But the narrative quickly did an about-face, and blame was reassigned to ISIS\u2019s mortal enemies: the Syrian government and\u2014perhaps more importantly\u2014Hezbollah, the Syrian government-allied Lebanese political party and militant organization that has long been a thorn in the side of the US empire and its integral Israeli appendage.<\/p>\n
![\"WaPo:](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/WaPo-Captagon.png\")
“Whether Hezbollah was directly involved in the Italian shipment is not yet known,” the Washington Post<\/strong> (8\/4\/20<\/a>) reported–implying that indirect involvement was known, and suggesting that a direct connection was only a matter of time.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n On August 4, coincidentally the same day that the Beirut port explosion<\/a> devastated Lebanon\u2019s capital city, the Washington Post<\/b> ran a dispatch<\/a> by Joby Warrick<\/a> and Souad Mekhennet, headlined \u201cHezbollah Operatives Seen Behind Spike in Drug Trafficking, Analysts Say.\u201d While the authors concede that \u201cwhether Hezbollah was directly involved in the Italian shipment is not yet known,\u201d the ultimate takeaway is that \u201cinvestigators say the episode fits a pattern of recent drug cases in the Middle East and Europe linked to the powerful Lebanese militia.\u201d The idea that \u201cHezbollah operatives began manufacturing [Captagon] more than a decade ago\u201d is presented as fact without need for evidence.<\/p>\n As is par for the course for such articles, the \u201canalysts\u201d are largely unnamed, consisting of the usual assortment of anonymous \u201cintelligence officials\u201d and the like. Among the few named officials are John Fern\u00e1ndez, head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration\u2019s Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center\u2014whose briefing on Hezbollah at the fervently pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is quoted\u2014and Matthew Levitt<\/a>, a former Treasury official and FBI analyst now ensconced at WINEP, where he is perennially available to link Hezbollah to any and every narco-terrorist plot on the planet.<\/p>\n In their piece, Warrick and Mekhennet plug Levitt\u2019s latest pride and joy, an interactive map<\/a> that purports to implicate Hezbollah operatives in \u201cdrug smuggling, money laundering and other criminal enterprises in dozens of countries around the world, while also charting terrorist attacks financed by such illicit proceeds.\u201d A quick perusal reveals that key global enterprises have unfortunately been overlooked, such as the \u201cHezbollah pig farm in Liberia<\/a>\u201d that was dutifully exposed in 2018 by US State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism Nathan A. Sales. Other essential components of the fearmongering arsenal do, however, appear in Levitt\u2019s database, including Hezbollah\u2019s alleged narco-ties<\/a> to Venezuela\u2014a country that must be demonized at all cost on account of its refusal to subscribe to US-prescribed systems of right-wing oppression\u2014as well to as the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), myriad drug cartels and other preferred imperial bogeymen.<\/p>\n In his book<\/a> Hezbollah: The Global Footprint of Lebanon\u2019s Party of God<\/i>, Levitt retails all of the traditional neoconservative talking points about said party, such as Hezbollah assisting the cartels in constructing narco-tunnels from Mexico into the US\u2014because, obviously, \u201cthe terrain along the southern US border, especially around San Diego, is similar to that on the Lebanese\/Israeli border.\u201d<\/p>\n Fox News<\/strong>‘ headline (7\/9\/10<\/a>) manages to turn lack of evidence for its story into a story. Meanwhile, it implicitly backs up its claim about Hezbollah on the border (of the US and Mexico) with a photo of Hezbollah on the border (of Lebanon and Israel).<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n Then there\u2019s the old rumor of a \u201crise in imprisoned gang members with Farsi tattoos\u201d in the American Southwest\u2014which, as Fox News <\/b>noted<\/a> in 2010, had also elicited a letter<\/a> to the Homeland Security Department from then-US Rep. Sue Myrick (R-N.C.), who fretted:<\/p>\n We have typically seen tattoos in Arabic, but Farsi implies a Persian influence that can likely be traced back to Iran and its proxy army, Hezbollah.\u2026 These tattoos in Farsi are almost always seen in combination with gang or drug cartel tattoos. These combinations have been increasing in number and point to the fact that these criminals are tied to both Hezbollah and gangs and drug cartels.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n And there you go. Though the beloved \u201cCommunist menace\u201d of the Cold War is making a comeback in both Russian<\/a> and Chinese<\/a> forms, it\u2019s still helpful to have a narco-jihadi menace\u2014in bed with socialist regimes in Latin America, no less\u2014festering along the United States\u2019 southern border. This justifies increased US militarization of the hemisphere, global antagonism vis-\u00e0-vis Hezbollah\u2019s backers in America\u2019s current pet enemy Iran, and all sorts of other good stuff.