Hezbollah received billions of dollars thanks to Obama shutting down a DEA operation to destroy its drug smuggling operations

In 2017, Politico broke a story that has particular relevance to what is happening in Lebanon today.

In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

The campaign, dubbed Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself from a Middle East-focused military and political organization into an international crime syndicate that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.

Over the next eight years, agents working out of a top-secret DEA facility in Chantilly, Virginia, used wiretaps, undercover operations and informants to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks, with the help of 30 U.S. and foreign security agencies.

They followed cocaine shipments, some from Latin America to West Africa and on to Europe and the Middle East, and others through Venezuela and Mexico to the United States. They tracked the river of dirty cash as it was laundered by, among other tactics, buying American used cars and shipping them to Africa. And with the help of some key cooperating witnesses, the agents traced the conspiracy, they believed, to the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.

But as Project Cassandra reached higher into the hierarchy of the conspiracy, Obama administration officials threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way, according to interviews with dozens of participants who in many cases spoke for the first time about events shrouded in secrecy, and a review of government documents and court records. When Project Cassandra leaders sought approval for some significant investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, officials at the Justice and Treasury departments delayed, hindered or rejected their requests.

“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” said David Asher, who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst. “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”

The article also notes how the Obama administration was convinced that Hezbollah had "moderate" elements that could be encouraged.

This is all documented. Katherine Bauer, a former Treasury official, testified to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2017, "Under the Obama administration, however, these investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal."

A major reason Hezbollah is such a major threat today is because the United States looked at it, and Iran, with rose-colored glasses. That policy has resulted in the deaths of many  - in Lebanon, Syria, Israel and also the US from illicit drugs being imported. It also resulted in Hezbollah cementing its role as de facto ruler of Lebanon, at least to the extent that it could veto anything it doesn't like.

I'm not seeing any mea culpas from the Democrats over their hero Obama's role of strengthening Hezbollah.

If the US had finished what it started, perhaps there would have been no Lebanese front in this war.

 

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