Italy announced last July 1 the seizure of 84 million counterfeit pills of the amphetamine Captagon, widely used by combatants in the Syrian civil war that began in 2011. The pills, seized in the southern Italian port of Salerno and said to be worth 1 billion euros, were immediately attributed to ISIS, one of the primary parties to the Syrian conflict.
But the narrative quickly did an about-face, and blame was reassigned to ISIS’s mortal enemies: the Syrian government and—perhaps more importantly—Hezbollah, 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.
On August 4, coincidentally the same day that the Beirut port explosion devastated Lebanon’s capital city, the Washington Post ran a dispatch by Joby Warrick and Souad Mekhennet, headlined “Hezbollah Operatives Seen Behind Spike in Drug Trafficking, Analysts Say.” While the authors concede that “whether Hezbollah was directly involved in the Italian shipment is not yet known,” the ultimate takeaway is that “investigators say the episode fits a pattern of recent drug cases in the Middle East and Europe linked to the powerful Lebanese militia.” The idea that “Hezbollah operatives began manufacturing [Captagon] more than a decade ago” is presented as fact without need for evidence.
As is par for the course for such articles, the “analysts” are largely unnamed, consisting of the usual assortment of anonymous “intelligence officials” and the like. Among the few named officials are John Fernández, head of the US Drug Enforcement Administration’s Counter-Narcoterrorism Operations Center—whose briefing on Hezbollah at the fervently pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) is quoted—and Matthew Levitt, 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.
In their piece, Warrick and Mekhennet plug Levitt’s latest pride and joy, an interactive map that purports to implicate Hezbollah operatives in “drug smuggling, money laundering and other criminal enterprises in dozens of countries around the world, while also charting terrorist attacks financed by such illicit proceeds.” A quick perusal reveals that key global enterprises have unfortunately been overlooked, such as the “Hezbollah pig farm in Liberia” 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’s database, including Hezbollah’s alleged narco-ties to Venezuela—a country that must be demonized at all cost on account of its refusal to subscribe to US-prescribed systems of right-wing oppression—as well to as the left-wing Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), myriad drug cartels and other preferred imperial bogeymen. READ MORE AT FAIR.