<\/p>\n Levitt\u2019s book also covers other popular anti-Hezbollah would-be trivia, such as that it was possible (at least in pre-pandemic times) to travel with minimal difficulty between Caracas and Tehran by air\u2014a trajectory known as \u201cAero-Terror\u201d by the likes of Roger Noriega, former US assistant secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs and current permanent accessory at the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute. Noriega in 2011 sounded the alarm<\/a> at Fox News<\/b> that the Venezuelan state airline was ferrying \u201cterrorists and weapons to our own neighborhood,\u201d with merely a single stop in Damascus. Never mind that it is also possible to travel between Caracas and pretty much everywhere else on earth.\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n According to<\/a> a 2011 Foreign Policy Research Institute missive titled \u201cThe New Nexus of Narcoterrorism: Hezbollah and Venezuela,\u201d by Caracas-born socialite<\/a>-cum-\u201cterrorism expert<\/a>\u201d Vanessa Neumann, Aero-Terror appears to have departed Venezuela with a \u201ccargo of cocaine\u201d and returned \u201cfull of Iranians, who boarded the flight in Damascus, where they arrived by bus from Tehran.\u201d Neumann never deigned to explain why the Iranians could not have simply boarded the flight in the Iranian capital rather than riding on a bus for more than 1,000 miles.<\/p>\n As if Farsi tattoos weren\u2019t enough, Levitt unveils in his book additional alleged nefarious activities by Hezbollah in the US proper, including \u201cfood stamp fraud, misuse of grocery coupons and sale of unlicensed T-shirts.\u201d One envisions Hezbollah guerillas diabolically stockpiling buy-one-get-one-free Cocoa Puffs to sell on the international black market, along with fake Hypercolor apparel featuring Kalashnikovs. Levitt is consistently cited as an authoritative source in corporate media reports on Hezbollah and related themes, and relied upon in US government circles as the expert of experts.<\/p>\n Foreign Policy<\/strong> (8\/10\/20<\/a>) sets you straight on which Official Enemy to blame for Europe’s drug problems.<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n As for the July seizure in Italy of the billion-euro amphetamine shipment, it wasn\u2019t only the Washington Post<\/b> that jumped on the Hezbollah\/Captagon bandwagon with no evidence. In an August Foreign Policy <\/b>article<\/a> headlined \u201cThe Islamic State Isn\u2019t Behind Syria\u2019s Amphetamine Trade,\u201d Tessa Fox insists that \u201cCaptagon production flourished in Syria after 2013, when a crackdown in neighboring Lebanon likely forced Hezbollah to relocate its drug production operations next door,\u201d and that Syrian \u201cdrug operations would likely not be possible without the technical knowledge of Hezbollah, which has links to Captagon production in [the Syrian cities of] Homs, Tal Kalakh and Qusayr, near the Lebanese border.\u201d A December video<\/a> courtesy of BBC<\/b> Mideast correspondent Quentin Sommerville confirms that the \u201cSyrian regime\u201d and Hezbollah are both \u201cdeep in the drugs trade,\u201d which is for them a \u201cmajor source of funding.\u201d<\/p>\n Accusing Hezbollah of drug trafficking is kind of like accusing the US government of trafficking in glow-in-the-dark Joseph Stalin figurines; it makes no ideological sense on any level. If the organization were really up to its ears in drugs, there presumably would not be a need to resort to such patently ludicrous arguments as that \u201cVenezuela\u2019s geographic proximity to West Africa make[s] it an ideal launching pad\u201d for trans-Atlantic narco-shipments that help expand Hezbollah\u2019s coffers. This insight was delivered during a 2009 presentation<\/a> to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by former United Press International<\/b> bureau chief in El Salvador Douglas Farah, who refrained from explaining how 6,000 miles constitutes \u201cgeographic proximity.\u201d<\/p>\n Lebanese scholar Amal Saad<\/a>, author of Hizbu\u2019llah: Politics and Religion<\/i><\/a>, commented in a recent email to me that the \u201cbaseless charges\u201d against Hezbollah \u201cdon\u2019t merely clash with its ideology and identity as an Islamist party whose adherents are socialized in the Islamic way of life, which obviously has zero tolerance for drug use,\u201d but that they also \u201cundermine Hezbollah\u2019s strategy of combating drug use\u201d in various areas in Lebanon, where other Shia clans are known to distribute drugs. She went on to remark that drug trafficking and use are \u201canathema to Hezbollah for organizational reasons\u201d and that there is \u201cno room for drugs for a party with strong internal discipline,\u201d for which drug trafficking would \u201cseverely undermine its internal cohesion, popular support, and organizational and military efficacy vis-\u00e0-vis Israel and jihadi groups.\u201d<\/p>\n Which brings us back to Israel, which, it bears mentioning, is entirely responsible for Hezbollah\u2019s existence in the first place. In 1982, the Israeli military invaded Lebanon, in the middle of that country\u2019s civil war of 1975\u201390, slaughtering some 20,000 Lebanese and Palestinians\u2014as Noam Chomsky emphasizes<\/a>, the vast majority of them civilians\u2014and prompting the rise of the militant organization. Hezbollah then undertook to combat the brutal, torture-happy<\/a> 22-year Israeli occupation of south Lebanon, ultimately driving Israel out of Lebanese territory in May 2000.