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Charles Taylor, the Liberian president who has been indicted by an international court for crimes against humanity, has few remaining supporters in the United States. But one prominent American who has stuck with the West African leader is religious broadcaster and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson.

In recent broadcasts of his cable TV show "The 700 Club," watched by an estimated 1 million households, Robertson has defended Taylor as a fellow Baptist and Liberia's "freely elected" leader. The "horrible bloodbath" taking place in Liberia, he has repeatedly said, is the fault of the State Department.

"So we're undermining a Christian, Baptist president to bring in Muslim rebels to take over the country. And how dare the president of the United States say to the duly elected president of another country, 'You've got to step down,' " Robertson said to his viewers on Monday.

What Robertson, 73, has not discussed in these broadcasts is his financial interest in Liberia. In an interview yesterday, he said he has "written off in my own mind" an $8 million investment in a gold mining venture that he made four years ago under an agreement with Taylor's government.

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Taylor possessed more than the necessary means in 2001 to coordinate a “diamond-buying spree” worth $20 million on the part of Bin Laden's personal agents, who furnished Taylor himself with at least five percent of that sum for providing them shelter and refuge, in the weeks following the September 11th assault, within a protected region of Liberia. But even beforehand, in 1998, Ahmed Abdullah, a top al Qaeda member, met with Taylor's representative Ibrahim Bah in Monrovia to purchase diamonds for resale and the funding of the sabotage of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.

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