Posted on 10/23/2003 5:59:59 PM PDT by yonif
PHILADELPHIA, Oct 23 (Reuters) - At least half the groups designated as "foreign terrorist organizations" by the U.S. State Department raise money from international drug trafficking, a Bush administration official said on Thursday.
White House drug czar John Walters, credited with a federal anti-drug publicity campaign linking drug use among American adolescents with the financing of terror groups, told a police group, "The American drug consumer is the single most important funder of terrorism in this hemisphere."
He warned that secret channels used to ship narcotics into the United States could also transport biological or nuclear weapons.
"It is a fool's paradise to depend on the scruples of people who already engage in terror and violence," he told the International Association of Chiefs of Police, or IACP, which represents law enforcement executives from over 90 nations.
About 14,000 police officers from around the world were attending the IACP's annual convention in Philadelphia this week.
The State Department's 2002 report on global terrorism, issued in April, lists 36 groups as foreign terrorist organizations, ranging from Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda network to the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC.
He provided no details about the groups he believed were profiting from drug trafficking and did not discuss the possible sums involved.
Jamaican Police Commissioner Francis Forbes told the audience he also believed illicit profits from drug trafficking were helping to finance militant groups.
But he warned that Washington's war on drugs, specifically its $1.7 billion aid program for Colombia, was pushing drug cartel operations into poor Caribbean countries.
The arrival of drug cartel operations in the Caribbean was encouraging a flood of illegal firearms from the United States, he said, forcing underfunded local police to confront a new menacing threat from "high-tech" criminals.
"The terrorists are poised to take the high ground," said Forbes, who called for substantive international cooperation to combat a new "unholy" union among drugs, guns and terrorism in the Caribbean.
"When the United States sneezes, we catch a cold," he told a predominantly American audience. "But if we sneeze, you are bound to catch pneumonia."
The caption: "When you're doing drugs, you're riding with bin Laden!"
Courtesy of the Drug Czar.
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