'The DEA needs to update its outlook if it wants to avoid the impression that it is preparing ground for a swashbuckling pre-emptive strike'



Here, for the edification of all PICs, is the current “Outlook” for their region as perceived by the United States Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). Go through it and, given international qualms about the accuracy of the intelligence of various US intelligence agencies, pick out what may not be completely factual:

“The Pacific Islands Region is an active illicit drug cultivation, production, trafficking, and money laundering area. The noticeable increase in the availability and use of crystal methamphetamine in the region is a primary law enforcement concern. In American Samoa, for example, the increase in violent crimes is directly linked to the escalating crystal methamphetamine problem, and the Northern Mariana Islands attribute 100 percent of their drug crimes to crystal methamphetamine. The high purity of the drug (97 percent) in areas such as Guam and the Northern Mariana Islands, is cause for alarm.

“Islands such as Fiji and Guam, which are located within major shipping lanes and airline routes, create the potential for increasing shipments of crystal methamphetamine from China and the Philippines, and Southeast Asian heroin through the region. In June 2004, a crystal methamphetamine “super” laboratory was discovered in Fiji. Although the volume of Southeast Asian heroin decreased from the high levels in the late 1980s in Guam, availability of heroin on the island may increase sharply with new airline flights between Guam and Thailand.

“The Pacific Islands Region is very susceptible to money laundering activities. Nauru, for example, ranks second only to the Cayman Islands in the Caribbean as the world's largest tax haven. Half of all Russian offshore bank accounts are held in the Pacific with a total of US$80 billion passing through Nauru. Nearly one quarter of the world's offshore financial centres are located in the Asia-Pacific Region.

“Except for Australia and New Zealand, law enforcement efforts throughout the region continue to be sporadic at best due to limited manpower, inadequate equipment, and large expanses of unpatrolled territory for traffickers to conduct their smuggling activities. Many governments in the region are using the PIF (Pacific Islands Forum) to enhance the economic and social well-being of their populations in order to eliminate several poverty-related problems, including drug abuse. However, until law enforcement efforts improve, drug trafficking through the region will likely to increase.” End of the “Outlook”. How accurate is it?

The Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will have some idea about what's happening in the United States territories in the region. Asia's close proximity to Guam and the Northern Marianas makes the drug problems in them inevitable. American Samoa's domestic infection with the substance traded as “ice” is as much a commentary on the condition of society in this sad backwater as is the role that Asian fishing boats probably have in moving the stuff through the port of Pago Pago.

The discovery in Fiji in 2004 of a large illicitly operated laboratory for the manufacture of crystal methamphetamine is a warning not to be ignored.

It was a timely alert. But the DEA's apparent perception of the region's 20 or so other islands countries as being places that are hotbeds for drugs, money laundering, and heavens know what other evils, is too sweeping. It seems to be as exaggerated as all those stories about nuclear bomb and chemical and biological weapon factories in Iraq. DEA comments about the criminal exploitation of the regional tax shelters are out of date. Ask the Cook Islands, Niue, Nauru, Vanuatu, Samoa and the Marshall Islands about the pressure put on them to close down the shady side of that business.

Are the islands as simplistic and wide open to exploitation as the DEA portrays them to be? They are open, but not so nearly widely as they were. Islands governments and leaders have a record of gullibility, but they are not the complete innocents that some were. Too many jaundiced eyes, local and expatriate, watch them now.

The DEA needs to update its outlook if it wants to avoid the impression that it is preparing ground for a swashbuckling pre-emptive strike at Lilliput where the locals are not as well equipped to hit back as they are in Iraq.