A Tale of Collusion : Obama and Hezbollah (1)

THERE'S REAL COLLUSION NEWS TODAY. Let's talk about the under-reported cascade of news about "Collusion" -- Obama's for example. • • • THE OBAMA COLLUSION WITH HEZBOLLAH AND IRAN. This hot potato is not even being mentioned so far by the ProgDem mainstream media, but Townhall published on Monday an article by Cortney O'Brien titled 'There Was Collusion' : Obama Reportedly Derailed Anti-Hezbollah Effort in Pursuit of Iran Nuclear Deal. Townhall asks : "Just how far did President Obama go to seal his nuclear deal with Iran? Apparently so far as to derail an anti-drug trafficking effort waged by Hezbollah. Project Cassandra began in 2008 after the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) was convinced that Hezbollah was amassing $1 billion a year from drug and weapons trafficking, money laundering and more. Operating out of Chantilly, Virginia, agents went undercover to map Hezbollah’s illicit networks and follow cocaine shipments." BUT, the project got in the way of the Obama administration's nuclear agreement, new reports suggest. Politico writes : "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." • Townhall says : In an attempt to build up the 'moderate elements' of Hezbollah, the Obama White House was 'reluctant' to punish its leaders. Perhaps that can explain why the US failed to pressure the Czech government to extradite Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad to the US. He is now believed to be 'back in business,' helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons." Ari Fleischer, former White House press secretary for President George W. Bush, took the report to mean that we have found evidence of collusion after all, tweeting : "Now we learn there WAS collusion. The Obama Administration colluded with Iran and Hezbollah. Unbelievable." • • • HEZBOLLAH, OBAMA AND THE IRAN DEAL. Politico broke the story in its Magazine, which is available at < https://www.politico.com/interactives/2017/obama-hezbollah-drug-trafficking-investigation/ >. • According to Politico : "An ambitious US task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran." Politico's Josh Meyer, the reporter who researched and wrote the bombshell exposée is sticking by his story. That's what he told Fox News. Meyer's report states that the Obama administration "shut down" a law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah for fear of jeopardizing the Iran nuclear deal, and Meyer told Fox News@Night : “These federal investigators were watching and gathering evidence of Hezbollah sort of transforming itself from a political power and a terrorist organization to one that was trafficking in drugs and other criminal conspiracies to make hundreds of millions of dollarst." Fox's Bret Baier tweeteds : "It’s hard to overstate the significance of this developing story." Meyer explained that a "couple dozen super facilitators" were identified but when investigators "tried to delve deeply into these people, they got shut down." He said Obama administration officials threw a series of roadblocks in front of the campaign, known as Project Cassandra," which halted efforts to curtail top Hezbollah operatives' criminal activities. Shannon Bream points out that former National Security Counsel spokesman Tommy Vietor said Meyer's sources are "very flawed" and former State Department spokesperson Marie Harf claimed the narrative in Meyer's report is "just false." Veitor tweeted : "There are many reasonable critiques of Obama's foreign policy. The idea that he was soft on Hezbollah is not one of them. The story is so manufactured out of thin air that it's hard to push back except to say that it's a figment of the imagination of two very flawed sources." Harf told Fox & Friends : "There's no evidence in this story to back up their allegations. They quote a couple of low-level, ideological sources who clearly don't like the Iran deal." Meyer responded that he's a fan of Harf, but he said her claim that the people he spoke to were "low-level" is "sort of ridiculous. These were the people that led this task force. They were not ideologues. They are not flawed. I don’t know what she’s talking about." Meyer added that he spoke to "many, many dozens" of people and read thousands of documents to see if the allegations held up in the light of day, concluding : "So this is not a story in 14,000 words where I was just taking some spin from some people. I spent months of meticulous reporting to document what was happening, talking to people outside of the administration. So I challenge people to let me know what the specifics are that they think aren't true." • The Obama tribe's attack on Josh Meyer is reminiscent of Obama partisans' attack on Seymour Hersch when he published a meticulous report on the flimsy Obama recounting of the bin Laden killing authorized by Obama and blown up as one of his great achievements. • • • ISRAEL BACKS UP THE MEYER REVELATIONS. The Jerusalem Post reported on Wennesday that : "Long before the US ramped up the pressure against Hezbollah’s financial network in 2006, and then dialed it down in 2009-2010, the Mossad and an Israeli NGO were going after the terror group’s monetary oxygen. In fact, even when the US returned to taking a backseat, Shurat Hadin -- Israel Law Center -- kept going after a major Hezbollah allied Lebanese bank and connected banks, winning a major US court decision in 2012. With Politico’s story on Monday presenting new evidence that the Obama administration backed-off from its pursuit of Hezbollah’s financial network due to a combination of intelligence and diplomacy concerns -- notably preserving the Iran nuclear deal -- it is worth looking at this other unreported angle to the story." The JP says that former Israeli government sources have told it that both their intelligence operations and lawsuits by Shurat Hadin and others “dramatically impacted Hezbollah’s budget and ability.” Shurat