Hezbollah fighters parade during a rally to mark the Hezbollah Martyrs Day in a southern suburb of Beirut, Lebanon, on Nov. 11, 2011

U.S. authorities are building a politically explosive case that Hezbollah, the Lebanese militant group, finances itself through a vast drug-smuggling network that links a Lebanese bank, a violent Mexican cartel and U.S. cocaine users.

Federal prosecutors Tuesday charged Ayman Joumaa, an accused Lebanese drug kingpin and Hezbollah financier, of smuggling tons of U.S.-bound cocaine and laundering hundreds of millions of dollars with the Zetas cartel of Mexico.

 

 

“Ayman Joumaa is one of top guys in the world at what he does: international drug trafficking and money laundering,” a U.S. anti-drug official said. “He has interaction with Hezbollah. There’s no indication that it’s ideological. It’s business.”

The indictment in Virginia results from a continuing investigation by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration targeting Hezbollah, which has a bloody history of terror attacks against the United States and Israel.

Now a powerful partner in Lebanon's government, Hezbollah presents itself as a legitimate political party and rejects allegations of terrorism. But Tuesday's case reflects increasing concern that Hezbollah and its ally, Iran's intelligence service, are expanding their presence in Latin America as conflict with the West intensifies over Iran's nuclear program.

Hezbollah allegedly uses the cocaine trade to develop revenue and build foreign networks, according to U.S., European and Israeli officials. In October, the Justice Department charged an Iranian-American resident of Texas and two Iranian intelligence officers with plotting to hire Mexican cartel gunmen to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington.

Acting in February under the Patriot Act, the U.S. Treasury Department publicly identified [1] the Lebanese Canadian National bank of Beirut, Lebanon's eighth-largest bank, as a “financial institution of primary money laundering concern” linked to Hezbollah. Authorities alleged that the bank facilitated the financing of Hezbollah by Joumaa, a 47-year-old businessman who speaks excellent Spanish and resided many years in Colombia. About eleven years ago, he shifted his base to Lebanon because of law enforcement pressure, according to U.S. anti-drug officials.

The DEA described him earlier this year [2] as the hub of a sophisticated operation that has smuggled cocaine from South America to Africa and Europe, and laundered profits via money exchange houses, used-car businesses and other companies in the United States, Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia.

The indictment unveiled Tuesday focuses on a different piece of the puzzle: U.S.-bound cocaine trafficking.

 

Ayman Joumaa (DEA)

Joumaa allegedly coordinated the smuggling of at least 85 tons of Colombian cocaine through Central America and Mexico in partnership with the Zetas, the brutal Mexican cartel founded by former commandos, according to the indictment. Between 1997 and 2010, Joumaa's mafia laundered hundreds of millions of dollars for the Zetas and their Colombian and Venezuelan suppliers, regularly picking up southbound bulk cash shipments of $2 million to $4 million in Mexico City, the indictment says.

“Ayman Joumaa is accused of facilitating the shipments of huge amounts of cocaine for the United States while laundering the proceeds all over the globe,” said DEA Administrator Michele Leonhart. “According to information from sources, his alleged drug and money laundering activities facilitated numerous global drug-trafficking organizations, including the criminal activities of the Los Zetas Mexican drug cartel.”

Filed by the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia, the indictment does not mention Hezbollah. But U.S. officials say the alliance with the Zetas was part of the already targeted network linked to the Lebanese militant group.

“The indictment does not reflect all of the information that the government has,” said a Justice Department official. “It's accurate that Treasury's previous statement connected Mr. Joumaa to Hezbollah. The investigation is ongoing.”

Antidrug officials cautioned that the connection between Hezbollah and the Zetas is indirect, with Joumaa’s drug and money network as the hub that does business with both organizations.

“It’s not like there’s a sit-down between the leaders of Hezbollah and the Zetas,” one official said.

The investigation is politically sensitive because views of Hezbollah — and its alleged involvement in the drug trade — differ around the world and even in the U.S. government.

