Liberia, Aug. 31 -- Liberian law is openly hostile to secret recordings. A Monrovia courtroom let one in anyway earlier this year, in the Capitol arson case against former Speaker J. Fonati Koffa, and the Supreme Court declined to stop it. That precedent may now matter more than any statute when Jewel Howard-Taylor's lawyers try to keep a wiretapped "gift" call out of evidence.

By Rodney D. Sieh | rodney.sieh@frontpageafricaonline.com

Monrovia - Every account of how Jewel Howard-Taylor came to be arrested runs through the same piece of evidence: a phone call, recorded by a cooperating informant, in which Sheikh Bassirou Kante told the former Vice President that the "investors" she had met in Dubai had sent her a "gift." It is the closes...