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While the renewed terror has muted Doe's critics, it has understandably done little to reassure foreign investors or Liberian businessmen of stability any time soon. One reminder is the conduct of Colonel Harrison Pennue, a former corporal and Doe loyalist who likes to boast that he disemboweled President Tolbert. Doe appointed Pennue to a P.R.C. committee charged with collecting $36 million owed by private debtors to the defunct Bank of Liberia. So far, says a foreign businessman, "not one cent" of the millions of dollars in cash that Pennue collected has been turned over to the central bank. On the same day that Doe met with Western diplomats and businessmen to inform them that shakedowns would stop, Pennue ordered his bodyguards to hold down the manager of the government-controlled radio station while the colonel flogged him with a belt. The man's crime: passing Pennue's car. which was stopped along Monrovia's main street. Doe finally jailed Pennue for four days as a "warning" to other P.R.C. members.
Despite the P.R.C.'s excesses, the U.S. Government remains supportive of the regime. While total foreign aid has been drastically slashed by the Reagan Administration, U.S. annual assistance to Liberia has leaped from $8 million during the last year of Tolbert's presidency to $68.3 million this year, an increase, at a time of general retrenchment, that Washington explains as due to the fact that there is "no visible alternative" to the Doe regime. The U.S. is helping to pay Liberia's monthly oil bill of $12 million, supplying more than 20,000 tons of rice at subsidized prices and building new barracks for the army. A team of 100 U.S. Special Forces soldiers arrived in Monrovia on the first anniversary of Doe's coup for joint exercises with the Liberian armed forces. American diplomats insist that they aim to promote a degree of stability that will allow the Liberians to enjoy the "fruits of the revolution." They are also clearly pleased with the pro-American drift of the Doe regime.
That trend worries some Liberian officials. "Most of us feel that America is more comfortable with these people than with some intellectuals who might pursue a more independent foreign policy." says one Monrovia official. "We don't see the U.S. doing much to persuade Doe to return Liberia to the civilians. Unless something unforeseen forces him to step down, we think Doe will be in power for at least five more years." The skeptics are not assured by the fact that a commission has begun to draft a new constitution and is expected to complete it before the end of 1982. Nonetheless, Doe's newly appointed P.R.C. vice chairman. Major General Nicholas Podier, insists that the soldiers will eventually return to the barracks.