The Shiite militia killed hundreds of people in terror strikes in the 1980s and 1990s, from the car-bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut to attacks on Jewish targets in Argentina. In recent years, though, Hezbollah has curbed attacks outside of the Middle East, focusing on its bitter military struggle with Israel and growing role in Lebanese politics. The group is seen in Lebanon, the Arab world and parts of the West as a legitimate resistance organization.

As Iran pursues its nuclear ambitions, Hezbollah and Iran are locked in a worsening shadow conflict with the United States and Israel. This week, Hezbollah leaders claimed that they had identified clandestine CIA officers working in Lebanon.

International sanctions have hurt Iran, which helps fund, train and direct Hezbollah. As a result, antiterror officials say the militant group has relied more heavily on longtime ties to criminal rackets involving members of the far-flung Lebanese diaspora. The DEA has pursued several cases in which Hezbollah operatives allegedly teamed up with or taxed Lebanese-connected traffickers of South American cocaine.

The Joumaa case is the biggest so far. The network described in U.S. documents encompasses Joumaa relatives and associates who own money exchanges, stores and other businesses in Colombia, Panama, Lebanon, Benin and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Joumaa allegedy has overseen flows of cocaine from Colombia and Venezuela through two smuggling pipelines: north through Mexico to the United States and east through Africa to Europe and the Middle East.

The organization charged its partners in Mexico and elsewhere between 8 percent and 14 percent for using its sophisticated apparatus to launder the huge cash proceeds, the indictment says. It accuses Joumaa of laundering more than $250 million out of at least $850 million in drug-related proceeds.

“Hezbollah derived financial support from the criminal activities of Joumaa's network,” says a Treasury Department document that laid out allegations about the Lebanese Canadian Bank in February. “Additionally, LCB managers are linked to Hezbollah officials outside Lebanon. For example, Hezbollah's Tehran-based envoy Abdallah Safieddine is involved in Iranian officials' access to LCB and key LCB managers, who provide them banking services.”

A money exchange house in Joumaa's network used a branch of the Lebanese bank to deposit “bulk proceeds of drug sales” and then wire them to “U.S.-based used car dealers,” the document says. The cars were sold and sent to Africa in suspiciously structured transactions, U.S. officials say.

The Lebanese bank denied the U.S. charges in February. In the wake of the Treasury allegations, however, Lebanon's Central Bank announced that a Lebanese subsidiary of Societe Generale would acquire the assets and liabilities of Lebanese Canadian Bank, which had 35 branches and $5 billion in assets.

 

 

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Visited Portugal, as one of the Global Drug Commissioners, to congratulate them on the success of their drug policies over the last 10 years.

Ten years ago the Portuguese Government responded to widespread public concern over drugs by rejecting a “war on drugs” approach and instead decriminalized drug possession and use. It further rebuffed convention by placing the responsibility for decreasing drug demand as well as managing dependency under the Ministry of Health rather than the Ministry of Justice. With this, the official response towards drug-dependent persons shifted from viewing them as criminals to treating them as patients.

Now with a decade of experience Portugal provides a valuable case study of how decriminalization coupled with evidence-based strategies can reduce drug consumption, dependence, recidivism and HIV infection and create safer communities for all.

I will set out clearly what I learned from my visit to Portugal and would urge other countries to study this:

In 2001 Portugal became the first European country to officially abolish all criminal penalties for personal possession of drugs, including marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamines.

Jail time was replaced with offer of therapy. (The argument was that the fear of prison drives addicts underground and that incarceration is much more expensive than treatment).

Under Portugal’s new regime, people found guilty of possessing small amounts of drugs are sent to a panel consisting of a psychologist, social worker, and legal adviser for appropriate treatment (which may be refused without criminal punishment), instead of jail. 

Critics in the poor, socially conservative and largely Catholic nation said decriminalizing drug possession would open the country to “drug tourists” and exacerbate Portugal’s drug problem; the country has some of the highest levels of hard-drug use in Europe. The recently realised results of a report commissioned by the Cato Institute, suggest otherwise.

The paper, published by Cato in April 2011, found that in the five years after personal possession was decriminalized, illegal drug use among teens in Portugal declined and rates of new HIV infections caused by sharing of dirty needles dropped, while the number of people seeking treatment for drug addiction more than doubled.

