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CounterPunch
November
12, 2002
Ashcroft's Narco-Terror
War
by JOANNE MARINER
Announcing the arrest last Wednesday of suspects
in two drugs-for-weapons deals, Attorney General John Ashcroft
declared, "The war on terrorism has been joined with the
war on illegal drug use." One could almost hear him lick
his lips, savoring the thought of it.
Since the September 11 attacks last year,
the drug war has ceded priority to the war on terrorism. Government
funding that previously went toward counter-narcotics efforts
has been reallocated to fighting terror; manpower has been reassigned,
including several hundred FBI agents; and public attention has
shifted.
Never notable for its success, the drug
war, juxtaposed against the more menacing threat of terrorism,
has began to seem like a dispensable extravagance.
Ashcroft would no doubt be the last person
to acknowledge this. When he was appointed Attorney General,
he vowed to reinvigorate the country's counter-drug efforts.
"I want to escalate the war on drugs. I want to renew it.
I want to refresh it, relaunch it, if you will," said Ashcroft,
in his first interview upon taking office. His words were buttressed
by his record in the U.S. Senate, where he was a drearily reliable
proponent of tough anti-drug policies and long prison sentences
for drug offenders.
It must have been straight away obvious,
in the wake of September 11, that the best way to revive the
drug war would be to piggyback it on the war against terrorism.
That Ashcroft would seek to join the two was probably a given.
For now, the pressing question is this:
What does the proclaimed merger entail? With drugs and terror
conjoined, can we expect Bolivian coca growers to swell the ever-growing
crowd of "enemy combatants" on Guantanamo? Will drug
couriers face "targeted killing," like the missile
strike carried out last week in Yemen? Or is Ashcroft's latest
gambit just a way to update the same old formula for filling
up prisons, discouraging effective drug treatment, and ruining
lives?
War as War,
or as Metaphor
Given the circumstances of Ashcroft's
announcement--involving arrests, criminal charges, and indictments--it
would be premature to predict an end to the traditional law enforcement
approach to the drug "war." (Yes, the mocking quotes
are still appropriate.) But the possibility of using more war-like
tactics in confronting drugs and terror is worth examining.
Before September 11, loose references
to "war" made by people like our Attorney General could
be safely understood, and decoded, as a sort of linguistic convention.
War, as declared by such generals, was simply a shorthand way
of saying: we're really serious, we're going to put a lot of
resources into this, and we're going to succeed. Indeed, in more
optimistic times, the United States even declared war on poverty--and
no one really thought we would kill the poor.
Even though the war on terrorism was
declared long before 2001, the United States continued to prosecute
terrorists as criminals, fill Guantanamo with Haitians instead
of Arabs, and focus defense thinking on missile shields rather
than on airport security. War was a metaphor in those days, not
a literal fact.
That era has passed. The war on terrorism
may still be a metaphor, but it is now a metaphor with an army
behind it. Putting aside, for the moment, the question of whether
the government is correct to characterize the anti-terrorism
effort as a war that justifies a military approach, it is indisputable
that the tactics have changed.
There is, to begin with, the armed conflict
in Afghanistan, although that seems to be winding down dramatically.
But Bush Administration officials insist, at any rate, that the
relevant war is not the Afghan war, which they see as just a
battlefield, but rather the much larger--indeed, global--war
on terrorism. It is for that reason that even if Afghanistan
quiets down and ultimately evolves into a Central Asian Switzerland,
the 625 detainees held on Guantanamo as "enemy combatants"
cannot expect to claim their freedom.
But at least they're still alive, the
detainees might tell themselves, were they to know about the
Bush Administration's missile strike against six alleged terrorists
in Yemen last week. (The detainees have probably not thought
to celebrate their good fortune, however, because they have absolutely
no access to news.)
The Yemen group of "enemy combatants,"
caught driving across the desert in a car, even included a U.S.
citizen: a dead version of Jose Padilla and Yaser Hamdi. (Like
the latter two "enemy combatants," he paid a price
for his alleged Al Qaeda links without ever having been put on
trial.) According to news accounts, moreover, the Yemen air strike
will almost certainly be followed by others.
Fighting the
Drug War with Arrests or with Missiles?
Whether the drug war will ever be fought
using such overtly military methods remains to be seen. Despite
Ashcroft's martial rhetoric, I do not really expect to see a
fundamental change in the existing approach. His words are part
of a strategy for preserving the status quo, not for transforming
it.
And even in the past, of course, the
drug "war" has occasionally lived up to its moniker.
Just over a decade ago, the U.S. invaded Panama in order to bring
back military strongman Manuel Noriega, now a drug war prisoner
in Florida.
In Peru, another drug war battleground,
the U.S. has sponsored air interdiction operations by which planes
suspected of drug smuggling are shot down if the pilots do not
respond to calls to land. An American missionary and her seven-month-old
daughter were killed last year--becoming real civilian casualties
of a metaphorical war--in one such operation. The small Cessna
that transported them, flown by the woman's husband, who survived
the crash, was mistakenly downed after a CIA surveillance plane
called in a Peruvian jet to intercept it.
A Losing War
But let's stick with the assumption that
Ashcroft's repackaging of the drug war is more about preserving
counter-narcotics funding, and gaining public support, than it
is about adopting military tactics. What is objectionable about
that?
Without attempting a comprehensive list
of the drug war's failures, suffice to say that its impact in
reducing the flow of drugs has been negligible. By Ashcroft's
own estimation, Americans spend about $64 billion annually on
illegal drugs. Overall drug use has hardly changed since the
mid-1980s, and the price of most drugs has fallen. Billions of
dollars spent, millions of people incarcerated, and no results--it's
a dismal picture.
The drug-trafficking-and-terrorism angle,
moreover, has its own complications. Ashcroft may be factually
correct in spotting a link between the two activities, but he
should think about why this is so. By making the drug trade illegal,
the government ensures that only criminal organizations profit
from it. If drugs were decriminalized, then traffickers would
have to fall back on other criminal enterprises--immigrant-smuggling,
for example, or the illegal arms trade.
Oh yes, the arms trade. That reminds
me of one final reason to doubt the sincerity of Ashcroft's drug-terror
reasoning. Recall that the case in which Ashcroft made his announcement
about drugs and terror actually involved a drugs-for-weapons
scheme, with the weapons meant for two groups on the official
U.S. list of foreign terrorist organizations.
Here is an inventory of the weaponry
that the defendants were hoping to buy: 9,000 assault rifles,
including AK-47 submachine guns and sniper rifles; 300 pistols;
approximately 53 million rounds of various types of ammunition;
rocket-propelled grenade launchers and almost 300,000 grenades;
and several shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles. In short,
a very scary bag of loot - scarier, to me, than the hashish and
opium that was going to be exchanged for it.
So can somebody please explain why Ashcroft
isn't trumpeting his office's efforts to stem the flow of illegal
arms?
End the Drug
War
The drug war and the war on terrorism
do resemble each other in important ways, although not those
that Ashcroft emphasizes. Both efforts are open-ended, or maybe
never-ending. Both lend themselves to broad extensions of government
power, and thus, if not carefully controlled, both can lead to
violations of fundamental rights. But in trying to combat terrorism
the government has at least chosen a worthwhile opponent.
The drug war is not just a conspicuously
unsuccessful war, it is a misguided one. Reviving it under the
guise of fighting terrorism--and possibly making it more war-like
in the process--will only make matters worse.
Joanne Mariner
is a human rights attorney in New York.
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