Where does Hezbollah get the funds to buy its tens of thousands of missiles pointed at Israel? Back in 2006, these missiles were the cause of the Second Lebanon War. Hezbollah, a US-designated terrorist organization, promiscuously launched thousands of these missiles at Israel, virtually shutting down the northern part of the country and causing hundreds of thousands of Israelis to flee south.
Reportedly, Hezbollah now possesses more missiles than it did in 2006, its defeat in that war notwithstanding. In the past eleven-and-a-half years, Hezbollah has rebuilt and even expanded its arsenal. Whence the money to pay for all this?
Josh Meyer, a reporter at Politico, thinks he knows the answer: drug running and money laundering on a scale that amounts to a global crime syndicate. Some three weeks ago, Meyer published on Politico a 13,000 word report that has aroused sharp controversy. The essence of Meyer’s report is that “Cassandra” —the code name for a US Drug Enforcement Administration investigation into Hezbollah — was intentionally derailed by the Obama administration in order to prevent the DEA from derailing the US negotiations with Iran over the nuclear deal, Obama’s major foreign policy goal of his second term.
The charge of derailing a DEA investigation, which had carefully been built up over years, is a serious one. Former officials in the Obama administration have rejected the charges, with the sparks flying between Meyer and these officials.
We are not privy to the details of either the DEA investigation or the Obama administration’s decisions. We cannot establish where the truth lies. We do know two things. First, the Obama administration did not support, even verbally, the popular protests in Iran in 2009 against the election rigged by Iran’s oppressive regime. The administration cut Iran a lot of slack during the nuclear deal negotiations, including — lest it be forgotten — the delivery of some $1.3 billion in cash on wooden pallets to Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.
The second thing we know is that Meyer’s 13,000 word report is not being attacked on its merits or demerits. Its facts are not being challenged. Rather, Meyer is being called names and his sources are attacked for harboring anti-Iran deal biases. They may well harbor such biases, but when the facts in a report are ignored in favor of attempts to discredit its sources, we suspect that there may be something to Meyer’s report. It is the oldest and most tawdry tactic in the playbook to divert attention from facts by smearing the author or his sources. If Meyer’s facts are wrong, let them be rebutted.
Meyer interviewed dozens of Cassandra participants and reviewed court documents from the Treasury Dept., the Justice Dept., intelligence personnel and other Obama administration officials. All this linked Hezbollah with the Colombian drug trade and Lebanese money-launderers. Among the facts that Meyer garnered are the names of three major suspects in the drug trafficking and testimony by former Obama administration officials that the administration suppressed the DEA investigation in order to show good faith to the Iranians. One such official, David Asher, says that Cassandra was “serially ripped apart . . . from the top down.” Other former Obama administration officials deny all this, but specific rebuttals have not been forthcoming.
There is a reason why Israel, as repeatedly reported, has had to attack the flow of arms from Iran to Hezbollah. It’s because Hezbollah has the money to pay for these arms. The money comes from somewhere. The Drug Enforcement Agency was “following the money.” Next?
Copyright © 2018 by the Intermountain Jewish News
