A while ago, on the 1st of July the story broke via the Financial Times that the US was to intensify counter-terrorist efforts in West Africa after revelations concerning Liberian dictator Charles Taylor’s connections both with the CIA and Al-Qa’ida. This was covered both here and also at Laura Rozen’s War and Piece. The Financial Times story included a sensational paragraph quoting Alex Yearsley of Global Witness as saying that “the CIA and FBI long had tried to publicly minimize links between conflict diamonds and Islamic militant groups, including al-Qaida. The U.S. security agents feared exposure of their own longtime links with Charles Taylor..”. However, this bombshell vanished from later editions and the FT website after everything beyond an anodyne call for a full investigation was spiked.
The recent Boston Globe story on the cancelled US raid into Liberia to seek an AQ financial expert seems to bear out the original version of the FT story.