President Barack Obama torpedoed a DEA-led effort to stop Hezbollah from smuggling cocaine into the country. POLITICO broke the bombshell news Sunday night. The reason for allowing the Iran-backed terror group’s criminal enterprise to continue? Obama’s desperate desire for better relations and a nuclear deal with Iran.
The DEA teamed with dozens of agencies here and abroad in 2008 after discovering Hezbollah had grown beyond Middle East politics and thuggery into international crime. The special task force was called Project Cassandra. For eight years Project Cassandra worked to unravel Hezbollah’s drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and other criminal activities.
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.
Hezbollah isn’t just smuggling cocaine. A November piece in The Hill noted, “Hezbollah’s involvement in producing and selling counterfeit medicines such as Captagon — a powerful amphetamine — is well documented.” Captagon is dubbed “chemical courage.” It was the drug of choice for ISIS. As Canada’s CBC reported, Captagon is “widely used by fighters in the Syrian civil war for its ability to make people alert, fearless and ready to kill with abandon.” Project Cassandra traced the crime syndicate to “the innermost circle of Hezbollah and its state sponsors in Iran.”