Hadin Director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner’s October-released book, Harpoon, gives significant and vivid details about pursuing Hezbollah’s financial network long before the US got interested in fall 2006. But this part of the book has been under-reported and, along with other details that Shurat Hadin explained to the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday, shed new light on the new Politico story about the US’s Operation Cassandra -- an up-and-down fight against Hezbollah’s financial networks. Some of Israel's effort was in parallel to the US more comprehensively using its resources to go after Hezbollah from 2006-2008. Yet, says the JP : "As Politico explained Monday, the US rolled back those efforts during the Obama administration already in 2009-2010 and even further in 2012, culminating with virtually halting efforts in 2014 as the Iran nuclear deal started to crystallize. It is important to note that spokespeople for Obama have said that tacking terrorists’ finances is not always the whole picture. They said that some of the breaks put on going after Hezbollah’s money could have related to preserving undercover intelligence operations and concerns about Lebanon’s overall stability, not merely preserving the Iran deal. But the bottom line is that before, during and after the US went after Hezbollah’s financing, Shurat Hadin was down in the same trenches." The Jerusalem Post cites the most important court decision Shurat Hadin won to cripple aspects of Hezbollah’s financing in a November 2012 decision against the Lebanese Canadian Bank, USA, who had used American Express Bank as its correspondent bank in the US. The decision put new pressures on American and international banks not to risk doing business with shady entities if they presented even the possibility of being terrorism-related. The New York State Court of Appeals decision created much higher risk for terror groups to carry out transactions in US dollars. The New York court issued the ruling in favor of victims of Hezbollah rocket attacks from the Second Lebanon War in 2006 who were citizens of the US, Canada and Israel. Until that decision, terror financing could avoid scrutiny in the US by making fund transfers through American correspondent banks that essentially serve as a middle bank for fund transfers for banks that do not have local US branches. Most importantly, the 2012 decision pressured many correspondent banks to cease being involved in any transactions where they had doubts about a possible terror connection in order to avoid even the possibility of heavy civil liability and bad press. The lawsuit was filed in 2008. Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, an Israeli attorney, human rights activist and the founder of Shurat Hadin Israeli Law Center, said : "It was the Israeli intelligence task force...Harpoon” which first targeted “Hezbollah by going after its international drug trafficking business...It was only after the difficult 2006 war in Lebanon that Israel finally convinced American law enforcement…to target Hezbollah's illegal enterprises and financing. Eventually, the US was extremely active in this fight until the Obama Administration decided that it was going to sign a deal with Iran…At that point the intelligence operations targeting Hezbollah's drug trafficking were shamefully thrown under the bus,” to protect the deal, she said. Looking into the future, Darshan-Leitner stated : “One can only hope that under the new Washington White House the battle against Hezbollah's funding will be reinstated by the US and it'll work with Israel in killing the terrorists' funding." The JP also states, as does Meyer, that several of the main US veterans of Operation Cassandra interviewed in the Politico story also expressed high interest in helping the Trump administration reenter the fray of pursuing Hezbollah financing. • • • POLITICO'S MEYER TELLS THE HEZBOLLAH STORY. "Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion." Deterlined to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed the ambitious DEA Project Cassandra law enforcement campaign that targeted drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, which was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to Politico. Project Cassandra, was launched in 2008 after the DEA 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. During the entire Obama presidency, DEA 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 US and foreign security agencies. Politico reported that : "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. They followed cocaine shipments, tracked a river of dirty cash, and traced what they believed to be 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. 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 US-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." • Politico stated that in this case, "multi-ton loads of cocaine" entered the United States, with "hundreds of millions of dollars going to a US-designated terrorist organization with vast reach....Obama had entered office in 2009 promising to improve relations with Iran as part of a broader rapprochement with the Moslem world. On the campaign trail, he had asserted repeatedly that the Bush administration’s policy of pressuring Iran to stop its illicit nuclear program wasn’t working, and that he would reach out to Teheran to reduce tensions. • • • OBAMA AND BRENNAN. Obama's top counterterrorism advisor and then CIA director, John Brennan, went further : "He recommended in a policy paper that 'the next President has the opportunity to set a new course for relations between the two countries' through not only a direct dialogue, but 'greater assimilation of Hezbollah into Lebanon’s political system.' ” By May 2010, Brennan was assistant to the President for homeland security and counterterrorism when he confirmed in a speech that the Obama administration was looking for ways