Trump isn't interested in Venezuela because of the drugs, it's the oil

This entire drug war is a charade. 

Trump, April 2011: "I'm only interested in Libya if we take the oil".

He just pardoned the former Honduran president sentenced to 45 years over cocaine, but he's going after the Venezuelan president over drugs?

Venezuela has 4x the proven oil reserves of the United States, tops in the world, and it's right in our backyard.

Trump isn't interested in peace and freedom in Ukraine, either. All he wants is a piece of action.

All that lizard brain cares about is money. 

 

 

Trump's indefensible kill-everybody-policy in the Caribbean means up to 20% of those he's murdering could be entirely innocent according to none other than the U.S. Coast Guard

Instead of pouring money into the military to kill people, Trump should have poured the money into the Coast Guard, which apprehended, without murdering anybody, about 171 drug boats in the last fiscal year. 

Every American should be ashamed about what Trump & Company is doing. 

This morning's drug boat crime cabinet meeting got one thing right

 

Comrade Karoline claims war crime was legal even as she said Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth knew nothing about it but Admiral Frank Bradley did

White House Throws Admiral Under the Bus on Boat Strike

S.V. Date, HuffPost

 

... Killing survivors of a destroyed vessel is literally an example of a war crime in the U.S. Department of Defense Law of War Manual. “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal,” the manual reads.

Press secretary Karoline Leavitt, nevertheless, repeatedly stated that it was legal – even as she further claimed, as President Donald Trump did Sunday, that Hegseth was unaware that it had happened.

“On Sept. 2, Secretary Hegseth authorized Admiral Bradley to conduct these kinetic strikes. Admiral Bradley worked well within his authority and the law, directing the engagement to ensure the boat was destroyed and the threat to the United States of America was eliminated,” she said.

At the time of the attack off the Trinidad coast, Frank Bradley was head of the Joint Special Operations Command. According to a Washington Post report about the incident, it was he who relayed the order from Hegseth to “kill everybody” by sending Navy SEALs back to the disabled boat to have them kill the two people clinging to the wreckage.

In October, Bradley was promoted to run the U.S. Special Operations Command. ...

Real Clear Politics is part of the problem, not the solution

 

Tom Bevan: Anonymous Sources, Convenient Timing, and Past Drone Strikes Undercut Caribbean Boat-Strike Outrage

 

Past drone strikes by Obama were also murder, making us the terrorists.

 

We don't have the guts to declare an actual war, so we pretend this is OK instead. That's the problem. 

No you don't

 

White House: "If Narco-Terrorists Are Trafficking Illegal Drugs To the U.S., We Have The Authority To Kill Them"

 

If you let these people get away with this, anything they call terrorism can be murdered.

 

It's not terrorism, and it is murder. 

Trump & Company just make stuff up after the fact about the drug boat attacks, which is their modus operandi

 Shoot first and ask questions later.

When Elon Musk went in all gangbusters cutting government willy nilly from January 20th, he was immediately challenged about his authority and the nature of his position until the Trump administration retroactively made him a special government employee on February 3rd. But Musk still controversially operated with unprecedented authority over all of government even though he never submitted to the advice and consent of the U.S. Senate, which is standard for all high-ranking federal appointees. His rogue status was never adjudicated. 

The retroactive appointment is called covering your ass.

The same thing has happened now with the drug boat controversy, twice.

After the first drug boat attack caused an uproar, Trump made up some shit to justify it weeks later, indicating he knew what they were doing was wrong:

... In the weeks following the attack, President Trump, 79, attempted to retroactively insulate those responsible from legal consequences by informing Congress that the U.S. was in a “non-international armed conflict” with “designated terrorist organizations,” and therefore those who killed suspected narcotics traffickers would be exempt from criminal prosecution. ...

Similarly, someone changed the protocol for attacks after the September 2nd incident because they knew killing survivors was wrong. They just hoped we didn't find out that's what they did that day:

The protocol for future suspected drug boat strikes was altered after the Sept. 2 attack, and the military was instructed to detain any survivors. 

This is Trump Amateur Hour 2.0. They don't know what they are doing. It would be amusing but for the bodies left in their wake.

More.

Seal Team 6 disgraces itself and the country it serves, obeys illegal Hegseth order to finish off survivors of already illegal September 2nd drug boat attack

One illegal act leads to another, and another, and another. 

Over 80 alleged criminals are now dead in such attacks, but we'll never know if they really were criminals.

 Hegseth order on first Caribbean boat strike, officials say: Kill them all: As two men clung to a stricken, burning ship targeted by SEAL Team 6, the Joint Special Operations commander followed the defense secretary’s order to leave no survivors.

... The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any of the men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.

Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law. ... "the state using force is judge, jury and executioner," Huntley said. ...

If the video of the blast that killed the two survivors on Sept. 2 were made public, people would be horrified, said one person who watched the live feed. The Intercept first reported that the survivors were killed in a follow-up attack. ... There has been no public release of a subsequent strike video ...

If you go on the cousin walk I'm locking the doors behind you

Just keep walkin'.

 

 The other thing Americans consume in record numbers on Thanksgiving: Marijuana...

