How Obama admin subverted plan to take down Taliban drug running, just like it shut down operation against Hezbollah

How Obama admin subverted plan to take down Taliban drug running, just like it shut down operation against Hezbollah

In December 2017, investigative reporter Josh Meyer broke a story in Politico Magazine which exposed how the Obama administration allowed Hezbollah to run drugs, including into the U.S., for fear that a crackdown would upset Iran during the nuke deal negotiations.

We covered that report in Obama allowed Hezbollah cocaine running into U.S. in quest for Iran nuke deal:

In 2014, cocaine was second only behind heroin in U.S. drug deaths.

A major player in the cocaine traffic into the U.S. was the Iranian-sponsored terrorist group Hezbollah. For year it has been known that Hezbollah has infiltrated criminal gangs in South America and set up its own billion-dollar international criminal enterprise to finance its terror activities. None of this was a secret.

U.S. law enforcement came up with an aggressive plan to take down the Hezbollah international network and its key individuals. But it never happened. We now know why.

Politico Magazine has an amazing expose on how the Obama White House derailed the plans to take down the Hezbollah network, and to allow Hezbollah to continue drug-running into the U.S., in order to avoid upsetting the Iran nuclear deal.

The Politico article is so long, so detailed, and so powerful, it’s impossible for me to give a brief summary, so read the whole thing, The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hoo. The subheadline tells the story:

An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah’s billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House’s desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.

Despite a campaign by the Iran Deal echo chamber, no one ever proved any of the material allegations in Meyer’s report to be wrong:

The Mainstream media still is maintaining almost complete silence on the Politico story, as the Obama Iran Deal Echo Chamber attacks Meyer.

But as WaPo reported, when it finally covered the story through its media critic Eric Wemple:

“The pushback doesn’t cite any factual errors involving the story’s claims about shut-down investigations and the like.”

After Meyer’s report, DOJ agreed to investigate the shut down of Operation Cassandra.

Now Meyer has another report at Politico Magazine, this time focusing on the parallels between the shut down of Operation Cassandra against Hezbollah and Operation Reciprocity against the Taliban drug running operation that financed the Taliban war effort.

As before, the new Meyer report is so long and detailed, you need to read the whole thing. Here are some pertinent excerpts, The secret story of how America lost the drug war with the Taliban:

As Afghanistan edged ever closer to becoming a narco-state five years ago, a team of veteran U.S. officials in Kabul presented the Obama administration with a detailed plan to use U.S. courts to prosecute the Taliban commanders and allied drug lords who supplied more than 90 percent of the world’s heroin — including a growing amount fueling the nascent opioid crisis in the United States.

The plan, according to its authors, was both a way of halting the ruinous spread of narcotics around the world and a new — and urgent — approach to confronting ongoing frustrations with the Taliban, whose drug profits were financing the growing insurgency and killing American troops. But the Obama administration’s deputy chief of mission in Kabul, citing political concerns, ordered the plan to be shelved, according to a POLITICO investigation.

Meyer explained in a Twitter thread how this came to his attention:

The tipster believed this was another example of the Obama White House putting politics ahead of U.S. security interests, and shutting down global law enforcement investigations that got too politically sensitive, and allowing narco-terrorists to continue operating as a result.

— Josh Meyer (@JoshMeyerDC) July 8, 2018

And the Taliban used the drug proceeds – as much as $300 million a year – to buy weapons and explosives to kill 2,000 American troops, countless civilians, and to push Afghanistan to the verge of becoming a narco-state. pic.twitter.com/sk5g722gXQ

— Josh Meyer (@JoshMeyerDC) July 8, 2018

This story wouldn’t have been possible without the person who first sent me the tip. If you’ve got another tip for me, on this or other stories, please shoot me a note at my encrypted email account, [email protected]. It'll stay confidential. https://t.co/zmgxFF1tgN

— Josh Meyer (@JoshMeyerDC) July 8, 2018

Meyer explains how central this operation was to disrupting the Taliban war effort:

“This was the most effective and sustainable tool we had for disrupting and dismantling Afghan drug trafficking organizations and separating them from the Taliban,” said Michael Marsac, the main architect of the plan as the DEA’s regional director for South West Asia at the time. “But it lies dormant, buried in an obscure file room, all but forgotten.”

A senior Afghan security official, M. Ashraf Haidari, also expressed anger at the Obama administration when told about how the U.S. effort to indict Taliban narcotics kingpins was stopped dead in its tracks 16 months after it began.

“It brought us almost to the breaking point, put our elections into a time of crisis, and then our economy almost collapsed,” Haidari said of the drug money funding the Taliban. “If that [operation] had continued, we wouldn’t have had this massive increase in production and cultivation as we do now.”

* * *

The plan, code-named Operation Reciprocity, was modeled after a legal strategy that the Justice Department began using a decade earlier against the cocaine-funded leftist FARC guerrillas in Colombia, in concert with military and diplomatic efforts. The new operation’s goal was to haul 26 suspects from Afghanistan to the same New York courthouse where FARC leaders were prosecuted, turn them against each other and the broader insurgency, convict them on conspiracy charges and lock them away….

The document — a 240-page draft prosecution memo and 700 pages of supporting evidence — was the result of 10 years of DEA investigations done in conjunction with U.S. and allied military forces, working with embassy legal advisers from the departments of Justice and State. In May 2013, it was endorsed by the top Justice Department official in Kabul, who recommended it be sent to DOJ’s specialized Terrorism and International Narcotics unit in Manhattan. After agents flew in from Kabul for a three-hour briefing, the unit enthusiastically accepted the case and assigned one of its best and most experienced prosecutors to spearhead it.

This video (click on link if video does not load or size properly) tells the story:

In the end, the Operation Reciprocity was died a death of neglect, while Project Cassandra had been deliberately shut down:

The Afghanistan team members said there are striking parallels between their case and Project Cassandra, the DEA code name for the Hezbollah investigations, as well as nuclear trafficking cases disclosed in another POLITICO report as being derailed because of the Iran deal. Taken together, they said, the cases show a troubling pattern of thwarting international law-enforcement efforts to the overall detriment of U.S. national security….

* * *

One senior Obama-era Pentagon counternarcotics official told POLITICO that high-level administration officials, at the National Security Council and elsewhere, did, in fact, undermine the plan to indict Taliban leaders. “The NSC was aware of it, [and] it ran headlong into the issue of engagement” with the Taliban, he said.

Operation Reciprocity, like some Hezbollah cases before it, died from a lack of political support, the official said, rather than an organized conspiracy to shut it down. Even so, the result was the same. “You can kill things by not moving it,” he said. “If DEA is waiting for approval and someone says no, you have to pause, that’s pretty much it.”

Meyer’s reporting on Project Cassandra and Operation Reciprocity should be headlines on the front page of every major media publication.

But these reports of Obama administration malfeasance and neglect are ignored because they are inconvenient in a media environment focused exclusively on demonizing Trump.

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