to build up “moderate elements” within 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 political party with representatives in the Lebanese Parliament and Cabinet, according to a Reuters report. Brennan said : “There is certainly the elements of Hezbollah that are truly a concern to us what they’re doing. And what we need to do is to find ways to diminish their influence within the organization and to try to build up the more moderate elements.” • • • OBAMA SAW HEZBOLLAH AS A MIDDLE EAST 'PLAYER.' In practice, the Obama administration was willing to envision a new role for Hezbollah in the Middle East, combined with its desire for a negotiated settlement to Iran’s nuclear program. This morphed into a reluctance to move aggressively against the top Hezbollah operatives, according to Project Cassandra members and others. • Lebanese arms dealer Ali Fayad, a Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq, was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But, according to Politico : "For the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it. Fayad, who had been indicted in US courts on charges of planning the murders of US government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles -- he indictment also alleges that Fayed agreed to provide the FARC with weapons to kill US and Colombian officials -- was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by US officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons." • Politico states that : "Project Cassandra members say administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives including one nicknamed the 'Ghost,' " whom people familiar with his case say "has been one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, including to the US, as well as a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people." • And, says Politico : "When Project Cassandra agents and other investigators sought repeatedly to investigate and prosecute Abdallah Safieddine, Hezbollah’s longtime envoy to Iran who allegedly oversaw the group's “Business Affairs Component” involved in international drug trafficking...considered the linchpin of Hezbollah’s criminal network, the Justice Department refused, according to four former officials with direct knowledge of the cases." • According to Politico : "The administration also rejected repeated efforts by Project Cassandra members to charge Hezbollah’s military wing as an ongoing criminal enterprise under a federal Mafia-style racketeering statute, task force members say. And they allege that administration officials declined to designate Hezbollah a 'significant transnational criminal organization' and blocked other strategic initiatives that would have given the task force additional legal tools, money and manpower to fight it." • • • THE OBAMA DEFENSE TO DEA ALLEGATIONS. Former Obama administration officials declined to comment to Politico on individual cases, but noted that the State Department condemned the Czech decision not to hand over Fayad. Several of them, speaking on condition of anonymity, said they were guided by broader policy objectives, including de-escalating the conflict with Iran, curbing its nuclear weapons program and freeing at least four American prisoners held by Teheran, and that some law enforcement efforts were undoubtedly constrained by those concerns. But the former officials denied that they derailed any actions against Hezbollah or its Iranian allies for political reasons." Politico quotes Kevin Lewis, an Obama spokesman who worked at both the White House and Justice Department in the administration : "There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal.” Lewis, speaking for the Obama administration, provided to Politico a list of eight arrests and prosecutions as proof. He made special note of a February 2016 operation in which European authorities arrested an undisclosed number of alleged members of a special Hezbollah business affairs unit that the DEA says oversees its drug trafficking and other criminal money-making enterprises. BUT, Project Cassandra officials noted that the European arrests occurred after the negotiations with Iran were over, and said the task force "initiated the multinational partnerships on its own, after years of seeing their cases shot down by the Justice and State departments and other US agencies. The Justice Department, they pointed out, never filed corresponding US criminal charges against the suspects arrested in Europe, including one prominent Lebanese businessman formally designated by the Treasury Department for using his “direct ties to Hezbollah commercial and terrorist elements” to launder bulk shipments of illicit cash for the organization throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East." A former senior national security official of the Obama administration, who played a role in the Iran nuclear negotiations, suggested to Politico that Project Cassandra members were merely speculating that their cases were being blocked for political reasons. Other factors, including a lack of evidence or concerns about interfering with intelligence operations could have been in play : “What if the CIA or the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and they were trying to pursue someone...against whom we had impeccable [intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that?. I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws. The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking. So you’re not going to let CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does, Treasury does, DOD does.” • However, other sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed many of the allegations in interviews with POLITICO, and in some cases, in public comments. One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration...these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.” • David Asher, veteran US illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise