Former U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration “derailed” a DEA operation targeting Hezbollah’s multi-million-dollar drug trafficking activities in Latin America to secure approval of the controversial Iran nuclear deal, reports Politico.
Iran’s narco-terrorist proxy Hezbollah is involved in a plethora of criminal activities in Latin America, ranging from money laundering to massive drug trafficking.
“This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision,” David Asher, a veteran Pentagon illicit finance expert deployed to combat the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise, told Politico, referring to the DEA operation, dubbed Project Cassandra. “They [Obama administration] serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
For years, the U.S. military has been sounding the alarm on the threat against the United States posed by the presence of Iran and Hezbollah in America’s backyard — Latin America.
However, the Obama administration argued that Iran’s influence in the Western Hemisphere was “waning,” reported the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ watchdog arm, in late September 2014, months before world powers and Iran approved the nuclear deal in July 2015.
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.
Rep. Robert Pittenger (R-NC), the chairman of the Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, chastised the Obama administration for undermining the DEA operation.
In a statement, Pittenger, the vice chairman of the House Financial Services Committee Task Force to Investigate Terrorism Financing, declared:
The nexus between terrorists organizations, including Hezbollah, and Latin American drug cartels is a subversive alliance which provides hundreds of millions of dollars to global jihad. “The witnesses providing account of the Obama administration derailing and stonewalling the prosecution of this illicit funding investigation has resulted in the most serious consequences of the misguided and injudicious actions of President Obama and his team.”
In June 2016, Michael Braun, a former DEA agent, told lawmakers that Hezbollah is generating hundreds of millions from a “cocaine money laundering scheme” in Latin America that “provides a never-ending source of funding” for its terrorist operations in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Iran has deployed thousands of Hezbollah militants to fight on behalf of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, a move that has allowed the ruthless leader to remain in power.
Both the U.S. military and State Department have warned against the menace that Hezbollah and Iran’s presence in Latin America represents.
Politico reveals:
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.
The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.
Soon after U.S.-led world powers and Iran approved the nuclear pact, Obama predicted that Iran would use sanction relief funds to boost its terrorist proxies, namely Hezbollah, saying in August 2015:
Let’s stipulate that some of that money will flow to activities that we object to … Iran supports terrorist organizations like Hezbollah. It supports proxy groups that threaten our interests and the interests of our allies — including proxy groups who killed our troops in Iraq.
A day after the deal’s approval, Obama also said:
Do we think that with the sanctions coming down, that Iran will have some additional resources for its military and for some of the activities in the region that are a threat to us and a threat to our allies? I think that is a likelihood that they’ve got some additional resources. Do I think it’s a game-changer for them? No.
They are currently supporting Hezbollah, and there is a ceiling — a pace at which they could support Hezbollah even more, particularly in the chaos that’s taking place in Syria. So can they potentially try to get more assistance there? Yes.
According to the Jerusalem Post, Iran has dramatically increased its financial support to Hezbollah from $200 million to $800 million per year, two years after the nuclear deal was signed by Iran and world powers.
In 2010, John Brennan, Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser and then CIA director, confirmed that former president’s administration was trying to build up “moderate elements” within Iran’s terror proxy Hezbollah.
“Hezbollah is a very interesting organization,” Brennan told a Washington conference, saying it had evolved from “purely a terrorist organization” to a militia and, ultimately, a prominent Shiite political party in Lebanon, reported Reuters.
The judgment of the Ninth Circuit upholding the temporary restraining order (TRO) against President Donald Trump’s recent executive order restricting travel from seven terror-prone countries would have allowed one of the 9/11 hijackers to sue the government to come to, or stay in, the United States.
They need to be bombed, not embraced.
Under the court’s novel theory of legal standing, “injuries” to public universities that result from foreign students and teachers not being able to enter the country give the states standing to sue.
Moreover, the court held that foreigners with visas have due process rights under the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, even though the precedent it cited applied to people already in the United States. Those due process rights could also be asserted by states on behalf of people in the U.S. illegally or “who have a relationship with a U.S. resident or … institution,” the court held in its ruling.
Hani Hasan Hanjour was one of the four pilots in the September 11, 2001 attack. He flew American Airlines flight 77 into the Pentagon, killing 184 people, including everyone on the flight. He was in the U.S. on a student visa, according to the 9/11 Commission report.
He was from Saudi Arabia, a country not covered by the executive order. By the reasoning of the Ninth Circuit, however, Hanjour would have due process rights to challenge his exclusion from the United States once he had been granted a student visa. His relationship with a U.S. “institution” — in this case, an English as a Second Language school in Oakland, California — would have been enough to grant him standing. A state could have sued on his behalf even while he was still abroad.
Hanjour did not, in fact, attend the English as a Second Language school in California, but resumed flight training in Arizona that he had begun on an earlier visit, the 9/11 Commission found.
Egypt’s powerful Muslim Brotherhood has claimed the lead in the first stage of the country’s first parliamentary elections since Hosni Mubarak’s fall.
The movement’s Freedom and Justice Party said initial results showed its coalition ahead, followed by parties belonging to the hardline Islamist Salafi movements, then a coalition of secular movements in third.
On Monday and Tuesday, millions filed into polling stations in the capitalCairoand second cityAlexandriaas Egyptians embraced new freedoms won by the toppling of autocrat Hosni Mubarak in February.
