Reposted in light of the Mugabe fracas.
But at least OUR MAN was a BIPARTISAN EFFORT!
"the State Department, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, cultivated good relations with Taylor."
"During Taylor's brutal rule, US watched, waited; Liberian now facing Hague" by Bryan Bender, Globe Staff | June 3, 2007
WASHINGTON -- In the fall of 1998, as President Charles Taylor consolidated his grip on Liberia, the defense attache at the US Embassy invited representatives of the country's formerly warring factions to a series of dinners at his residence.
The overture was intended to help the West African nation make a fresh start after more than a decade of civil war. But Taylor's government had other ideas: Members of the three opposing factions "who attended these dinners have been shot dead," the embassy bluntly reported to Washington in a secret cable in October.
"When the going gets tough, Taylor intends to rule through the barrel of a gun," the cable continued.
The secret cable, one of dozens obtained by the Globe under the Freedom of Information Act, revealed for the first time how early the United States was tracking Taylor's alleged crimes in his six-year tenure as president.
Despite the State Department's stark conclusion about Taylor's murderous intentions, it took another five years -- during which militias armed by Taylor allegedly caused an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 deaths -- for the United States to call for his ouster.
Much of Taylor's time in office, the United States continued to supply economic aid to Liberia, helped train government personnel, and maintained a policy of watching and waiting, according to the cables....
So we SUPPORTED HIM!!!
We KNEW about this stuff (just like Mugabe)!!!
HE was OUR GUY!
The cables make clear that US diplomats knew that Taylor, a former Boston - area college student, was behind the death squads in Sierra Leone. Yet the State Department, under the Clinton and Bush administrations, cultivated good relations with Taylor....
That's under FAT-F*** Clinton's watch, by the way, for all you liberals out there -- just add it to the FAT-F**** MURDER SPREE as president!
As one cable from the embassy to the State Department put it in December 2002, "Liberia is virtually a commonwealth of America and most of Taylor's government was trained there and is strongly pro-American."
.... One cable in 2002 summarizing a meeting between Taylor and US officials reported that "Taylor claims that he has been an advocate for human and political rights for many years, including as a student organizer during his ten years in the United States."
After his decade in Boston, Taylor took a job in the Liberian government but returned to the United States in 1984 after being charged with embezzling more than $900,000 in government funds. He was arrested in Boston, and while awaiting extradition in September 1985 , he escaped from the Plymouth House of Corrections....
He escaped from one of our prisons? He HAD to have had help!!!
Nicolas Cook, a specialist in African affairs at the Congressional Research Service in Washington:
"Taylor, seen as charismatic and articulate, also talked a good game. There was some initial optimism that he might implement his electoral promises to pursue political and economic rebuilding and reconciliation."
High hopes are dashed
As the cables indicate, those hopes quickly were dashed -- but the United States continued to provide aid and assistance to Taylor's government.
In October 1999 -- a year after the cable that declared Taylor "intends to rule through the barrel of a gun" -- US Ambassador Bismarck Myrick attended a ceremony with Taylor in Buchanan, about 95 miles southeast of Monrovia, to launch an international logging venture that Taylor promised would help rebuild the country's economy.
The show of support was no accident: Another cable from the embassy to the State Department that month declared that the embassy's "cultivation of rapport with [Taylor] gives us a fresh, new vehicle for communicating our own message" of promoting human rights and democracy.
Is this kind of talk beginning to make you sick like me?
But the US support for the Liberian logging industry backfired. A year after the ceremony in Buchanan, a cable from the State Department to the embassy in Monrovia declared that Taylor was using the logging profits, along with his earnings in the diamond trade, to fund rebel groups in at least three neighboring countries. Meanwhile, the cable said, Taylor's security forces continued to exterminate his political rivals in Liberia.
Backfired? Or was that what we wanted him to do?
The December 2000 cable declared:
"What many nations do not understand is that [the logging venture] is without benefit to the Liberian population. Few, if any jobs, are created locally from it. The concessions paid by the timber companies go directly to Taylor."
For more than a year, other African nations had been pressuring Washington to use its influence to force Taylor to stop funding mercenaries in Sierra Leone....
A US liaison officer in the Nigerian capital of Abuja, in a February 1999 cable to the State Department:
"He urged that the [US government] apply its considerable resources to pressure Taylor to stop his assistance to the rebels."
But in May 2000, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, serving as a special envoy for the Clinton administration , visited Taylor and apparently gave him no reason to believe the United States was ready to abandon him. According to a summary of Jackson's meeting in a cable from the Monrovia embassy to the State Department, Taylor raised particular concern about the proposed UN tribunal.
