"Last month two famous defendants — one adored, the other despised — appeared in courts nearly 10,000 km apart. Charles Taylor, the former president of Liberia, is being tried by a special tribunal in The Hague for murder, rape, torture, and other war crimes allegedly committed during the decade-long conflict in neighboring Sierra Leone. Taylor — known as "Pappy" to child soldiers who, say prosecutors, were abducted, drugged and dispatched to commit atrocities on his orders — used his first appearance on the stand on July 14 to dismiss the charges as "disinformation, misinformation, lies, rumors." (Read "?Lies and Rumors?: Liberia?s Charles Taylor on the Stand.")..."