Pubdate: Mon, 01 Oct 2001 Source: Knoxville News-Sentinel (TN) Copyright: 2001 The Knoxville News-Sentinel Co. Contact: http://www.knoxnews.com/ Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/226 Author: James Rosen Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/find?203 (Terrorism) THE DRUG CONNECTION Long before he became Public Enemy No. 1, Osama bin Laden was waging a different kind of war on Americans and their Western allies. Since the mid-1990s, while the spotlight shone on cocaine cartels in Latin America, bin Laden fortified a drug-trafficking network that provided major revenues for Afghanistan's Taliban regime - and financed his al Qaeda network of terrorism. The renegade Saudi's commerce in narcotics helped make Afghanistan the world's leading exporter of heroin, some 2,200 pounds of which reached the United States last year, according to the State Department. Worth at least 260 million in street value, some of the proceeds from the American heroin sales found their way back to bin Laden, who stands accused by President Bush of orchestrating the Sept. 11 suicide hijack attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. "What better way to poison the Western world than through drugs," said Donnie Marshall, who headed the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration from July 1999 through June of this year. "It's another weapon in their arsenal." Yoseff Bodansky, author of a 1999 biography of bin Laden and director of the congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, said the terrorist kingpin takes a 15 percent cut of the drug trade money in exchange for protecting smugglers and laundering their profits. "The Afghans are selling 7 to 8 billion dollars of drugs in the West a year," Bodansky said. "Bin Laden oversees the export of drugs from Afghanistan. His people are involved in growing the crops, processing and shipping. When Americans buy drugs, they fund the jihad (holy war)." Rachel Ehrenfeld, who tracks international money laundering and drug trafficking as director of the Center for the Study of Corruption in New York, said bin Laden recycles the drug proceeds through businesses in Europe and the Far East. "The drug trade is a triple-pronged weapon for bin Laden and the Taliban," she said. "It finances their activities. It undermines the enemy. And it proves that the enemy is corrupt, which they then use in their own recruiting propaganda." Heroin is produced in labs through a chemical process from opium gum, a thick sap scraped from the scored flower bulbs of poppy plants Afghanistan's Taliban rulers announced a ban on poppy plant cultivation 14 months ago. Before the Sept. 11 attacks, they complained that the ban had not succeeded in easing economic sanctions the United Nations imposed on Afghanistan in 1998 for harboring terrorists and drug traffickers. "We have done what needed to be done, putting our people and our farmers through immense difficulties," Abdol Hamid Akhondzadeh, director of the Taliban's High Commission on Drug Control, said in May. "We expected to be rewarded for our actions, but instead were punished with additional sanctions." But a five-person panel of United Nations experts concluded that 10 months after the ban, stored opium was being sold to buy arms, "finance the training of terrorists and support the operation of terrorists in neighboring countries and beyond." The U.N. panel also noted that Afghanistan was still importing large quantities of acetic anhydride, the main chemical used in heroin production. Many Western experts suspect the Taliban of stockpiling opium gum and heroin, which unlike cocaine have long shelf lives and can be stored for years if securely packaged. "They have reduced poppy cultivation over the last year or two, but I think that was largely a sham," said Marshall, the former DEA chief. "There is a lot of evidence that they have stockpiled opium gum and that limiting cultivation is not going to have any impact because they have been preparing for several years to do that." - --- MAP posted-by: Josh