It has enabled the Portuguese government to manage and control the problem far better than virtually every other Western country does.

Compared to the European Union and the US, Portugal drug use numbers are impressive.

Following decriminalization, Portugal has the lowest rate of lifetime marijuana use in people over 15 in the EU: 10%. The most comparable figure in America is in people over 12: 39.8%, Proportionally, more Americans have used cocaine than Portuguese have used marijuana.

The Cato paper reports that between 2001 and 2006 in Portugal, rates of lifetime use of any illegal drug among seventh through ninth graders fell from 14.1% to 10.6%. Drug use in older teens also declined.  Life time heroin use among 16-18 year olds fell from 2.5% to 1.8%.

New HIV infections in drug users fell by 17% between 1999 and 2003.

Death related to heroin and similar drugs were cut by more than half.

The number of people on methadone and buprenorphine treatment for drug addiction rose to 14,877 from 6,040, after decriminalization, and the considerable money saved on enforcement allowed for increase funding of drug – free treatment as well.

Property theft has dropped dramatically (50% - 80% of all property theft worldwide is caused by drug users).

America has the highest rates of cocaine and marijuana use in the world, and while most of the EU (including Holland) has more liberal drug laws than the US, it also has less drug use.

Current policy debate is that it’s based on “speculation and fear mongering”, rather than empirical evidence on the effect of more lenient drug policies. In Portugal, the effect was to neutralize what had become the country’s number one public health problem.

Decriminalization does not result in increased drug use.

Portugal’s 10 year experiment shows clearly that enough is enough. It is time to end the war on drugs worldwide. We must stop criminalising drug users. Health and treatment should be offered to drug users – not prison. Bad drugs policies affect literally hundreds of thousands of individuals and communities across the world. We need to provide medical help to those that have problematic use – not criminal retribution.

We’ve all seen those color-coded air-quality charts on the news — warnings about smog, ozone, and pollen. Now it may be time to add a new alert to the list: illegal drugs. Researchers have found that regions with greater cocaine and marijuana use have higher levels of these drugs in the surrounding atmosphere.

A few studies since the mid-1990s have shown that illicit drugs make their way into the atmosphere. In 2007, for example, analytical chemist Angelo Cecinato and colleagues at the Institute of Atmospheric Pollution Research in Rome, detected small amounts of cocaine in the air of Rome and the city of Taranto on the coast of southern Italy. “We considered it a curiosity,” Cecinato says.

But further research revealed that atmospheric concentrations of certain drugs were higher wherever drug use was presumed to be more prevalent — leading Cecinato and co-workers to wonder if they had found a better way to estimate the extent of drug abuse in a given area. Currently, authorities must rely on indirect information, such as communitywide surveys or questionnaires and police records. These methods can be time consuming and expensive, Cecinato explains. Measuring the amount of drugs in the air, his group suspected, might be accurate, fast, and cheap.

To find out, Cecinato and colleagues analyzed the air in 20 spots in eight regions of Italy in winter and 39 sites in 14 regions in summer. The investigators collected air samples, extracted the contaminants, and analyzed the results, checking for cocaine and cannabinoids (the active ingredients in marijuana). To rule out false positives caused by other compounds, the team also tested for common pollutants including hydrocarbons, ozone, and nitric oxide.

Relationships were evaluated with the so-called Pearson regression coefficient (represented by the symbol R²), which shows how strongly two factors correlate when plotted on a graph. An R² of 1 means the two essentially coincide. When the researchers compared their results against records of drug-related criminal activity, they found that airborne concentrations of cocaine correlated with the amount of drugs seized by police; R² values were 0.54 for cocaine seizures and 0.73 for the total amount of illicit substances.

Average concentrations of cocaine also correlated strongly with users’ requests for detoxification treatment (R² exceeding 0.94), the team reports in today’s issue of Science of the Total Environment.

The data also showed possible associations between air levels of cocaine and some types of crime, such as robbery. Statistical relationships between cocaine levels and some cancers, and between cannabinoid levels and mental disorders, also turned up. But Cecinato cautions that it’s not clear what — if anything — those correlations mean. The study could be a starting point for future research, he says.

