Context in Perspective

By Douglas Farah

I think we are straying from the real issue of debate: Did al Qaeda enter the gemstone trade in West Africa to hide its assets and move its resources. However, I will respond to some of what Dennis has said.

I am a little puzzled by the references to context. The context of the Belgian police report was that it was prepared by three Belgian investigators and given to the FBI in its Detroit office, as a powerpoint presentation, in 2003. It is marked "For Police Use Only." The names of the authors are on the cover sheet. It was a summary of a much longer Belgian police report, translated so the FBI could read it, and speaks for itself. It can be viewed on my website. Perhaps the Washington office never saw it.

It is also not true, and I have provided the quotes and citations, that al Qaeda was not mentioned in the Belgian police court case. It was, multiple times. There are transcripts on this, which I am happy to provide. But the context of that is that it is the official prosecutor/police report place before a judge in the trials, outlining the official state findings.

While it is true that Osaillly and Nassour were tried on illegal diamond charges, it is not a strategy unknown to U.S. law enforcement officials, who have routinely failed to win convictions on terrorism charges. Rather, they ask, as in the case of Abdulrahman Alamoudi, for terrorism enhancements to the sentences because they could not prove the terrorism allegations in court in a satisfactory way. The federal government, including the FBI, chose not to prosecute Enaam Arnout on terrorism charges, despite the fact Arnout was present at the founding of al Qaeda and was photographed carrying an AK-47 beside Osama bin Laden. Instead, there was a plea bargain on much lesser charges. And of course Al Capone was never tried as a mobster, but for tax evasion. I think it is amply clear in the post-9/11 world that laws have not caught up with the new reality. The Belgian prosecutors told me they wanted to go for a sure conviction on what they knew they could get, rather than going the more risky route of terror prosecutions. A choice the FBI has made many times, despite evidence those involved in many different cases were linked to terrorism.

Finally, it is not in dispute that the FBI investigated the allegations. But it seems to me that, had anyone known beforehand that al Qaeda was involved in diamonds, that police or intelligence service would have moved to cut it out. Going back to legal attaches in countries that obviously had no information, confirming they have no information and taking that as evidence confirming something did not happen is hardly a surprising outcome.

The FBI may not have relied on hearsay, but that strongly implies that everyone else who came to separate conclusions did, and that is not true and insulting. Several people, myself included, risked their lives investigating the story on the ground. My pregnant wife and 2-year-old son had to be evacuated because Charles Taylor wanted to kill us, an unlikely reaction if everything we said was not true. Al White of the Special Court was almost killed numerous times during his investigations.

The Special Court for Sierra Leone found 12 witnesses to events, told separately. These investigations were carried out by people with 30 years experience in U.S. law enforcement. It was not a fly-by-night, in-and-out deal talking to people through official channels. I had four witnesses when I wrote the first story, most of whom were different from the Court sources. In most cases, 15 witness describing seeing the same people, during the same time frame, in the same place, meeting the same people, is not considered hearsay.

There is documentary evidence, including the calls to Afghanistan, a country that had no known jewelry business under the Taliban that would merit long discussions of diamond purchases. And no one but the Taliban and al Qaeda had satellite phones with Afghan prefixes at that time. The market for diamonds in Sierra Leone was sufficiently skewed in the summer of 2001, when the purchasing was going on, that the U.S. Ambassador there, Joseph Melrose, wrote a cable to the State Department saying there were mysterious Arab buyers who were purchasing the vast bulk of diamonds from the RUF rebels, causing fears that the diamonds were being purchased by criminals. Unfortunately, terrorism did not enter into the the thoughts at the time.

Finally, it is not true that no other country found evidence of al Qaeda's ties to the diamond trade. The Israelis, Indonesians and British all did, and wrote cables to the State Department and intelligence community on it. The Israelis identified Ibrahim Bah, one of those interviewed extensively by the FBI teams in West Africa, as an al Qaeda operative. Bah's name was found in the al Qaeda rolls in Afghanistan. However, he produced a passport (one of at least five he holds, including diplomatic passports from Gambia and Burkina Faso) to the FBI showing he was born in 1969. Despite the fact that his real birth date was 1957, the FBI accepted this as evidence he was too young to have been in Afghanistan. Dennis acknowledged in the Dateline NBC interview that the the FBI "didn't have any
leverage on him (Bah). He certainly adamantly denied al-Qaeda being involved with him and we--we couldn't find any information to discredit what he said." One has to ask how likely it would be for a person to admit to FBI officials they were involved with al Qaeda, while residing in a country that has given them a diplomatic passport?

I will be happy to get back to issues of more substance as the debate continues.

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