ANTI-TERRORISM EFFORTS DRAINING AGENTS, EQUIPMENT FROM DRUG WAR

Federal Agencies Shift Focus To Prevent Attacks

WASHINGTON -- The war against terrorism is diverting federal agents, patrol
boats and other resources from the war on drugs, the nation's chief
narcotics officer said Tuesday.

"It's a battle of resources right now," Drug Enforcement Administration
chief Asa Hutchinson said. It's particularly an issue for the Coast Guard
and the FBI, he said. "When the dust settles, there will be discussions."

The FBI has yanked agents off narcotics cases for counterterrorism duty,
Hutchinson said, and Coast Guard cutters that once were dedicated to
patrolling for narcotics shipments now watch over vulnerable seaports.

"We've tried to make up the slack," said Hutchinson, a former Republican
Congress member from Arkansas who became the DEA's administrator three
months ago.

He said it remained to be hashed out whether "functional shifts" in the
duties of federal agencies are required. A "formal reworking of the
jurisdiction lines" may be needed, he said, if the FBI, a major ally in the
drug war, withdraws permanently from drug investigations.

Since the suicide airliner attacks Sept. 11, the FBI has shifted 7,000 of
its personnel, or about one in four employees, to new missions involving
terrorism, FBI Director Robert Mueller said in a speech Oct. 24.

A former assistant attorney general, Stuart Gerson, said he thinks that the
FBI may eventually hand off counternarcotics and some other functions to
other federal agencies or to state and local law enforcement authorities.

"The driver of this is the need for the FBI to transform itself almost
overnight from a criminal-investigations agency to a counterterrorism
function," Gerson said.

Consolidating counternarcotics authority under the DEA, he said, might be a
good idea.

"The last time I looked, there were more than 30 federal agencies with
positive federal-enforcement functions on narcotics," said Gerson, who's
now a private litigator with a New York City law firm.

Hutchinson noted that the Coast Guard had pulled as much as 75 percent of
its cutter and aircraft fleet from the Caribbean to handle security for
seaports.

"That has an impact," he said. "I don't want Miami and the Caribbean to go
back to the way it was in the 1980s."

Hutchinson lauded federal counterterrorism efforts, but noted there is
"growing evidence" that cash from the narcotics trade finances
organizations that sponsor terrorism, including the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Hutchinson said drug smuggling diminished right after the Sept. 11 attacks,
then increased.