The guys in the military who actually have to do Trump's killing for him in the Caribbean Sea know that what they are doing is wrong

 White House blew past legal concerns in deadly strikes on drug boats

 ... In recent weeks, junior officers in the military, fearing potential legal exposure, asked military lawyers, known as judge advocates general, for written sign-off before taking part in strikes, said two people familiar with the matter. It does not appear that such memos were furnished. ...

Trump knows it, too, which is why he's getting rid of all the lawyers and military officers who tell him so.

Senator Tom Cotton sees absolutely nothing wrong with Trump acting as judge, jury, and executioner of noncombatant alleged criminals in drug boats

In an interview with Brian Kilmeade, who said on air that we should just kill the homeless. 

They don't believe in the rule of law.

They are a law unto themselves, no different than Democrats have been.

Our country is lost.

 

 

Another Tuesday, another crime committed by Mad King Ludwig and his man who just follows orders

 

Delusional Mollie Hemingway says murderer Donald Trump is hungry for peace

 

Hemingway: We Often Have Presidents Who Focus On Waging War, Trump "Seems To Have A Hunger For Peace"

 

 

 

Will Trump be tried for murdering drug traffickers like former Philippine president Duterte is being tried?

 

... Duterte was arrested in March by Philippine authorities on a warrant issued by the ICC. He is now being held at an ICC facility in the Netherlands.

Supporters of Duterte criticized the administration of President Ferdinand Marcos Jr., Duterte's political rival, for arresting and surrendering the former leader to a court whose jurisdiction his supporters dispute. ...

More. 

I suppose it depends on a future president giving Trump up to arrest by the International Criminal Court somehow.

... The strikes on Venezuelan narcoterror smuggling boats provide one possible avenue. Shortly after the U.S. Navy destroyed the first such vessel, Ken Roth, a former head of Human Rights Watch, endorsed ICC intervention. “Trump just did what the International Criminal Court has charged former Philippines Pres. Duterte with doing—ordering the summary execution of alleged drug traffickers,” Mr. Roth tweeted. Venezuela is a Rome Statute party, which in the court’s thinking gives it jurisdiction over U.S. officials and servicemen involved in the attacks. The ICC has already launched an investigation against a nonmember state (Israel) based on a single boarding of a vessel flagged by a member state, so it has all the precedents it needs.

Mr. Trump has thus far taken an incremental approach to the ICC. He revived a first-term executive order authorizing sanctions against the court and applied it against four ICC officials. None of this has significantly reduced the risk to the U.S. or led the ICC to change its ways.

The ICC’s supporters don’t see the existing sanctions as an “existential threat.” The tribunal can easily ride it out by lying low until a Democratic president lifts the sanctions, as Joe Biden did. The court takes a long view—its prosecutors and judges have nine-year terms, and its other staffers are part of a global deep state who can expect to remain at their jobs indefinitely.

International lawyers are already developing multiple lines of attack against the administration and its officials. ...

More.

When you think it's 2025 but it's really just 1987 all over again

 

In addition to noncombatant drug runners, what Trump is executing is this magnificent old tree to make room for his stupid new $200 million ballroom

 

There's a killer on the loose in the Caribbean

Military Strikes Second Venezuela Drug Ship Headed to the U.S.

Trump Says Military Hit THIRD Drug Boat From Venezuela...

Uniparty Trump hides behind the skirts of the 2001 anti-terror legislation to murder so-called terrorists near Venezuela after cutting and running from the Houthis in the Red Sea

<insert tough guy image here>

MEXICO CITY — U.S. forces could have stopped the boat that officials say was carrying illegal drugs from Venezuela to the United States on Tuesday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but President Donald Trump chose instead to destroy it, killing 11 people on board, to send a deterrent message to traffickers. ...

The action was a dramatic escalation for the U.S. in its fight against drug traffickers. Lawmakers and legal analysts questioned the legality of launching a lethal strike against civilians in international waters outside of an armed conflict.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly said in a statement that the strike was “conducted against the operations of a designated terrorist organization and was taken in defense of vital U.S. national interests and in the collective self-defense of other nations,” an apparent reference to the 2001 authorization for the use of military force enacted by Congress after the 9/11 terrorist attacks that year. It authorizes the use of force against the perpetrators of the al-Qaeda attacks and to prevent “future acts of international terrorism.” Various lawmakers have tried unsuccessfully for years to repeal the measure, including Vice President JD Vance, who as a senator in 2023 co-sponsored the End Endless Wars Act. ...

The U.S. Coast Guard sometimes shoots out the engines of go-fast boats during maritime interdictions, the former agent said, but killing the crew is new for the United States. ...

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of law at the University of Notre Dame, said the strike violated international law. The U.S. is not in armed conflict with Venezuela or its criminal elements, she noted, which means it violated the suspects’ right to life. ...

Colombian President Gustavo Petro called the attack “murder.”

“We have been capturing civilians transporting drugs for decades without killing them,” Petro said. “Those who transport drugs are not the big drug lords, but very poor young people from the Caribbean and the Pacific. ...

 More. 

Elon Musk's hair sample for fentanyl, ketamine, etc. comes up negative

 George Floyd wouldn't have died with such results.

 

 

One of these days the parcel drones won't be carrying simply what they carry now, which will be a fateful turning point for this country