The American Warlord Guilty of Torture
Chucky Taylor, the bloodthirsty son of a former Liberian dictator, is the only American rotting in U.S. prison for torturing people abroad.
By Brian Caster
The Daily Beast
"...Before West Africa was gripped by an epidemic, before images of abandoned bodies in the streets of Monrovia, before chlorine and quarantines, before CDC predictions of calamity, before the scare in Dallas and talk of closing the border, before the United States deployed the 101st Airborne Division to fight a disease, before Ebola, Liberia was known for its civil war.
By any objective measure, that 13-year slaughter was a human catastrophe: over 10% of the population dead and 80% internally displaced—numbers that dwarf (as if there is some sick contest here) today’s tragedy in Syria. But the 1989-2003 Liberian civil war gained infamy not for the quantitative count of its suffering, but rather for its grotesque headlines; child soldiers fought naked under the tutelage of teenage generals, juju priests in Halloween masks blessed fighters, and warlords tortured and exterminated whole villages.
Chucky Taylor was one such sadistic antagonist. The illegitimate son of then-Liberian President Charles Taylor, Chucky nominally led the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), one of his father’s many retinues of bodyguards. To obtain approval and affection, he disappeared his father’s enemies, real and perceived. He beat his subordinates to death, and inflicted pain for sport. For this he eventually ended up in U.S. federal prison, because amazingly Chucky Taylor is an American citizen, the only person ever tried and convicted of torture committed abroad under U.S. law.
Johnny Dwyer’s subtitle for American Warlord, his narrative of the life and times of Chucky Taylor, is A True Story, and not for nothing, as even the basic proven facts of the case might otherwise strain credulity..."
Read the Full Article @:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/07/the-american-warlord-guilty-of-torture.html
By Brian Caster
The Daily Beast
"...Before West Africa was gripped by an epidemic, before images of abandoned bodies in the streets of Monrovia, before chlorine and quarantines, before CDC predictions of calamity, before the scare in Dallas and talk of closing the border, before the United States deployed the 101st Airborne Division to fight a disease, before Ebola, Liberia was known for its civil war.
By any objective measure, that 13-year slaughter was a human catastrophe: over 10% of the population dead and 80% internally displaced—numbers that dwarf (as if there is some sick contest here) today’s tragedy in Syria. But the 1989-2003 Liberian civil war gained infamy not for the quantitative count of its suffering, but rather for its grotesque headlines; child soldiers fought naked under the tutelage of teenage generals, juju priests in Halloween masks blessed fighters, and warlords tortured and exterminated whole villages.
Chucky Taylor was one such sadistic antagonist. The illegitimate son of then-Liberian President Charles Taylor, Chucky nominally led the Anti-Terrorist Unit (ATU), one of his father’s many retinues of bodyguards. To obtain approval and affection, he disappeared his father’s enemies, real and perceived. He beat his subordinates to death, and inflicted pain for sport. For this he eventually ended up in U.S. federal prison, because amazingly Chucky Taylor is an American citizen, the only person ever tried and convicted of torture committed abroad under U.S. law.
Johnny Dwyer’s subtitle for American Warlord, his narrative of the life and times of Chucky Taylor, is A True Story, and not for nothing, as even the basic proven facts of the case might otherwise strain credulity..."
Read the Full Article @:
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/04/07/the-american-warlord-guilty-of-torture.html
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