“The people have passed the democracy test,” headlined the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk on Tuesday, while the interim ruling military leaders expressed their “happiness” at proceedings.
“The election has been a huge success,” declared Ahmed Nashaat, a 29-year-old member of the leading Islamist party the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) as night fell inCairoat the end of the voting.
Turnout had been high, he said, security well controlled by the army and police, while there was “no vote rigging worth mentioning” – a stark contrast with the 30-year Mubarak era when abuses were widespread.
Analysts warned, however, that the country faced huge challenges ahead in its long, complicated and uncertain transition to democracy that is scheduled to finish only in June next year under the current timetable.
The vote on Monday and Tuesday inCairo,Alexandriaand other areas was the first of three stages of an election for a new lower house of parliament. The rest of the country follows next month and in January.
The FJP, the party of the formerly banned Muslim Brotherhood, a moderate Islamist group, is expected to emerge as the largest power in the new lower parliament when final results are published on January 13.
The backdrop to the vote had been ominous after a week of protests calling for the resignation of the interim military rulers who stepped in at the end of Mubarak’s rule. Forty-two people were killed and more than 3000 injured.
Egypt’s stock market closed up 5.48 per cent on Tuesday as investors welcomed the stability after weeks of falls caused by the political upheaval and unrest.
The successful first stage of the election was a boost for army leader Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi, who insisted voting should go ahead despite the unrest last week.
The army “played the election card to stabilise the country in the face of pressure from the street”, said Tewfik Aclimandos, an expert at the College de France, a leading academic institute.
Tantawi “expressed his happiness at the way the process was carried out and the high turnout, especially among women and the young”, said Ismail Etman, a member of the ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF).
Protesters last week had again occupiedTahrir SquareinCairo, the epicentre of protests against Mubarak, but this time they were calling for the resignation of Tantawi and his fellow generals.
The demonstrations stemmed from fears that the junta, initially welcomed as a source of stability after Mubarak’s fall, was looking to consolidate its power and was mishandling the transition period.
Figures for the turnout for Monday and Tuesday have not been officially given, but Etman from the SCAF estimated it could reach up to 70 per cent – unprecedented in the Mubarak era.
Once final results are published on January 13, the country will then head into another three rounds of voting to elect an upper house, in a process widely criticised for its complexity.
Move follows MK Matalon letters to US House, Senate, detailing PA president’s policy to pay convicted terrorists released byIsrael.
Florida Democratic Congressman Ted Deutsch and New York Democratic Congressman Steve Israel have asked US Comptroller-General Gene Dodaro to investigate the Palestinian Authority’s use of American funding.
The request this week came three weeks after MK Moshe Matalon (Israel Beiteinu) had sent a letter to the budget committees of the US Senate and House of Representatives, informing them of PA President Mahmoud Abbas’s policy of paying freed Palestinian prisoners who had been convicted of murder $5,000 and building them new homes.
Matalon received a copy of the congressmen’s letter on Thursday.
“Many of the released prisoners were convicted of orchestrating and carrying out Hamas-sponsored terrorist attacks in Israel, including the bombing of a Tel Aviv nightclub that killed 21 people, the attack on a Netanya hotel that killed 29 people, and the bombing of a Sbarro Pizzeria that killed 15 people,” Deutsch and Israel wrote.
The two congressmen explained to Dodaro that they “are troubled by reports of President Abbas’ use of Palestinian Investment Fund (PIF) funds to provide housing for these convicted terrorists.”
According to the letter, the US contributed to the PIF after PA Prime Minister Salam Fayyad founded it in 2002 “under a framework of transparency and accountability.” However, recently there has been “ambiguity surrounding the amount of US taxpayer dollars contributed to the PIF,” Deutsch and Israel wrote.
Aside from the issue of Abbas building houses for convicted terrorists, Deutsch and Israel “are concerned about the increasing lack of transparency for the PIF as well as reports that Prime Minister Fayyad is no longer overseeing the fund and that Hamas has taken control of PIF assets in Gaza.”
The letter also requested that the US Government Accountability Office, which Dodaro heads, investigate whether US Economic Support Funds (ESF) given to the PA were used to fund Abbas’s trips around the world “on his misguided attempt to unilaterally declare statehood at the United Nations… efforts that are in direct contravention of US policy.”
The congressmen said US ESF should not be used “to fund Mr. Abbas’ extensive lobbying to achieve a Palestinian state by any means other than direct negotiations with Israel.”
They added that “the US must be unequivocally committed to ensuring that American taxpayer dollars are used to serve the interests of the US and our allies around the world.”
In his letter three weeks ago, Matalon had written that Abbas was rewarding “unrepentant terrorists.”
“At the ceremony Abbas held [in honor of released prisoners] in Ramallah, he is reported as having praised these individuals for their ‘courage and sacrifice,’” the Israel Beiteinu MK wrote. “The atrocities referred to by Abbas as acts of ‘courage’… include the murders of scores of innocents, including women and children.”
He continued: “I feel it incumbent upon myself to present these facts to you, as a fellow parliamentarian, not as interference in your parliamentary activities, but rather in order to ensure that the full facts are before you, as you deliberate on whether to continue extending financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority.”
