Obama’s Pass for Hezbollah, Charges that he killed a probe of the terror group to get his Iran deal

Di Vincenzo Santo*

(Da WSJ – 20 dicembre 2017)

Washington. The Iran nuclear deal was the Holy Grail of Barack Obama’s second term, and it’s no secret he subjugated other priorities and relationships to get it. But now come allegations that he also killed a U.S. investigation into drug running by the Iranian-backed terrorists of Hezbollah. Josh Meyer of Politico reported Monday that former U.S. officials say the Obama Administration quashed a Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into Hezbollah’s transnational crime networks. Senior Obama officials deny it, but Politico reports compelling evidence. After 9/11 the DEA launched investigations into Venezuelan crime syndicates, links between Colombian drug-traffickers and Lebanese money-launderers, and the “suspicious flow of thousands of used cars” from the U.S. to Benin, Mr. Meyer explains. The U.S. military was also investigating links between Iran and Shiite militias with improvised explosive devices that killed hundreds of U.S. soldiers. “All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah,” he writes. By 2008 the DEA had “amassed evidence that Hezbollah had transformed itself” into a global crime syndicate “that some investigators believed was collecting $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking and money laundering,” Mr. Meyer reports. DEA’s Project Cassandra was born to take down the Hezbollah operation by busting its “innermost circle.” But according to interviews with dozens of Cassandra participants “and a review of court documents and records,” he writes, Obama officials “threw an increasingly insurmountable series of roadblocks in its way.” David Asher, a Pentagon specialist in illicit finance who helped launch and supervise Cassandra, told Mr. Meyer that the Administration “serially ripped apart [the] entire effort . . . from the top down.” […] Cassandra was closing in on Hezbollah as Mr. Obama was trying to complete his Iran nuclear deal. John Brennan, Mr. Obama’s counterterror chief who later led the CIA, had argued in May 2010 that Hezbollah was evolving into a political party. Exposing it as a transnational crime syndicate would upset the Iranians and damage the Administration’s ability to sell his nuclear deal to a skeptical public.[…]

I rapporti tra l’amministrazione Obama e gli Hezbollah sul traffico di droga

*Generale CA ris

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