NCRI Staff
NCRI – The Obama administration reportedly ignored Iran-backed Hezbollah’s drug-trafficking and money-laundering operations, including those taking place in the US, in order to secure the Iranian nuclear deal.
The Drug Enforcement Administration conducted an elaborate campaign, known as Project Cassandra, in order to target Hezbollah’s criminal activities but Obama administration officials threw up roadblocks to hold up the project.
This meant that Hezbollah was allowed to grow into a major global security threat, which bankrolled terrorist and military operations, according to Politico.
David Asher, a Defense Department illicit finance analyst who helped establish Project Cassandra in 2008, said: “This was a policy decision, it was a systematic decision. They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
When project leaders, who were working out of a DEA Counter facility in Chantilly, Virginia, sought approval for investigations, prosecutions, arrests and financial sanctions, they were delayed, hindered or rejected outright by Justice and Treasury Department officials.
This meant that Project Cassandra’s ability to stop top Hezbollah operatives, including “Ghost”; one of the world’s largest cocaine traffickers who was also supplying chemical weapons to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for use against the Syrian people.
Iranian Regime Nuclear Deal
Former Obama administration officials, who spoke to Politico on condition of anonymity, explained that their decisions were supposed to improve relations between the US and the Iranian Regime, who is Hezbollah’s main backer and effectively uses the terrorist group to export reactionary Islam across the Middle East.
While Hezbollah hold great control in Lebanon, where they act as a puppet for the Iranian Regime, they also destabilise other parts of the Middle East in order to help the Iranian Regime to take power by proxy.
Asher, 49, said that following the agreement of the nuclear deal, Project Cassandra officials were reassigned and it became more difficult to investigate Hezbollah.
He said: “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.”
Hezbollah has deep ties with the Iranian Regime because it was founded by members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC) in 1982 to attack Israel.