"Jackson assured Taylor that the [US government] had not yet taken a position on forming a tribunal," according to the cable.
False-friend Jesse, huh?
Sigh.
Jackson's "strongest" message to Taylor, in fact, was that the Liberian leader should "take on directly" the "rumors" of his complicity in gun-running, diamond smuggling, and support for mercenaries, the summary of the meeting reported.... Jackson did not respond to requests for an interview.
A former US intelligence operative in West Africa who agreed to speak about Taylor on the condition of anonymity:
"[Taylor] loved seeing himself as a slickster, and he loved fooling the Americans and always running a game on us."
Yeah, right! He fooled us!
Ready to take on Taylor
By December 2000, a month before leaving office, the Clinton State Department finally seemed ready to take on Taylor.
Ha-ha-ha-ha!
And African-Americans think Clinton was the greatest thing since sliced s***?
Well, not anymore I suppose.
In a cable marked for "immediate" attention, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright wrote to the embassy in Monrovia that Taylor was "in a category by himself" as "a cunning and effective warlord whose brutal rule terrorizes millions in Liberia and Sierra Leone."
Other diplomatic cables during the changeover in administrations reflect growing alarm about Taylor. According to a May 2001 cable from the embassy to the State Department, one US informant -- whose name was blacked out by State Department censors -- characterized Taylor as a "dangerous and erratic mad man." Another cable raised the prospect that Taylor was "suicidal."
He sounds like Bush!
But the new Bush administration remained as willing to tolerate Taylor's denials as the Clinton team had been, according to the cables.
NOT a surprise! NOT a surprise t'all!
In November 2001, Talal Eldine , a close Taylor associate who was identified by a UN panel the year before as Taylor's "paymaster to diamond and arms traffickers," according a cable, visited the embassy in Monrovia.
Eldine told the ambassador that he would "do anything the embassy asks" and denied involvement in any illicit activities, the embassy reported back to Washington. Almost a year later, amid a flurry of new allegations about Taylor's complicity in war crimes, the US government still did not appear to think the situation was urgent.
Because he was OUR TOOL and we DIDN'T CARE!
When in August 2002 the Mexican government proposed that the United States lead an international effort to ensure elections were held to replace Taylor, a cable from the State Department instructed the UN ambassador to tell the Mexicans that the United States was "continuing to review next steps forward."
As late as December 2002, a few months before Taylor was indicted by the UN special court, P. Michael McKinley, deputy assistant secretary of state, met with Taylor in a late-night session at the executive mansion to talk about the refugee problem in West Africa -- a situation created in large part by Taylor .
McKinley told Taylor that "Washington places great importance on Liberian cooperation with regional peace initiatives and welcomes [Taylor's] assertions that he has no intention of pursuing actions beyond his own borders," according to the cable.
Shortly after McKinley's visit, the UN special court for Sierra Leone became a reality. One of its first moves was to issue its sweeping indictment of Taylor, which was dated in March 2003. In August, when the indictment was unsealed, President Bush called for Taylor to step down.
Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, in 2003:
"Charles Taylor needs to leave because Charles Taylor is the problem. And Charles Taylor is, by the way, not just a problem for Liberia, he's a problem for the region."
INCREDIBLE!!!
So when the charges finally came down, this S*** was SPEWED by the U.S.?
UNREAL!
The United States persuaded the Nigerian government to offer exile to Taylor as a way of removing him from power.... In 2006, Bush persuaded the Nigerian government to arrest Taylor and send him to the UN tribunal in The Hague.
So we still DOUBLE-CROSSED HIM?
Should be a lesson to all leaders (hear that, Abass) to WATCH OUT when they deal with the U.S. (Saddam found that out the hard way)!
Now, specialists can only wonder if the United States could have forced Taylor from power sooner.
Elwood Dunn , a political science professor at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., who is writing a book about relations between the United States and his native Liberia:
"There could have been a much more robust role before we got to 2003. [The United States was] just going to wait [Taylor] out -- that was the policy, if one can call that a policy. There were those with very different views, but the US decided 'we will just play the game.' "
Cook also said the Clinton and Bush administrations could have been tougher on Taylor, but he noted that "they had little choice but to interact with him as a major player in Liberian politics."
Yup, U.S. had little choice; we always at the mercy of tin-pot dictators from small African nations, huh?
Chester Crocker, who was assistant secretary of state for African affairs in the Reagan administration, said the State Department took far too long to decide Taylor was simply unredeemable:
"What I found astonishing was how long it took to figure out Taylor was a considerable threat."
Right!Like we DIDN'T KNOW!
Pffffft!