Epidemiologist Wilson Compton of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, Bethesda, Maryland, calls the work innovative. “We’re always looking for more accurate ways to gauge the amount of drug use in communities,” he says, adding that better information could lead to improved treatment, education, and policing.

Regarding the possible health risks to non-users, Compton said “I wouldn’t sound any alarm bells based on this one study. But the researchers did find this link, and it’s worth further exploration. Second-hand cigarette smoke wasn’t considered a health threat either, until comparatively recently.”

This story provided by ScienceNOW, the daily online news service of the journal Science.

An obscure Pentagon office designed to curb the flow of illegal drugs has quietly evolved into a one-stop shop for private security contractors around the world, soliciting deals worth over $3 billion.

The sprawling contract, ostensibly designed to stop drug-funded terrorism, seeks security firms for missions like “train[ing] Azerbaijan Naval Commandos.” Other tasks include providing Black Hawk and Kiowa helicopter training “for crew members of the Mexican Secretariat of Public Security.” Still others involve building “anti-terrorism/force protection enhancements” for the Pakistani border force in the tribal areas abutting Afghanistan.

The Defense Department’s Counter Narco-Terrorism Program Office has packed all these tasks and more inside a mega-contract for security firms. The office, known as CNTPO, is all but unknown, even to professional Pentagon watchers. It interprets its counternarcotics mandate very, very broadly, leaning heavily on its implied counterterrorism portfolio. And it’s responsible for one of the largest chunks of money provided to mercenaries in the entire federal government.

CNTPO quietly solicited an umbrella contract for all the security services listed above — and many, many more — on Nov. 9. It will begin handing out the contract’s cash by August. And there is a lot of cash to disburse.

The ceiling for the “operations, logistics and minor construction” tasks within CNTPO’s contract is $950 million. Training foreign forces tops out at $975 million. “Information” tasks yield $875 million. The vague “program and program support” brings another $240 million.

That puts CNTPO in a rare category. By disbursing at least $3 billion — likely more, since the contract awards come with up to three yearlong re-ups — the office is among the most lucrative sources of cash for private security contractors. The largest, from the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, doles out a $10 billion, five-year deal known as the Worldwide Protective Services contract.

CNTPO is “essentially planning on outsourcing a global counternarcotics and counterterrorism program over the next several years,” says Nick Schwellenbach, director of investigations for the Project on Government Oversight, “and it’s willing to spend billions to do so.”

For the vast majority of people who’ve never heard of CNTPO, the organization answers to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Low-Intensity Conflict Directorate, within the Counternarcotics and Global Threats portfolio. It’s tucked away so deep, bureaucratically speaking, that it doesn’t actually have an office at the Pentagon.

The organization, run by a civilian named Mike Strand, has been around since 1995. In 2007, it made a big push into contracting, hiring the Blackwater subsidiary U.S. Training Center as well as defense giants Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon and ARINC for “a wide range of Defense counternarcotics activities,” according to a statement provided to Danger Room by the agency. That award, which has doled out $4.3 billion so far, is the precursor to the current bid.

Maybe that’s why an “Industry Day” last week at a Fredericksburg, Virginia hotel to introduce CNTPO to would-be contractors attracted “approximately 180 companies,” CNTPO boasts.

CNTPO might not be well-known. But in some circles, it’s infamous.

In 2009, a bureaucratic shift plucked the responsibility for training Afghanistan’s police out of the State Department’s hands. Suddenly, the contract — worth about $1 billion — landed with CNTPO. CNTPO quietly chose Blackwater for the contract, even though Blackwater guards in Afghanistan on a different contract stole hundreds of guns intended for those very Afghan cops.

The incumbent holder of the contract, Blackwater competitor DynCorp, protested. It didn’t help that a powerful Senate committee discovered Blackwater’s gun-stealing antics. In December, DynCorp finally received the contract — administered by an Army office, not CNTPO.

But that hasn’t stopped CNTPO’s expansion. In its new contract, the office explicitly stakes out a broad definition of its mandate: “to disrupt, deter, and defeat the threat to national security posed by illicit trafficking in all its manifestations: drugs, small arms and explosives, precursor chemicals, people, and illicitly-gained and laundered money.” It declares its practices “beyond traditional DoD acquisition and contracting scopes.”

