Counterterrorism Blog

There is new evidence that Charles Taylor continues to meddle in West African affairs, this time presented by a Liberians United for Transparent Elections. The group went public with the information, including airplane tail numbers, travel tickets and other information on Taylor's movements out of his guilded exile in Nigeria, and the movement of those rebel leaders in the region who Taylor supports. The full story from Allafrica.com can be found here.

In a nutshell, this shows that a man who dealt extensively with al Qaeda and international criminal syndicates has spent considerable time meeting with rebel leaders from Guinea, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Yet the Nigerian government, (president Obasanjo and foreign minister Oluyemi Adeniji) refuse to take action. One of the few viable explanations left is the conclusion of the investigating organization: "the presence of Charles Taylor in Nigeria is reduced to personal and business interests between president Obasanjo and his foreign minister Adeniji."

These developments--the willingness to protect mass murderers and terrorists--make it all the more likely that the recent prediction by a senior U.S. military official will come true sooner rather than later. Maj. Gen. Douglas Lute, director of operations for the U.S. Central Command, said earlier this week that al Qaeda fighters in Iraq will fan out to the "vast ungoverned spaces" of Africa when (and if) the situation in Iraq stabilizes. Lute predicted that Zarqawi and his followers would take the "path of least resistence" if forced to leave Iraq, and that would be to resettle in the stateless regions of Africa. The full story from the Guardian of London can be found here.

Unfortunately, Nigeria's handling of Taylor is an open invitation for not only terrorists but criminals of all stripes to move in. If Taylor will not be turned over for trial after his atrocities and terrorist ties, then anyone else will be safe there too, if the price is right.

It is interesting to note that while some, like my friend Dennis Lormel, continue to dispute the reality of al Qaeda's ties to the diamond trade, there is near-unanimous consensus that the "vast ungoverned spaces" of Africa are and have long been attractive to al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. There is also a growing recognition that the intelligence community does not and did not have any idea what was happening in those areas, especially ones wracked by violence like Liberia and Sierra Leone. There was simply no one but a few U.S. military attaches providing any intelligence at all on the conflicts.

It would be extremely challenging, in the best of circumstances, to "thoroughly investigate" anything in the region in two trips taken more than two years after events occured, each lasting a few weeks, with teams made up of people with no regional experience, and assume one can gather the "facts." This is not due to incompetence, political agendas or anything else. It is simply not possible to go into countries like Sierra Leone, Liberia, Burkina Faso, trace a story as one would in the United States, and assume the case is closed based on that information.

The biggest divide in the diamond debate is between people who spent considerable time on the ground in the region dealing with those directly involved in the diamond transactions (the Special Court for Sierra Leone investigators, intelligence officials from the U.S. European Command, myself, Global Witness, European intelligence investigators), who came to one conclusion, and those (the FBI and some in the CIA), who spent minimal time there, relied of formal channels for information and came to a very different conclusion. Maybe the thorough investigations by the FBI found more in a few days on the ground than the rest of did in years, but I remain unconvinced.