MEDIA GRASS FIRES FACE DEA CHIEF

Former federal prosecutor, three-term Arkansas congressman, and Clinton
nemesis, Asa Hutchinson, took over the beleaguered Drug Enforcement
Administration (DEA) last week. The so-called mainstream media was there.
But you wouldn't know it from their coverage.

Instead of focusing on the new administrator's recognition of the
challenges his 4,561 special agents face in stemming the tide of illegal
drugs flowing through American cities, the potentates of the press decided
the "big story" was Mr. Hutchinson's intent to enforce federal laws against
the use of "medical marijuana."

"DEA head backs medical marijuana ban." screamed the Associated Press
headline. The Washington Post trumpeted, "DEA chief tough on medical
marijuana," as though the man who had presented the case against Bill
Clinton was a heartless dog kicker.

Mr. Hutchinson acknowledged that, despite ordinances permitting marijuana
to be grown and dispensed as medicine in Alaska, Arizona, California,
Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Oregon and Washington, it's still "a violation of
federal law" that the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld and made a federal
enforcement responsibility. Responding to reporters' questions, he
emphasized his support of local drug courts, treatment and rehabilitation
rather than incarceration for first-time offenders. But that was lost in
the clucking of the press who were more concerned with whether or not
grandma could still get a toke to treat her Alzheimer's. Instead of taking
"pot shots" at the new DEA chief over "healthful hash," the paragons of the
press should have probed him on how he intends to staunch the flow of
cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine into the United States from south of
our border.

Strangely, the same editors, producers and news directors who couldn't get
enough Latin American footage in the 1980s, have now forgotten the region's
existence. Back then, in the salad days of Marxist revolutionaries running
rampant through the capitals of our southern neighbors, the press was
fascinated by the Reagan administration's efforts to prevent communism from
establishing a toehold on the mainland of this hemisphere. With great glee,
newspapers and TV networks dispatched hoards of reporters to cover our
efforts to stem what CIA Director Bill Casey called "the red tide." But now
- -- when the threat to U.S. citizens comes from well-financed, highly armed
narco-terrorists who threaten the stability of whole countries -- no one is
asking questions of the man who has to lead the fight.

He faces a formidable challenge. With a $1.5 billion budget, and only 9,132
employees, the DEA administrator is responsible for building alliances in
what the media describes as "a war we are losing." Hobbled by the Clinton
administration's refusal to negotiate with Panama for surveillance and
intelligence collection sites in 1999, Mr. Hutchinson must now contend with
highly sophisticated Colombian drug traffickers and what outnumbered,
outgunned DEA agents call "a labyrinth of smuggling routes throughout the
Caribbean, the Bahaman Islands chain and South Florida."

At his swearing-in ceremony, the press asked Mr. Hutchinson to respond to
past DEA gaffes -- like the failure to adequately supervise paid
informants. But in the great scheme of things, that's the least in a long
legacy of past policy catastrophes that he inherits.

Colombian President Andres Pastrana was whipsawed for years by Clinton
officials who urged him, on the one hand, to fight back against the
narco-guerrillas who ravaged his country and to appease them with a
Mideast-like "land for peace" deal, on the other hand. As a result, the
second oldest democracy in this hemisphere is in pieces -- with tens of
thousands of square miles ceded to the Marxist Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia (FARC), the leftist National Liberation Army (ELN) and
right-wing paramilitaries who are a law unto themselves.

With more than 40,000 Colombians dead in drug-related violence, Venezuelan
President Hugo Chavez -- a big fan of Fidel Castro and Nicaragua's
drug-dealing Daniel Ortega -- complains that counter-narcotics operations
by U.S.-trained Colombian army and national police units -- supported by
$1.3 billion in U.S. aid -- are "driving traffickers across the border."
Apparently Mr. Chavez and his champions in the U.S. media have forgotten
that for more than two years he has been offering sanctuary to FARC and ELN
terrorists he describes as lawful "belligerents."

Meanwhile, on the eve of Mr. Hutchinson's swearing in, the Colombian army
announced that it had apprehended three Irish Republican Army terrorists en
route to Paris after spending five weeks in Colombia training FARC
guerrillas to build car bombs "and other unconventional weapons." According
to Cuba's Foreign Ministry, one of the men, Niall Connolly, had lived in
Fidel's island paradise as the Latin American representative for Sinn Fein,
the political arm of the IRA. Apparently, none of the reporters questioning
Mr. Hutchinson thought to query the new DEA head about the IRA-FARC-Cuba
connection.

Maybe the members of our Fourth Estate just don't get it. But one who does
is Gen. Rosso Jose Serrano, the now-retired Colombian cop who destroyed the
Medillin and Cali drug cartels. Just before he returned to Colombia last
week, I asked Gen. Serrano what he thought of Mr. Hutchinson's appointment
as the head of DEA. "I know him and I trust him. With his help, we can win.
He's a strong man," the general said. But unfortunately, that strong man
isn't a part of the State Department's delegation to Colombia this week to
hold three days of talks on combating the FARC, ELN and the drug
traffickers. He should be. And the press should ask why he isn't.