Obama and Hezbollah

#4
#4
Obama is Satan and we hate him because he's black and smart and we just can't have that; pass the potatoes and shotguns we use to hunt armadillos in the front yard while we sing Confederate songs #Make America 1850 Again
 
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#7
#7
lawgator1 said:
Obama is Satan and we hate him because he's black and smart and we just can't have that; pass the potatoes and shotguns we use to hunt armadillos in the front yard while we sing Confederate songs #Make America 1850 Again
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Interesting take you have on Politico. I thought they were generally left-leaning. Not racist Obama-haters. But I know that's your knee-jerk reaction to anyone saying something not nice about your boy Obama. Sad!

The secret backstory of how Obama let Hezbollah off the hook | Politico
 
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#9
#9
lawgator1 said:
Obama is Satan and we hate him because he's black and smart and we just can't have that; pass the potatoes and shotguns we use to hunt armadillos in the front yard while we sing Confederate songs #Make America 1850 Again
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You’re one the biggest race perpetrators on this entire site, how about he’s just a failed potus regardless of his skin color.
 
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#10
#10
lawgator1 said:
Obama is Satan and we hate him because he's black and smart and we just can't have that; pass the potatoes and shotguns we use to hunt armadillos in the front yard while we sing Confederate songs #Make America 1850 Again
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4 posts. nice. gotta be close to breaking the record aren't we?
 
#12
#12
In its determination to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, the Obama administration derailed an ambitious law enforcement campaign targeting drug trafficking by the Iranian-backed terrorist group Hezbollah, even as it was funneling cocaine into the United States, according to a POLITICO investigation.

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.

The Justice Department declined requests by Project Cassandra and other authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian paramilitary Quds force. And the State Department rejected requests to lure high-value targets to countries where they could be arrested.

Lebanese arms dealer, Ali Fayad (a Ukraine-based arms merchant suspected of being a Hezbollah operative moving large amounts of weapons to Syria whom agents believed reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin as a key supplier of weapons to Syria and Iraq), was arrested in Prague in the spring of 2014. But for the nearly two years Fayad was in custody, top Obama administration officials declined to apply serious pressure on the Czech government to extradite him to the United States, even as Putin was lobbying aggressively against it.

Fayad, who had been indicted in U.S. courts on charges of planning the murders of U.S. government employees, attempting to provide material support to a terrorist organization and attempting to acquire, transfer and use anti-aircraft missiles, was ultimately sent to Beirut. He is now believed by U.S. officials to be back in business, and helping to arm militants in Syria and elsewhere with Russian heavy weapons.

Project Cassandra members say administration officials also blocked or undermined their efforts to go after other top Hezbollah operatives including one nicknamed the ‘Ghost', allowing them to remain active despite being under sealed U.S. indictment for years. People familiar with his case say the Ghost has been one of the world’s biggest cocaine traffickers, including to the U.S., as well as a major supplier of conventional and chemical weapons for use by Syrian President Bashar Assad against his people.

“The closer we got to the [Iran deal], the more these activities went away,” Asher said. “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.”

As a result, the U.S. government lost insight into not only drug trafficking and other criminal activity worldwide, but also into Hezbollah’s illicit conspiracies with top officials in the Iranian, Syrian, Venezuelan and Russian governments — all the way up to presidents Nicolas Maduro, Assad and Putin, according to former task force members and other current and former U.S. officials.

Meanwhile, Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa, including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former U.S. officials believe.

“They were a paramilitary organization with strategic importance in the Middle East, and we watched them become an international criminal conglomerate generating billions of dollars for the world’s most dangerous activities, including chemical and nuclear weapons programs and armies that believe America is their sworn enemy,” said Kelly, the supervisory DEA agent and lead coordinator of its Hezbollah cases.
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#16
#16
Ok, I read it and the basic message is that there was a trade off between whether to go after Hezbollah criminally, i.e. charge them crimes and try to find ways to take them into custody, or look for ways to manipulate them from the inside out, by supporting moderates and killing the extremists, which Obama did.

I get that people on the law enforcement side would complain as the decision to try to go after the extremists by killing them, as opposed to trying to break up the drug cartel aspect with arrests, did not coincide with their particular tasks. But you have to take into account the larger picture here.

I think we have learned over the last couple of decades now that radical Muslim ideology takes many, many forms. Its easy to say we need to kill the members of ISIS. It gets a lot harder when you have to make choices between killing a politician member of another aspect of Muslim extremism when the consequence of that is simply to create more Muslim extremism.

I will say this: It illustrates just how complex this problem is, and why it is we find ourselves in a constant tug of war even internally on how to deal with it. You can make an argument that the long term Obama administration approach of promoting more moderate actors backfired in many ways, I would not argue otherwise.

But you can also make the argument that a heavy handed simple "wipe them all out" approach has not exactly paid big dividends when we've tried it, either.
 
