Hezbollah and Drug Lords: A Dangerous Alliance
Traffickers are frighteningly able to help their new partners smuggle deadly weapons.
According to documents unsealed by a federal magistrate in Miami last week, Harb, who lived in Bogotá and went by the alias “Taliban,” acted as the money man between the cocaine cartels and the terror organization. Described as a “world-class money-launderer,” Harb’s illegal financial transactions have spanned the globe — from Latin America to Asia — with a cut being diverted to fund terror.
“Harb traveled frequently to Syria, Egypt, and Lebanon, and his arrest occurred when he was about to leave Bogotá for Syria,” the Miami Herald reported last weekend. Also arrested in Operation Titan were 21 individuals in Colombia and “90 others in Panama, Guatemala, Lebanon, Hong Kong, and the United States.” According to the Colombian special prosecutor’s office, investigators analyzed more than 700,000 intercepted phone conversations from 370 tapped cell phone lines. Two other Middle Eastern men were also charged — a Jordanian named Ali Mohamad Abdul Rahim and a second Lebanese national named Zacaria Hussein Harb.
This new partnership will no doubt raise complications for President-elect Barack Obama in his proposed plans to open diplomatic talks with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Hezbollah in Lebanon is a proxy of Iran,” says former Middle East CIA operative Robert Baer in his new book, The Devil We Know. “It follows to the letter Iranian orders.”
This means that Iran is co-sponsoring Hezbollah along with the only global organization able to consistently smuggle tons of illegal goods into every single industrialized nation in the world including America — on a daily basis. Toss the Colombian cocaine cartels’ newest mode of transport into the mix — stealthy semi-submersible submarines, or “drug subs” — and the national security ramifications in the Iran-Hezbollah-Colombia cocaine cartel triumvirate grow exponentially.
Vice President-elect Joe Biden summed up one resulting nightmare scenario just last month. On the eve of the Senate passing legislation directed against the cartels’ “use of submarines to smuggle drugs,” the senator from Delaware, who spearheaded the bill (S.3351), said, “If smugglers can pack tons of illegal drugs into these stealthy vessels, terrorists could carry weapons of mass destruction or other threats into our country the same way.”
Which is exactly what the terrorists — ‘A’-Team and ‘B’-Team members alike — already know.
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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