The 'Blood Diamond' Hoax, Liberia as a Parlor Game and You

The Gay Secretary

Thanks to Naomi Campbell's clueless testimony before the U.N. Special Court for Sierra Leone in The Hague, the manufactured nonscandal of "blood diamonds" is once again being trundled before the collective gullibility of the world.

The hoopla is over some diamonds that allegedly were given during a gala fund-raiser hosted by the sainted Nelson Mandela to Ms. Campbell by Charles Taylor, the apparently infatuated accused mass murderer and ex-president of Liberia (and erstwhile friend of Americans such as Jesse Jackson and Jimmy Carter).

But despite what much media coverage would have you believe, the parallel occurrences of diamonds and internecine mayhem in Africa are in no way related—certainly no more than are violence and any other commercial commodity found on the continent. When was the last time we heard of "blood manganese," or "blood copper," or, for that matter, "blood bananas" or "blood cut flowers"?.

As for the real reason Taylor was ousted from Liberia, it was strictly international global politics, with various U.S. factions using Liberia as a something akin to a parlor game.

I happened to have something of a front row see to observe the player that the then out of office Colin Powell was promoting to replace Taylor. This new man was to end all the corruption going on in Liberia under Taylor, or so the propaganda went. Of course, the son of Powell's man was not in Liberia but in D.C. trying to sell off concessions to every piece of Liberian business he could think of, before his father was even in office.

This using the son to do the dirty work was a formula developed and refined by Kofi Anan when he was Secretary-General of the United Nations. The NY Sun gives us a glimpse on how this all works.