Hezbollah and Drug Lords: A Dangerous Alliance
Traffickers are frighteningly able to help their new partners smuggle deadly weapons.
In the early days of the War on Terror, back when the United States was only fighting one war, in Afghanistan, Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage made a bold statement: “Hezbollah may be the ‘A-Team of terrorists,’” Armitage said, referring to the Lebanese-based, Iranian-controlled organization, “and maybe al-Qaeda is actually the ‘B’-Team.”
Hezbollah has certainly been killing Americans for longer than al-Qaeda has — beginning in 1983 with the truck bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut which killed 241 Marines. As recently as June 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State David Satterfield told reporters that Hezbollah teams were involved in attacking U.S.-led coalition forces in Iraq.
Now, in an alarming new development, the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) has broken apart an international drug smuggling and money laundering ring which links Hezbollah to the Colombian cocaine cartels though a Lebanese operative named Shukri Mahmud Harb.
This is the first time the U.S. has tied a terrorist organization to a major cocaine cartel. “The profits from the sale of drugs went to finance Hezbollah,” says Gladys Sanchez, the chief investigator for the special prosecutor’s office in Bogotá. The DEA took the lead on the investigation, which went by the code name Operation Titan.
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Annie Jacobsen writes about aviation and intelligence. She blogs at TheAviationNation.com and is working on a new book for Little Brown and Company.
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6 Comments
1. CM Smith:Interesting to note the photo used above was revealed to be one of the many hoax photos willingly accepted by a gullible US media.
The original caption claimed the Hezbollah fighter was guarding the site of an Israeli air strike but he’s actually posing in front of a garbage dump.
Nov 12, 2008 - 4:50 am 2. SAF:Our enemies will do anything to harm us while we are unwilling to wire tap phones let alone field other effective anti-terrorist programs. The press was all too happy to engage in a war on Bush.
Hezbollah will continue to be effective as long as we let them have safe haven in Iran.
So with policies like these guess who is going to lose?
Nov 12, 2008 - 7:17 am 3. Tinfoil Hatter:The Hezbollah problem is like an onion; the more you peel it, the more it makes you cry.
Short of a full scale invasion of Syria, Hezbollah will continue to have safe haven in Lebanon, where their “state-within-a-state” serves to give them almost all the advantages of a state, and all the advantages of non-state actor.
Nov 12, 2008 - 11:55 am 4. Richard:This is another example of why the War on (some) Drugs is a failed policy. The only thing achieved by prohibition is to make dealing in these substances extremely profitable. Notice that the terrorist cells and gangsters are *not* funded by trafficking in cigarettes or alcohol, just the stuff that is illegal. The War on (some) Drugs is a failed policy and only results in creating more misery and crime than it prevents.
Nov 13, 2008 - 1:46 pm 5. tomWright:Richard is correct.
We should admit to the lessons of alcohol prohibition, that they also apply to everything else that people demand regardless of legal status.
If we were to regulate all recreational drugs in a manner similar to how we treat alcohol, we would devastate organized crime as effectively as happened when prohibition was repealed.
My view is that the natural forms of these drugs should legal, though regulated. So natural opium, cocaine, marijuana and others would be legally sold by licensed dealers who are known and monitored for compliance with the rules just like the corner liquor store. It could even BE the corner liquor store. The producers and distributors would also be regulated just as the various tobacco vendors, breweries and distillers are today.
The highly refined versions of the drugs should continue to be considered pharmaceuticals, available with a physicians order, as they are today.
Doing this would eliminate one of the biggest sources of revenue, if not the largest, that funds organized crime and terrorist organizations. It would also remove a huge source of corruption from our police, court and political systems.
Nov 16, 2008 - 8:39 am 6. Hezbollah on Drugs » The Aviation Nation:[...] Hezbollah and Drug Lords: A Dangerous Alliance: Traffickers are frighteningly able to help their new partners smuggle deadly weapons. [...]
Nov 17, 2008 - 8:40 am