Bush May Propose Drug War ‘Radar Net’

President Bush is likely to propose at the upcoming drug summit that U.S. ships be used to provide an offshore “radar net” to help Colombia interdict drug traffickers, a top aide said today.

National security adviser Brent Scowcroft said the proposal has been “on the shelf” since Colombian officials balked at news reports that the United States was considering a naval “blockade” of their ports.

U.S. officials have denied they ever planned a blockade, calling use of the term unfortunate.

Bush, meanwhile, signed a new U.N. compact to help curb international drug traffic and urged other nations to do the same, “to join us in working together to rid the world of this menace, the menace of drugs.”

The U.N. Convention Against Illegal Traffic in Narcotic Drugs, adopted in Vienna in December, 1988, calls upon all nations to make illegal the production, cultivation and transportation of narcotic and other dangerous drugs. It also calls for tighter controls of chemicals used in drug production and sets up guidelines for extraditing drug offenders, seizing drug-tainted assets and curbing money-laundering.

The Senate ratified the agreement last November. The United States is the fifth of 76 signatories to the convention to ratify it.

Meantime, Scowcroft told a White House briefing on Thursday’s four-nation drug summit in Cartagena, Colombia, that the United States never planned a naval blockade but wanted “to provide a radar net and give the Colombians a better indication” of air traffic that might be involved in drug trading.

“It’s an idea we think has merit,” Scowcroft said. “I expect it might be discussed” at the Cartagena meeting among Bush and the presidents of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia.

“We’re not trying to push the use of U.S. military forces where they’re not needed or wanted,” Scowcroft said.

He said the radar screen would be confined to equipment on U.S. naval ships cruising off the coasts of Colombia, and would not entail any land-based U.S.-manned radar installations.

In a related development, sources said today that the United States has sent the amphibious assault ship Nassau and its 1,900 Marines off the coast of Colombia in preparation for Bush’s trip to the Andean drug summit.

The Tarawa-class assault ship, accompanied by a destroyer, left its home port of Norfolk, Va., Feb. 5 “for routine training operations in the South Atlantic,” the U.S. Atlantic Command said. However, defense sources speaking on condition they not be identified said the Nassau and the destroyer were sent to waters off Colombia as part of U.S. preparations for Bush’s trip Thursday to Cartagena.

“They’re there mainly for logistics purposes. But, of course, if anything happens, they would be prepared,” one defense official said of the Nassau.