An ambitious U.S. task force targeting Hezbollah's billion-dollar criminal enterprise ran headlong into the White House's desire for a nuclear deal with Iran.
Part I: A global threat emerges
How Hezbollah turned to trafficking cocaine and laundering money through used cars to finance its expansion.
Donald Trump’s official recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is an embarrassment. A salutary embarrassment.
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America has become a Zionist country. And it shows. And it’s discomfiting. For the most powerful people and institutions in the United States, Zionism has become a core component of American ideology and politics, married, like nothing else is, to capitalism and imperialism as a co-equal existential imperative.
“In the wake of the 2016 election, concerns have been raised with respect to the legal regime governing foreign influence in domestic politics,” a new report from the Congressional Research Service notes. “The central law concerning the activities of the agents of foreign entities acting in the United States is the Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).”
Significantly, that law does not prohibit “representation of foreign interests or limited distribution of foreign propaganda. Instead, the Act provides only for public disclosure of any such activities. FARA's legislative history indicates that Congress believed such disclosure would best combat foreign influence by informing the American public of the actions taken and information distributed on behalf of foreign sources.” See The Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA): A Legal Overview, December 4, 2017.
Most next-generation terrorism and future-of-war scenarios focus on artificial intelligence, drones, and self-driving car bombs. But those are, at best, only half the story, projecting white-collar America’s fears of all the possible dystopian uses of emerging technology. The other, and potentially more worrisome, half lies in the blue-collar technicians of ISIS. They have already shown they can produce a nation-state’s worth of weapons, and their manufacturing process will only become easier with the growth of 3-D printing.