<\/p>\n From a \u201cterroristic\u201d point of view, Hezbollah has never even come close to inflicting the human and infrastructural damage that Israel has. During the 1982 invasion, for example, the Israeli army engaged in phosphorus shelling<\/a> of Muslim-majority West Beirut, which caused patients to start arriving at hospitals literally on fire. In his book<\/a> Pity the Nation: Lebanon at War<\/i>, journalist Robert Fisk quoted a doctor on the situation of five-day-old twins who were dead upon arrival: \u201cI had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour later, they were still burning.\u201d<\/p>\n The list goes on. In April 1996, Israel massacred<\/a> 106 refugees sheltering at a United Nations compound in the south Lebanese village of Qana. In summer 2006<\/a>, Israel killed some 1,200 people in Lebanon over the course of 34 days, including children in the back of a pickup truck evacuating their village in accordance with Israeli orders, only to be slaughtered<\/a> at close range by an Israeli helicopter.<\/p>\n For this particular conflict, the United States conducted rush shipments<\/a> of weapons to the Israeli armed forces. Not that the US has ever been a stranger to abetting carnage in the diminutive Levantine nation; a certain civil war episode from 1985 comes to mind, when CIA-trained operatives<\/a> endeavored to assassinate Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah\u2014the Lebanese cleric forever vilified as Hezbollah\u2019s supposed \u201cspiritual leader<\/a>\u201d\u2014via car bomb in Beirut, and instead dispensed with more than 80 civilian lives, among them many women and children. But, again, Hezbollah are the \u201cterrorists\u201d\u2014if only because they happen to effectively thwart imperial designs in the region.<\/p>\n The hypocritical logic of empire furthermore permits the US to sensationally denounce Hezbollah as narco-terrorists while blissfully backing regimes that objectively qualify as such. For instance, one of the highlights of Levitt\u2019s interactive map is Operation Titan, a two-year collaboration between the DEA and Colombian authorities to investigate the \u201cColombia-based cocaine smuggling and money laundering operations\u201d of an alleged Hezbollah operative.<\/p>\n Titan was launched in 2004, on the watch of then\u2013Colombian President \u00c1lvaro Uribe, who not only appeared on a 1991 US Defense Intelligence Agency list<\/a> of \u201cthe more important Colombian narco-traffickers contracted by the Colombian narcotic cartels,\u201d but also presided over the terrorization of swathes of the Colombian population, like the more than 10,000 civilians<\/a> murdered by the military and passed off as FARC guerrillas. The so-called \u201cfalse positives\u201d campaign enabled individual soldiers to accrue bonus pay and extra holiday time, while also justifying\u2014what else?\u2014yet more US military aid.<\/p>\n There\u2019s also Honduras, where US-backed President Juan Orlando Hern\u00e1ndez is, you know, a drug lord<\/a>, and has also overseen<\/a> countless extrajudicial killings and other forms of human rights obliteration.<\/p>\n Were the US actually opposed to narco-terrorism, it might have abstained from utilizing right-wing Contra mercenaries to terrorize Nicaragua<\/a> in the 1980s while simultaneously enabling those same Contras to enrich themselves via the drug trade\u2014an arrangement that resulted in a crack cocaine epidemic<\/a> that destroyed Black communities in South Central Los Angeles. So much for protecting Americans from foreign terrorists.<\/p>\n New Yorker<\/strong> (12\/7\/15<\/a>): “Skepticism about the extent to which terrorists engage in the drug trade…runs deep among numerous counterterrorism and national-security officials.”<\/em><\/p><\/div>\n America\u2019s narco-terror hype begins to make more sense when one considers Pulitzer Prize\u2013winning journalist Ginger Thompson\u2019s 2015 New Yorker <\/b>article<\/a> \u201cTrafficking in Terror,\u201d in which a former senior money-laundering investigator at the US Justice Department tells her that, following the 9\/11 attacks and the funneling of resources into \u201cterrorism\u201d rather than drug enforcement, the concept of narco-terror \u201cbecame an \u2018expedient way for the [DEA] to justify its existence.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Thompson writes that after the crime of \u201cnarco-terrorism\u201d was appended to the new \u00a0iteration of the Patriot Act in 2006, the DEA was able to claim \u201cvictories against Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, the Taliban and the FARC.\u201d Disturbingly, however, in every last one of the cases that were prosecuted, the \u201conly links between drug trafficking and terrorism entered into evidence were provided by the DEA, using agents or informants who were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars to lure the targets into staged narco-terrorism conspiracies.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, as the Captagon conspiracies take off and the US and allied media continue trafficking in propaganda\u2014poisoning the public mind with narco-terror fantasies that justify all manner of belligerence and terror for the foreseeable future\u2014that old image of frying eggs from US drug war TV adverts comes to mind: \u201cThis is your brain on drugs.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n![\"Fox](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Fox-Hezbollah.png\")
![\"Foreign](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/Foreign-Policy-Amphetamine.png\")
![\"New](\"https:\/\/fair.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/02\/New-Yorker-Trafficking.png\")