Pat "The Liquor Officer" Robertson is a chickenhawk and a crook.
Dirty diamonds By Michael Barone
What do Jesse Jackson, Pat Robertson, and al Qaeda have in common?
The answer is: They all have been associated with the bloody Liberian dictator Charles Taylor.
The al Qaeda connection is the one that has most recently come to light. In a November 2 Washington Post article, Douglas Farah reported that "the terrorist network led by Osama bin Laden has reaped millions of dollars in the past three years from the illicit sale of diamonds mined by rebels in Sierra Leone." Al Qaeda has been buying the diamonds at below-market rates in Africa and selling them for higher prices in Europe. Diamonds are easy to transport and smuggle, and diamond transactions are hard to trace; al Qaeda evidently increased its purchases in July, presumably in anticipation of its bank accounts being frozen. The diamonds are mined in Sierra Leone by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) rebels, who famously hacked off the arms and legs of hundreds of people and built up an army of boys. Since 1998, the diamonds have been sold for cash in Liberia to al Qaeda agents by the RUF's diamond dealer, alleged to be a Libyan-trained Senegalese rebel. There is big money here: A United Nations panel estimated RUF diamond sales in 1999 at $75 million. Farah writes that Taylor receives a commission on each sale in Liberia; Taylor has repeatedly denied this.
Taylor runs a regime that, according to Amnesty International, routinely imprisons, tortures, and rapes citizens for offenses like participating in peaceful demonstrations. Taylor has been the major supporter and arms provider to the RUF and its leader, Foday Sankoh. In a lengthy and well-documented article in the July 2000 New Republic, Ryan Lizza describes how Taylor's regime has had the enthusiastic and effective support of Jesse Jackson. As Bill Clinton's special envoy to Africa, Jackson in late 1998 pressed the president of Sierra Leone to "reach out" to Sankoh–"a man," Lizza wrote, "who built his Revolutionary United Front (RUF) by systematically kidnapping children and forcing them to murder their parents. ... Once children were conscripted, their loyalty was maintained through drugs–they were injected with speed, which numbed their sensitivity to violence and rendered them dependent on their adult suppliers–and violence. When conscripts tried to escape, RUF leaders amputated their limbs. Refugees even accused the RUF of cannibalism." Taylor, who had taken power by starting a rebellion in Liberia in 1989 and building his own Small Boys Unit, had gone to the same revolutionary school as Sankoh.
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