A Warlord's Last Chance

Charles Taylor has always been an opportunist.

In the late 1980s, the Liberian warlord-turned-president used the killing of his mentor, Gen. Thomas Quiwonkpa, as a springboard to launch his own revolution. In 1997, he deployed the same rebel army that had torn Liberia to pieces during the civil war as a political machine to mobilize votes for a popular election. And several years into his presidency, Taylor leveraged the bloodletting in Sierra Leone to turn the world's attention to the region and find an audience with the United States.

So as his war crimes trial at The Hague winds down, it should come as no surprise that Taylor is finding opportunity in a final moment of adversity. During closing arguments on Feb. 9, when the prosecution hoped to wrap up more than two years of testimony from 115 witnesses, Taylor used the occasion instead to rehash the narrative of his political demise: that he is the victim of an international conspiracy.

The drama came during closing arguments, when Taylor's defense counsel, Courtenay Griffiths, stormed out of the court, followed soon after by his client, to boycott a proceeding the defense has decried as biased since the trial opened nearly four years ago. (This was a repeat performance; Taylor's original counsel opened the trial by walking out on the first day of the proceedings in 2007.) From the first day of his trial, Taylor's defense has claimed that the proceedings are rigged against him. Specifically, the Liberian ex-president has charged that the United States, Britain, and a legion of other entities from the IMF and the World Bank to Human Rights Watch and journalists like the Washington Post's Douglas Farah, engaged in a conspiracy to remove him from power.

For a man accused of nearly a dozen crimes against humanity, from terrorism, murder and rape to sexual slavery and the conscription of child soldiers, the notion of Taylor's victimhood appears remarkable. Taylor, who rose from beginnings as a rebel and warlord in Liberia to win the nation's presidency, is the first African head of state to be tried before an international tribunal for crimes against humanity; the charges he faces stem from his alleged involvement with the Revolutionary United Front (RUF), a rebel group that terrorized neighboring Sierra Leone throughout the 1990s, killing and displacing thousands, hacking the arms and hands off of countless others.

But there is some history -- and a shade of fact-- behind Taylor's conspiracy theories. Over the last three years of research for my book, I have used the Freedom of Information Act to request the declassification of 564 U.S. diplomatic cables relating to Charles Taylor -- more than 3,000 pages of documents. Several of the documents appear to implicate the Liberian president in the crimes for which he now stands trial, but they also illustrate an effort akin to what Taylor describes: a campaign orchestrated by the United States through the U.N. Security Council to use sanctions and diplomatic pressure to destroy his regime.

Where Taylor sees conspiracy, others may simply see politics at work. In either light, the State Department cables illustrate that once Taylor disobeyed Washington on Sierra Leone, the U.S. government pursued Taylor, his inner circle, as well as members of his family -- including his son Chucky, an American citizen, who is currently serving a 97-year sentence for torture committed under his father's administration -- with nearly every political means at its disposal.

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