and who helped establish and oversee Project Cassandra as a Defense Department illicit finance analyst, told Politico : “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.” Asher told Politico that "Obama administration officials expressed concerns to him about alienating Teheran before, during and after the Iran nuclear deal negotiations. This was part of an effort to defang, defund and undermine the investigations that were involving Iran and Hezbollah. The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away. So much of the capability, whether it was special operations, whether it was law enforcement, whether it was [Treasury] designations -- even the capacity, the personnel assigned to this mission -- it was assiduously drained, almost to the last drop, by the end of the Obama administration.” Asher and other Cassandra officials said that after the final Obama Janusry 2016 announcement of the final agreement on implementation of the Iran deal, Project Cassandra was all but dead. Some of its most senior officials, including Jack Kelly, the DEA agent overseeing Hezbollah cases at Special Operations Division. Asher himself left the task force long before that, after the Defense Department said his contract would not be renewed. As a result, concluded Politico : "The US government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments -- all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former US officials. • • • PRESIDENT TRUMP TAKES OVER. Recently, the Trump administration designated Venezuela’s vice president, a close ally of Hezbollah and of Lebanese-Syrian descent, as a global narcotics kingpin. And, as alwqys, Hezbollah -- in tandem with Iran -- continues to undermine US interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa -- providing weapons and training to anti-American shiite militias, while Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former US officials believe. Kelly, the DEA task force leader, stated : "They were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy. “If they are violating US statutes, why can’t we bring them to justice?” • Politico says Kelly and Asher are "among the officials involved in Project Cassandra who have been quietly contacted by the Trump administration and congressional Republicans, who said a special Politico report of April 24 on Barack Obama’s hidden Iran deal concessions raised urgent questions about the need to resurrect key law enforcement programs to counter Iran." But, the former Cassandra officials say that won’t be easy, "even with President Donald Trump’s recent vow to crack down on Iran and Hezbollah." They said they tried to keep the project on life support, in hopes that it would be revived by the next administration, but the loss of key personnel, budget cuts and dropped investigations are only a few of many challenges made worse by the passage of nearly a year since Trump took office. Kelly told Politico : “You can’t let these things disintegrate. Sources evaporate. Who knows if we can find all of the people willing to testify?” • • • OPERATIONS TITAN AND PERSEUS LED TO HEZBOLLAH. Derek Maltz, senior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations and who oversaw Project Cassandra as the head of the DEA’s Special Operations Division for nine years ending in July 2014, put it this way : “Certainly there are targets that people feel that could have been indicted and weren’t. There is certainly an argument to be made that if tomorrow all the agencies were ordered to come together and sit in a room and put all the evidence on the table against all these bad guys, that there could be a hell of a lot of indictments.” But Maltz told Politico that the damage wrought by years of political interference will be hard to repair : “There’s no doubt in my mind now that the focus was this Iran deal and our initiative was kind of like a fly in the soup. We were the train that went off the tracks.” • Project Cassandra had its origins in a series of investigations launched in the years after the 9/11 attacks which all led, via their own meandering paths, to Hezbollah as a suspected global criminal enterprise. Operation Titan was a joint investigation with Colombian authorities into a global money-laundering and drug-trafficking alliance between Latin American traffickers and Lebanese operatives, in which the DEA worked with Colombian authorities to explore a global alliance between Lebanese money launderers and Colombian drug trafficking conglomerates. Operation Perseus, targeting Venezuelan syndicates, was another. At the same time, DEA agents in West Africa were investigating the suspicious flow of thousands of used cars from US dealerships to car parks in Benin. Meanwhile, in Iraq, the US military was probing the role of Iran in outfitting shiite militias with high-tech improvised explosive devices known as Explosively Formed Penetrators, or EFPs, that had already killed hundreds of US soldiers. • All of these paths eventually converged on Hezbollah. Agents told Politico that "this wasn’t entirely a surprise." For decades, sqys Politico : "Hezbollah -- in close cooperation with Iranian intelligence and Revolutionary Guard -- had worked with supporters in Lebanese communities around the world to create a web of businesses that were long suspected of being fronts for black-market trading. Along the same routes that carried frozen chicken and consumer electronics, these businesses moved weapons, laundered money and even procured parts for Iran’s illicit nuclear and ballistic missile programs. As they pursued their investigations, the DEA agents found that Hezbollah was redoubling all of these efforts, working urgently to raise cash, and lots of it, to rebuild its south Lebanon stronghold after a 2006 war with Israel had reduced it to rubble. Dating back to its inception in the early 1980s, Hezbollah, which translates to 'Party of God,' had also engaged in 'narco-terrorism,' collecting