#17
#17
Because Hezbollah’s drug trafficking was bankrolling its Islamic Jihad military wing and joint ventures with Iran, as Asher would later testify before Congress, it represented “the largest material support scheme for terrorism operations” the world had ever seen.
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Meanwhile, Hezbollah — in league with Iran — continues to undermine U.S. interests in Iraq, Syria and throughout wide swaths of Latin America and Africa, including providing weapons and training to anti-American Shiite militias. And Safieddine, the Ghost and other associates continue to play central roles in the trafficking of drugs and weapons, current and former U.S. officials believe.
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So the Obama administration could have undermined the largest material support scheme for terrorism, but instead enabled and protected Hezbollah and appeased the leading state sponsor of jihad, Iran. Un-****ing-believable.
 
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#18
#18
golfballs said:
So the Obama administration could have undermined the largest material support scheme for terrorism, but instead enabled and protected Hezbollah and appeased the leading state sponsor of jihad, Iran. Un-****ing-believable.
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You are taking select things from the article, out of context.

I am not surprised.
 
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#21
#21
lawgator1 said:
You are taking select things from the article, out of context.

I am not surprised.
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Sorry, can't post the entire ****ing article, you idiot. But these are your feeble excuses to defend Obama? First it was MUH racism. Now it's MUH Context.

Here's more context. Sorry. The CONTEXT isn't helping your cause. What's your next lame excuse?
All of that information was shared with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies — and the White House — via the DEA’s Chantilly nerve center. But by early 2009, Obama’s national security team batted down Project Cassandra’s increasingly urgent warnings as being overly alarmist, counterproductive or untrue, or simply ignored them, according to Kelly, Asher, Maltz and other participants in and out of government.

By following the money, though, Asher had become convinced that the task force wasn’t overhyping the threat posed by Hezbollah’s criminal activities, it was significantly underestimating it. Because Hezbollah’s drug trafficking was bankrolling its Islamic Jihad military wing and joint ventures with Iran, as Asher would later testify before Congress, it represented “the largest material support scheme for terrorism operations” the world had ever seen.

As proof, Asher (a Veteran U.S. illicit finance expert sent from Pentagon to Project Cassandra to attack the alleged Hezbollah criminal enterprise) would often bring PowerPoints to interagency drug and crime meetings, showing how cash reserves of U.S currency in Lebanon had doubled, to $16 billion, in just a few years, and how shiny new skyscrapers were popping up around Beirut, just like Miami, Panama City, Panama, and other cities awash in drug money.

Privately, Asher began to tell task force colleagues, the best way to take down the entire criminal enterprise — especially such a politically sensitive one as Hezbollah — was to go after its money, and the financial institutions assisting it. Their first target would be one of the world’s fastest-growing banks, the Beirut-based Lebanese Canadian Bank and its $5 billion in assets.

Federal authorities filed a civil action against the bank in February 2011 and later seized $102 million, ultimately forcing it to shut down and sell its assets without admitting wrongdoing. But the Justice Department never filed the criminal charges, and also stymied investigations into other financial institutions and individuals that task force agents targeted as part of the planned RICO case, they say.

The Obama White House said privately that it feared a broader assault on Lebanese financial institutions would destabilize the country. But without the threat of prison time, complicit bank officials clammed up. And without pressure on the many other financial institutions in Lebanon and the region, Hezbollah simply moved its banking business elsewhere.

Soon afterward, Kelly said, he ran into one of the unit’s top prosecutors and asked if there was “something going on with the White House that explains why we can’t get a criminal filing.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” the prosecutor replied, according to Kelly. “Right now, we have 50 FBI agents not doing anything because they know their Iran cases aren’t going anywhere,” including investigations around the U.S. into allegedly complicit used-car dealers.
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#22
#22
golfballs said:
Sorry, can't post the entire ****ing article, you idiot. But these are your feeble excuses to defend Obama? First it was MUH racism. Now it's MUH Context.

Here's more context. Sorry. The CONTEXT isn't helping your cause. What's your next lame excuse?
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And you quote none of the parts of the article which explain the bigger picture and why those choices were made. You quote none of the article about the payoff for having adopted a strategy to promote moderates as opposed to simply trying to arrest drug dealers within the organization.

Again, I get that there can be criticisms of individual decisions of who, and who not, to go after. But you can't ignore the bigger picture of all of it.
 
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#23
#23
lawgator1 said:
And you quote none of the parts of the article which explain the bigger picture and why those choices were made. You quote none of the article about the payoff for having adopted a strategy to promote moderates as opposed to simply trying to arrest drug dealers within the organization.

Again, I get that there can be criticisms of individual decisions of who, and who not, to go after. But you can't ignore the bigger picture of all of it.
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Sure I can just start posting the entire article

Ok, here's "Obama's" side:

But the former officials denied that they derailed any actions against Hezbollah or its Iranian allies for political reasons.

