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"France is funding AQ. I'd wager on it."

Assuming that the above is true, the only reasonable explanation I could come up with is that the French have been blackmailed by AQ, much like the Saudis.

LOL! Oh, please. No one ever had to blackmail France into supporting evil. It's a niche market they've pursued on their own initiative.

Were they "blackmailed" into supporting the most radical elements of the Hutu in Rwanda (incl with military supplies and deployments of French troops) before, during and after they murdered 800,000 Tutsis? No. They did it because the Hutus were their freely chosen allies in a campaign to increase French influence in Africa's great lakes region.

Were they "blackmailed" into violating their mutual defense pact with the government of the Ivory Coast when it faced a violent islamic insurgency? No. The frogs were doing the blackmailing, or rather punishing the country's president for deigning to award an important government contract to a non-French company.

The French don't need to be blackmailed. They've made an affirmative policy of perfidy.

Wouldn't be the first time the French " tipped" someone off.

"Karadzic was in the French sector," Clark explains, and seizing him would have "required a degree of cooperation with other powers that proved difficult for some in the US government to accept. There remained rumors of some kind of French connection," he adds darkly, "rumors that have been denied vigorously by Paris."

France's ambassador to Nato has strongly rejected reports that a French military officer tipped off the Bosnian Serbs about last week's failed operation to arrest Radovan Karadzic.

When there is a failed operation it is always tempting to find an excuse

Benoit D'Aboville
French ambassador to Nato
Benoit D'Aboville told the BBC that an alleged telephone conversation between the French captain and a Bosnian Serb police officer, apparently warning the Bosnian Serbs about the imminent operation, "never took place".

He said that the story was made up as an excuse for Nato's public failure to capture the Bosnian Serb wartime leader and the international war crimes tribunal's most wanted suspect.

But a German journalist who broke the story about the alleged leak told BBC News Online that he was standing by his story, which he said had been confirmed by intelligence sources.

Franz-Josef Hutsch, of the German newspaper Hamburger Abendblatt, said Nato's rejection of the reports was "not credible".

Nato launched its largest-scale operations yet to capture Mr Karadzic on Thursday and Friday last week.

Hundreds of Nato troops as well as helicopters and armoured vehicles were deployed to seal off the village of Celibici, near Foca. But Mr Karadzic is reported to have fled the area in the nick of time.

The Abendblatt and the UK's Times newspaper reported separately on Monday that the French officer had given the Bosnian Serb the tip-off about the plan.

The Times carried details of a transcript of the conversation which it said had been monitored by British intelligence.

Franz-Josef Hutsch said his transcript, which was less detailed, had come from another western European member of Nato's Stabilisation Force (S-For), but was not from the British source quoted by the Times.

Both transcripts quoted the French officer as telling the Bosnian Serb policeman: "Foca and its neighbourhood are always interesting for us".

"That the conversation took place is not debatable," Mr Hutsch told BBC News Online.