news about U.S. No Longer Considers Iran and Hezbollah ‘Global Terrorism’ Threats
No United States government official or agency has ever publicly stated that Iran and Hezbollah are not threats to the United States—for good reason. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence (odni)—the principal administrator of the 17-member U.S. Intelligence Community, which includes the State Department, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Department of Homeland Security, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—has, for example, always said that Iran and Hezbollah posed threats to the U.S.
The odni, however, made controversial headlines about what it chose not to say about Iran and Hezbollah in its February 26 “Statement for the Record Worldwide Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community.”
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Unclassified_2015_ATA_SFR_-_SASC_FINAL.pdf
All the directors of National Intelligence, from Bush-nominated John Negroponte (2005-2007) and J. Michael McConnell (2007-2008), to Obama-nominated Dennis Blair (2009-2010) and James Clapper (2010-present), have said that Iran and Hezbollah are threats to the United States. Clapper’s annual reports from 2011 to 2014 condemned Iran in the reports’ “Terrorism” sections. Hezbollah was also included in that section in Clapper’s 2014 report. However, both Iran and Hezbollah are conspicuously absent from the “Terrorism” section of this year’s threat assessment report.
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Newsroom/Testimonies/20110310_testimony_clapper.pdf
http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Intelligence Reports/2014 WWTA SFR_SSCI_29_Jan.pdf
Even though the report has a lot of negative assessments of Iran, it has some uncharacteristically positive comments. It mentions how Iraq’s military, Peshmerga fighters and Shiite militants—“bolstered by air and artillery strikes, weapons and advice from the United States, Arab and Western allies, and Iran—have prevented [the Islamic State] from gaining large swaths of additional territory” (emphasis added throughout).
Hezbollah
Even though odni spokesman Brian Hale said that “Hezbollah and Iran are still a threat,” James Clapper’s 2015 report mentions Iran’s Lebanon-based terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, only once—as a victim of “terrorist groups, including the al-Nusrah Front and [the Islamic State].”
It’s not a small thing to completely omit that Hezbollah, is an instrument of “Iran’s foreign policy and its ability to project power in Iraq, Syria and beyond,” as the Defense Intelligence Agency reported on the same day the odni produced its assessment.
Statement for the Record: Worldwide Threat Assessment > Defense Intelligence Agency > Article View
Hezbollah has never apologized or repented of its actions, yet it was not mentioned in any negative light in the odni report.
Hezbollah has deluded and eluded security authorities across the globe to the extent that it took Europe 30 years to decide that the terrorist organization was indeed a terrorist organization. Still, some of these same nations only apply that designation to Hezbollah’s military wing—but not its political wing—a wing Hezbollah itself does not claim to have.
https://www.stratfor.com/weekly/20100811_hezbollah_radical_rational
Today, we see the United States changing its tone toward Iran and Hezbollah, legitimizing Hezbollah, desperately negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, and forsaking Israel—its most loyal ally in the Middle East—in the process.
The U.S.’s move to declassify Iran and Hezbollah as terrorist threats will only lead to more terror.
