The growing threat of Hezbollah

Following are three separate articles published yesterday on the growing threat of Hezbollah:

• My Townhall.com column for January, “Hezbollah’s bags of cash.”
• My piece, “Making murder look clean,” at WorldNetDaily.
• My piece, “Connecting the dots,” at World Defense Review.

I was also quoted Sunday in Al Seyassah (one of Kuwait’s leading newspapers, also published in Lebanon and Egypt).

Translated text follows:

“I’m convinced Hezbollah is directly involved — one way or another — in Friday’s assassination of Internal Security Forces Capt. Wissam Eid,” says W. Thomas Smith Jr., a former U.S. Marine and current director of the Counterterrorism Research Center of the Family Security Foundation (an American public defense information organization). “This was an operation coordinated and conducted out of Hezbollah’s so-called ‘operation room,’ which is directed by Syria and Iran. This was an effort to eliminate any connection between all the assassinations since the murder of Mr. Rafik al-Hariri in 2005.”

Smith adds, “Even if any of these latest assassinations — conducted against top political, military, and now a key national police official — were determined to be the work of another terrorist cell or organization based in Lebanon, they could not have been accomplished in the meticulously planned and coordinated manner in which these killings have been executed without the direct operational support of Hezbollah.”

More to come, including Tom Harb’s piece, “Hezbollah’s dark hand” in yesterday’s Washington Times.

WTSjr