O/T Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson And Osama?
Ron Turner
From the New Republic
On September 19, 1998, the U.S. Embassy in Monrovia, Liberia, was attacked by
the forces of Liberian dictator Charles Taylor. According to an internal State
Department report on the incident obtained by The New Republic, Taylor's
police, pursuing a local warlord seeking protection at the embassy gates, laid
siege to the building using AK-47s and at least one rocket-propelled grenade.
In the ensuing firefight, one American embassy official was shot in the lower
back. Although the warlord and 23 of his men reached safety in the embassy
compound, Taylor, who had ordered the attack, apparently thought they were dead
and issued a statement of regret over the incident. When a Liberian government
official learned they were alive and about to be evacuated by air, however, he
informed the United States that Taylor would order his forces to shoot down the
helicopters. Taylor eventually relented, and the men were flown to a third
country.
Following the attack, some on the Hill called for closing the embassy. But the
Clinton administration didn't let the incident interfere with its efforts to
coddle Taylor, the man responsible for more than a decade of bloody warfare in
Liberia and its neighbors, Sierra Leone and Guinea. Here's one choice excerpt
from the State Department's official response to the attack: "The United States
would like to sincerely thank the Government of Liberia, and especially
President Charles Taylor, for the enormous cooperation and assistance we
received in amicably resolving the situation at the US embassy in Monrovia....
[W]e look forward to continuing our close cooperation with the Government."
Why does this matter today? Because we now know, thanks to a detailed report
last week by Douglas Farah in The Washington Post, that something else of great
importance happened in Liberia in September 1998: Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda
network opened shop there. According to Farah, one of bin Laden's top aides,
Abdullah Ahmed Abdullah, arrived in Monrovia and met with one of Taylor's
longtime lieutenants, Ibrahim Bah. Together they flew in a government
helicopter to meet with a senior commander of the Revolutionary United Front
(RUF), the vicious rebel army controlled by Taylor that has controlled the
diamond mines of Sierra Leone for the last four years. A few weeks later two Al
Qaeda terrorists wanted for the American Embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania
arrived with $100,000 in cash to buy the first pouch of diamonds from the RUF.
Since then, Farah reports, bin Laden has raised millions--perhaps tens of
millions--of dollars buying cut-rate RUF diamonds and selling them in Europe. A
European investigator told Farah that the Liberian diamond connection has
become so important to bin Laden, "that to cut off al Qaeda funds and
laundering activities you have to cut off the diamond pipeline."
This is all very bad news for Taylor's apologists and business associates in
the United States--a motley crew that includes Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson,
New Jersey Representative Donald Payne, and former Massachusetts Democratic
Party Chairman Lester Hyman. Until now, they could argue that Taylor was just a
garden-variety strongman, no different than the dozens of others who dot the
political landscape of the Third World. But now we know that the Liberian
dictator is not just a menace to West Africa; he is a menace to the United
States as well.
That Taylor has ties to Al Qaeda shouldn't be terribly surprising. Since
becoming president in 1997, Taylor has run Liberia like a giant criminal
enterprise, attracting South African mercenaries, Latin American drug lords,
and Ukrainian mobsters to Monrovia. Middle Eastern terrorists were bound to
find their way there eventually.
Indeed, even as the Clinton administration was treating Taylor as a statesman
in the 1990s, some observers warned that Liberia was becoming a haven for
transnational criminal syndicates. "When I met with mid-level officials at the
[Defense Intelligence Agency], they told me they were sending one alarming
report after another up the ladder at the Department of Defense, but no one was
listening," says Joseph Opala, a professor at James Madison University and an
expert on the region. "They were warning of RUF/Taylor contacts with
international crime groups in France and the Ukraine. They were concerned about
the RUF helping international drug dealers launder their cash earnings via
diamonds. They were also concerned that [Sierra Leone] was being used as a
transshipment point for drugs from South America and Asia into the U.S. and
Western Europe. They urged me to write something for the newspapers because no
one in the government would pay attention to them."
One reason the Clinton administration didn't pay attention was that here in the
United States, a circle of influential Americans was busy either painting
Taylor as a fledgling democrat or pursuing their own sketchy economic
opportunities in Liberia--or both. Jesse Jackson, Clinton's envoy to Africa,
befriended Taylor in early 1998 on a visit to Liberia (see "Where Angels Fear
to Tread," July 24, 2000). When he returned to the United States, he held a
conference in Chicago to help burnish the warlord's image. He also encouraged
Americans to invest in the war-torn country. (According to Liberian
businessmen, at least one of Jackson's friends eventually used Jackson's
connection to Taylor to get into the telecommunications business in Monrovia.)
