Liberia: Report Reveals Why Ellen Wants Africom in Liberia

Πηγή: All Africa
Oct 11 2012

Report gathered by this paper has revealed that Liberian President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf's interest in hosting in Liberia a base for the United States Africa Command (AFRICOM) appears to have had more to do with protecting the George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa than in championing stability and human rights.

George Soros is a Hungarian-American business magnate, investor, philosopher and philanthropist. The 82- year-old is the chairman of Soros Fund Management, and also the chairman of the Open Society Institute.

HE IS THE NEW YORK HEDGE FUND MANAGER AND ONE OF THE MOS

Since the mid-1980s in particular, he has used his immense influence to help reconfigure the political landscapes of several countries around the world--in some cases playing a key role in toppling regimes that had held the reins of government for years, even decades. Vis à vis the United States, a strong case can be made for the claim that Soros today affects American politics and culture more profoundly than any other living person.

The report, which was published online nearly a year now, indicates that for the sole purpose of protecting the George Soros and Rothschild mining operations in West Africa, President Johnson-Sirleaf and her friend Leymah Gbowee received two Nobel gold medals to help the Rothschild/Soros team control all the gold metal," adding, "A little gold for all the gold."

The report divulges that: "As with so many international constructs that started out with good intentions, the Norwegian Nobel Committee, like the International Olympic Committee, has become contrivances for global corporations," adding that: "It is now clear that the decision by the Nobel committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to two Liberian women, along with a female Yemeni human rights campaigner, was to engage in a bit of influence-peddling in mineral resource-rich West Africa while also attempting to recognize the "Arab Spring" democracy movement."

The report avers that, While the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize to Yemeni human rights activist seems appropriate, considering the work she has done to oust Yemen's brutal dictator Ali Abdullah Saleh from power, the awarding of the Peace Prize gold medals to Liberian President Johnson-Sirleaf and Liberian human rights activist Leymah Gbowee, just before the Liberian presidential election in 2011, appears to be a blatant act of trying to influence the outcome of the election and rewarding the Liberian leader for her support for the U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM).

"In addition to being Africa's first elected female head of state, the report adds, "Sirleaf also has the distinction of being the only African head of state to offer AFRICOM a base of operations and headquarters in Africa - Liberia."

According to the report, "Sirleaf's invitation to AFRICOM was unsettling to many Liberians who are cognizant of Liberia's past as a colony founded by freed slaves from the United States and run for decades by a series of American-Liberian dictators who acted as virtual proxies for Washington and the Firestone Rubber Corporation."

The report maintains that President Johnson-Sirleaf was implicated in supporting Liberia's brutal dictator, Charles Taylor, in a report issued in 2009 by the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), but she rejected the TRC report and also reneged on her promise to serve only one term as president.

Winston Tubman, the nephew of Liberia's long-serving President William Tubman and who ran against then candidate Johnson-Sirleaf, the report indicates, "questioned the timing of the Nobel Committee's awarding of the peace prize to his opponent, only a few days before the October 11 election," adding that "It is also noteworthy that after the announcement of this year's Nobel awards, Gbowee, the other Liberian peace prize awardee, endorsed Sirleaf's re-election."

"Sirleaf, a Harvard graduate, has long been a darling of George Soros's "human rights" and "civil society" contrivances, including the Open Society Institute and Foundation," says the report. The report states that: "On September 9, 2008, WMR reported: "Soros is a close friend of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, a former Vice President of Equator Bank in Washington, DC. Equator was later bought by HSBC, which, not surprisingly is a financial partner of Soros."

"Soros has much more of an interest in Liberia and surrounding countries -- including Ivory Coast, which saw French troops fight troops loyal to ousted president Laurent Gbagbo to install a Rothschild/Soros-run World Bank veteran, Alassane Ouattara and his French Zionist wife, into power -- than promoting "civil society," the report adds.

The report unveils that: "Liberia is a nexus for gold mining and Soros's senior partner, Nathaniel Rothschild, is, according to WMR's sources, buying up all the world's gold mines in anticipation of the collapse of several world currencies, including the euro and the dollar."

"Rothschild and Soros, through Rothschild-controlled Newmont Mining Corporation, along with other Rothschild-controlled companies like Vallar and Glencore, are currently moving in to buy up gold mining companies and mining operations in Indonesia, Papua New Guinea, the United States, Peru, Ghana, Guinea, Canada, Namibia, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Sierra Leone, and Liberia," the report among others stated.

