(CNSNews.com) – The Drug Enforcement Administration has “unequivocal” evidence that terrorists – including al Qaeda and Hamas – are using the global drug trade to finance their organizations and put deadly drugs into the hands of Americans, a top official said.
 
Michael Braun, chief of operations for the federal intelligence agency, said almost half of the 42 groups designated as terrorist organizations by the United States government are involved in the drug trade and justify their criminal activity because it can further jihad by funding cells around the globe and providing drugs to consumers in the U.S. and other western societies.
 
“This is the face of 21^st century organized crime, and it’s meaner and uglier than anything we’ve ever seen before,” said Braun, who spoke last week at the Washington Institute, a public educational foundation that studies U.S. interests in the Middle East. (See list of terrorist organizations)
 
Braun said the difference between long-operating drug cartels like the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Columbia (FARC), and the new “hybrid” drug rings operated by organizations that are “one-part terrorist and one-part drug cartel” is what drives them.
 
“Terrorist organizations are motivated by ideology, and global drug cartels are motivated by one thing only, and that is greed,” Braun said.
 
But Braun said the DEA, which joined the intelligence arm of the U.S. government in 2006, has been fighting terrorists with links to drug trafficking for 25 years. He also cited the Taliban – and its rise to power by taxing farmers who grew opium in Afghanistan – as evidence of how the drug trade supports terrorism.
 
The bottom line continues to attract terrorist organizations, Braun said.
 
“Nothing, absolutely nothing, produces the kind of money that the global drug trade produces,” Braun said, adding that cash assets seized from the drug trade in bilateral operations staged by U.S. agencies and their counterparts in countries around the globe has ballooned from about $500 million four years ago to more than $3.4 billion in 2007.
 
Terrorist organizations use the proceeds from drug sales for what Braun calls their “care, nurturing and feeding” – namely recruiting, training, procuring arms and other weapons and the establishment of safe houses around the world.
 
“It cost hundreds of millions of dollars for any terrorist organization worth its salt to operate,” Braun said.
 
Braun also said the nexus between drug trafficking and terrorism is part of a larger global war on terror that will not go away any time soon.
 
“Most of the deep thinkers at the (Department of Defense) believe we are going to be fighting this fight – what they refer to as ‘the long war’ – for the next 30 to 50 years,” Braun said.