Obama Admin Had the Chance to Cripple the Global Heroin Trade, But Chose to Play Politics Instead
The Obama legacy continues to crumble as news sources reveal that he and his administration torpedoed plans to strike a devastating blow at the global heroin trade. Fully 90 percent of terrorism in Afghanistan is funded by the drug.
Obama’s administration cited “political concerns” as the reason for ordering the end of the plan – Operation Reciprocity. When the plan that could have shut down the worldwide spread of narcotics ended, Afghanistan became a narco-state in 2015.
The result of Obama’s actions, according to Politico’s John Meyer, was a failure to “sever the critical revenue streams financing the deadly insurgency American troops are fighting and dying to end.”
It appears Obama was so focused on leaving a legacy as the President who ended America’s occupation of Afghanistan that he turned his back on delivering a crippling blow to the heroin trade. Since that decision, the Taliban has become rich from the deadly drug and more troops have been deployed.
By 2013, when Operation Reciprocity was starting to gain momentum, the conflict in Afghanistan had already cost American taxpayers almost $700 billion and more importantly 2,000 American lives. With the conflict turning in our troops’ favor, Obama ordered a troop drawdown and canned the DEA’s plan to severely cripple heroin production.
The DEA regional director for Southwest Asia, Michael Marsac along with DOJ law enforcement adviser John Seaman drafted the plan modeled after early successful attempts to disrupt the Columbian cocaine trade. Marse said:
“This was the most effective and sustainable tool we had for disrupting and dismantling Afghan drug trafficking organizations and separating them from the Taliban.”
Marsac told reporters that the plan to indict 26 Taliban commanders and allied drug lords and try them in U.S. courts — “lies dormant, buried in an obscure file room, all but forgotten.”
With Operation Reciprocity agents under orders to stand down in 2013, drug raids ground to a halt, the harvest of the purple-flowered poppies boomed, and the narcotics trade multiplied exponentially. The end result is that Taliban forces have surpassed the Islamic State as the world’s deadliest terrorist organization.
But the designers of Operation Reciprocity believe Obama put a halt to their plan for others reasons than his claim it might impact plans for a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan. They say it also was a threat to negotiations for a prisoner swap that would ultimately see the release of U.S. Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl in exchange for five senior terrorist leaders held in Guantanamo Bay.
The decision to shelve an important drug intervention strategy to gain political points was not a one-time miscalculation by Obama and his team. In 2008 the DEA launched Project Cassandra. During the following eight years, it gathered evidence that Hezbollah had moved from being simply a Middle East-focused military and political organization to an international crime syndicate that collected an estimated $1 billion a year from weapons and drug trafficking, money laundering and various other criminal activities.
An investigative report published by Politico in December 2017, revealed that the Obama administration’s concerns regarding the nuclear deal with Iran took precedence over the DEA project. Like Operation Reciprocity, the DEA found itself railroaded by its own government.
When Project Cassandra heads sought approval for investigations, arrests, prosecutions, and financial sanctions, officials at the Treasury and Justice Department delayed, hindered, and outright rejected their requests.
The Justice Department refused requests by Project Cassandra authorities to file criminal charges against major players such as a Lebanese bank that allegedly laundered billions in alleged drug profits, Hezbollah’s high-profile envoy to Iran, and a central player in a U.S.-based cell of the Iranian Quds force. Along with that, the State Department refused requests to lure high-value targets to friendly countries where they could be arrested.
David Asher a U.S. illicit finance expert who was sent by the Pentagon to help Project Cassandra attack the Hezbollah criminal enterprise. He said at that time: “They serially ripped apart this entire effort that was very well supported and resourced, and it was done from the top down.”
When Obama finally re-engaged the Taliban, American forces were able to stop the enemies’ advance. By then, however, the damage was done. Obama’s legacy appears now to be the exchange of known terrorists for an American traitor, piles of cash for an Iran deal that is doomed to failure, and an Afghani heroin mega-factory.
~ American Liberty Report
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