The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook


Politico has the story The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook.

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.

I am not sure what to make of this story. There is enough in the story to back up the headline, but their are also tidbits that undermine it. Some day, I might put aside enough time to read the whole story.

Here is another excerpt from the story.

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.

While reading this, I was thinking of another post I had yesterday – “Rise and Kill First” Explores the Corrupting Effects of Israel’s Assassination Program. In that post, I had an excerpt that said the following:

Bombing and invading Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, with assassination an essential element of the campaign, produced out of the hitherto pacific Lebanese Shiite community an organization called Hezbollah that became the most effective guerrilla force Israel had ever faced.

These words are not a direct refutation of the excerpt from the first story, but it has me wondering if there is some conflict between the two understandings of Hezbollah.

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