a tariff from drug dealers and other black-market suppliers who operated in territory it controlled in Lebanon and elsewhere. Based on the DEA’s extensive network of informants, undercover operatives and wiretaps, it looked like Hezbollah had shifted tactics, and gotten directly involved in the global cocaine trade, according to interviews and documents, including a confidential DEA assessment." Kelly told Politico : “It was like they flipped a switch. All of a sudden, they reversed the flow of all of the black-market activity they had been taxing for years, and took control of the operation.” Operating like an organized crime family, Hezbollah operatives would identify businesses that might be profitable and useful as covers for cocaine trafficking and buy financial stakes in them, Kelly and others said : “And if the business was successful and suited their current needs, they went from partial owners to majority owners to full partnership or takeover.” • Politico states that : "Hezbollah even created a special financial unit that, translated into English, means 'Business Affairs Component,' to oversee the sprawling criminal operation, and it was run by the world’s most wanted terrorist after Osama bin Laden, a notoriously vicious Hezbollah military commander named Imad Mughniyeh, a Hezbollah mastermind who oversaw its international operations and, the DEA says, its drug trafficking, as head of its military wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization, according to DEA interviews and documents. Mughniyeh had, according to Politico interviewees : "for decades been the public face of terrorism for Americans, orchestrating the infamous attack that killed 241 US Marines in 1983 in their barracks in Lebanon, and dozens more Americans in attacks on the US Embassy in Beirut that year and an annex the year after. When President Ronald Reagan responded to the attacks by withdrawing peacekeeping troops from Lebanon, Hezbollah claimed a major victory and vaulted to the forefront of the Islamist resistance movement against the West. • Over the next 25 years, Iran’s financial and military support for Hezbollah enabled it to amass an army with tens of thousands of foot soldiers, more heavy armaments than most nation-states and approximately 120,000 rockets and ballistic missiles that could strike Israel and US interests in the region with devastating precision. Hezbollah also became an expert in soft power, as well, according to Politico : "It provided food, medical care and other social services for starving refugees in war-torn Lebanon, winning credibility on the ground. It then evolved further into a powerful political party, casting itself as the defender of poor, mostly shiite Lebanese against Christian and sunni Moslem elites. But, as Hezbollah was moving into the mainstream of Lebanese politics, Mughniyeh was overseeing a secret expansion of its terrorist wing, the Islamic Jihad Organization. Working with Iranian intelligence agents, Islamic Jihad continued to attack Western, Israeli and Jewish targets around the world, and to conduct surveillance on others -- including in the United States -- in preparation for future attacks." Hezbollah left the United States alone, says Politico, "in what was clearly a strategic decision to avoid US retaliation." • But by 2008, the Bush administration believed that Islamic Jihad was the most dangerous terrorist organization in the world, capable of launching instantaneous attacks, possibly with chemical, biological or low-grade nuclear weapons, that would dwarf those on 9/11. • And, the DEA, according to Politico : "believed that it was the logical US national security agency to lead the interagency effort to go after Mughniyeh’s drug trafficking networks. But within the US national security apparatus, this was both a questionable and problematic assertion." The DEA was established by President Richard Nixon in 1973 to bring together the various anti-drug programs under the Department of Justice. The DEA was among the youngest of the US national security agencies. And although the DEA had quickly proven itself adept at working on the global stage -- especially in partnerships with drug-infested countries desperate for US help like Colombia -- few people within the US government thought of it as a legitimate counterterrorism force." In the final years of the Bush administration, though, the DEA had won the support of top officials for taking down two major international arms dealers, a Syrian named Monzer al-Kassar and the Russian “Lord of War,” Viktor Bout, known as the "Lord of War." Convicted of conspiracy to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to Colombian narco-terrorists. And, says Politico, "thanks to supportive Republicans in Congress, it had become the beneficiary of a new federal law that empowered its globe-trotting cadre of assault-weapon-toting Special Operations agents." Congress had given the DEA the green light to "operate virtually anywhere, without permission required from other US agencies. All they needed to do was connect drug suspects to terrorism, and they could arrest them, haul them back to the United States and flip them in an effort to penetrate “the highest levels of the world’s most significant and notorious criminal organizations.” That is what then-Special Operations chief Derek Maltz, the senior DEA official who as head of Special Operations Division lobbied for support for Project Cassandra and its investigations, told Congress in November 2011. As they crunched the massive amounts of intel streaming into the DEA’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Operations Center in Chantilly, Virginia, the agents on Operation Titan, Perseus and the other cases began to connect the dots and map the contours of Hezbollah's overarching criminal enterprise. • • • DEAR READERS, and then along came President Barack Obama. We will continue the Obama-Hezbollah collusion tale tomorrow.