing in politics and diamond mines
and their speech is growing increasingly unkind
They say they are Christ's disciples
but they don't look like Jesus to me
and it feels like I am living in the wasteland of the free

You got it, those are the very same Liberian diamond minds that our old friend Pat Robertson was involved in. See:

http://www.hypocrites.com/article1570.html
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0OBW/is_2_42/ai_101797923


(Are we having fun yet?)