THE WAR ON TERROR'S NEWEST TARGET: U.S. CHILDREN

Did you know you are harboring terrorists in your furnished basement?
To the terrible trio of Iran, Iraq and North Korea, we've now got to
add millions of American kids. At least that's the cock and bull
story the commander in chief is peddling with a slick new $10 million
ad campaign that is one of the most offensive displays of drug war
propaganda ever. And that's saying something.

The TV spots, which for maximum impact premiered during the Super
Bowl, promote the twisted reasoning that, since drug profits have
found their way into the pockets of terrorists, any young Americans
who use drugs are therefore guilty of aiding and abetting the enemy.

In one particularly odious ad, a series of fresh-faced young people
are shown copping to a host of terrorist atrocities: "I helped kids
learn how to kill;" "I helped murder families in Colombia;" "I helped
blow up buildings."

Apparently, in The World According to George W. Bush and his drug
czar, John Walters, the kid smoking a joint at a party is the moral
equivalent of Osama bin Laden or Mohamed Atta.

In the single largest ad buy the federal government has ever made,
the White House spent nearly $3.5 million to get these commercials on
the Super Bowl - $3.5 million spent not on treatment but on
demonizing America's young people. Our tax dollars at work.

And that's just a minute portion of the $180 million a year the drug
office spends on ads. But they've really upped the ante this time.
It's one thing to drop an egg into a frying pan to demonstrate that
drugs are bad for you, and quite another to link drug users to
bloodthirsty murderers.

These ads make it seem like the next logical step in the war on
terrorism is dropping Daisy Cutters on America's high schools and
shipping teen-age drug users off to Guantanamo Bay. With 54 percent
of high school seniors admitting they've used illicit drugs, it's
going to get awfully crowded down in Cuba.

In addition to setting new standards for illogic, the ads are also
exercises in highly selective finger-pointing. We know, for instance,
that bin Laden and al-Qaeda used tens of millions of dollars in
profits from the diamond industry to fund their operations. So how
come we didn't see a commercial with a woman, say a senator's wife,
fingering the diamonds on her sparkling tennis bracelet and
admitting: "I helped kids learn how to kill"? And, given the fact
that 15 out of the 19 hijackers - and most of the detainees in Cuba -
came from Saudi Arabia, why no taxpayer-funded ad showing a soccer
mom filling up her SUV and saying: "I helped blow up buildings"?

Simple. Linking diamonds or oil to terror doesn't fit the Bush
agenda. Conflating the war on drugs with the war on terrorism does.
These ads are nothing more than a lame-brained attempt to give the
drug war a desperately needed makeover - turning it from a dismal,
multibillion- dollar failure into a vital front in America's war
against the Evil Ones. "Just Say No" repackaged as "The Battle Hymn
of the Republic."

You can almost hear the wheels turning inside the heads of the White
House spinmeisters: "The War on Drugs is a loser, but the War on
Terror's got big-time legs. So all we've got to do is blend the two
of them together and, bingo, no more pesky people asking if the $20
billion a year we keep throwing at the drug war is worth it."

It's hardly a coincidence that just one day after the Super Bowl ads
aired, the White House released a new foreign aid budget that
escalates U.S. military assistance to Colombian troops battling drug
traffickers.

At the end of the movie "Traffic," Michael Douglas' dispirited drug
czar crystallizes the madness of the drug war: "If there is a war on
drugs, then many of our family members are the enemy. And I don't
know how you wage war on your own family."

Clearly, the Bush administration has no such misgivings.