When the 2nd Vice Presidential Press Secretary of President Johnson-Sirleaf, Mr. Christopher Sele was Monday 8 October 2012 contacted via cell phone for the Liberian leader's reaction to the report, an unidentified individual believed to be a staff member of the office of the Presidential Press Secretary, answered the call and stated that he [Mr. Sele] was upstairs, but promised that Mr. Sele would immediately return the call. However, neither did the unidentified staff nor Mr. Sele return the call up to press time.

Charles Taylor 'worked' for CIA in Liberia

Charles Taylor was a CIA informant in the 1980s

Πηγή: BBC
Jan 19 2012

US authorities say former Liberian leader Charles Taylor worked for its intelligence agencies, including the CIA, the Boston Globe reports.

The revelation comes in response to a Freedom of Information request by the newspaper.

A Globe reporter told the BBC this is the first official confirmation of long-held reports of a relationship between US intelligence and Mr Taylor.

Mr Taylor is awaiting a verdict on his trial for alleged war crimes.

Rumours of CIA ties were fuelled in July 2009 when Mr Taylor himself told his trial, at the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone in the Hague, that US agents had helped him escape from a maximum security prison in Boston in 1985.

The CIA at the time denied such claims as "completely absurd".

But now the Defence Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon's spy arm, has disclosed that its agents - and those of the CIA - did later use Mr Taylor as an informant, the Globe reports.

Globe reporter Bryan Bender told the BBC's Network Africa programme that Pentagon officials refused to give details on exactly what role Mr Taylor played, citing national security.

But they did confirm that Mr Taylor first started working with US intelligence in the 1980s, the period when he rose to become one of the world's most notorious warlords, Mr Bender says.

Mr Taylor was later elected Liberia's president.

He has been accused of arming and controlling the RUF rebels in neighbouring Sierra Leone during a 10-year campaign of terror conducted largely against civilians.

If convicted, Mr Taylor would serve a prison sentence in the UK.

He denies charges of murder, rape and using child soldiers.

Rape Reporting During War: Why the Numbers Don't Mean What You Think They Do

Πηγή: Foreign Affairs

By Amber Peterman, Dara Kay Cohen, Tia Palermo, and Amelia Hoover Green

August 1, 2011

Reports of sexual violence during the ongoing unrest in Libya have captured headlines across the world. Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi's forces, some have alleged, were given Viagra to facilitate their rape of hundreds, if not thousands, of victims. Recently, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, the chief prosecutor at the International Criminal Court, and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton both expressed outrage at what was apparently a purposeful campaign. Yet recent reports by the U.N. and by advocacy groups shed doubt on these claims. Amnesty International, for example, has been unable to locate a single rape victim, or even anyone who knows a victim.

As the veracity of stories about sexual violence in Libya came into question, the American Journal of Public Health published a study estimating that the prevalence of rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo was far worse than previously documented. The article estimated that between 2006 and 2007 more than 400,000 women between the ages of 15 and 49 were raped during the war there -- 26 times the U.N.'s official count.

So what are we to make of these two cases -- a possible exaggeration of rape in Libya and a gross underestimation of it in the DRC? Wartime sexual violence has rightly been called a hidden epidemic; in truth, we know very little about its actual magnitude and impact. Reports of rape are increasingly common in countries wracked by conflict, such as Colombia, the DRC, East Timor, Côte d'Ivoire, Libya, and Sudan, but no one knows what the relationship is between increased reports and increased rape. Even in peacetime, sexual violence is severely and unevenly underreported. Beyond prevalence, patterns of where, when, and by whom rape is committed -- not to mention why it is committed -- are even less clear. War exponentially worsens these problems. As a result, estimates of rape in prominent conflicts are often unreliable.

The lack of clarity about wartime sexual violence is hardly surprising. Wartime rape is violent and brutal. Few of us want to think about it, talk about it, or read about it. Even when it does make headlines, it is the sensational details, not meaningful analysis of patterns and causes, that are often reported. And researchers are as apt as anyone to look away. The study of wartime rape has been marginalized as a "feminist" or "gender" issue. For many years, research on sexual violence was considered too unseemly a topic for top academic publications. Social scientists and statisticians rarely collect systematic data on wartime rape; instead, they frequently rely on victim narratives recorded by human rights advocates, aid workers, and journalists; as well as law enforcement reports; and hospital records.
A 2002 BBC article stated that "a girl born in South Africa will have a greater chance of being raped than learning how to read." It is almost certainly not true that the rape rate there surpasses 97.5 percent, the U.N. estimate for literacy among South African females aged 15 to 24.