A Slight Clarification on Diamonds

By Douglas Farah

I would only clarify that it is simply not true that no other police or intelligence service in the world found ties between al Qaeda and the diamond trade.

On my website is a copy of a Belgian police report prepared for the FBI that has a section called "Indications of Terrorism," showing the calls of the al Qaeda-linked diamond dealers to Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Lebanon, as well as other evidence gathered. It can be viewed in its entirety here. The terrorism section begins on page 26, but it is all interesting.

The more complete internal Belgian police report--carried out because the diamonds were arriving in Antwerp, Belgium, the diamond capital of the world-- gave even fuller information, and police investigators there said they were satisfied "at the level of very good intelligence" that al Qaeda was involved in the diamond purchases they investigated.

The same police, when filing diamond trafficking charges against the individuals, wrote in their court brief that "�When we compare the allegations in the Washington Post (where they were first published in November 2001) about conflict diamonds serving to lock al Qaeda�s assets, with the chronology and combination of the above mentioned conclusions, they appear to be coincide remarkably.�

It is not just Europeans who found the story at least credible. Several U.S. agencies and officials have as well, and said so publicly.

The DIA has also written a highly classified report on the diamond ties to al Qaeda in 2003 and concluded it was "likely" that such ties existed, something Gen. Charles Wald, deputy commander of the U.S. European Command, then publicly stated the ties I and others outlined were "a fact."

Dateline NBC got a former CIA station chief for Liberia to appear on camera last month to use remarkably similar language: �They (al Qaeda operatives) were there during the period in question,� said Mike Shanklin, referring to the period of 1998-2001. �And clearly they were involved in some sort of a diamond business. That�s a fact.�

Finally, U.S. investigators on behalf of the United Nations have written extensively and publicly on the ties that exist. So, while the FBI may not agree with these conclusions, it is incorrect to state no one else, looking at the same evidence, came to very different conclusions.

My only point is, one can disagree about where the evidence leads. But those that arrived at conclusions starkly different from the FBI's are many and public.

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