Pubdate: Thu, 04 Oct 2001
Source: U.S. News and World Report (US)
Copyright: 2001 U.S. News & World Report
Contact:  http://www.usnews.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/464
Author:  Edward T. Pound, Chitra Ragavan, Linda Robinson

TEARS OF ALLAH

Another Weapon In Osama Bin Laden's War Against The West

Osama bin Laden's search for new ways to strike at the West may have gone 
beyond planes and bombs. Officials believe that shortly after the Saudi 
exile's operatives bombed two U.S. embassies in August 1998, he began 
searching for another weapon in his war against the West -- a super-charged 
drug that bin Laden hoped would worsen addiction and possibly even kill the 
infidels. He called it the "Tears of Allah."

These officials told U.S. News that bin Laden's plan to let loose a plague 
of potent heroin on the United States and its friends was detailed in 
intelligence reports from U.S. allies.

Tears of Allah was described as a liquid drug, requiring 50 kilograms of 
opium to produce one liter of heroin. Officials say the reports describe 
how bin Laden and his al Qaeda network of terrorists recruited chemists in 
South Asia in an unsuccessful attempt to create the powerful new 
concoction. "It was a chemical dud,'' explains one official. "He wanted a 
deadly form of the drug and he wanted to get it to the U.S. He wanted to kill."

Officials disclosed the plan to underscore the breadth of bin Laden's 
efforts to maim and murder his enemies. Bin Laden is now the most hunted 
man in the world, said by the U.S. and its allies to be the brains behind 
the deadly Sept. 11 bombings of the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

His ties to the illicit drug trade have been difficult to pin down. But 
American authorities are now convinced of the accuracy of foreign 
intelligence reports detailing his involvement. "He sees it as a way to 
poison the West,'' says one U.S. official. Experts say bin Laden has 
profited from the drug trade by taking payment for providing armed fighters 
to protect opium and heroin shipments moving from Afghanistan to the West, 
primarily Europe. They also say that the intelligence reports link bin 
Laden's people to the labs in Afghanistan where heroin is produced.

Officials maintain that bin Laden does not need the drug trade to finance 
his terrorism, but instead became involved as a good will gesture designed 
to cement his relationship with the militant Islamic Taliban government. 
The Taliban--which controls most of the impoverished nation--has provided 
bin Laden with a safe haven for more than five years.

Opium is one of Afghanistan's few cash crops, and there is no doubt that 
the Taliban government profits from the illicit trade. Western officials 
say the opium and heroin trade provides a ready source of badly needed cash 
for the Taliban. A United Nations report issued earlier this year put it 
this way: "Funds raised from the production and trading of opium and heroin 
are used by the Taliban to buy arms and other war materiel, and to finance 
the training of terrorists and support the operations of these extremists 
in neighboring countries and abroad.'' U.S. officials estimate that the 
Taliban makes at least $50 million a year by taxing and selling opium and 
by providing protection for smugglers.

Afghanistan became the world's largest producer of raw opium in the 1990s, 
supplying more than 70 percent of global demand. According to U.S 
officials, the country produced more than 3,600 metric tons last year. Last 
July, U.S. officials say, the Taliban sought to polish its image by 
declaring a ban on the cultivation of opium poppy. Opium production did 
drop substantially, but U.S. officials contend the move was part of larger 
scheme to reduce supply and drive up the wholesale price. The Taliban 
stockpiled much of the 2000 crop, and the wholesale price did indeed rise 
tenfold to $301 from $30 a kilogram, according to the United Nations.

American officials now say it is essential for the United States and its 
coalition to destroy the poppy fields and choke off this valuable revenue 
stream if the war against terrorism is to succeed. Anticipating a possible 
strike, U.S. officials say, law-enforcement agencies both here and overseas 
have provided the Defense Department with the locations of some of the 
stockpiled opium and heroin. The trouble now is that since Sept. 11, the 
Taliban has been moving the stockpiles, the officials say. In an interview, 
Asa Hutchinson, the new administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement 
Administration, declined to say whether he thought the United States would 
go after the stockpiles. "The focus is obviously to get after the 
terrorists,'' he says. "But, whenever you see the terrorist training camps 
and the poppy fields and the opium labs in the same geographic area, there 
is a correlation that is impossible to avoid."

"Heroin is to Afghanistan what oil is to Saddam Hussein,'' says another 
American official. "It is the juice.'' He says that by destroying the 
fields, the West would be killing off a critical source of cash to the 
Taliban and hurting bin Laden as well. The United States needs to "starve 
the terrorists' treasuries of money,'' adds Rep. Henry Hyde, an Illinois 
Republican, who wants DEA agents to begin training border police in the region.

Efforts to track down or kill bin Laden have failed. After his network 
bombed the U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in August 1998, then 
President Clinton ordered missile strikes on training camps used by bin 
Laden's forces in Afghanistan. Bin Laden avoided the attack. Soon after 
that, he began trying to develop the new potent form of heroin known as the 
Tears of Allah, according to an American official who has reviewed foreign 
intelligence reports. "He wasn't just thinking ABC,'' the official says, 
referring to atomic, biological, and chemical warfare. "He was thinking 
ABCD'' to include drug warfare.
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MAP posted-by: Larry Stevens