5 August 2004
interview
Washington, DC — The arrest of a Tanzanian fugitive in Pakistan last week, release of the 9-11 Commission report in Washington and a forthcoming finding by a war crimes tribunal in Sierra Leone have rekindled the debate over what role, if any, west African diamonds played in financing the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian accused of masterminding the 1998 bombings of American embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, who was arrested by Pakistan security forces along with more than a dozen other al Qaeda suspects, has been identified as a linchpin of an al Qaeda diamond trading operation in Liberia and neighboring Sierra Leone. Washington Post correspondent Douglas Farah, in a recently published 225-page book entitled "Blood from Stones: The Secret Financial Network of Terror," provides a detailed description of al Qaeda's activity in West Africa. Corroborative accounts have been published by the London-based nongovernmental organization Global Witness and by the Special Court for Sierra Leone, established by the United Nations to investigate crimes against humanity committed during Sierra Leone's brutal civil war in the 1990s.
According to Farah, American intelligence agencies overlooked the connection between diamond trading and al Qaeda and the central role played in harboring and profiting from the illicit dealing by Liberian President Charles Taylor, who was forced into exile in Nigeria last year under a deal brokered by the U.S. government. Farah's findings have been hotly disputed by the CIA and FBI, and their viewpoint was reflected in the recently release report of the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, also known as the 9-11 Commission. "We have seen no persuasive evidence that al Qaeda funded itself by trading in African conflict diamonds," the report states (page 171).
But a confidential investigation by the Sierra Leone Special Court further bolsters the view that that the alliance between Taylor and al Qaeda was substantial, according to an article in Wednesday's Boston Globe by Washington correspondent Bryan Bender. "Al Qaeda allegedly paid Taylor for protection and then joined him in the African diamond trade, raising millions of dollars for terrorist activities, according to UN war crimes documents," Bender wrote. Citing the Special Court's investigation and U.S. intelligence official, Bender said a planned raid a few weeks after September 11, 2001 by U.S. Special Forces aimed at capturing Ghailani and an associate in Liberia was called off for unexplained reasons. One explanation raised by Bender's sources was Taylor's reported longstanding relations with the CIA.
Farah, who currently serves as senior fellow at the National Strategy Information Center, discussed with AllAfrica's Eunice Ajambo the 9-11 Commission findings, the interaction between Al Qaeda and West Africa's diamond trade, and his view of the role U.S. intelligence has played. Excerpts:
What is your reaction to the single sentence in the 9-11 Commission report that dismisses African diamonds as a source of al Qaeda funding?
If you look at the footnotes of that particular citation, it's all FBI and CIA reports with the exception of an interview they quote with Allan White from the Special Court in Sierra Leone. I find it disturbing because they had access to the Belgium police report, which I have on my website, which they were given. The Special Court also wrote a special brief to them and the intelligence indicating al Qaeda's presence. The book, the Global Witness Report - none of those are cited as having been used at all in making their determination.
I think the 9-11 Commission was under a great deal of pressure to make hurried judgments. In my limited communication with them, they told me that they could not get to the bottom of the dispute. If you read my book, I have a lot of discussion of why the CIA tried to discredit the story, and the great lengths that they went to do so, despite the fact that they did not succeed, and the fact that more evidence continues to emerge [that] the story is actually correct. But there is a great hostility towards the story from the intelligence community, and all the commission did was take the intelligence community reports and use them as their basis for making their assertions.
I was really disappointed because several people talked to them after their initial staff report came out that contained that sentence. They do not seem to have listened to anybody, and they certainly didn't acknowledge [in their footnotes] that there was any other information out there.
The 9-11 Commission also stated "to date, we have not been able to determine the origin of the money used for the 9-11 attacks?" How do you respond to that?
The proof of the telephone contacts to Afghanistan on September 10th and the prior communications from the Belgium police who traced the phone call from the satellite phone used by Aziz Nassour and Samih Osailly [two al Qaeda operatives whose activities in west Africa are detailed in Farah's book] is not hearsay evidence. They made numerous calls and it's documented. I have the phone bills for them, and more importantly, the police got them out of the official records. I do not think it's something you can easily dismiss. Neither are the bank records from Artesia Bank that show $20m flowing and being unaccounted for, and all the other indications that other people came up with.
To just say, "we do not know where the money came from," seems a little bit disingenuous. My sense is that the report on how things went was largely based on official documents given to them by the intelligence community. And the intelligence community had a vested interest in trying to discredit this story. The panel, I think, just did not have the time or inclination to really investigate this. It wasn't really the focus of what they were doing. So it took the word of the CIA and the FBI, and used it, and unfortunately they are wrong.
Several investigations by other organizations have found evidence that corroborated your findings linking al Qaeda to the West African diamond trade. Do you think the 9-11 commission will revisit the evidence provided by these organizations?
I do not expect them to revisit the issue. There is a cultural resistance in the intelligence community to using any information that does not originate with themselves, and unfortunately in this case, they had no information. So the reaction to other information from me, from Global Witness, from the Special Court, from the Belgium police and from all the other players was that, `We did not have it, and therefore it can't be true.' I am afraid what we have seen with the 9-11 commission report is pretty much the final word. I do not have any indication they'll be revisiting the issue at all.
Why do you think U.S. policy makers ignored al Qaeda's Africa associations in the first place?
The U.S. has not perceived itself to have a strategic interest in sub-Saharan Africa on the terrorism front until very recently. I think that what you are seeing now is a little bit more interest, but only moderately more interest. The policy for decades has been neglect of sub-Saharan Africa. There is no administration that has given much attention to African issues. Europe has also been extremely negligent, and what you have is a consequence of that negligence, and the lack of strategic thinking on the part of the U.S. and others.
The development, not only in Liberia, [of] a functioning criminal state, is not a secret to anyone who has been to the region or who lives in the region. You have widespread corruption. You have vast areas of a country like the Democratic Republic of Congo where the state has no control. You have the Central African Republic, where government controls essentially only the capital. Mali, Chad, Niger [and] Nigeria all have very large areas where other armed groups outside of the state control the resources and life there. That whole scenario is part of the neglect by the outside world.
Why was Al Qaeda interested in West Africa?
Diamonds were perfect for several reasons. They are easy to transport. They have extremely high value in a very small packet, they are easy to convert into cash, and the market is big enough that it does not react to small sales, such that if you sell a few carats of diamonds the whole diamond market does not go out of register. It was extremely convenient from that point of view.
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