By: Mary Mostert, Analyst, Banner of Liberty (www.bannerofliberty.com)
April 20, 2004
Those of us who personally know and get reports from soldiers or contractors trying to free and rebuild Iraq realize that the media simply does not want to report victories that might reflect well on President Bush. They only want to dwell on the deaths of Americans and the victories of the terrorists. So, it should not surprise any of us that the media also ignores other stories that might lead the American people to realize their president is doing a good job.
For example, the Associated Press reported from Rome, Italy today, in a small, 211 word article that “Italian mobsters and Islamic terrorist groups have forged links in arms and drug trafficking” according to “Italy's top anti-Mafia investigator.” The prosecuter, Pierluigi Vigna, “singled out a Naples mob known as the Camorra which deals in arms and drugs, among other rackets.
"There are ties without doubt," Vigna told reporters Monday at a briefing at the Foreign Press Association. "We have evidence that Camorra groups are implicated in exchange of arms for drugs with (Muslim) terrorist groups," Vigna said. This is an interesting development. Some of us have known for quite awhile that there is a connection between the terrorists and the drug trade. Certainly President Bush warned us about the connected - often. It is just that the Associated Press has never seemed to want to mention it. Although my own article on the subject of President Bush’s warnings about the links between terrorism and the huge international drug trade came up, I found no Associated press articles in a media search that reported the warnings President Bush gave the American people linking drugs and terrorism. The UN claims that there is a $400 BILLION worldwide illegal drug trade. That’s about 1/7th of all world trade. To put that into perspective, the United States imports a mere $50 billion worth of oil from various nations around the world to run our cars and heat our buildings. The illegal drug trade is about twice size of the worldwide petroleum market and its profits are not taxed, which leaves plenty of money for things like bombs, guns and building training camps for terrorists.
Shortly after terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and tried to destroy the Pentagon, in December 2001, President Bush clearly told the American people who might have happened to hear his speech, that there was a clear connection between the illegal drug trade and terrorism. In signing the Drug-Free Communities Act on December 14, 2001 he said:
“Drug use threatens everything, everything that is best about our country. It breaks the bonds between parents and children. It turns productive citizens into addicts. It transforms schools into places of violence and chaos. It makes playgrounds into crime scenes. It supports gangs here at home. And abroad, it's so important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the work of terror, sustaining terrorists -- (applause) -- that terrorists use drug profits to fund their cells to commit acts of murder.“If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in America.
So, those looking for a financial aspect in the Iraq war probably should be looking more carefully at the illegal drug market than at the oil market in searching for financial causes.
Although the Associated Press almost totally boycotted the President’s statement about the connection between drugs and terrorism, the London Guardian dubbed it as an effort “to hitch an increasingly unpopular drug war to a very popular war on terror." The Guardian also reckoned that the war on drugs was just Bush’s way of putting large numbers of Democrat voters, blacks and Hispanic and other drug-users, in jail to keep them from voting. When the ad campaign was ended, there were articles claiming that the campaign was a total failure. One commentator observed:
“While a small portion of black-market profits may theoretically fund certain terrorist groups around the globe, this fact is not the result of drugs per se, but the result of federal drug policies that keep them illegal.” In other words, Bush himself is responsible for any accidental linking of terrorism and drugs because, apparently, the Patriot Act has made it more difficult to launder drug money.
Yet, Bush’s anti-drug campaign has surpassed its goalsin two years’ time. I have not seen any media report of that either.
On December 19, 2003 Secretary of Health and Human Services Tommy Thompson released results of the 2003 Monitoring the Future survey, that showed an 11 percent decline in drug use by 8th, 10th, and 12th grade students over the past two years. When President Bush released his first National Drug Control Strategy in February, 2002, he set national goals to reduce youth drug use by 10 percent in two years and 25 percent in five years.
The two-year goal was exceeded. Current use (past 30 days) of any illicit drug between 2001 and 2003 among students declined 11 percent, from 19.4 percent to 17.3 percent. Similar declines were seen for past year use (11%, from 31.8% to 28.3%) and lifetime use (9%, from 41.0% to 37.4%). John P. Walters, Director of National Drug Control Policy noted,
“Teen drug use has reached a level that we haven't seen in nearly a decade.”
Or, put another way, since the end of the Reagan Administration.
"This survey shows,” Walters continued, “that when we push back against the drug problem, it gets smaller. Fewer teens are using drugs because of the deliberate and serious messages they have received about the dangers of drugs from their parents, leaders, and prevention efforts like our National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign."
While the youth are getting about as bad publicity these days as the President, I find them on the whole to be generally a whole lot smarter and far more law abiding than their parents’ generation, which includes most of today’s news reporters. Maybe some of those young people can figure out a way to get their elders who are still living in the drugs-and-sex-sixties into the realities of the 21st century.
To Comment: Mary Mostert