Jackson compared the RUF to Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, and
just weeks after bin Laden's terrorists made their first RUF diamond deal, he
was in Sierra Leone pleading with civil society leaders to "reach out" to the
notorious rebel group. Most importantly--and ruinously for the region--Jackson
helped pressure the government of Sierra Leone to appease Taylor, and to sign a
settlement with the RUF, the Lomé accord, that gave the rebels amnesty and
invited them into the government. The agreement soon fell apart, when the RUF
took 500 UN peacekeepers hostage.
In Congress, Democrat Donald Payne of New Jersey, another American official
cultivated by Taylor, used his perch on the House Africa Subcommittee to fend
off legislative proposals that got tough on Taylor. As late as 1999, when
Taylor's links to the RUF had been amply documented even by the Clinton State
Department, Payne opposed language in a House resolution accusing Taylor of
supporting the rebels. One Taylor acolyte who had Payne's ear was Omrie Golley,
a RUF negotiator and associate of Bah, the Taylor underling who brought Al
Qaeda diamond buyers to Liberia. On a visit to the United States in February
1999, Golley met with Payne and Clinton administration officials and was
instrumental in gaining American support for the Lomé accord.
Democrats aren't the only ones who have reached out to Taylor, however. Pat
Robertson, the conservative televangelist and onetime GOP presidential hopeful,
actually went into business with the Liberian dictator. In 1999 a Robertson
company called Freedom Gold inked a deal with Taylor to mine in a
900-square-kilometer section of southeastern Liberia. The Liberian government
even issued a press release in which Robertson was quoted as saying, "I pray
that this investment may become a wonderful blessing to the people of Liberia."
In truth, investments in Liberia generally become blessings only to Taylor. To
an extraordinary extent, Taylor runs Liberia as a personal fiefdom, deciding
unilaterally what to do with the revenues from state ventures. Indeed, his
personal control over the country's resources was codified last year in a new
law that states, "The President of the Republic of Liberia is hereby granted
the sole power to execute, negotiate and conclude all commercial contracts or
agreements with any foreign or domestic investor for the exploitation of the
strategic commodities of the Republic of Liberia."
In other words, Robertson is in business (Taylor owns 10 percent of Freedom
Gold) with a man who, through his underlings in the RUF, is in business with Al
Qaeda. And it is entirely possible that money washes from one enterprise into
the other. For as much as Robertson might like to pretend that any profits
Taylor accrues from the Freedom Gold partnership are being used to buy Bibles
for Liberian children, the truth is that Taylor's top fiscal priority is arming
the RUF and maintaining control over Sierra Leone's diamonds--the same diamonds
whose sale funds Al Qaeda.
But of all the American VIPs who have supported Taylor over the years, perhaps
none is as intimately connected to the dictator as Lester Hyman, a discreet
Washington lawyer renowned in Democratic Party circles. A self-described
"protege of John F. Kennedy" who once chaired the Massachusetts Democratic
Party, Hyman has been an adviser to eight presidential candidates and helped
Clinton vet nominees for his Cabinet and the Supreme Court. Hillary Clinton
personally asked her husband to appoint Hyman to the commission that oversaw
the design of the FDR memorial. And, on and off for the last decade, Hyman has
been Charles Taylor's representative in Washington.
The association started in the early '90s, after Taylor invaded Liberia with a
small force and quickly took control of much of the countryside. From a command
post in the town of Gbarnga, Taylor set up his provisional National Patriotic
Reconstruction Assembly Government (NPRAG). Hyman was hired to represent NPRAG
in the United States, and apparently became a great admirer of the warlord. In
August 1991 Hyman spent a week in Taylor-controlled territory. And while human
rights groups were documenting Taylor's mounting abuses, Hyman wrote a
Panglossian report on Taylor and NPRAG intended for American officials. Taylor
"considers himself a believer in democracy" and "seems very family-oriented,"
noted Hyman, adding, "His family, including his little daughter Sharon, were
with him often." Of Taylor's notorious child soldiers--some not yet
teenagers--Hyman wrote, "they are extraordinarily well-disciplined. Their
bearing is erect--they conduct themselves as soldiers (saluting, coming to
attention, responding to orders, etc.)." In a personal letter to Jimmy Carter
the following year, Hyman argued that Taylor "has no extraterritorial ambitions
whatsoever; his sole goal is to restore peace, democracy and prosperity to
Liberia." At the time, Taylor was sponsoring the nascent RUF rebellion in
Sierra Leone.
