The Daily Double

Was Liberian War Criminal
Charles Taylor on the U.S. Payroll?

Ex-strongman Charles Taylor, who is considered responsible for the deaths of between 250,000 and 300,000 while the dictator of Liberia, may have been on the payroll of the United States in the mid-’90s.

That may explain why the White House hasn’t been all that aggressive in pressuring Nigeria to turn over the exiled strongman to Sierra Leone to face trial on war crimes… because Taylor may reveal details of his relationship with U.S. intelligence.

“Taylor was a paid informant of the U.S. Defense Department intelligence service and reported regularly on his trips to Libya from at least 1992 to 1995,” former West Africa correspondent for the Washington Post Douglas Farah told The New Republic. “Debriefings took place in Ouagadougou. It was at a time when the United States had very little access to Muammar Qaddafi, and Taylor was traveling to Libya twice a month and meeting regularly with Qaddafi and Qaddafi’s senior people.”

In Bush’s ‘Model’ Iraqi Town, 40 Killed in Suicide Bombing

Tal Afar, the town which has been cited by President Bush and numerous news accounts as a success story in the U.S. and Iraqi drive to quell the insurgency, was the scene of a suicide bombing last night that killed at least 40 and injured 20 others.

“The attack, in which the bomber detonated an explosives belt amid a line of recruits outside Tamarat army base at 11.15am (7.15pm AEDT) near the town of Tal Afar, close to the Syrian border, was the deadliest single attack since a January suicide assault on police recruits in Ramadi,” reports the Australian. (Oddly, the irony that Tal Afar was the setting for this attack has not received much attention in the U.S. press.)

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 28th, 2006 at 3:01 pm and is filed under International, Iraq War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.