CALIFORNIA, DRUGS AND MIDEAST TERROR

Occasionally, you bump into a truly compelling policy argument. Here is one
that emerges out of facts that came to light this past month. On data that
has recently surfaced, there can no longer be any doubt about a direct link
between drug-trafficking money from the buyers of illicit drugs in the
United States and leading terrorist organizations, including al Qaeda,
Hamas, also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement, and Hezbollah.

This puzzle piece is added to another: Colombian FARC terrorists have long
funded their operations with cocaine and heroin revenue. New this autumn is
a riveting development: Clear and convincing evidence has emerged that
California's methamphetamine "super labs" are, in fact, a significant
source of revenue not only for Mexican drug traffickers, but also to Middle
Eastern terrorist organizations based in Yemen and Jordan. That revelation
is significant. It should have resounding policy implications for law
makers in both parties and the administration.

In the words of Attorney General John Ashcroft last month, "The war on
terrorism has been joined with the war on illegal drug use." More to the
point, Congress must seriously grapple with properly funding -- and clearly
articulating the reasons for funding -- a full bore effort to take down the
infrastructure surrounding California's unique phenomenon of
methamphetamine "super labs." This is not an excuse for massive new funding
across 50 states; this is an immediate threat posed by one state. Nor is
this a "get to it in Fiscal Year 2004" sort of affair; this is a "get to it
now" challenge.

Evidence has long simmered, just short of a full boil, that major Middle
Eastern terrorist organizations were drawing substantial revenues from the
sale of high potency narcotics on U.S. streets and in U.S.schools. The link
was always ironclad in the case of Colombian terrorists, not least because
their links to cocaine and heroin traffickers were both transparent and
repeatedly surfaced in public documents. Not so, however, with the
California methamphetamine gusher.

In recent years, two mistaken presumptions have characterized federal
efforts to end the methamphetamine production glut. First, California's
meth problem has mistakenly been deemed no worse, proportionally, than any
other state's. The implication is that meth produced in the source country
we call California will stay there -- only it does not. We now know that
more than 85 percent of California's meth ends up in other states, north to
New Hampshire, East to Virginia, south to Florida, and through states like
Texas and Illinois. The second mistake has been assuming that Mexican
cocaine cartels had locked up California meth production. That also turns
out to be only half the story.

In a first glimpse of the Middle Eastern connection to U.S. drug profits,
indictments were handed up last month against two Pakistanis and an
American once from India for "an alleged scheme to use profits from illicit
drug sales to finance the purchase of Stinger [shoulder-fire] missiles for
the al Qaida terror network." They had sought to buy four Stinger missiles
on profits from illegal drugs in San Diego. But that is not the kicker. Nor
is the fact that terrorists coincidentally tried to bring down an Israeli
jet airliner with a shoulder-fire missile.

This autumn, the California Department of Justice internally documented an
elaborate review of finance transactions in a report entitled
"Narco-Terrorism in California: The Middle Eastern Connection." The
California Anti-Terrorism Information Center specifically found, perhaps to
its surprise, that evidence of the meth link to Middle Eastern terrorists
abounds. The analysis found that "Yemeni, Jordanian and Palestinian
psudoephedrine traffickers are the primary groups operating in California."

It also found that these same traffickers transport precursor chemicals
from Canada to California via Illinois and Michigan, and that the pivotal
California nexus with meth distribution nationwide is "transnational cell
structures" located in California.

Perhaps most revealing, the report confirms that "funds derived from these
organizations are funneled to the Middle East through a Middle Eastern
inter-communal process that bypasses traditional government methods of
recording and tracking the funds." And finally the report nails the issue
with this assessment: "Points of destination for these funds include Yemen,
Israel, Brazil and Jordan -- countries that have been infiltrated by
terrorist organizations such as the Islamic Resistance Movement, also known
as Hamas; Hezbollah; and al Qaeda."

What should this finding mean for the administration and new Congress,
which will consider fresh the unfinished Fiscal Year 2003 appropriations
bills, including those affecting anti-terrorist and anti-drug funds for
states like California?

It should mean that, in addition to fully funding strong international
anti-terror and anti-drug programs like Plan Colombia, which has begun to
make progress against the towering terrorist threat to our immediate south,
Congress should aggressively fund the California effort to turn off and
take down terrorist-funding operations that pivot on the meth superlabs
across that state.

In the larger context, if Congress now commits to take down these
California superlabs, the entire nation gets a two-for-one benefit. By
supporting a critical state program with a mere $18 million -- the amount
necessary to sustain California's program against these superlabs -- it
appears that Congress would both save more chlidren's lives and turn off a
major source of terrorist revenue.

Congress could -- and the administration in its budget request should --
turn an important page in the fight against terrorism, acting aggressively
to end what we now know is a significant source of funding for Jordanian,
Palestinian and Yemeni terrorists.

Whether to beat drugs or beat terrorism, policy arguments seldom come more
compelling than that.