In early 1993 Hyman stopped representing Taylor (apparently because of
financial differences), but when Taylor took power in 1997, Hyman was one of
the first Americans he called. Taylor had just presided over a war of
incredible barbarity that left 85 percent of the Liberian population dead,
injured, or displaced. Yet, in August of that year, Hyman wrote to him: "With
your high intelligence, charismatic leadership qualities and strength of
purpose, I know that you are capable of achieving great deeds on behalf of your
country." In Washington, Hyman worked tirelessly on Taylor's behalf. He had
dozens of conversations with senior Clinton officials and members of Congress
with influence over Africa policy. He arranged a meeting between Hillary
Clinton and Charles Taylor's wife, Jewel. In a major coup, the former
Massachusetts politico helped convince a Plymouth, Massachusetts, district
attorney to drop outstanding charges against Taylor stemming from his escape
from jail there in 1985. And, of course, Hyman urged the administration to
engage Taylor, which meant downplaying his government's human rights abuses,
and overlooking Liberia's transformation into a gangster state.
These efforts eventually paid off--for Hyman as well as for Taylor. For many
years, one of Liberia's most consistent and lucrative revenue streams had been
a U.S.-based ship registry company called International Registries Inc. (IRI).
This flag of convenience register allows ships from anywhere in the world to
sail under the Liberian flag irrespective of where they are based. The register
collects taxes and other dues from the shipholders, keeps a profit and sends
the rest back to the Liberian government. During the civil war, the company
provided some 90 percent of Liberia's total state budget--but the money went to
the internationally recognized government in Monrovia, not to Taylor's NPRAG.
And so one of Hyman's first missions after Taylor became president was to
wrestle control of the ship registry away from the company that had refused to
recognize Taylor all those years. In 1999, after a mess of litigation, IRI
finally relinquished control of the registry to a new U.S. company, Liberian
International Ship and Corporate Registry, based in Virginia. The chairman of
LISCR? Lester Hyman.
Which brings us back to the RUF and Al Qaeda. For 50 years, IRI operated its
ship registry at arm's-length from the Liberian government. But it appears that
under Hyman, the registry has worked hand in glove with Taylor. A recent
lawsuit against LISCR filed by IRI put it this way: LISCR "is a major source of
Liberia's income for [financial and military aid to the RUF] and a handy honey
pot for lining the pockets of Liberia's current president, Charles Taylor." And
two weeks ago, a UN report confirmed these charges. It showed that in 2000,
almost $1 million was paid directly by LISCR to entities involved in smuggling
weapons to Liberia (including 1,000 submachine guns from Uganda) in
contravention of UN sanctions. The United Nations has also documented the
registry's role in illicit diamond transactions. The recent UN report concludes
that the Liberian Bureau of Maritime Affairs--the government entity that
oversees LISCR--is "little more than a cash extraction operation and cover from
which to fund and organize opaque off-budget expenditures including for
sanctions-busting." In other words, LISCR funds the Liberian maritime bureau,
which in turn funds illicit weapons purchases for Charles Taylor and the RUF.
(According to the United Nations, Hyman stepped down as chairman of LISCR
earlier this year, and it is unclear if he is still a shareholder in the
company. A Hyman spokeswoman told tnr that he was recuperating from hip
replacement surgery and unavailable for comment.)
September 11, and Farah's revelations about the RUF's links to Al Qaeda, put
all this in a rather different light. A financial relationship with Charles
Taylor no longer just supports a brutal African army terrorizing far away
people; it tacitly supports a terrorist organization dedicated to the
destruction of the United States. Last week the cruise line Royal Caribbean
appeared to concede as much when it announced it would no longer use the
Liberian ship registry for its large passengerships. What will it take before
Taylor's American partners and apologists do the same?
**************************************************
God bless America!
Reading "Wise Blood" by Flannery O'Connor (for school)