How the US Failed to Take Down Narco-terrorism | The War on Drugs

foreign a cheap amphetamine that is popular in Gulf countries drug cartels backed by the Syrian government are fueling the trade what connects cannabis production in Lebanon cocaine trafficking in Latin America and one of the most brutal Civil Wars of the modern era the DEA is now investigating a multi-million dollar money laundering scheme with possible terrorist ties the answer lies in one of the murkiest and most controversial areas of the entire War on Drugs the concept of narco-terrorism these Global narcotics organizations that are involved with you know terrorism they're using the proceeds of international drug trafficking to support maybe some radical agenda that they may have narco-terrorism is a poorly defined term that basically refers to any intersection between the global drugs trade and terrorist groups around the world this is definitely come into play with illegal armed groups like The farc or the AUC in Colombia and one place where this tension played out particularly intensely is with the Lebanese paramilitary group and political party Hezbollah this is the wild story of how an Islamic militant group got accused of being one of the key players in the global Narco trade and how I ended up with the CIA the DEA and the White House all accusing each other of endangering U.S national security The bakar Valley in Lebanon is a remote semi-autonomous Zone that's most famous for one thing the hashish trade it's incredibly sticky and it smells I mean I can't even describe the smells stunning cannabis as far as I can see weed has been grown in the bakar valley for centuries and is perhaps the most important pillar of the local economy making this tiny country the world's third largest producer of cannabis resin [Music] the bakar valley is controlled by a complex web of Clans and militias each of whom wield considerable Firepower holy the car is full of Rocket repel grenade launchers have you ever fired those at the Army before but by far the single most powerful group in the region is Hezbollah the paramilitary terrorist group founded by Iran during lebanon's brutal Civil War in the 1980s we've since grown to become a political party and part of the country's government Hezbollah is a political militant organization that has existed in Lebanon for decades that has very deep control in many ways they're somewhat of a government within a government Hezbollah is believed to be responsible for a number of deadly terrorist attacks across the world but one question that has always dogged them is just how involved they really are in the bakar valley drugs trade on paper Hezbollah is devout Islamic religious movement to whom all drugs are prohibited and is denied involvement in any aspect of the Narco trade however clerics have also issued rulings that trafficking drugs to non-believers is actually acceptable and Hezbollah has been accused of massively profiting from the drugs trade though the group often maintains a cloak of plausible deniability by collaborating with independent traffickers instead of using actual members of Hezbollah while many political factions within Lebanon have historical affiliations to the drug trade the main production sources and smuggling routes today run through hezbollah-controlled areas and political donations aside it's hard to imagine this trade flourishing so openly without its tacit approval they created a Blurred Lines system within the Lebanese political landscape that has allowed them to exploit local families smuggling routes you name it to their advantage it's allowed a Hezbollah to say look we are not directly imposing any instruction for the production and the trafficking of marijuana hezbollah's denials also seem to wear a little thin looking at this video which shows the celebrity hash trafficker Nua zetar on lebanon's Al jadine TV station in 2016 openly declaring his allegiance to the group [Music] um during the Civil War in Syria Hezbollah has also been accused of using their smuggling routes to traffic captagon a cheap amphetamine pill produced in huge quantities by the Assad regime but it turns out the smuggling hash and speed in the Middle East is only the tip of the cocaine Iceberg when it comes to hezbollah's alleged involvement in global Narco trafficking and this is where the story gets really interesting [Applause] in 2008 the DEA created operation Titan a multi-agency task force to investigate hezbollah's links to drug trafficking not in the Middle East but in South America what they uncovered was staggering an elaborate series of interlocking operations involving cocaine and arms trafficking as well as money laundering for the cartels worth millions of dollars we've been able to establish very impressive International networks with cocaine cartels and take a number of pages from their books on how to successfully shroud these drug shipments successfully without interdiction so I think that that really you know is the proof is in the pudding here when you look at these Maps when you look into these networks it's all there operation Titan largely focused on the shadowy figure of einen jumo he was at the center of a complex Network that would ship cocaine from South America to West Africa and onwards into Europe before passing the launder proceeds onto Hezbollah and then Juma was indicted in America for moving like 200 million dollars a month through this scheme that's over a billion dollars a year and he was also moving the proceeds of Los Santas cocaine the Mexican cartel he was moving like 80 000 kilograms of cocaine so this was some of the biggest drug trafficking we've ever seen in the world they had this this network of facilitators around the globe that were helping develop this criminal Enterprise to support hezbollah's terrorism organization these investigations are part of what led Congress to pass the Hezbollah International financing Act