How broad is that in practice? Tasks contained in the CNTPO contract range from “airlift services in the trans-Sahara region of Africa” to “media analysis and web-site development consultation to officials of the Government of Pakistan.”

The small agency is “worldwide,” the contract says, as “the primary regional areas of interest include Central and Western Asia, Sub-Sahara Africa, and Central and South America.” But its contracting oversight efforts are comparatively local.

According to CNTPO, oversight for its contracts are themselves outsourced to an Army Contracting Command outfit in Hunstville, Alabama. CNTPO “provides all contracting support for this effort, with 10 contracting officers/contracting specialists and legal/policy review of all contracts and task orders,” CNTPO’s statement reads, with “program management and customer support requirements” provided by CNTPO itself. That’s 10 bureaucrats to review billions of dollars in private security contracts, spent all over the world.

A member of the Wartime Contracting Commission, created by Congress to stop war profiteering, came away from an interaction with CNTPO concerned about that level of oversight.

“The overriding consideration tends to be helping the military with their mission,” says commissioner Charles Tiefer, a law professor at the University of Baltimore who interviewed CNTPO officials about the Afghanistan police contract. “Economies for tight supervision of private security activities take a back seat.”

CNTPO’s rise underscores an emerging trend in private security contracting: a move into some of the most sensitive missions the military performs. Mercs protect the bases in Afghanistan where U.S. Special Operations Forces live and work. When soldiers are taken prisoner, hired guns are entrusted to rescue them. Their tracking technology finds terrorists for U.S. commandos to kill. Now they’re training foreign commando forces.

“These are special-forces operations, and they’re best left in hands of our SF folks,” Schwellenbach says. “This stuff isn’t delivering paper clips or even fuel or bullets. It’s complex, sophisticated services, and there’s a reason we have Special Forces do this kind of training, not the regular Army. This is something you really want to keep a tight lid on.”

It's "too controversial" for the uptight Chinese, but ready for you on September 15

​Communist Bosses Won't Even Allow Book Inside The Country

The worldwide release of an American book on cannabis has been delayed, due to the refusal of the communist government of China to allow its binding on Chinese soil, according to the publisher.

The Little Black Book of Marijuana, by yours truly, Toke of the Town editor Steve Elliott, was scheduled for availability on August 1, but that printing schedule was thrown off after the totalitarian Chinese government decided the book was "too controversial" to even allow the printed pages inside the tightly-run dictatorship.

"Our printer is located in Hong Kong, with binderies in mainland China," production manager Ginny Reynolds of Peter Pauper Press explained to me Friday morning. "Usually it's no problem to move printed books from Hong Kong to China for binding.

"However, Chinese censorship is extremely tight," Reynolds told Toke of the Town. "Any content deemed 'sensitive' or 'controversial' by their standards is banned."

Photo: alapoet

Steve Elliott: "You can always tell a totalitarian dictatorship, because they're afraid of the truth."

​"We have the same problem with our books on sexuality," she told me. "The printer has to arrange for binding in Hong Kong, and facilities there are limited and overbooked in the summer season.

Basically, what this means for prospective readers of The Little Black Book of Marijuana is that instead of an August 1 availability date, we are now looking at a delay until around September 15. Believe me, that doesn't make me any happier than it does you. In fact, it frustrates the hell out of me.

You wanna talk about frustration? The book is already bound, at this point -- but it's literally on a slow boat from China. The damned thing is somewhere in the mid-Pacific, chugging this way at a glacial pace, and there ain't shit you or I can do, except maybe fire up a doob and wait.

"We're doing everything we can to speed things along, although I know patience is hard to come by!" Reynolds said. "We were unaware of the extent of the delays until recently."

So, for those of you who have already ordered The Little Black Book of Marijuana: The Essential Guide to the World of Cannabis, I offer my sincere apologies. You will receive your books, just a month later than planned.

The book is already available in electronic format at Amazon (Kindle), Barnes and Noble (Nook) and iTunes.

Now, who'd care to join me in a big shout?: FUCK CENSORSHIP!

Here's a sneak peek at the photo section of The Little Black Book of Marijuana.