Political Quotes

“today I have introduced a new bill along with Senator Mike DeWine, a Republican from Ohio, and Senator Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin, which intends to address the U.S. response to the scourge of conflict diamonds. In war-torn areas in Africa, rebels and human rights abusers, with the complicity of some governments, have exploited the diamond trade, particularly alluvial diamond fields, to fund their guerrilla wars, to murder, rape, and mutilate innocent civilians, and kidnap children to be part of their guerrilla forces. Since November, the press has reported a connection between al-Qaida operatives and conflict diamonds. Those connections were noted in advance of the September 11 attack. It stands to reason that when we have a terrorist organization and a country such as the United States in concert with its allies trying to trace the financial transactions that fund this terrorism, the terrorists will look for some other coin of the realm, some other way to fund their operations. Conflict diamonds turned out to be one of the most easy, portable, and least detected way to do it. It is quite clear that Hezbollah, another terrorist organization in the Middle East, has had a long history of dealing in conflict diamonds.”