of 2015 though Juma himself has never been caught and remains at large Federal officials tell CNN they believe Juma is somewhere in the Middle East and his operations continue to a very proactive in expulsion hezbollah's role in the in the global drug trafficking business the DEA has never been involved in this type of traditional Terror drug investigation so the magnitude was off the chart as surprising as it may seem to find Middle Eastern terrorist groups trafficking Coke in the jungles of South America there's a backstory here Hezbollah had actually been active in the region for decades in the 1990s the group pulled off two of its all-time most significant attacks in Argentina involving the country's Israeli Embassy and a Jewish Community Center but by the 2000s hezbollah's priorities in South America appear to have shifted from bombings to making millions in the cocaine business several members of an international Terror Network have been arrested accused of helping drug cartels move massive amounts of cocaine through the United States and then using the money from the drug deals to buy weapons to use in Syria and this is where the story turns outright bizarre and the underlying confusion of the War on Drugs really comes into play building on the success of operation Titan the DEA put together another task force to investigate hezbollah's Narco business this time called operation Cassandra there is a lot of very significant operations that are being conducted around the world by DEA but if you rephrase it as far as the biggest operation ever targeting a drug trafficking Network that led us to a terror Network I would say yes evidence from various intelligence agencies began to suggest that hezbollah's drug profits were supplying weapons to militias Killing American soldiers in Iraq and funding high-level political corruption in countries like Paraguay and Venezuela gradually operation Cassandra started running into roadblocks not from Hezbollah or the Colombian drug cartels but at home from the CIA and the Department of Justice I was told specifically we couldn't use Hezbollah as the terrorist group in a narcoterrorism charge it was just that that's not going to fly right now they defunded us they defanged our operations from a prosecution no one would take our cases we arrested people that would be potential Cooperators and they weren't prosecuted but they weren't and many of whom were eventually let go it was ridiculous they claim this was done to protect intelligence assets and to not endanger negotiations with Iran over its nuclear weapons program today after two years of negotiations the United States together were International Partners has achieved something that Decades of animosity has not a comprehensive long-term deal with Iran that will prevent it from obtaining a nuclear weapon up launches the announcement that there's going to be a joint comprehensive plan of action to solve the Iranian nuclear crisis and instantly up with the walls of resistance in our own government against project Cassandra sources from within the CIA and the Obama Administration have denied sabotaging operation Cassandra to journalists claiming that any reluctance to pursue investigations was simply down to lack of evidence and some have gone even further accusing the DEA themselves of acting like cowboys and recklessly endangering areas of sensitive diplomacy a lot of these guys were on other agencies charts and other agencies Target lists okay and it wasn't really like accepted that the DEA which should have been focused on drug trafficking was looking at these traditional terrorist topics so who are we to believe on the one hand the CIA definitely has a history of sabotaging drug enforcement operations to protect politically useful assets most famously during the Nicaraguan Contra drug trafficking scandals of the 1980s as a public elected officials all of us must be concerned that our government could have anyway been involved in drug trafficking on the other hand the DEA has been accused of exaggerating the links between drug trafficking and terrorism in the years after 9 11 in order to maintain their relevance and funding one investigation discovered that out of 37 major operations attempting to link drug trafficking to groups like Al-Qaeda almost all of them were in fact initiated by undercover DEA agents themselves it would use an informant and ask that informant to either play the role of a drug trafficker or a terrorist or both and lure a Target into a narco-terrorism conspiracy one of the joys of the giant mess that is the War on Drugs is that both of these scenarios can be true at once when it comes to Hezbollah though it seems undeniable that they are into the holistic drug trade in a big way and this is further destabilizing Lebanon as a country shaded certainly there's no denying that Hezbollah is very deeply integrated into the illicit economy of the region particularly when it comes to drugs but just how deep this goes and whether the DEA investigations will actually sabotaged is still a bit of a mystery the underlying logic of the War on Drugs remains clear if you create a massive illegal Market criminal groups will control it and some of the profits May well end up going to terrorists we'd like to congratulate drugs winning the war on drugs

Channel: VICE

Views: 1,658,688

Keywords: hezbollah, hezbollah vs israel, hezbollah documentary, hezbollah military power, hezbollah training, hezbollah usa, CIA, cia usa, DEA, drugs, the war on drugs, lebanon, middle east, war, drug doc, drug documentary, war on drugs hezbollah, war on drugs, narco terrorism, narcos, documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, world, exclusive, underground, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, hamas, israel, hezbollah attack on israel, who is hezbollah

Id: 6l796cTNGfg

Length: 12min 37sec (757 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 02 2023