“There has been a consistent pattern of actions taken against Hezbollah, both through tough sanctions and law enforcement actions before and after the Iran deal,” said Kevin Lewis, an Obama spokesman who worked at both the White House and Justice Department in the administration.

Lewis, speaking for the Obama administration, provided a list of eight arrests and prosecutions as proof. He made special note of a February 2016 operation in which European authorities arrested an undisclosed number of alleged members of a special Hezbollah business affairs unit that the DEA says oversees its drug trafficking and other criminal money-making enterprises.

Project Cassandra officials, however, noted that the European arrests occurred after the negotiations with Iran were over, and said the task force initiated the multinational partnerships on its own, after years of seeing their cases shot down by the Justice and State departments and other U.S. agencies.

The Justice Department, they pointed out, never filed corresponding U.S. criminal charges against the suspects arrested in Europe, including one prominent Lebanese businessman formally designated by the Treasury Department for using his “direct ties to Hezbollah commercial and terrorist elements” to launder bulk shipments of illicit cash for the organization throughout Asia, Europe and the Middle East.
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Oh and then the part where the former Obama official starts throwing out hypotheticals as defense. Then says that they don't get the big picture...

“What if the CIA or the Mossad had an intelligence operation ongoing inside Hezbollah and they were trying to pursue someone . . . against whom we had impeccable [intelligence] collection and the DEA is not going to know that?” the official said. “I get the feeling people who don’t know what’s going on in the broader universe are grasping at straws.”

The official added: “The world is a lot more complicated than viewed through the narrow lens of drug trafficking. So you’re not going to let CIA rule the roost, but you’re also certainly not going to let DEA do it either. Your approach to anything as complicated as Hezbollah is going to have to involve the interagency [process], because the State Department has a piece of the pie, the intelligence community does, Treasury does, DOD does.”
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Oh, what's that? There is an inter-agency stance on this? Hmm, here's an Obama official on record to Congress....
Nonetheless, other sources independent of Project Cassandra confirmed many of the allegations in interviews with POLITICO, and in some cases, in public comments.

One Obama-era Treasury official, Katherine Bauer, in little-noticed written testimony presented last February to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, acknowledged that “under the Obama administration … these [Hezbollah-related] investigations were tamped down for fear of rocking the boat with Iran and jeopardizing the nuclear deal.”

As a result, some Hezbollah operatives were not pursued via arrests, indictments, or Treasury designations that would have blocked their access to U.S. financial markets, according to Bauer, a career Treasury official, who served briefly in its Office of Terrorist Financing as a senior policy adviser for Iran before leaving in late 2015. And other “Hezbollah facilitators” arrested in France, Colombia, Lithuania have not been extradited — or indicted — in the U.S., she wrote.
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Ooops!
 
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#24
#24
lawgator1 said:
Obama is Satan and we hate him because he's black and smart and we just can't have that; pass the potatoes and shotguns we use to hunt armadillos in the front yard while we sing Confederate songs #Make America 1850 Again
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link?
 
#25
#25
The young man was not only in contact with Joumaa (Accused drug kingpin and financier whose vast network allegedly smuggled tons of cocaine into the U.S. with Mexico’s Zetas cartel and laundered money.) and some of the other top drug traffickers in the world” but also “leaders of a foreign [country’s] black ops special forces; executive leadership of Hezbollah; and a representative of a company which is most likely facilitating the development of WMDs.”

“We should also not forget,” he added, “about the 100’s of used car companies in the states — some of them owned by Islamic Extremists — which are part of this network.” In interviews, former task force officials identified the young man as Safieddine’s son, and said he acted as his father’s liaison in Beirut.

All of that information was shared with other law enforcement and intelligence agencies — and the White House — via the DEA’s Chantilly nerve center. But by early 2009, Obama’s national security team batted down Project Cassandra’s increasingly urgent warnings as being overly alarmist, counterproductive or untrue, or simply ignored them, according to Kelly, Asher, Maltz and other participants in and out of government.
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:question:

House IT Staffers Owed Money To Hezbollah-Linked Fugitive | The Daily Caller

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group has reported that while working for Congress, the Pakistani brothers controlled a limited liability corporation called Cars International A (CIA), a car dealership with odd finances, which took–and was unable to repay–a $100,000 loan from Dr. Ali Al-Attar.

Philip Giraldi, a former CIA officer, wrote that Attar “was observed in Beirut, Lebanon conversing with a Hezbollah official” in 2012–shortly after the loan was made. Attar has also been accused of helping provoke the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq as a leader of Iraqi dissidents opposed to Saddam Hussein.

“It was very bad record-keeping in Cars International … it is close to impossible to make any sense out of all the transactions that happened,” Khattak said in court documents.

CIA’s finances interwove with the House’s. A car-dealing associate who was owed money by the brothers, Rao Abbas, was placed on the congressional payroll.
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